Cold Case Files: Single mom from Mena disappeared somewhere between Polk County and Little Rock in 1989
- Dennis McCaslin
- Mar 21, 2025
- 2 min read
Susan Lynn Darst Burns was a 32-year-old woman living in Mena in the spring of 1989
She was a mother, and her family would later become voices in the search for answers.
On April 29, 1989, Susan’s life took a mysterious turn. According to reports, her husband drove her to the Little Rock airport, roughly 150 miles east of Mena, and dropped her off. The story goes that he last saw her there, presumably to catch a flight, but what happened next remains unclear.
Susan vanished that day, never to be seen or heard from again.
No one knows if she boarded a plane--there’s no mention of a confirmed ticket purchase--or if something else intervened. Her disappearance left a void, and questions began to pile up.
Her case entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) years later, on March 30, 2011. . Eventually, two images surfaced on NamUs: one of Susan at 16, provided by her daughter, and another from 1985, showing her closer to the time she went missing.
The circumstances reported are minimal: her husband’s account of the airport drop-off is the last breadcrumb.
Susan’s case didn’t garner widespread attention at first. Public records hint at a life before Arkansas--her Social Security updates show name changes (Susan Lynn Darst to Susan Lynn Brown in 1975, then back to Darst in 1983, and finally S.L. Darst in 1991, oddly post-disappearance)--but these don’t explain her fate.
The distance between Mena and Little Rock fueled theories: Did she intend to travel far, or was the airport a convenient story? No evidence of foul play has been publicly confirmed, yet the lack of proof she ever left Little Rock keeps the mystery alive.
. The Polk County authorities and NamUs hold the case open, a testament to a woman who slipped away without a trace.
For her family--her daughter, her grandmother, perhaps aunts and uncles listed in distant records--Susan Lynn Darst Burns is more than a missing person file.
She’s a memory frozen in time, a question mark lingering over Arkansas, waiting for someone, somewhere, to bring closure.
