Chase Darkness with Me

by Billy Jensen

  I also had to decide how I was going to answer the first question in the personal declarations section: “Have you used marijuana during the last three years or more than fifteen times?” Not that marijuana makes you paranoid or anything, but I heard they gave all applicants a polygraph exam.

  In the meantime, I collected my master’s degree. In the best shape of my life from running through those wheat fields and playing a full hockey season, I was deciding between PhD programs and getting the Lasik (and also reading up on how one could beat a polygraph exam) when my mother called me.

  “Your father is having a problem,” she said.

  Dad, the man with all the energy in the world, was getting tired. One of the valves in his heart was failing. He needed open-heart surgery.

  I thought the right thing to do was to go home and save the family business. I went from studying religion on the hilltop of Lawrence, Kansas, to standing on a twenty-four-foot ladder in ninety-five-degree heat, using an electric sander to scrape paint off a million-dollar house in Garden City, Long Island.

  Dad’s operation was a success. And it turned out that the new heart valve they installed in his chest made him feel like a teenager. It wasn’t long before he was back on the job.

  We drove to work together every day. After two seasons, he finally let me touch a brush. I was only painting a window in the back of a garage, but it was a start. Maybe I was destined to be a house painter after all? I thought. But I needed some kind of creative outlet. It was the first time in eighteen years that I didn’t have a school reading list or papers to write.

  I started a zine about hockey fights. I was always more drawn to the fighters, the hitters, and the agitators than the scorers. Watching Clark Gillies beat the snot out of Terry O’Reilly was the reason I started playing hockey when I was twelve.

  I watched every Islander game and wrote down a blow-by-blow description of every fight: who won, who lost, who bled. Then I discussed whether the blood affected the outcome of the game. I stole some photos off the web, laid out the mini magazine on a graphics program, made fifty copies at Kinko’s, and handed them out at the games, strategically placing some copies in the men’s bathroom stalls. I called it the Fight Card.

  A copy got into the hands of the Village Voice, the famous alternative rabble-rousing newspaper, which was getting ready to launch a new edition on Long Island. I got a call from John Mancini, the editor in chief.

  “Hey,” he said. “I just saw the Fight Card. I love this!”

  He offered me $400 to write a recap of the season in punches for the first issue.

  Then I stuck around and pitched any story I could think of. The day jobs of professional lacrosse players. The NYPD vs. FDNY annual ice hockey game. Extreme backyard wrestling. I tried out for a professional roller hockey team and was an Arena Football League assistant coach for a week.

  My dad took my first cover story—a tale of the Mets-Yankees rivalry ahead of their first interleague series—and framed it. He hung it on the wall of his office, along with my second cover, HOW TO SURVIVE A HOCKEY FIGHT.

  It was all fun and games and I loved it, but I still really wanted to write about crime.

  Long Island had just come out of a hellish series of true-crime episodes—the capture of serial killers Joel Rifkin and Robert Shulman. Little Katie Beers locked in John Esposito’s dungeon. The Long Island Railroad Massacre. The Suffolk Sniper. The Long Island Lolita. Long Island in the 1990s was like Florida is today.

  I started pitching crime stories to Mancini.

  “Why do you want to mess things up with the sports!? People are loving the sports!” he said in his high-pitched, staccato Queens accent. “Stick with the sports!”

  My crime writing would have to wait.

  At home, my father’s heart was ticking along fine. My returning home to “save the family business” turned into a bit of a joke, as he would bolt up and down ladders while I asked, “Do we really have to work on Saturday?”

  But one Sunday as we were working in the backyard, Dad kept needing to sit down and rest. The next day, he went to the doctor. After a series of tests, the doctor told him he had hepatitis C. He had probably picked it up from needles thirty years earlier. Maybe when he was selling his blood for food, but more likely when he was sharing needles for heroin.

  In the fall of 1997, his liver began to fail. After six months of watching him get transferred from one hospital to another, I started to realize the unthinkable: my dad could actually die. His face became gaunt. His once-mighty forearms thinned and deflated.

  On April 22, 1998, I sat next to him in his hospital room. I showed him the cover of my latest story for the Voice. It was called MY DAD KICKED YOUR ASS AT SHEA. It was all about the adventures we had together, of a father and son getting into trouble across the arenas and stadiums of New York. We watched the Mets on the TV in his room.

  Before I left, I kissed him on the top of his head. “You’re my hero,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he whispered back to me.

  He died the next day.

  It was raining at his funeral. My wife, Kendall, held our newborn daughter in the car on the path next to the grave while I gave his eulogy. Even though I didn’t believe in the afterlife, I gave my mother two things to put in Dad’s pocket inside the casket: a twenty-dollar bill so he could tip the usher to get a better seat in heaven and his pocket knife in case he ran into any trouble if he ended up in hell.

  5.

  A Partner in Crimesolving

  Hollywood, 2013

  Fifteen years after Dad died, I made a decision. I followed the path he had taken when he was fifteen (without stealing his coin collection or visiting a Tijuana whorehouse) and set out for Hollywood. I had one goal—make a TV show about solving unsolved crimes.

  I had already seen the writing on the wall when it came to the future of newspapers. In 2006, I had reinvented my day job. I started building websites and blogs and honed a particular talent of getting millions of people to click on web links to read stories or look at photo galleries. I tripled my paycheck, but my life became filled with analytics, spreadsheets, marketing strategy, and revenue goals, leaving little brain time for what I was still searching for—that first murder solve. The job did afford me the chance to start a national crime blog called True Crime Report. I staffed it with a writer and also built what was then the nation’s largest unsolved murders database that could be accessed by anyone. But it wasn’t enough. So I left the six-figure job behind to pursue a dream of becoming a Jack-Webb-meets-John-Walsh for the reality TV generation. American Idol, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Duck Dynasty, Hell’s Kitchen—that was where the public’s attention was directed. Why not use the reality format to try to solve murders?

  So I went to LA, with the plan to fly back to Phoenix every weekend to see Kendall and our son and daughter, who were now both teenagers, back at the homestead. Figuring a hotel room for four nights a week was cheaper than an apartment, I checked into the Hollywood Historic Hotel, a ninety-nine-dollar-a-night accommodation boasting a 1920s bathtub, a 1980s mini fridge, and a far-reaching view of the Hollywood sign.

  Before I walked into the long, brooding building poised over Melrose Avenue, a Google search yielded tales that the hotel was haunted. The story didn’t say whose ghost it was, but a few months after I arrived, it had gained a friend when the woman down the hall hanged herself in her room. The hotel was cheap but clean, and when it was available, the night manager would give me the room on the top floor with the vaulted ceiling and secret compartment under the bed where I hid a bottle of vodka between stays.

  With my housing settled, I then needed some type of income to keep me afloat as I worked on creating the TV show.

  My friend Lenora Claire, a redheaded Vargas pinup girl come to life, told me about a job opening where she worked casting reality TV. I took it. During the day, I tracked
down people with peculiar habits or uncommon occupations—like a woman who couldn’t stop eating the stuffing in her couch cushions or the girl who opened a business where lonely, fully clothed men paid to cuddle with her for a hundred bucks an hour. At night, alone in my hotel room, I investigated crimes. For Boston magazine, I wrote about Maura Murray, the UMass coed who had gone missing in the snowy New Hampshire woods in 2004, launching a thousand theories from amateur sleuths. For Rolling Stone, I investigated how animal-rights citizen detectives used their web smarts to track down kitten killer Luka Magnotta in Canada. They pleaded with authorities to take their information and make an arrest, warning them that this guy would one day kill a person. No one listened until human body parts began showing up in the mail.

  Down the street from the casting office was a start-up company called TradioV. The idea behind it was to bring in interesting people from all walks of life, put them in front of a microphone and a video camera, and live stream whatever they had to say. C-list celebrity Andy Dick had his own show. So did actor Eric Roberts, Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro, and the tattooed-and-pierced models of the Suicide Girls. Lenora had a show, too, called The Obscenesters, where she interviewed a rotating cast of Hollywood eccentrics.

  She told me they were looking for more content, and I pitched them a true-crime show. They liked the idea. It wouldn’t pay anything, but at least I could scratch the itch to bring some of the cases I was looking into to light while I was trying to get a traditional TV show off the ground. They ended the meeting with a suggestion: “You should find a cohost.”

  I did a Google search for “Los Angeles” and “true crime” and found a site called True Crime Diary, which I had run across before. I read a few of the blog posts—one about the Zodiac Killer, another about serial killer Israel Keyes—and then clicked the “About” link.

  “True Crime Diary began when Michelle McNamara, a writer, decided the investigating she was doing on unsolved crimes to satisfy her own curiosity might be better shared.”

  The name sounded familiar. I googled Michelle, clicked the first link, and discovered that I had read a story she published in Los Angeles magazine about her quest to find a serial killer who had eluded authorities for decades. I remembered reading the story and saying to myself Damn, I wish I wrote this.

  “By day, I’m a forty-two-year-old stay-at-home mom with a sensible haircut and Goldfish crackers lining my purse,” Michelle wrote. “In the evening, however, I’m something of a DIY detective.”

  I sent Michelle a message asking to meet up and included links to my work in an attempt to assure her that I wasn’t a psychopath.

  A couple of days later, I woke up staring up at the bright white cathedral ceiling of the very best room of the Hollywood Historic Hotel, pulled on my leather jacket, walked out of the hotel, and headed toward the cemetery, where I had left my car.

  I passed the Paramount gates that Norma Desmond crashed to see Cecil B. DeMille before a writer ended up dead in her swimming pool at the end of Sunset Blvd., then turned north on Gower, walking along Hollywood Forever Cemetery and the remains of DeMille, Bugsy Siegel, Jayne Mansfield, Rudolph Valentino, and even Lana Clarkson, the actress Phil Spector was convicted of killing. Reminders of mortality on every side. It wasn’t the death that was getting to me but the length of time that they lived—I was actually older than every single one of those legends when they checked in to the cemetery. Every tick on my watch was a march toward failure, four lines and a slash on the wall adding up to a death without purpose. And becoming a cliché? That was a punishment worse than failure. I had to make something, anything, happen.

  I got into my car and drove to Los Feliz for the meeting. Walking into the Coffee Bean on Hillhurst Avenue, I got a text from Michelle McNamara.

  I’m on patio, dark hair, black-and-white outfit.

  I walked out to the patio and spotted Michelle in her black-and-white outfit straightaway. She was the only person not sitting in front of a laptop.

  I sat down, and we immediately began sizing each other up, dancing around like two prizefighters in a ring, trying to see how much the other knew about this murder or that. The laptop people surrounding us were arguing over scenes with their writing partners. “This is the character’s arc.” “And then that’s when he gets his superpower.” Michelle and I were talking about the specific ways Elizabeth Short’s internal organs had been dissected and removed from her body.

  We clicked.

  We lamented the media’s insatiable hunger for retelling the same five crime stories over and over again. For the networks, true crime had turned into a fossil-rock concert experience—everyone just wants to hear the hits. “Play Manson!” “Play OJ!” Meanwhile, thousands of unsolved murder stories went untold.

  Michelle was game for doing the show, and we decided to call it The Shadowpulp True Crime Radio Hour. The first episode would be about the serial killer she wrote about in that Los Angeles magazine story, the East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker (EAR/ONS), the closest thing to the boogeyman the United States has ever had.

  Unlike Son of Sam, who killed people on lovers’ lanes, or John Wayne Gacy, who murdered young boys living on the margins, EAR/ONS attacked people where they felt most safe—in their homes, with their lovers beside them in bed and a loaded gun in the drawer. He would break into a house, empty the gun of all the bullets, and then leave undetected. He would return the next night, slink his way through an unlocked window, creep down a hallway, and present himself in the darkness with a blinding flashlight in his victims’ eyes. Then he terrorized them for hours, tying up the man. Raping the woman. Making himself a sandwich in the kitchen. Stealing a personal item or two. Then slithering away. In the beginning, he left his victims alive. After fifty rapes, he evolved into a killer, murdering at least twelve people.

  Michelle had first written about the case in 2011 on True Crime Diary. Her wonder at EAR/ONS’s elusiveness bled through each sentence. He left so many clues behind. He was luckier than he was good. He “wasn’t a supervillain,” she wrote. “He was a man, a guy with habits and traits and preferences that, with enough examination, should shine like Hansel’s breadcrumbs in the woods.”

  She believed one of the reasons he hadn’t gained traction in the public consciousness—and the main reason he was still at large—was due to branding. The man was responsible for two separate series of crimes at opposite ends of the state that had not been connected until years later via DNA. So he had two names. The one he earned in Northern California was the East Area Rapist. Not as flashy as the Zodiac, the Ripper, or the Florida Sex Beast. It was an incredibly provincial name. East of where, exactly? The one he earned in Southern California was the Original Night Stalker, “Original” to differentiate him from the more famous Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez, a qualifier which would be comical if you weren’t so terrified by the realization that there were two serial killers called the Night Stalker operating at the same time in the same metropolitan area. Michelle believed rebranding the criminal might lead to more information to uncover his identity, so when she wrote her feature story, she introduced EAR/ONS to a broad audience and swiftly christened the monster with a new name: the Golden State Killer.

  We live streamed the first episode of the Shadowpulp Radio Hour in front of a two-camera set up at the TradioV studios on Santa Monica Boulevard. Fewer than a hundred people watched. We received one phone call from a viewer calling himself “Frank from Burbank.” Frank from Burbank was in actuality Patton from Los Feliz, Michelle’s husband, the comedian Patton Oswalt, who was watching the live stream from home.

  Despite the lukewarm reception, they asked us back for another show. Michelle and I went back and forth on which case we would dig into next.

  “Bauerdorf/Christa Helm, Hollywood Starlets unsolved in general,” Michelle texted me. “Or Zodiac? Or the additional murders linked possibly to Manson family? Whatever you feel like
, I’m flexible.”

  Every murder she suggested we cover was an unsolved case. I was really starting to like her.

  We settled on the unsolved murders that surrounded the Manson family. While the Manson tale is the most infamous American true-crime story ever told, there were still secrets to be uncovered. Beyond Gary Hinman, the victims at the Tate and LaBianca houses, and Don “Shorty” Shea, who was killed at the Spahn ranch, true-crime buffs have speculated for years that the family was responsible for more than a dozen bodies that were found across Los Angeles in the late 1960s, including Marina Habe’s, who was found near Mulholland Drive on New Year’s Day in 1969. The seventeen-year-old had been kidnapped from her mother’s driveway, beaten, and stabbed multiple times. Another, Jane Doe #59, was dumped in the heavy undergrowth of Laurel Canyon in November 1969, within sight of where Habe had been left less than a year earlier. The teenage girl (identified decades later as Reet Juvertson), had been stabbed 157 times in the chest and throat. The bodies of fifteen-year-old James Sharp and nineteen-year-old Doreen Gaul were found in an LA alley on November 22, 1969. The teens had been active in a Scientology splinter group called the Process, which Manson had flirted with. They were both stabbed to death. The bodies of Nancy Warren and Clida Delaney were found near Ukiah on October 13, 1968. They were strangled to death and beaten with leather thongs. Members of the Manson family were among the suspects, but no one was ever charged. Proving any kind of connection between Manson’s family and these victims would have been a huge accomplishment for the show.

  We divided up the cases and began collecting material. We both got to talk to Vincent Bugliosi, the district attorney who not only convicted Manson but also wrote one of the bestselling true-crime books in history, Helter Skelter. We shared the internal fanboy and fangirl squeals after hearing the voice of a legend on the other end of the line. Bugliosi politely declined to appear on the show, his voice weakened by the cancer that would lead to his death two years later, but we had more than enough facts to stuff into the hour-long episode.