In partnership with Epic Magazine

She was known, back then, as Susan Thunder. For someone in the business of deception, she stood out: she was unusually tall, wide-hipped, with a mane of light blonde hair and a wardrobe of jackets embroidered with band logos, spoils from an adolescence spent as an infamous rock groupie. Her backstage conquests had given her a taste for quaaludes and pharmaceutical-grade cocaine; they’d also given her the ability to sneak in anywhere. 

Susan found her way into the hacker underground through the phone network. In the late 1970s, Los Angeles was a hotbed of telephone culture: you could dial-a-joke, dial-a-horoscope, even dial-a-prayer. Susan spent most of her days hanging around on 24-hour conference lines, socializing with obsessives with code names like Dan Dual Phase and Regina Watts Towers. Some called themselves phone phreakers and studied the Bell network inside out; like Susan’s groupie friends, they knew how to find all the back doors. 

When the phone system went electric, the LA phreakers studied its interlinked networks with equal interest, meeting occasionally at a Shakey’s Pizza parlor in Hollywood to share what they’d learned: ways to skim free long-distance calls, void bills, and spy on one another. Eventually, some of them began to think of themselves as computer phreakers, and then hackers, as they graduated from the tables at Shakey’s to dedicated bulletin board systems, or BBSes. 

Susan followed suit. Her specialty was social engineering. She was a master at manipulating people, and she wasn’t above using seduction to gain access to unauthorized information. Over the phone, she could convince anyone of anything. Her voice honey-sweet, she’d pose as a telephone operator, a clerk, or an overworked secretary: I’m sorry, my boss needs to change his password, can you help me out? 

In the early ’80s, Susan and her friends pulled increasingly elaborate phone scams until they nearly shut down phone service for the entire city. As two of her friends, Kevin Mitnick and Lewis DePayne, were being convicted for cybercrime, she made an appearance on 20/20, demonstrating their tradecraft to Geraldo Rivera. Riding her celebrity, she went briefly legit, testifying before the US Senate and making appearances at security conventions, spouting technobabble in cowboy boots and tie-dye. Then, without a trace, she left the world behind. 

I went looking for the great lost female hacker of the 1980s. I should have known that she didn’t want to be found.

Few of Susan’s old friends have remained in touch with her; those who have are tight-lipped. “We have protocols,” one tells me. “No chance,” says another. That’s how she likes it. She’s kept herself well-scrubbed from the public record. No social media, no website. Fragments scattered across the web indicate a peripatetic career: proposition poker player at the Las Vegas Stardust, city clerk of California City, eBay dealer of ancient Roman coins. It takes me nearly a year to track her down. In the end, it’s an ex-boyfriend who leads me to her.

In 1981, Scott Ellentuch — known online as “Tuc” — was the teenage system operator of a BBS frequented by phreakers. One day, a message popped up on his screen from a user named Susan Thunder. She was asking about his system. Trying to impress her, Scott told Susan his BBS was highly secure, locked in a vault 10 feet underground, and served by a single phone line. “Scott, you know that’s not true,” she responded. “Let’s get off here and talk on the phone.” In the other room, he heard the phone ring, and then his mother’s voice, yelling — “Scott, phone for you!” 

Susan took Scott under her wing. “She’d talk about systems she’d compromised, how to do it, how to trick people into thinking you’re someone else to get information,” he remembers. “She was a mix of smart, technical, connected, and able to absorb information like a sponge.” She seemed to know all the elite hackers of the day, and she introduced him around. 

Now, it’s Scott who holds the keys to Susan. Before I can talk to her, he tells me, I have to prove myself worthy.

Susan Headley was just a kid when her father moved her family into a two-bedroom house in La Crescenta and walked out. After he left, she retreated into the phone; she’d sit curled up with the handset for hours, searching for a voice, any voice, at the other end of the line, even if it was only the voice of an operator, asking to whom she’d like to be connected. Sometimes she’d pick up the receiver just to hear the dial tone, to hear the “click, click, click” of the rotary dial. 

To Susan, talking on the phone was a basic magic: how could she reach her cousin in Chicago all the way from California? She thought only God could hear people from so far away. She dialed numbers at random, placing accidental long-distance calls that turned up on the family phone bill. She had whispered conversations with late-night radio DJs. When her mom installed a lock on the rotary dial, Susan figured out that by tapping repeatedly on the handset’s button rest, she could speak the secret clicked language of the telephone itself. 

She dreamt of becoming a telephone operator or, better yet, the recorded voice that plays when a call is disconnected: I’m sorry, please hang up and try your call again. That way, she could live inside the phone forever.

Then, when Susan was nine, her mom started dating a Navy officer. One day, while her mom was at work, the Navy officer tried to lure Susan into a detached bedroom in the back of the house. Eventually, he forced her. Susan attempted to explain what was happening to her mom but had no language for the parts of her body that he had touched. Her mother was strictly religious; shame made it impossible to communicate. When she tried to convey that the man had been doing “something dirty,” her mother did nothing.

Susan disappeared further into the phone, where she could be someone else. Prank calls made her feel powerful, and at first, they were innocent enough: Is your refrigerator running? Well, you better catch it. But when one of her exasperated targets called her a small-brained little twerp, Susan got mad. In retribution, she called the phone company and, posing as the woman, had her phone number changed. It was her first time misrepresenting herself. She was shocked to discover how easy it was.

When the Navy officer moved on to her younger sister, Susan decided she needed to take more drastic action. She told her mom that he was still doing the dirty thing — only now, she embellished the truth with more vivid details about how he had pulled her hair and punched her, too. Sex was taboo; violence was more legible. Still, it wasn’t until her brother caught the officer molesting their sister that the police were finally called.  

Susan’s mom told the cops about the violence, both real and invented. But when the prosecutor demanded a polygraph test, Susan was suddenly terrified that the whole case would go away if they discovered she’d told some half-truths to get her mom’s attention. It wasn’t just her own future at stake, but her sister’s, too. I have to pass that polygraph, she thought. 

By then, she was 11. She took the bus to the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles, an imposing Art Deco tower with cavernous tiled hallways. She made a beeline to the card file to look up polygraph testing and spent the day reading technical manuals, researching how the tests worked. She learned that the electrodes would measure her blood pressure and that they would be sensitive enough to detect sweat on her skin. She read about the baseline questions that officials would ask her before the test began in order to establish readings for her bodily responses. When the time came for the polygraph, she knew exactly what to do. 

The important thing was to invalidate the baseline so that her readings couldn’t be meaningfully compared against one another. When she was asked to tell a lie, she would tell the truth. When she was asked to tell the truth, she would lie. She manipulated her breathing, balled her hands into fists against the chair, and pressed her feet hard against the floor, causing her hands to sweat and her blood pressure to spike. The polygraph test was inadmissible. The case was sent to trial, and she testified in open court against her abuser. He was charged with a felony and dishonorably discharged from the military. It wouldn’t be the last time a man hurt Susan, but it wouldn’t be the last time a man paid the price for it, either.

Scott Ellentuch and I correspond for nearly three months before he agrees to give me Susan’s email address. He wants to know my intentions. He wants to know what I already know. He warns me, repeatedly, that Susan is a flake. That she’s no feminist, if that’s what I’m looking for. That she isn’t interested in talking to the media. That she barely responds to him, let alone to strangers. Still, he says, he’ll pass on my messages. 

During the early days of quarantine, the search for Susan had kept me occupied. But as the doldrums of that spring turned to a blistering wildfire summer in Southern California, it had begun to occupy me. Looking for the great, lost female hacker of the ’80s had become a noble distraction from the sadness and horror of that summer. I follow up with Scott, my only lead, relentlessly. Why, he asks, do I want to talk to her so badly? 

I tell Scott that Susan practiced, even pioneered, techniques still widely used by hackers. That a woman who broke into systems over the phone subverts the popular imagination of a hacker as some hoodie-sporting guy at a keyboard. I tell him that history has ignored women for too long and that when we fixate on the people who build systems and forget those who maintain, moderate, and use — or, in this case, exploit — those systems, we’re missing the messy realities of how technology actually evolves. We’re missing, too, how profoundly the human is entangled in the machine.

Finally, Tuc gives me her email address. It’s a Gmail account; I feel like an idiot. Humbled, I write to Susan. “By now I think Tuc has probably told you about my project and my intentions,” I begin. I tell her that I’d spent the year researching hacker and phreaker culture, reading everything I could about her, and about the other — far more famous — hackers of her era. I tell her I think that her place in this history is just as important as theirs and that I would really love to get the story right, but that I can’t do that without her help. 

Another month passes in silence.

When she was 14, Susan ran away fro