by Billy Jensen
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2019 by Billy Jensen
Cover and internal design © 2019 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Faceout Studio
Cover image © Philippe Sainte-Laudy Photography/Getty Images
Endsheet images © Hey Darlin/Getty Images; Victor Coscaron and EyeEm/Getty Images
Internal design by Danielle McNaughton/Sourcebooks
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.—From a Declaration of Principles Jointly Adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations
This book contains elements of memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over a period of time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been re-created.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jensen, Billy, author.
Title: Chase darkness with me : how one true-crime writer started solving murders / Billy Jensen.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks, Inc., [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019006718 | (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Jensen, Billy. | Murder--United States. | Cold cases (Criminal investigation)--United States. | Murder--Investigation--United States. | Journalists--United States.
Classification: LCC HV6529 .J47 2019 | DDC 363.25/9523092--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006718
To the victims
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Prologue
1. Bam! Pow! Screech! Zap!
2. The Body in the Barrel
3. The Murder in the Shadows
4. Have You Seen This Man?
5. A Partner in Crimesolving
6. The Absolute Worst Humanity Has to Offer
7. The Wrong Side of Broken
8. The Man in the Green Hoodie
9. The Villain with a Thousand Faces
10. Losing Jade and Finding Mariah
11. The Halloween Mask Murder
12. The Devil in Plain Darkness
13. The Girl with the Serpent Tattoo
14. The Cantina Scene
15. The Monster at the End of This Book
Epilogue
Addendum
In Conversation with Billy Jensen and Paul Holes
Reading Group Guide
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
Foreword
by Karen Kilgariff
Look, I don’t want to tell you how to read this book or anything, but if I were you, I’d skip to the last chapter and read that first. Now, I’d normally never tell anyone to do this. It’s illogical and bizarre. How can you grasp the meaning of an ending if you don’t know who the main character is or what they’ve gone through to get themselves there? How can you care?
But in this book, we have a unique situation because (a) it’s not a novel, it’s the story of a real crime journalist and (b) if you’re any sort of consumer of true crime, you’re already very familiar with the last chapter’s inciting incident. It involves a case now so infamous that most Americans, even the ones who “don’t like” true crime, know about it. I’m just saying, how can it be a spoiler if everybody already knows what’s going to happen?
• • •
It’s strange to think that I’ve only known Billy Jensen for about two years. It genuinely feels like twenty. So many huge, life-altering things have happened since we first met at a restaurant on Franklin Avenue. Georgia Hardstark and I were tucked into a corner table eating dinner after a live My Favorite Murder show at Upright Citizens Brigade next door, and, because I was sitting on the side that faced the room, I saw him approaching first. He was an extremely tall and serious-faced man wearing a black trench coat. Was he wearing a trench coat? That may be an embellishment. The point is, I got a bad feeling about him. He started talking to us from five feet away. And not in the usual, sorry-to-bother-you, let-me-introduce myself way we do here in Los Angeles. He spoke like we’d already been talking, and he wasn’t all that happy about it.
“Yeah, I worked on that case you guys just covered. I listened to it today.”
Was he accusing us of something? Was he saying it was his case? Or that we shouldn’t have done it? Who was this guy? I scanned the room to see if there was any type of security on duty.
“Did you hear the sheriff is going to release the original coroner’s report?”
Just an FYI, that isn’t literally what he said. I don’t remember the real quote, but it was very detailed and specific, and it made me panic. I had no idea what he was talking about. We cover two cases a week on our true-crime podcast, but unlike actual journalists, we’re much more, shall we say, casual about the details. I assumed we were being confronted by an expert about our lack of expertise. Check, please.
But Georgia did know what he was talking about and jumped right in. And when he landed at our table, I could see his eyes were sparkling with the enthusiasm of someone in a foreign land who’d found people who speak his language. It turned out he was not there to confront or correct us. He was excited to talk shop. And luckily, that conversation continues to this day.
Now that I’m thinking about it, you should probably read this book exactly the way Billy wrote it, with the ending at the end. He really knows his stuff. Take in his personal chronology. Learn about his background and his influences. Read about those early cold cases that weren’t shocking, gory, or blond enough to earn mass media coverage and see how they changed him as a young reporter. See how he got fed up and came up with the idea to actually start solving murders himself. Do the legwork and get your facts straight so when you finally land at that magnificent, breathless final chapter, the author’s internal fireworks display can be felt as your own.
Although, if I may say this: the end of this book isn’t just the electric, live-to-lapt
op recounting of how a major cold case that he’d waded into waist-deep got solved. It’s also the work of a seasoned crime reporter who, in the midst of the shock and unreality of such a watershed moment, had the presence of mind to write his own breaking story.
It’s a movie plot come to life. After years of difficult, thankless work, a reporter obsessed with justice gets the rare satisfaction of seeing justice finally served. Who doesn’t want to read that immediately?
Good crime journalists offer themselves as a bridge between the worst of humanity and those of us who want to know how bad it can actually be. And sometimes, if a crime story has no ending, then a reporter like Billy Jensen will take up the cause and dedicate their life to finding one. They’ll visit old crime scenes, interview bereaved families, and walk dark neighborhoods searching for the truth. They do the rarely recognized service of filling in the blanks around these victims’ identities, telling us who a person was before they became just another anonymous statistic. It’s noble work. And this book is about a life dedicated to that work.
Because how can you grasp the meaning of an ending if you don’t know who the main character is or what they’ve gone through to get there? How can you care?
Prologue
It starts with an overhead shot—in color, but with no sound—of a man walking into a 7-Eleven. It’s late, well past 2:00 a.m., but the scene is glowing, the streetlamps working with the store signs to give off a glimmer you don’t usually see on the typical nighttime surveillance video. The nearby bars—Henry’s, O’Callaghan’s, Howl at the Moon, and Mother Hubbard’s—are well beyond last call, and the street is a mix of those who don’t want the night to end and those for whom the day is just beginning.
As bright as the street is, your eyes squint as the video quickly switches to the glaring whiteness of the store’s interior. Inside, you see the back of a well-dressed man with close-cropped hair standing at the counter, purchasing what looks like a bag of chips from the store clerk. He motions to the customer to his left, and we see his face. He is handsome, but his eyes are tired, presumably from a long evening. He turns back to the clerk, completes the transaction, and walks out of the store and into the night.
The video then cuts to an overhead shot of the sidewalk, where a man wearing a green hoodie opens the door to the 7-Eleven. He is a big man, but you can’t make out his face. He is barely inside the store when a security guard who was manning the door on the sidewalk comes up behind him, says something that gets his attention, and performs the universal take-a-hike gesture with his thumb. The Man in the Green Hoodie does an about-face and skulks back to the sidewalk.
Moments later, you see the customer with his newly purchased chips exit the store. In a minute, you’ll learn the man’s name, when a caption flashes at the bottom of the screen. He is Marques Gaines, a bartender at the Chicago Marriott on Michigan Avenue. As Marques exits the store, the Man in the Green Hoodie steps in front of him. For the first time, you can see his face, a menacing brow perched over angry eyes and an angrier scowl. You can see him yelling. He gets in Marques’s face. He gets in the security guard’s face. He gets back into Marques’s face. Marques turns his palms up as if to say, “Why are you so mad?” then tries to walk away. The Man in the Green Hoodie follows him.
The video then cuts to a traffic camera across the street, and the images transform from a brilliantly lit close-up of animated humans to an overhead shot of grainy, pixelated ghouls. But you can still make out Marques and the Man in the Green Hoodie. You watch Marques walking quickly toward the crosswalk. Walking away from the confrontation, like everyone tells you to do. Just. Walk. Away.
But the Man in the Green Hoodie pursues him. Marques’s walk turns into a run. He takes three strides and then for some reason turns back around to face the man. The Man in the Green Hoodie hits him in the head with a crushing right hook, sending his body backward into the crosswalk. Marques is crumpled and unconscious before he hits the ground. As he lies on the pavement, two figures run into the frame from the opposite end of the street.
“Thank God,” you say to yourself as you watch the Good Samaritans kneel down next to Marques’s motionless body. Your relief turns to horror and disbelief as they shove their hands into his pockets and strip them of their contents before getting up and fleeing down an alleyway. To the right of the frame, the Man in the Green Hoodie stalks away into the night.
A few seconds later, two taxicabs, one in front of the other, make right turns onto the street where Marques lies unconscious. The first one drives to the right of Marques’s motionless body, narrowly missing him. The next one drives directly on top of him, crushing his chest under two tons of automobile and killing him.
The rest of the video shows the aftermath. A close-up of people in the street. On the sidewalk, one man is in complete shock. Another takes out his phone, in all likelihood calling 911.
Marques Gaines’s life ended in the gutter. No one helped him until it was too late. Until they had to instruct the taxi driver to back up his car, slowly removing the front tires from on top of his body.
• • •
By the time I saw the video, Marques Gaines had been dead for three months. It was 4:00 a.m., and I was in bed in my Los Angeles apartment. After seventeen years as a journalist writing about unsolved murders, stories with no endings tend to elbow their way into your dreamscape. They aren’t nightmares, just strange situations. The images and settings and characters are always slightly off, always a little different from real life. Every now and then, they trade starring roles with my dad, who has somehow clawed his way out of his grave to come visit me. That one is a nightmare, because I always know in my dream that he has to go back. Either way, they don’t lend themselves well to restful sleep.
I clicked on the play button again, and my anger started to percolate. A few dark weeks ago, I was sitting in a bar in Boston, the dirt still on my shoes from a day of investigating the scene where a woman and three children were murdered, stuffed into two fifty-five-gallon drums, and dumped in the New Hampshire woods. I was two beers into the night when I absentmindedly looked at my Facebook messages and saw a note from a stranger. Not sure if you heard. So very sorry, the woman wrote, with a link to an article. I read the headline six or seven times, trying to wish the words away: MICHELLE MCNAMARA, WRITER AND WIFE OF PATTON OSWALT, DEAD AT 46.
Michelle was a partner in crimesolving. She died in the middle of her pursuit of a real-life monster in the closet, the Golden State Killer, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript about her obsession with the case. He had murdered at least twelve people and raped at least fifty women in their own homes. Michelle was driven, determined. Relentless. We would meet every month for lunch, and she would tell me about her quest. About how close she thought she was to finding him. To finding the monster.
What I had just witnessed was a monster in the street. But both were cut from the same cloth. They were masters of terror shouting in their actions “I am king here.” The Golden State Killer would rape a woman in her own home while her husband was forced to lie still, lest the dishes the criminal had laid on his back make any noise and provoke him further. He would make himself a sandwich, riffle through cabinets, and then go silent, making the victims think he might have left before announcing he was still there and the terror was not over. For those few hours, Michelle’s monster was the king of those people. He had their entire lives inside his palm, and he thrived on it. On the night that Marques Gaines died in Chicago, the Man in the Green Hoodie was the king of that street corner. He stalked the sidewalk, eyeing everyone in his path as prey, just waiting for someone to say something to him. Make eye contact with him. Walk down the street in a manner that just rubbed him the wrong way and be prepared for a world of hurt.
Michelle had only sketches of her villain. Sketches of a man who wore a mask. A phantom. The Man in the Green Hoodie was fully formed, preserved forever on video.
Whenever people ask me why I only write about unsolved murders, I always say the same thing: because I hate the guy who got away with it. But after Michelle died, it was different. Now I hate the perpetrator for taking over the lives of the living just as much as taking the lives of the dead. The victim’s families. The investigators. The volunteers. They all gave up giant chunks of their own lives to search for an answer that someone selfishly kept hidden away.
People die before getting the answer.
As a journalist focusing on cold cases, I opened letters every day from family members desperate for justice. Some wanted to know who killed their son. Some wanted to know where their daughter was buried. Some just wanted to talk. Because everyone else had stopped listening, they came to me. I tried to help each and every one of them. But every story I wrote—the DJ shot dead on New Year’s Eve in his Miami apartment, the hippie girl gone missing in the marijuana fields of Northern California, the Swedish nanny found cut in half in a Boston dumpster—had one thing in common: they had no endings. The killers had gotten away. The missing stayed missing. The Villain with a Thousand Faces continued to grow stronger. And now, as I stared at my computer screen, the Man in the Green Hoodie was the newest face in the club.
I watched the video again and again, my anger building with each play. After the tenth viewing, I made up my mind. This time was going to be different. I was going to give Marques Gaines’s story an ending.
I was going to solve the crime myself.
1.
Bam! Pow! Screeech! Zap!
Long Island, 1977
“They got him,” my dad said to me.
He had just come home from work, but he didn’t head upstairs to wash off the paint and dust like he did every other day. No, this day was different. He unfurled the front page of Newsday, the tabloid that was delivered to most every house on Long Island in those days, and held it up to my face. On the cover of the paper was a pasty, passive-looking man in a dingy collared shirt, the majority of its buttons opened, revealing a white T-shirt underneath.
