The arrest came quietly, almost without notice, for a man who had terrorized the affluent suburbs of Bergen County, New Jersey, for weeks. Robert Reldan, the charismatic 35-year-old nephew of a millionaire aunt, was taken into custody on November 5, 1975, not for murder, but for two house burglaries. It was a technicality that would hold him, investigators hoped, long enough to build a case that would explain the horrific deaths of two young women named Susan.
The first body had been found on October 22, 1975, in a park just across the state line in New York. A local resident walking his dog along the pathway to a reservoir had been pulled by the animal toward a secluded trail. There, the dog led him to the remains of a human being.
Dental records confirmed the victim was Susan Haynes, the 28-year-old British newlywed who had vanished from her home just sixteen days earlier.
Susan Haynes had seemed to have it all. A beautiful, warm, and social young midwife from England, she had recently married Jonathan Haynes, a British professional who had taken a job in the United States. The couple had chosen the leafy, tranquil streets of Haworth, New Jersey, as the place to build their new life.
It was, by all accounts, an idyllic setting, a world away from the crime-ridden streets of New York City just across the George Washington Bridge.
On the morning of October 6, 1975, Jonathan headed off to work as usual. He spoke with his wife by telephone at around 1:00 p. m.
, and she was in high spirits, excited about a letter from friends in Cape Town. He told her he might be home slightly late. When Jonathan returned just before 6:00 p.
m. , the house was locked and silent. There was no Sue at the door, no sign of a struggle, no note.
Her car was in the garage, the driver’s keys in the ignition, her house keys on the passenger seat.
For three agonizing days, Jonathan Haynes was treated as the prime suspect, as spouses so often are in missing person cases. He submitted to a polygraph test, a process he had never experienced before, and passed with flying colors. Police were forced to look elsewhere.
They searched wooded areas, brought in sniffing dogs, and even consulted a psychic. Hundreds of volunteers marched arm-in-arm across cleared fields. Nothing turned up.
Just eight days later, on October 14, 1975, the unthinkable happened again. Susan Reev, a 22-year-old advertising agency employee who had just become engaged to be married, stepped off a commuter bus at the corner of Anderson Avenue in Bergen County and began walking toward her parents’ home. She never arrived.
Her family, initially thinking she might have stopped for a drink or visited her fiancé, grew frantic as the night wore on. By morning, they had reported her missing.
An eyewitness report from a toll collector on the George Washington Bridge sent a chill through the investigation. In the early evening hours, a car had driven through the toll booth with the radio playing loudly. The toll collector heard a female voice from the back of the car crying out, “Help me!
He’s crazy!” over and over again, before the man sped off across the bridge. Police quickly connected the dots.
Two women named Susan, both young, both attractive, both vanished without a trace from the same quiet suburban county. The coincidence was too great to ignore.
The break in the case came on October 21, when the toll booth operator was shown a photo lineup. She picked out the driver as Robert Reldan, a 35-year-old Bergen County resident who was currently on parole. When investigators brought him in for questioning, he appeared calm, cooperative, and charming.
He presented a detailed diary of his activities over the past six months, claiming he had been at a bar not far from his house on the days in question, drinking a bitter lemon non-alcoholic beverage. But when detectives visited that bar, the bartenders told them they did not stock bitter lemon. The alibi was a fabrication, laid out in suspiciously elaborate detail.
Reldan was a master of manipulation, according to those who would later investigate him. He was handsome, tall, powerfully built, and impeccably spoken. He didn’t swear.
Women loved him. If you saw him walking down the street, you would stop to help him without a second thought. But behind the polished exterior lurked a violent predator with a deeply disturbing history of crimes against women, a history that stretched back to his teenage years.
Born in Brooklyn in 1940, Reldan had moved with his family to Bergen County as a child. His parents owned a luncheonette in New York City and worked long hours, leaving young Robert with little supervision. His younger sister had suffered from polio as a child, drawing much of their parents’ attention.
But Reldan never wanted for material goods. His wealthy aunt, Lillian Booth, a former aspiring actress who had married the son of an early IBM investor, lavished gifts on her favorite nephew, whom she called Bobby. She bought him a brand new Volkswagen convertible and funded his horseback riding lessons and ski trips.
He lived a playboy’s life, yet he seemed to want more.
His criminal record began at age 16, when he crossed the George Washington Bridge into New York City and accosted a woman in an apartment building, stealing her pocketbook. The thefts, burglaries, and muggings continued through the 1960s, always directed against women. In 1967, he spotted a local housewife driving by while he sat in his new Volkswagen.
He followed her home, used his charm to get inside under the pretense of making a phone call, and raped her. He was convicted and sent to Rahway State Prison to participate in a new rehabilitation program for 𝒔𝒆𝒙 offenders.
Reldan became the poster child for the program. He was smart, knew exactly what to say, and fooled the psychiatrists into believing he was cured. In one report, a psychiatrist wrote that if Reldan were released on parole, he would predict that Reldan would become the most successful parolee in the history of the criminal justice system.
He was released in 1970, but was soon arrested again for holding a young woman at knifepoint in her car. He showed just enough humility to win over the parole board once more and was released in May 1975. Five months later, two young women were dead.
The autopsy of Susan Haynes confirmed the worst fears of investigators. Her hyoid bone in the neck had been broken. She had been strangled with a woman’s stocking tied around her neck, with a stick inserted into the stocking and twisted to tighten it.
It was a sadistic, brutal, and personal method of killing. The description matched a chilling signature that investigators would soon learn was characteristic of a serial sexual murderer. The killer wanted to be up close and personal, to control death itself.
When Susan Reev’s body was discovered on October 28 in Harriman State Park, the scene was equally disturbing. Park employees checking a pipe for chlorine levels found the body lying on its back in the water, with the arms sticking straight up in the air. It was an unnatural position, indicating the body had been placed there after death.
The post-mortem confirmed that Susan had been sexually assaulted, and the cause of death matched the other Bergen County victim exactly. Both women had been garroted with their own stockings, with a stick in the stocking used to twist it tighter and tighter.
The press dubbed the murders the Susan Stranglings. The residents of Bergen County, a community that had once felt immune to violent crime, were terrified. For former prosecutor Charles Buckley, the case would remain etched in his memory forever.
The brutality of the killings, the methodical way in which the bodies were posed, and the realization that a charming, privileged man from their own community could be capable of such savagery shook the county to its core.
While in prison for the burglaries, Reldan continued to receive the unwavering support of his family. His mother, father, sister, and aunt Lillian never lost faith in him. But investigators soon discovered that Reldan was plotting to murder the very aunt who had supported him his entire life.
He approached two fellow inmates and asked if they could find someone to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 his aunt. He needed a big-time attorney to represent him, and he wanted to inherit her fortune.
The inmates reported the plot to authorities. An undercover police officer posed as a hired hitman and met with Reldan at the state prison. In recorded conversations, Reldan told the investigator exactly what he wanted done with his aunt, signaling his intent by saying he wanted her throat slashed across.
He was arrested for conspiracy to murder his aunt Lillian. The man who had been given everything, who had been given a new car, funded ski trips, and was set to inherit millions, was willing to have his benefactor killed for more.
When the trials began, Reldan made an impression on everyone who encountered him. He was a good-looking, well-dressed, polished, charming man who looked like an everyday upper-class gentleman. He had such a commanding presence that many people in the courtroom assumed he was the attorney, and his actual attorney was thought to be the defendant.
But Robert Reldan was not content to rely on the due process of law.
In a stunning development, Reldan somehow obtained a can of mace while being held in an anteroom to the courthouse. He sprayed the guard in the eyes, jumped out of the second-story window, and broke both ankles. He still tried to run.
Jonathan Haynes, the husband of his first victim, chased him through the courthouse parking lot, screaming that he was going to get him. Reldan managed to reach a car and sped off on the highway, entering New York State before police apprehended him when the car veered off the road into a ditch.
In 1986, Robert Reldan was finally sentenced to 30 years for the murder of Susan Haynes and life imprisonment for the murder of Susan Reev. But the question that haunted investigators, psychologists, and the families of his victims remained: what was the root of his brutal ferocity? Was this privileged young man shaped by his upbringing, or was he simply born to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁?
Those who studied him believed greed was a fundamental problem. Reldan felt he should be getting more from his aunt. She never gave him enough to satisfy him.
He felt animosity toward women, and this hatred caused him to reach out and rape. But others believe there was something deeper, something inherently wrong with him. He was missing compassion and humanity.
When you talk to prisoners, many blame their environment, a missing father, a 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔-addicted mother. Reldan had everything. There was no watershed event in his life that made him into a monster.
It was internal. It was the way he was born. From a very early age, he enjoyed violating the rights of others.
These things are inborn to a great extent, and he gratified himself by hurting others, and not just a little bit, but a lot. It was part of his sexual arousal pattern.
For 21 years after his sentencing, Aunt Lillian Booth remained loyal to her nephew, supporting him throughout his time in prison. When she passed away, Reldan inherited the income from a $9 million trust fund. But the family of Susan Reev was determined that her murderer should not receive a penny.
They initiated legal action, and in 2010, a court ruled that Reldan must pay damages to them and that they should receive the income from the trust fund for the rest of his life.
Barbara Reev, Susan’s mother, said they wanted nothing of Reldan’s money. To take anything from him might have given him some solace in thinking they had accepted compensation for what he had done. So they determined the money would go into a memorial scholarship fund at the college from which Susan had just graduated.
It became a rewarding experience, turning the proceeds of murder into a legacy of education and hope for future generations.
Jonathan Haynes, meanwhile, ensured that his wife Susan would never be forgotten. She is buried in the local churchyard in England, at the 13th-century church where they had been married. He remains extremely proud of her, and friends all around still remember her.
For him, the pain never truly faded. He is nearly 70 now, and the horror of what happened to his young bride is still there, as fresh as the day he came home to an empty, silent house.
Robert Reldan, the charming, privileged man who charmed people to death with murder in mind, died in prison in 2019 at the age of 79. He had spent the remainder of his life behind bars for the two brutal stranglings. Investigators who worked the case believe there may have been other victims, other women whose stories have never been told.
The case stands as a chilling reminder that evil does not always wear a menacing face. Sometimes, it looks like the friendly, handsome man next door, the one who offers to help, the one who would charm you to death.
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