Debra Ann Sadusky is buried in a cemetery near the southwest branch of Rancocas Creek in Medford, N.J., surrounded by the graves of hundreds of people who were still walking the Earth when she died unexpectedly.

“This was all grass,” her youngest brother, Michael, said during a recent visit, recalling that summer more than 40 years ago. “All these people passed away afterward.”

In August 1980, Sadusky’s body was found inside the cabin of a boat that had capsized in Margate’s bay, near a rowdy bar scene then dubbed the Barbary Coast. She was 20 years old.

Police considered her death suspicious: She was cut and bruised and wore only a bra.

They circulated a sketch of an unidentified mustached man — a bandage taped across the bridge of his nose — with whom Sadusky had been dancing at Meral’s Inn just before she went missing. Police wanted him for questioning.

But no arrest followed. The case, chronicled in a few short local newspaper stories, seemed to fizzle out within days. Authorities ruled Sadusky’s death an accidental drowning.

That Labor Day weekend, as shoobies flocked to the Jersey Shore, her family held a funeral back in Medford, about an hour away in Burlington County. The years rolled by in the close-knit town, dotted with mom-and-pop stores on Main Street. There were high school reunions, and with the dawn of social media, Facebook photos of Debbie’s friends — each image, for her brothers, a stinging reminder of their loss that summer.

“You see all these faces,” said Michael Sadusky, who owns a Medford auto-body shop with his brother David. “And my sister’s not there.”

Her name still comes up from time to time. Old friends and acquaintances who bring their cars into the shop might notice the family photo under the glass on the front desk. Debbie standing behind her father’s left shoulder, smiling.

Even today, few accept that her death was just an accident.

Not her three brothers. Not her friends who last saw her alive. Not the fisherman from Northeast Philadelphia who was haunted for years by a muffled call for help on the bay.

“Something always just didn’t sit right with me,” said Michael Sadusky, who was 16 when his sister died. “I always had that feeling that someone had something to do with it, that things just didn’t add up.”

“I always had that feeling that someone had something to do with it, that things just didn’t add up.”

About a year ago, the family hired a private investigator. He now believes he has identified the man in the sketch from 1980. That man has declined to take polygraph tests offered by the investigator and law enforcement officials.

New Jersey State Police have been working the case, conducting interviews over the last year, from South Jersey to Northeast Philly.

This month, a detective with the department’s Cold Case Unit told The Inquirer that Sadusky’s death has been reclassified and is currently considered “unsolved.”

On Aug. 23, 1980, the night Sadusky left the bar, Bob Margeson, then a 32-year-old newlywed, was fishing off the dock while the college-age crowd partied at the bars across the street on Amherst Avenue. The moon, nearly full, hung over the bay, which was as calm as a lake.

Late that night, Margeson noticed a man and a woman sitting on a boat docked at the adjacent pier. One thing caught his attention.

“When he turned his head, I thought, ‘What the hell is that?’” Margeson said in a recent interview. “I saw the bandage across the bridge of his nose. It was, like, shining off his face.”

Later, while Margeson was sleeping in his own boat, ahead of an early-morning tuna fishing trip, he heard a woman’s voice call for help, twice. He thought maybe he was dreaming, so he went back to sleep.

“I’ve had all this in my mind for 41 years,” said Margeson, 74, who owns a heating and air-conditioning business and lives in Philadelphia’s Holmesburg neighborhood. “For the first 10 years, that went through my head: ‘Help me. Help me.’ I’d hear it and shudder. I wish I would’ve gotten up.”

The next morning, Margeson awoke to find that the boat on which he’d seen the man and woman sitting had somehow sunk.

It wasn’t until the following day, when they towed the boat to nearby Longport to be hauled out of the bay, that Debbie Sadusky’s body was discovered inside the cabin.

The way that Margate police officers handled the case still troubles Margeson. Once he learned that a woman had been found inside the boat, he went to police to tell them everything he knew. He recalls being shocked by an officer’s creepy attitude.

“He says: ‘You’re an avid fisherman, right? What would you do if you were out fishing and you pulled her naked body in?’” Margeson said. “And he’s grinning as he’s saying it.”

Margeson, who has two daughters, was furious. Then, he said, police seemed to view him as a suspect in Sadusky’s death. But they never bothered to talk to his wife or best friend, who also slept on his boat that night, he said.

“How do you drown accidentally, naked, in the cabin of a boat?”

“Jackasses” is how Margeson described the local investigators. “How do you drown accidentally, naked, in the cabin of a boat? They were busy focusing on me, and they had a composite sketch.”

Cynthia Burton, then a reporter for the Press of Atlantic City, recalled a similarly disturbing experience with Margate police when, she said, an officer made a sexual remark about Sadusky’s body.

“It was a little stunning to us at the paper,” said Burton, who would go on to have a long career at the Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer. “It sticks in your craw. This naked girl in an upside-down boat. Just no respect for her.”

No one who was working for the Margate Police Department in 1980 still works there today.

Born in North Jersey in 1960, Debbie Sadusky moved with her family to Willingboro a few years later, then to Medford in 1976. Her mother was a homemaker, her father a millwright at the old Schmidt’s Brewery in Fishtown, now The Piazza.

Growing up with three brothers made her pretty tough. She drove a big Chrysler station wagon to school, acted in plays, did volunteer work, and liked to write — inspirational stuff, her brothers recalled. She was also a great swimmer. In 1978, she graduated with honors from Shawnee High School, where she was a drum and bugle corps majorette.

Carol Williams, who shared Christmas dinners with the Saduskys in Medford, said Debbie was a devout Christian and a cheerful, stabilizing presence in her circle of friends. Williams recalled a brief time at Shawnee High when she and Sadusky weren’t on speaking terms. Sadusky ended the standoff on the bus one day with four words: “I love you, Carol.”

“I was like, ‘Son of a gun. Now I can’t be mad at her,’” said Williams, 62, a recently retired administrative assistant who lives in Mount Laurel.

In the summer of 1980, Debbie was enjoying herself. She’d enrolled at the former Stockton State College with the hope of becoming a dance teacher and was living on Asbury Avenue in Ocean City, N.J., with Williams and other friends. She worked long hours at Eckerd Pharmacy.

Darkly tanned and deeply religious, she’d talk Williams into going to church with her. At dusk, they’d hop on their bikes and race to see the sunset. Williams still recalls those memories when the sun sets today.

“She was one of the happiest people I ever knew. I often felt she was too good for this world.”

“She told me not to worry so much, and to live my life,” Williams said. “She was one of the happiest people I ever knew. I often felt she was too good for this world.”

On the night Sadusky disappeared, Williams and two other friends were with her at Meral’s Inn. Sadusky was dancing with a man Williams described as a “surfer kind of guy.” They didn’t know him. They did notice the bandage on his nose.

“Debbie didn’t really have boyfriends and I was like, finally, she met someone,” Williams said. “She just looked like she was having a good time.”

They weren’t at Meral’s long, maybe an hour, an hour and a half, by Williams’ estimate, when Sadusky asked Williams to keep an eye on her purse and said: “Don’t leave without me. I’ll be right back.”

She never saw her again.

Debbie’s friends later went looking for her, calling her name around the bar and the marina.

When Sadusky didn’t show up to work at Eckerd, Williams called hospitals, then Debbie’s home in Medford. Soon, Joseph and Marilyn Sadusky got word about the discovery in the boat. They headed for the Shore to identify the body of their only daughter.

Michael and his brother David, then 17, stayed up that night, waiting. Their oldest brother, Joe, a Marine, was stationed at Camp Lejeune.

“They came home and said that it’s her,” Michael said of his parents. “I remember being in the living room and kind of having a group hug.”

From the beginning the family had questions.

How did the boat sink? Who was the man in the sketch? Why were most of her clothes removed? Was the cabin locked from the outside, as one person on the marina claimed?

Joseph Jr., who was 22 when Debbie died and now works at Barbera Autoland in Northeast Philadelphia, questions whether Margate police were reluctant to pursue a potentially high-profile death investigation right before Labor Day weekend, a key income source for the town. Violent crime is rare there.

“It was just not handled right,” he said. “There are so many unanswered questions.”

Debbie’s room in Medford remained largely untouched until her parents moved to a new house about a decade later. They struggled with her death. Marilyn Sadusky became more religious, while Joseph, a tight-lipped union worker, talked even less. Eventually, the brothers learned that discussing their sister’s death was too hard for their parents. When the topic of Debbie came up, it was about how she lived, and how much they missed her.

Joseph and Marilyn Sadusky were buried beside their daughter in 2004 and 2014, respectively.

“After 40 years, we’re still kind of looking for closure. My parents went to the grave not knowing,” Joseph Jr. said. “The not knowing. It’s always there. You replay things in your mind.”

In December 2020, the Sadusky brothers hired William Trump, a private investigator.

Trump, a former New Jersey State Police detective, ran into a wall almost immediately when he sought the records in the case. He said many are missing, and those that he could locate raise questions about the quality of the initial investigation and autopsy. Some repeatedly misspell Sadusky’s name.

When Trump reached out to the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office about a year ago, he said he was told the records had been destroyed in Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

“I’m very suspicious about them not having that,” Trump said.

Trump hasn’t been able to determine to what extent investigators looked into the possibility of a sexual assault or if they ever identified the man in the sketch.

Last week, Bruce K. DeShields, chief of county investigators in the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office, disputed that any records were missing.

“The Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office lost no records as a result of Hurricane Sandy,” DeShields said in a statement. “The facts at the time of Debra Sadusky’s death led the investigation to be treated as an accidental drowning. As a result, the case was closed.”

Nearly three months after her death, in December 1980, a doctor filed a supplementary report stating that Sadusky had a blood-alcohol concentration of .284, a “gross state of intoxication” that is 3½ times the current legal limit for driving. She also had methaqualone in her blood, from taking a quaalude, which was a popular recreational drug at the time.

The report said the combination of alcohol and methaqualone could have led Sadusky to become comatose, or even to have died of a fatal overdose if she didn’t drown first.

For Trump and Sadusky’s friends and family, that report is concerning.

Either the blood-alcohol concentration is wrong — inaccurate test results were not uncommon at that time, Trump said — or Sadusky likely would have had to consume a massive amount of alcohol after leaving Meral’s with the unidentified man. Carol Williams said Sadusky was not a heavy drinker in general and did not appear intoxicated when she left the bar.

Newspaper accounts from August 1980 include police statements that the cuts and bruises on Sadusky’s body might have been caused when the cabin cruiser was towed from Margate to Longport.

But, even if that’s the case, why was she naked, except for a bra?

“She didn’t lose her clothes when that boat was rocking around. How did that happen?” Trump asked. “To me, it just didn’t happen the way they wanted it to sound. It definitely calls for more investigation, without a doubt.”

In recent months, Trump said, he has identified a person of interest, a man still living in South Jersey. Carol Williams, who provided police with information for their 1980 sketch and has viewed old photos of the man on Facebook, said they are of the same person.

“Definitely the guy Debbie was dancing with,” she said last month.

The New Jersey State Police Cold Case Unit, which was created in 2020 to work on unsolved crimes, is also looking into Sadusky’s death.

Detective Shaun Clark, a member of the unit, declined last week to comment in detail on their work because it is considered an open case.

“The case is considered active but administratively closed,” Clark said. “Technically, it is an unsolved death investigation.”

While the Cold Case Unit has already had some early success in solving old crimes — including the recent arrest of an Egg Harbor City man in the 1996 sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl — the Sadusky case presents particularly difficult challenges: no DNA evidence and an apparent lack of contemporaneous records.

“There isn’t much documentation from the past,” Clark said.

The three Sadusky brothers, the fisherman Bob Margeson, and Carol Williams said they were interviewed by State Police detectives last year.

Trump said last week that, according to his own sources, criminal investigators in October confronted the man he has been focusing on. The man agreed to answer some questions, Trump said, but left the police barracks when asked to take a polygraph.

Trump also offered the man a polygraph and he wouldn’t do it.

“My belief is he knows a lot more than what he’s saying about Debbie’s death,” Trump said.

The Inquirer is not identifying the man because police have not named a suspect in the case.

In a phone interview shortly before Christmas, the man denied ever meeting Debbie Sadusky. He said that he would never go out dancing with a bandage on his nose and that many guys looked the way he did back then.

“I have no idea who the girl is,” he said. “I’m not a hostile person at all. I don’t even know where it all came from. Just very odd.”

Asked if any law enforcement official contacted him about Sadusky’s death around 1980, he replied:

“I really don’t remember. I don’t recall.”

Anyone with information about the death of Debbie Sadusky can contact New Jersey State Police at 833-4NJ-COLD or coldcase@njsp.org.