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During this episode, we’ll be covering the chilling disappearance & presumed murder of Suzanne Simpson, a 51-year-old real estate agent, mother of four, and a beloved supermom from Olmos Park, Texas. After a violent confrontation with her husband of 22 years, Brad Simpson, Suzanne vanished without a trace. What started as a missing persons report has unraveled into a web of disturbing clues, family secrets, and a daughter’s fearless cry for justice. Today, we’ll walk through the timeline, the evidence that will leave you asking: what really happened to Suzanne Simpson?
Sunday, October 6, 2024 was the last day Suzanne Simpson was ever seen. She attended a birthday party at an upscale club in San Antonio, Texas where she was seen loudly arguing & physically struggling with her husband of 22 years, 53-year-old Brad Simpson. The last known sighting of Suzanne was at about 10 pm that night when a neighbor watched Suzanne struggle & pull free from her husband’s grasp. The man watched from his window as Suzanne escaped Brad’s clutches & ran away, Brad following closely behind. Shortly thereafter, the neighbor came outside to further investigate & heard screams coming from the nearby woods yet authorities weren’t contacted until the next night when Suzanne’s friends reported her missing.
Throughout the couple’s 22 years of marriage, they shared four children & as of 2024, they had a 5-year-old daughter, a 15-year-old son & 18 & 20-year-old daughters. Brad worked as an investor in real estate as well as within construction businesses around central Texas.
Since her mom vanished & is presumed to have been murdered despite the fact that her remains have yet to be located, Suzanne & Brad’s eldest child, 20-year-old Chandler Simpson, has been very outspoken. In a series of Instagram stories, the young girl directly implicated her father in her mother’s death & wrote, My mom was a victim of abuse from my father. My father took my mother’s life in a state of rage & control. Those who choose to remain silent are choosing to blind themselves from domestic violence in our homes. My mother tried to leave my father & lost her life.
Chandler has also shared the things she misses about her mom since she disappeared that include Suzanne’s bright smile, her impeccable meatloaf, her ability to converse with anyone & everyone, her pursuit to always put others first, her devotion as a mother, wife & best friend, her dorky dance moves & her endless support of her children that has allow Chandler to be her own person.
Suzanne was a smiling, friendly fixture within her Olmos Park community, a regular at a nearby coffee shop, someone who was seen as a supermom who was able to juggle her family life along with her successful real estate career & she was known as a hilariously bad driver.
Brad & Suzanne had been living in their $1.38 million dollar home at 520 E Olmos Drive in Olmos Park, Texas for nearly a decade with their 5-year-old daughter & 15-year-old child while their two adult children were out of the home. Before her mother disappeared Chandler had spent two years studying fashion design in Paris as well as New York.
On the day that Suzanne was presumed to have been murdered, Sunday, October 6, 2024, she, Brad & their 5-year-old daughter headed to a birthday party at about 6 pm at The Argyle, a private dinner club in Alamo Heights. The club, where Brad & Suzanne were guests, rather than members, is a 170-year-old three-story colonial mansion with a sprawling veranda that wraps around the top floor. Suzanne wore a short, dark dress to the party that evening with tall tan heels while her sandy blond hair was partially pulled back. During the party, guests witnessed the couple having a verbal altercation & shortly thereafter, Suzanne & their 5-year-old daughter left the party without Brad at about 8:30 pm.
From there, the pair drove two miles to the H-E-B grocery store on Olmos Drive & surveillance video indicated they were at the store between 8:40-8:51 pm. When they left, they made the three minute drive back to their house. Once home, Suzanne called a family friend at 9:15 pm & headed out to go to their house. While enroute, she called her mom at 9:16 pm & told her that she & Brad had gotten into a fight that escalated to the point that he assaulted her, injuring her & causing pain to her arm, back & neck. They spoke until 9:24 pm & it was right around this time that Suzanne arrived at her friend’s home.
Suzanne’s mom, Barbara, tried calling her daughter back to tell her to come to her house & stay with the kids, but there was no answer. Sadly, Suzanne never got the chance to hear her mom’s plan.
Little did Suzanne know, but at 9:16 pm, as she spoke on the phone with her mom, Brad was in the process of accessing the AT&T app on his phone in order to suspend his wife’s service. This ended up being a point of interest as after she was reported missing, Brad claimed that his wife lost her phone while she’d been at the grocery store.
It’s unclear how long Suzanne stayed at her friend’s home, but sometime between 10-11 pm a neighbor who lived directly across the street from the Simpsons heard an argument outside his bedroom window. As the argument grew louder, he went toward the window to investigate & indicated that the noise seemed closer to his window. The neighbor looked out & noticed Brad & Suzanne physically struggling with each other, Brad was grabbing her upper torso area to gain control of her body, until Suzanne managed to break free & run in a westerly direction. Brad began chasing her, trying to grab her, but the neighbor quickly lost sight of the couple as they ran from his yard.
When the neighbor went outside to investigate a short time later, he heard two to three screams coming from the woods that were situated across from his home. About an hour later he heard Brad’s black 2019 GMC Sierra truck start up & drive away & an hour later, it returned. Despite the alarming situation; the fact that he witnessed his neighbors physically struggling, followed by screams coming from the woods after he’d witnessed Brad chasing Suzanne, he never notified authorities & only gave his statement after an investigation began as a result of Suzanne’s friends reporting her missing.
In the meantime, the couple’s 20-year-old daughter, Chandler, utilized her Apple iPhone’s “Find My” app that they shared as a family & the last location listed for her mom’s phone was at their home at 10:22 pm.
Beginning at 11:09 pm, Brad intentionally engaged in a series of on/off cycles that included complete shutdowns of his phone in order to prevent data collection. According to the Texas Department of Public Safety Criminal Analyst as well as the FBI’s forensic examiner, this continued until the following day. He also shut his phone down in a way that the FBI rarely sees which is referred to as Lock Down mode which is a shutdown of a cell phone that is done by a person in order to avoid detection.
Brad’s truck was seen on surveillance video at 12:33 am, now in the early morning hours of Monday, October 7, at the H-E-B grocery store where Suzanne & her daughter had been only hours earlier. The video showed that at this point, the bed of his truck was clear of any cargo except for a large ice chest.
The last activity from Suzanne’s cell phone registered at 7:15 am with coordinates that proved it was in a business parking lot in Olmos Park.
At 7:53 am Brad dropped their 5-year-old daughter off at Howard Early Childhood Center where she went to school. This time, surveillance video observed that there were at least two white trash bags in the bed of the truck in addition to the large ice chest.
At 9:12 am Brad was seen in the drive-through of Whataburger on W. Bandera Road in Boerne 30 miles (49 km) from his daughter’s school. Now, in addition to the white trash bags & ice chest, video showed a large grey heavy-duty trash can as well as a large, bulky item that was wrapped in a blue tarp & secured by a strap or rope that had a silver metal firewood rack placed on top in a manner to conceal & weigh the tarp down.
At 9:50 am, Brad drove to a Home Depot, also in Boerne where surveillance depicted him purchasing two bags of cement, an orange construction bucket with a lid, a box of 32 count heavy duty trash bags, one can of Clorox disinfectant spray & insect repellant. He purchased these items with cash. As he left the store, Brad approached a man in the parking lot & asked him for directions to the nearest dump & the man gave him directions to the Kendall County Solid Waste site.
As Brad left the Home Depot parking lot at 10 am, he intentionally placed his phone in lock down mode & vehicle location data eventually captured his truck near the waste site. From here, he headed to a gas station where he was seen at 11:15 am purchasing gas for his truck as well as two one-gallon jugs of water. By now the white trash bags were missing from the bed of his truck, but the blue tarp, firewood rack & trash can were still there. While he remained at the gas station, he changed his sandals into cowboy boots.
After he left the gas station he headed to Medina, about an hour’s drive from Kendall County, where he remained for thirteen minutes before he headed back to Kendall County. Investigators believe this was where he unloaded the blue tarp that was concealing a large object, presumably Suzanne’s remains, as when his truck was captured on a license plate reader at 1:41 pm, the blue tarp was no longer visible in the back of his truck & the firewood rack had been repositioned.
His daughter’s school contacted Brad at 3 pm to let him know that his daughter hadn’t been picked up yet. Suzanne was normally the one who picked her up from school. When he retrieved her at 3:27 pm the firewood rack was no longer in the bed of his truck, but the trash can & the ice chest were still visible.
At 4:07 pm, Brad drove to the Bubble Bath car wash in San Antonio where he was a member & he was seen on surveillance washing & cleaning the driver’s front side & the rear left passenger side while splashes of dried cement were visible on the rear passenger side as well as the bed of the truck. The can of Clorox could be seen in the rear passenger side & only the ice chest remained in the bed of the truck.
That evening, unbeknownst to Brad, Suzanne’s friends gathered to discuss the fact that they’d been unable to reach her. One friend reached out to Brad about her concerns & at that point, he had not contacted authorities to report her missing. At 9:57 pm, a friend of Suzanne’s contacted the police to report her missing & fifteen minutes later Brad did the same, leaving a voicemail for Olmos Park Police Chief Fidel Villegas, indicating he hadn’t heard from his wife since 11 pm on Sunday.
However, during a phone call between Police Chief Villegas & Brad that happened on Tuesday morning at 9 am, Brad changed his story & said that the last time he’d seen Suzanne was at 6:30 am Monday morning when he was leaving the house to take their daughter to school. He said he peeked into a separate room & saw her asleep in bed.
Very early on in the investigation, Brad was cooperative but this quickly changed after he lawyered up & went silent. He failed to show up to secondary interviews before he was ultimately arrested. After he reported his wife missing, he didn’t return to his home, but rather went to a family home in Bandera County. Records prove that his father owns a home in Bandera, but Brad was ultimately arrested in Kendall County near where his brother owns a property though he was arrested during a traffic stop rather than at any of the family properties.
When investigators spoke with a counselor at Howard Early Childhood Center, they indicated that when they spoke to the Simpson’s 5-year-old daughter, she told them that her dad had pushed her mom against the wall, hit her in the face & hurt her elbow when they were at their house. Her dad also grabbed her mom’s phone & turned it off.
When investigators spoke with Suzanne’s mother, Barbara, she told them about her phone conversation with her daughter on Sunday night when she told her that Brad assaulted her. Barbara fully believed very early on that her daughter was deceased since hasn’t contacted her since that Sunday night when she vanished.
Barbara heard from Brad sometime on Monday when he told his mother-in-law that Suzanne hadn’t shown up to the school to pick their daughter up as she did each & every day. This was the first time Barbara was alerted to the fact that her daughter was missing & something was wrong, but at the same time, she could only hope that there was a reasonable explanation for her absence.
According to Barbara, she’d always respected Brad as a husband & a father; she always admired him & cannot understand how he could have potentially hurt her daughter. She questioned if maybe alcohol had been a factor in escalating the argument since her daughter & Brad had attended the birthday party earlier that evening.
When Barbara was asked if she was aware of any previous physical abuse in the past toward her daughter, she indicated that there had been a recent incident between the couple, but she never fathomed it would escalate further. When she confronted her son-in-law about the previous incident, she noticed he became defensive.
Investigators learned that on Tuesday, October 8 at 4:35 pm Brad texted his longtime friend & business partner, James Cotter, If you’re in Bandera can you haul ass to meet me at your house? I don’t have much time. Cotter responded that he would be there in forty minutes & Brad wrote, Ok, make sure & leave all that shit into the pump house, especially the gun. At 8:31 pm Cotter texted Brad, Get over here!! I won’t tell anyone. You’re my brother.
Cotter was charged with tampering with evidence with the intent to impair an investigation & possession of prohibited weapons in relation to Suzanne’s disappearance after police discovered an AK-47 hidden in the wall of his home. The gun had been illegally modified into a machine gun which was not properly registered & investigators believe that the man concealed the weapon that could potentially be tied to Suzanne’s disappearance. After he posted bond in November 2024, he was placed on house arrest.
Brad was arrested in the early morning hours of Wednesday, October 9; according to officers, he didn’t seem surprised nor did he question why he was being arrested. He had visible lacerations & bruising to his hands & arms, he showed little to no emotion & seemed unconcerned that his wife of 22 years & the mother of his four children was missing.
A search warrant was secured that same day where authorities located a burn site with a charred laptop & three cellular devices that belonged to Brad. At the time of his arrest, Brad had is iPhone 14 Plus on him & after the phone was examined, investigators found two notes on the device that were titled This next life & Last will & testament where he apologized for assaulting his wife on a previous occasion in August 2023 & again on the Sunday night she vanished. These notes were created the day before, Tuesday, October 8.
Investigators also found texts on Brad’s phone from September 17, 2023, one year earlier with another female. He wrote, I still feel bad about tonight. I never should’ve grabbed her phone & drove off but she was so protective of it. My dumb ass didn’t know her passcode so I got locked out & had to bring it back. I really have no interest in looking through her phone or anybody else’s. These devices are the Devil.
His truck tested positive for blood that was later proven to belong to Brad.
Brad was initially arrested & charged with Assault-Family Violence & Unlawful Restraint & wasn’t charged with Suzanne’s murder until November 7, one month later.
When investigators spoke with Suzanne’s personal banker at Frost Bank after they came forward on October 23 to tell investigators that she’d confided in them during a conversation in August 2024, two months before she went missing. Suzanne indicated that she was being physically abused by her husband who would often take her phone away & tell their children she’d lost it. She also told them that if she ever went missing, to look for her remains in a lake.
When the Simpson home was searched on October 23, investigators located one bag of cement, the box of heavy-duty black trash bags that contained 28 of the 32 total bags, a gray heavy-duty trash can & the metal firewood rack that was seen on surveillance the day after Suzanne went missing.
Detectives conducted an interview with an unnamed woman on October 30 & learned that Suzanne was very much aware that her husband tracked her movements & was an incredibly jealous person.
Since the night of Sunday, October 6, 2024 there have been no signs to suggest that Suzanne Simpson is still alive based on her cell phone records, financial records as well as the fact that none of her loved ones have seen her since that time. Those that know & love Suzanne all agree that the devoted mother of four would have never voluntarily abandoned her children.
Despite intensive searches, her remains have yet to be located. During the week of her disappearance, officers searched a landfill on the eastern side of San Antonio over the course of four days. Friends & neighbors passed out fliers after Suzanne vanished as police searched the woods that were near the Simpson home. The family’s ranch property was also searched one county over & as the investigation expanded, the Texas Rangers as well as the FBI got involved.
Brad was later indicted for tampering with evidence for concealing a mechanical saw two days after Suzanne’s disappearance which her DNA had been located on as well as destroying & concealing a human corpse with intent to impair its availability as evidence.
Ten days after Suzanne vanished, Brad’s brother Barton wrote a public post to Facebook, Until Brad chooses to cooperate, we will continue (to) cooperate for him as we have from the very beginning of this heartbreaking ordeal. This is not how we were raised & this is not who we are. He went on to say that his brother’s uncooperation was unacceptable & that their sister & brother-in-law had stepped up to care for the couple’s children in the wake of losing both of their parents. He signed off saying, We will not rest until we find Suzanne.
Brad & Suzanne’s 20-year-old daughter, Chandler has been very outspoken about the case & took to posting a series of Instagram stories that directly implicated her father. Chandler also directed her disgust at her parent’s wealthy neighbors, Shame on my community for not speaking about domestic violence. Within Alamo Heights, the women are marginalized by society & misogyny everyday & are told to keep their mouths shut.
The couple’s 18-year-old daughter Chelsea also took to social media to write a heartfelt, emotional tribute to her mom. She wrote about the void in their lives since their mom disappeared & how much her hilariously energetic & welcoming personality has been missed & acknowledged all the sacrifices her mom made over the years for her four children, things Chelsea failed to notice in her early teens.
Brad remains behind bars where he’s been since October 9, 2024 at Bexar County Jail with a $3 bond. He is allowed to exchange letters with his son, but is not allowed to have contact with his 5-year-old daughter while his adult children are refusing to communicate with him though he has pursued permission to see his children.
On December 10, 2024 the judge in this case issued a wide-ranging gag order for all family members, friends & witnesses. Given the case’s high profile and the ongoing forensic work, it’s not yet clear when the trial will begin. During a hearing in March 2025, Steven Gilmore, Brad Simpson’s attorney indicated that he believes he has enough evidence to proceed with the motion to quash the indictment charging Brad with murder, tampering with evidence & prohibited weapons possession. His next court appearance is scheduled for April 22 at 9 am. In the meantime he remains in Bexar County’s jail.
Suzanne Simpson is a woman remembered for her bright smile, her supermom grit, and even her hilariously bad driving. Her remains have yet to be found despite exhaustive searches and a mountain of evidence that point to a grim end to a once joyous life. This case is a stark reminder of the hidden struggles that might be happening behind closed doors, even in the most polished neighborhoods.
If you are experiencing domestic violence, please contact the Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233
References:
- KSAT: Daughter of Suzanne Simpson shares favorite memories of her mother
- Brad Simpson Arrest Warrant
- Town & Country: What really happened to Suzanne Simpson?
- MySA: Husband of Suzanne Simpson has hearing in murder charge delayed a week
- Fox News: Suzanne Simpson murder: Texas attorneys sift through evidence as husband’s case rocks affluent neighborhood
- KSAT: Timeline details Brad Simpson’s whereabouts before & after wife Suzanne Simpson disappeared
- YouTube: News 4 – Mother of Suzanne Simpson thinks her daughter is dead
- MySA: Inside the case of Olmos Park mom Suzanne Simpson days after vanishing
- Daily Mail: Texas tycoon’s daughter accuses dad of killing missing mom after argument at $1.5m mansion
- KSAT: Brad Simpson’s motion to quash hearing set for 30 days in connection with wife Suzanne’s murder case
- Fox News: Suzanne Simpson case: Texas court weighs husband’s request to have murder charge thrown out
