Category: Pennsylvania News

It’s possible that nobody knows the stretch of Brandywine River that meanders through the heart of Wilmington better than Missy Morrissey.

Since her sister Susan’s battered body was discovered there nearly seven years ago, the West Chester native regularly returns to its banks, mulling a question:

How exactly did the 50-year-old Delaware County schoolteacher arrive in the shallows more than three miles downriver from where her car was found abandoned early on a July morning in 2019 in what authorities said was a homicide?

And how, she wonders, has the crime gone unsolved for all these years?

Susan Morrissey, who had been sipping wine and texting with friends into the early morning hours, left her Wilmington home just after 3 a.m. for reasons unknown, authorities said, and turned up dead in the river hours later.

Surveillance cameras captured Morrissey’s black Honda Civic as it left her home and headed to the gates of a nearby office building, where it was parked haphazardly and left unlocked with her cell phone and purse inside.

It was not until about four hours later that a construction worker discovered Morrissey’s body floating in the water miles away near the Northeast Boulevard bridge. She had died from blunt force trauma and drowning, the medical examiner found.

Investigators can’t say for sure how Morrissey’s body made it to the opposite side of town, though they believe she was alive when she entered the river and that she did not do so near where her car was parked.

“A friend refers to it as ‘the magic carpet ride,’” Missy Morrissey said of the distance between her sister’s car and where her body was discovered. “We just can’t figure anything out.”

It’s a puzzle that brings Missy Morrissey, the oldest of four siblings, back to the Brandywine each year, where she lays a bouquet of roses to honor her sister’s memory.

But this year, as yet another anniversary of Morrissey’s July 23 death nears, her family has begun to wonder whether after years of efforts to uncover the truth, her killer may never be found.

“On the first anniversary in 2020, I couldn’t have imagined that we would be sitting here in 2026 talking about this,” said Meg Morrissey Heinicke, the second-youngest of Susan’s siblings. “I would say time doesn’t heal all wounds. It is just as painful this year as the first year, the second year, the third year.”

Homicide detectives with the Delaware State Police say the investigation continues, but they have no suspects or motive, and there are no new developments in a crime that has divided the Wilmington and Chester County communities and drawn attention from true-crime podcasts and amateur sleuths across the country.

Missy Morrissey appreciates that people have taken an interest in her sister’s death long after it faded from the headlines.

Still, she and her family just want the crime solved.

A sister with flair

Susan Morrissey did just about everything with flair, her siblings said.

She grew up around West Chester and Wilmington and attended the city’s prestigious Tatnall School before heading to Georgetown University and later to San Francisco State, where she earned a master’s degree and began her career as an educator at a public school in a low-income Bay Area neighborhood.

Morrissey volunteered often, her siblings said, working with young people at a juvenile detention facility and devoting hours to an animal rescue, where she combed frigid Northern California beaches for stranded sea lions.

She was the first to read up on far-flung conflicts and the world’s injustices, and she loved sitting with a book on the beach in Stone Harbor.

It was she who recommended Noam Chomsky tomes and George Carlin stand-up specials to her less-enlightened siblings, they said. Everything from her CD collection to her handwriting oozed taste and personality.

“I don’t know how many people feel this way, but I kind of felt like the coolest person in the world happened to be in my family,” said John Morrissey Jr., the youngest of the siblings.

Morrissey eventually returned east and, after a disappointing stint of online dating in her 40s, reconnected with a former schoolmate, Ben Ledyard, an investment consultant and a regular on the Wilmington social scene.

The two soon wed, and each weekday morning, Morrissey drove to Pennsylvania to teach English at Academy Park High School in Sharon Hill, Delaware County, where she worked for 13 years until her death on July 23, 2019.

Her brother now lives in Virginia but regularly returns home to the Brandywine Valley, where visits have begun to trouble him.

With each crossing of a bridge, each riverside drive, he said, a reminder of his sister’s killing lurks beneath the river’s surface.

“Susan liked true crime,” he said, “especially local crime.”

The mystery of her death, he said, is “exactly the kind of case that Susan would have been interested in.”

A body in the water

Even after all these years, Missy Morrissey still has the texts saved to her phone.

It was 12:29 a.m., she said, and the sisters casually exchanged messages while Susan Morrissey relaxed with a glass of wine on the back porch of her Riverview Avenue home.

She was a night owl, her sister said, and often stayed up late chatting with family or friends, especially during her summer break from school. Morrissey, she said, had been looking forward to attending a Rolling Stones concert with her husband at Lincoln Financial Field the next evening.

Phone records showed that Morrissey texted with friends and updated her storefront on Poshmark, an e-commerce site for secondhand fashion, until 2:45 a.m.

Then at 3:02 a.m., a nearby security camera captured Morrissey’s car leaving her driveway, according to Delaware State Police. It traveled around a mile through Wilmington to Walker’s Mill, a historic riverside property that had been converted into offices.

In the dark of night, however, detectives who later reviewed the footage could not determine who drove the vehicle to Walker’s Mill or see who left the car after it was parked.

What happened in the nearly five hours between the car’s arrival at Walker’s Mill and the discovery of Morrissey’s body downriver remains a mystery. Investigators say they have not determined why Morrissey would have entered the water that morning.

“She got her injuries close in time to when she died, and she died close in time to when her body was found” at 7:39 a.m., said Detective Daniel Grassi of the Delaware State Police.

He believes she may have entered the river anywhere from the Brandywine Zoo to the 16th Street Bridge, more than two miles downriver from her vehicle.

Using data from Morrissey’s Fitbit device, investigators have pieced together the barest of timelines from that morning.

The tracker did not record Morrissey’s GPS location, so investigators cannot trace her movements, but they know she walked about a mile within an hour of her vehicle arriving at Walker’s Mill.

And at 7 a.m., the device stopped recording her heartbeat.

“I don’t know why she left the house at 3 a.m., and I don’t know what she was doing between 3 and 7,” Grassi said. “That four-and-a-half hour gap is a major issue with the investigation.”

What happened to Susan?

At her West Chester home, Missy Morrissey, 58, keeps hundreds of pages of notes and documents related to her sister’s case, making her something of an in-house historian of the family’s tragedy.

Since 2019, she has studied the river’s edge between Walker’s Mill and the Northeast Boulevard Bridge, poring over maps, interviewing store owners and strangers, and posting flyers seeking information about the killing near where Susan Morrissey may have been.

It is not only the lack of a suspect that vexes her. Police have not detailed the cause or extent of Morrissey’s injuries, beyond saying that they were traumatic.

Morrissey had been home alone that evening while her husband attended a screening of a documentary about the jam band Phish along with a friend. When he came home, Ledyard told investigators, he and Morrissey shared half a bottle of wine before he took a sleep aid and went to bed around 11 p.m.

He said he had no idea what happened to his wife — a woman he told reporters was “the love of my life, my best friend” — until police came to the house around 9:30 the next morning to tell him she was dead.

Ledyard could not be reached for comment.

Two years after Morrissey’s death, Ledyard remarried, and in 2023 he was charged with assault for attacking his wife with a marble figurine and smashing her head into the floor after she asked him to turn down loud music on New Year’s Day.

He pleaded guilty to second-degree assault and was sentenced to two years in prison.

The charges brought fresh attention to the Morrissey case and fueled internet speculation that he could have harmed his former wife.

But police say he is not a suspect in the homicide and has cooperated fully with law enforcement.

‘A hope you desperately cling to’

Morrissey’s parents, Serena and John, died last year at 89 and 91 — without learning what happened to their daughter and without seeing anyone brought to justice for the crime.

John Morrissey’s death from advanced dementia came just two days after the anniversary of his daughter’s death.

“It’s been a tough year for our family,” said Meg Morrissey Heinicke, who lives in San Francisco. “This year’s anniversary feels particularly sad and painful.”

Yet there remains “a hope that you desperately cling to” that the case will be solved, she said.

In honor of their sister, the siblings started the Susan Morrissey Foundation, which awards an annual scholarship to an Academy Park student for excellence in English, a small way of keeping her memory and love of the written word alive.

In their quest for answers, the family has promised a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

“I just want us to have some answers,” Missy Morrissey said of the family’s ongoing grief. “I don’t think that any of us can really process, or go on, without knowing.”

Anyone with information about the case is encouraged to call detectives with the Delaware State Police at 302-365-8441 or email daniel.grassi@delaware.gov.