Searching for Susy Thunder
Epic Magazine
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:In the early ’80s, Susan and her friends pulled increasingly elaborate phone scams until they nearly shut down phone service for the entire city.
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.
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: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.
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. 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.
It was the beginning of a new era. Stripped half-naked in the Hollywood neon, she was no longer a troubled little suburban kid named Susan Headley. To survive these streets, she needed to become somebody else. Somebody who could handle such casual brutality. Someone in control. Someone the cops — and anyone else who crossed her — would think twice about hassling. Soon after, she became Susan Thunder.
Finally, she asks if I have a landline. She says it would be better that way because she’ll talk the battery dead on my iPhone. When I read that, I laugh, but then she nearly does.Back when she was a groupie, Susan got business cards printed:She claims to be one of only three women to have slept with all four Beatles, securing the trickiest, Paul McCartney, through an elaborate pretext that involved having his wife Linda whisked away in a limo for a staged photoshoot.
The man beneath her boot whimpered happily. Working as a dominatrix at a BDSM dungeon in the San Fernando Valley was better than streetwalking, and the money was stupendous. At the Leather Castle, she called herself Jeanine; newly sober and happy to be alive, she held the business end of the whip. She charged men hundreds of dollars for a half-hour session just to lick her feet, more than enough money to buy all the computer gear she wanted.
They started spending time together, swapping notes and sharing gear. One object of mutual fascination was the TI Silent-700, a portable terminal with an acoustic modem and two rubber cups you could sock a phone handset right into. Some nights, Lewis brought Susan to the USC computer center, and she watched him surf networks around the country.
But few major hacks are pulled off without some old-fashioned social skills. Passwords are hard to crack, but people are easy. In the summer of 2020, just as I was trying to convince Scott Ellentuch to grant me access to Susan Thunder, a group of teenage hackers was able to crack 130 of Twitter’s most closely guarded accounts by manipulating Twitter employees into granting them access to internal company tools.
Not long after Susan and Lewis started hanging out, she discovered that he’d been lying to her. On nights he claimed to be on campus, he’d been with another woman, a law student at USC. When it blew apart, she says, they both dumped him. It wasn’t long before his tape was making the rounds. In March of 1981, Lewis made an announcement to 8BBS, the phreaker forum: he would “expose” Susan, broadcasting the tape to anyone who called him.
The other hackers she ran with were keen on destruction. They wanted to cause chaos, sending the city’s 411 service into an endless loop or taking down the entire 213 area code. She wasn’t interested in that. All she wanted, at the end of the day, was a little control. She wanted to know that if anyone ever fucked with her again, she could do something about it. If an asshole cut her off on the freeway, or worse, she could tamper with his DMV records, or worse.
She included a letter in which she told the feds she wanted immunity from prosecution. That she wasn’t involved with the US Leasing hack — not as an active participant, anyway — but that she had sat next to the person who’d done it. She told them they could call her at her mom’s house. Over the phone, Susan tells me all kinds of things. That she used her social engineering skills to sneak past military checkpoints and into Area 51. That she went dumpster diving with a young Charlie Sheen. That she figured out how to set off US missiles from a phone booth—a feat Kevin Mitnick was once accused, famously, of being capable of pulling off. That she once sprang an accomplice from jail over the phone, posing as a clerk from a different precinct.
Back then, everyone had a landline, but people in the public eye kept their phone numbers out of the White Pages. Susan knew the phone company kept a hardcopy list of those private, unpublished numbers, which phreakers colloquially referred to as a “non-pub file.” For Susan, who had cut her teeth hunting rock stars on the Sunset Strip, a comprehensive index of the personal details of every celebrity in Los Angeles was the ultimate haul.
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