The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

by Mark Bowden

  Again, back to the video. In the restaurant footage, the man in the T-shirt is momentarily seen from behind, revealing another word on the back of the T-shirt. The best view comes in a split second as he sidesteps around someone leaving, giving the camera a better angle. Brennan could see the letter V at the beginning of the word, and O at the end. He could make out a vague pattern of script in the middle, but could not be sure of the exact letters. It was like looking at an eye chart when you need stronger glasses; you take a guess. It looked to him as if the word was “Verado.” It meant nothing to him, but that was his hunch. So he Googled it and found that “Verado” was the name of a new outboard engine manufactured by Mercury Marine, the boat-engine manufacturer.

  There had been a big boat show in Miami in February, when the incident had happened. Perhaps the man in the white T-shirt had been working at the show for Mercury Marine, and if he had, maybe his big friend had too.

  Mercury Marine is a subsidiary of the Brunswick Corporation, which also manufactures billiards and bowling equipment and other recreational products. Brennan called Brunswick’s head of security, Alan Sperling, and explained what he was trying to do. His first thought was that the company might have put its boat show employees up at the Airport Regency. If it had, he might be able to identify and locate the man in the picture through the company. Sperling checked; no, Mercury’s employees had stayed at a different hotel. Brennan racked his brain. Had any of the crews who set up the company’s booth stayed at the Regency? Again, the answer was no.

  “Well, who got those shirts?” Brennan asked.

  Sperling checked and called back two weeks later. He said the only place the shirts had been given away was at the boat show’s food court. The company in charge of food for the show was called Centerplate, which handles concessions for large sporting events and conventions. It was a big company with employees spread across the nation. Brennan called the head of human resources for Centerplate, who told him that the company had put up some of its people at the Regency, but that it had hired more than two hundred for the boat show, from all over.

  “Somebody has to remember a big black guy, three hundred pounds at least—in glasses,” said the detective.

  A week later, the man from Centerplate called back. Some of the company’s workers did remember a big black man with glasses, but no one knew his name. Someone did seem to recall, he said, that the company had initially hired the man to work at Zephyr Field, home of the New Orleans Zephyrs, the minor league baseball team in Metairie, Louisiana, a sprawling suburb. This was a solid lead, but there was a problem with it: Hurricane Katrina had devastated the city just months earlier, and the residents of Metairie had been evacuated. It was a community scattered to the winds.

  Brennan was stubborn. He was now months into this effort to identify and find the man responsible for raping and beating a woman he had never met. There was no way that what he was being paid for the job was worth the hours he was putting in. Nobody else cared as much as he did. What the hotel’s insurers really wanted, Brennan knew, was for him to tell them that Budnytska was a hooker and that she had been beaten by one of her johns, which would go a long way toward freeing them from any liability. But this wasn’t true, and he had told them at the outset that the truth was all they would get from him. Detective Foote of the Miami-Dade police was openly skeptical. He had given Brennan all the information he had. He had more pressing cases with real leads and real prospects.

  But Brennan had a picture in his head. He could see this big man with glasses coolly going about his business day to day—smug, chatting up the women, no doubt looking for his next victim, comfortable, certain that his crimes left no trail.

  Katrina created a problem with the New Orleans lead, but on the plus side, Brennan had a buddy on the police force there, a Captain Ernest Demma. Some years earlier, on a vacation to the French Quarter with his kids, Brennan had risked his hide helping Demma subdue a prisoner who had violently turned on him.

  “The guy had broken away from me,” Demma recalled, “and out of nowhere comes this guy in a black jacket flying down the sidewalk, who runs him down, tackles him, and held the guy until my men could subdue him. He was fantastic.” It was the kind of gesture a cop never forgets. Demma dubbed Brennan “Batman.” New Orleans may have been down for the count, but when Batman called, Demma was up for anything.

  The captain sent one of his sergeants out to Zephyr Field, where the club was working overtime to get its storm-ravaged facility ready to open the 2006 season. Demma called Brennan back: “The good news is, I know who this guy is.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “His name is Mike Jones, there’s probably only a million of them, and he doesn’t work there anymore, and nobody knows where he went.”

  Still, a name! Brennan thanked Demma and went back to the Regency database, and sure enough, he found that there had indeed been a guest named Mike Jones staying at the hotel when the attack occurred. He had checked in on February 14, seven days before the rape and assault, and he had checked out on February 22, one day after he was seen rolling his suitcase out to the car. The full name on his Visa card was Michael Lee Jones. The card had been canceled, and the address was for a Virginia residence Jones had vacated years earlier. He had left no forwarding address. Brennan lacked the authority to subpoena further information from the credit card company, and the evidence he had was still too slight to get the Miami-Dade police involved. The phone number Jones had left with registration was a number for Centerplate.

  But the trail was warm again. Brennan knew that Jones no longer worked for Centerplate, and the people there didn’t know where he was, but the detective thought he knew certain things about his prey. Judging by the nonchalance he showed hauling a young woman’s body out of the hotel stuffed in a suitcase, Brennan suspected that this was a practiced routine. The Centerplate job had kept him moving from city to city, all expenses paid, a perfect setup for a serial rapist with a method that was tried and true. If Jones was his man, then he wouldn’t give up an arrangement like that. If he wasn’t employed by Centerplate anymore, where would somebody with his work experience go next? Who was facilitating his predation now? Brennan got some names from Centerplate and went online to compile a list of the food-service company’s top twenty to twenty-five competitors.

  He started working his way down the list, calling human resources for each of the competing firms, and one by one he struck out. As it happened, one company on the list, Ovations, had its headquarters in the Tampa area, and Brennan was planning a trip up in that direction anyway, so he decided to drop in. As any investigator will tell you, an interview in person is always better than an interview on the phone. Brennan stopped by and, as he can do, talked his way into the office of the company’s chief operating officer. He explained his manhunt, and asked whether Ovations employed a three-hundred-plus-pound black man with glasses named Michael Lee Jones.

  The executive didn’t even check a database. He told Brennan, who was not a law-enforcement official, that if he wanted that information he would have to return with a subpoena. All the other companies had checked a database and just told Brennan no. He knew he had finally asked in the right place.

  “Why would you want someone working for you who is a rapist?” he asked. He was told there were privacy issues involved.

  “Get a subpoena,” the executive suggested.

  So Brennan got a fax number for Ovations and called Detective Foote at Miami-Dade; before long a subpoena spat from the fax machine. It turned out that Ovations had an employee named Michael Lee Jones who fit the description. He was now working in Frederick, Maryland.

  Michael Lee Jones was standing behind a barbeque counter at Harry Grove Stadium, home of the minor-league Frederick Keys, when Detective Foote and one of his partners showed up. It was an early-spring evening in the Appalachian foothills, and Foote the Floridian was so cold his teeth were chattering beneath his mustache.

  When Brennan
had called him with the information about Jones, Foote was impressed by the private detective’s tenacity, but still skeptical. This whole effort more or less defined the term “long shot,” but the name and location of a potential suspect was without question the first real lead since the case had landed on his desk. It had to be checked out. The department had a requirement that detectives traveling out of town to confront suspected criminals go as a team, so Foote had waited until another detective had to make such a trip to the suburbs of Washington, DC. He got the detective to agree to take him along as partner. Together they then made the hour-and-a-half drive from DC to Frederick to visit Jones in person.

  Foote had called Jones earlier that day to see whether he would be available. The detective kept it vague. He just said he was investigating an incident in Miami that had happened during the boat show, and he confirmed that Jones had been working there. On the phone, Jones was polite and forthcoming. He said he’d been in Miami at that time and that he would be available to meet with Foote, and gave him directions to the ballpark.

  Jones was a massive man. Tall, wide, and powerful, with long arms and big hands and a great round belly. His size was intimidating, but his manner was exceedingly soft-spoken and gentle, even passive. He wore clear-rimmed glasses and spoke in a friendly way. Jones was in charge of the operation at the food counter and appeared to be respected and well liked by his busy employees. He was wearing an apron. He steered Foote and the other detective away from the booth to a picnic area just outside the stadium.

  As Foote recalled it later, he asked Jones about meeting women in Miami, and Jones said he had “hooked up” once. The detective asked him to describe her. “I only have sex with white women,” Jones said.

  Foote asked if he had had sex with anyone at the Airport Regency, and Jones said no. He said that the woman he’d had sex with in Miami had been working at the boat show, and that they had hooked up elsewhere.

  “Any blonde women?” Foote asked.

  “No.”

  “Foreign accent?”

  Jones said the woman he’d had sex with in Miami had been German.

  Foote was not making Jones as a suspect. The big man acted convincingly, like someone with nothing to hide. The detective was freezing in the evening air. Foote preferred coming right to the point anyway; he was not given to artful interrogation. Besides, he felt more and more as if the trip had been a waste of time. So he just asked what he wanted to know.

  “Look, I’ve got a girl who was raped that week. Did you have anything to do with it?”

  “No, of course not!” said Jones, appropriately shocked by the question. “No way.”

  “You didn’t beat the shit out of this girl and leave her for dead in a field down there?”

  “Oh, no. No.”

  “Are you willing to give me a DNA specimen?” Foote asked.

  Jones promptly said he would, further convincing the detective that this was not the guy. Do the guilty volunteer conclusive evidence? He only knew of one prior case where one did—“and that guy was a complete idiot,” he said. Jones did not strike him as an idiot. He retrieved his kit from the car and ran a cotton inside of Jones’s mouth. Convinced Brennan had enlisted him in a classic wild goose chase, Foote carried the specimen back to Miami, submitted it for lab analysis, and called Brennan.

  “I’m telling you, Ken, this ain’t the guy,” he said.

  “No, man, he’s definitely the fucking guy,” said Brennan, who flew up to Frederick himself, traveling with his son, and spent time over a three-day period talking to Jones, who continued to deny everything.

  Months after he returned, the DNA results came back. Brennan got a call from Foote.

  “You ain’t going to believe this,” said Foote.

  “What?”

  “You were right.”

  Jones’s DNA was a match.

  Brennan flew up to Frederick in October to meet Foote, who arrested the big man. It had been eleven months since he took the case. Foote formally charged Jones with a variety of felonies that encompassed the acts of raping, kidnapping, and severely beating Inna Budnytska. The accused sat forlornly in a chair that looked tiny under his bulk, in an austere Frederick Police Department interrogation room, great rolls of fat falling on his lap under an enormous Baltimore Ravens T-shirt. He repeatedly denied everything in a surprisingly soft voice peculiar for such a big man, gesturing broadly with both hands, protesting but never growing angry, and insisting that he would never, ever, under any circumstances, do such a thing to a woman. He said that he “never had any problems” paying women for sex and that he “did not get a kick” out of hurting women. He did admit, once the DNA test irrevocably linked him to Budnytska, that he had had sex with her, but insisted that she was a “hooker,” that he had paid her a hundred dollars, and that when he left her she was in fine shape, although very drunk. They showed him pictures of her battered face taken the day she was found.

  “I did not hurt that girl,” Jones said, pushing the photos away, his voice rising to a whine. “I’m not violent. . . . I never hit a fucking woman in my whole fucking life! I’m not going to hurt her.”

  Brennan asked him why a man would roll his suitcase out to the parking lot and stash it in his car at five in the morning, two days before he checked out of the hotel.

  “I couldn’t remember if we were leaving that day or the next day. I wasn’t sure. . . . For some reason, I thought, ‘Fuck it, it’s time to go.’”

  Brennan was able to trip Jones up with only one small thing. Jones said that his suitcase had only his clothes, shoes, and a video game in it, but when the detective noted the extra tug Jones had needed to get it off the elevator, Jones suddenly remembered that he had had a number of large books in it as well. He said he was an avid reader.

  When Brennan asked him to name some of the books he had read, Jones could not. He could not name a single title.

  But Jones was unfailingly compliant, and his manner worked for him. Even with the DNA, the case against him was weak. He had ample reason for not having volunteered initially that he had paid a woman for sex—he had a prior arrest for soliciting a prostitute—so that wouldn’t count against him, and if he’d had consensual sex with Budnytska, as he said, it would account for the DNA. The fact that Jones had willingly provided the sample spoke in his favor. In court, it would come down to his word against Inna’s, and she was a terrible witness. She had picked Jones out of a photo lineup, but given how foggy her memory of the night was, and the fact that she had seen Jones before, unlike the other faces she was shown, it was hardly convincing evidence of his guilt. Her initial accounts of the crime were so much at odds with Brennan’s findings that even Foote found himself wondering who was telling the truth.

  Miami prosecutors ended up settling with Jones, who, after being returned to Miami, pleaded guilty to sexual assault in return for having all of the more severe charges against him dropped. He was sentenced to two years in prison, an outcome that Brennan would have found very disappointing if that had been the end of the story. It was not.

  Brennan never doubted that Jones was a rapist, and given what he had observed, first on the surveillance video and then after meeting him in person, he was convinced that sexual assault was Jones’s pastime.

  “This ain’t a one-fucking-time deal,” Brennan told Foote. “I’m telling you, this is this guy’s thing. He’s got a job that sends him all over the country. Watch him on that video. He’s slick. Nonchalant. He’s too cool, too calm. You’ll see it when you put his DNA into the system.”

  The “system” is the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). The FBI administered database now has well over eight million DNA offender profiles. Local, state, and federal law enforcement officials routinely enter DNA samples recovered from convicts and from the scenes and victims of unsolved crimes, and over the years the system has electronically matched more than a hundred thousand of them, often reaching across surprising distances in place and time. It means that if a D
NA sample exists, a case can never be classified as entirely “cold.”

  Michael Lee Jones had left a trail. The Miami-Dade police entered Jones’s DNA into CODIS in late 2006, and several months later, which is how long it takes the FBI to double-check matches the system finds electronically, three new hits came up.

  Detective Terry Thrumston of the Colorado Springs Police Department’s sex-crimes unit had a rape and assault case that had been bugging her for more than a year. The victim was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman who had been picked up early in the morning on December 1, 2005, by a stranger—a very large black man with glasses, who had offered her a ride and then talked his way into her apartment and raped her, holding his hand tightly over her mouth. Thrumston had no leads, and the case had sat for two years, until DNA collected from the victim matched with that of Michael Lee Jones.

  There were two victims in New Orleans. One of them, also a blonde, had been partying in the French Quarter a little too hard, by her own admission, and very early on the morning of May 5, 2003, she had gone looking for a cab back to her hotel, when a very large black man with glasses had pulled his car over to the curb and offered her a ride. As she later testified, he drove her to a weedy lot and raped her. He pressed his large hand powerfully over her face as he attacked her, and she testified that she had bit into his palm so hard that she had bits of his skin in her teeth afterward. When he was finished, he drove off, leaving her on the lot. She reported the rape to the New Orleans police, who filed her account and took DNA samples from the rapist’s semen. The case had sat until CODIS matched the specimen with Michael Lee Jones. The other New Orleans victim told a similar tale, but failed to pick Jones’s face out of a photo lineup.