Chase Darkness with Me

by Billy Jensen

  For the filming, Michelle brought in her Manson family Russian nesting dolls, which began with a large Charlie Manson and ended with a small refrigerator, a miniature version of the one from the LaBianca residence with the misspelled words “Healter Skelter” scrawled in blood across the door. The dolls sat between us as we discussed how Manson once bragged about committing more than thirty-five murders, and we wondered whether his charismatic reach could have extended from Venice and the supposed Russian roulette “accident” of John Haught to London and the supposed “suicide” of family member Sandra Good’s boyfriend Joel Pugh. Scott Michaels of Dearly Departed Tours, a company that takes curious tourists to infamous Manson sites across the city, called into the show to add his own insight. So did Frank from Burbank.

  A week later, we decided to take on the Zodiac Killer.

  “I could certainly get a few interesting callers for that one,” Michelle texted. “People LOVE their pet Zodiac theories.”

  For the Zodiac show, Michelle brought in a small piece of artwork Patton had commissioned. It was a cartoon of Michelle holding a cup of coffee while confronting the Zodiac Killer, who was wearing the hooded uniform from the Lake Berryessa murder. To roll in and out of commercial breaks, I played the Beatles’ “Wild Honey Pie,” “Do it Again” by Steely Dan, and Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street,” completely breaking copyright laws, which is probably one of the reasons you can’t find the episodes on the web anymore.

  The Shadowpulp True Crime Radio Hour was kind of like TV, but I was ready to start pitching my first real television show. I called it The Murder Circle. The idea was to take seven individuals who had all devoted their lives, in one way or another, to crime. There was a hard-edged female former prosecutor, a former FBI agent, a tough-but-likable ex-con, a young crime-scene investigator, a former homicide detective, an investigative journalist (me), and a citizen-detective housewife (Michelle). We would convene each week in a small town stumped by a cold case and put the investigation on steroids. In each episode, we were going to pick through all the evidence, reinterview the major players, and invariably fight with each other until we found the right guy.

  I found five people to fill the other roles of the show, filmed interviews with them all, and built a sizzle reel. Each individual introduced themselves and explained what they would bring to the circle.

  “During the day, I’m the mom to a four-year-old,” Michelle began, talking directly into the camera from her daughter’s playroom. “But at night, it’s autopsy reports. It’s googling gruesome details. And it’s all about trying to solve unsolved crimes. Everyone has their cause, and this feels like what I was born to do.”

  Michelle and I would meet for lunch once a month at places like the Tallyrand in Burbank, Fred 62 in Los Feliz, or the 101 Coffee Shop in Hollywood and talk almost exclusively about crime, welcoming any chance to bounce ideas off each other. She was working on a proposal to turn her Golden State Killer investigation into a book, while I was continuing to write features on unsolved cases.

  I texted her after watching the sizzle reel we built for The Murder Circle.

  “It came out great,” I said and told her we would be shopping it around as soon as we could set up some meetings.

  “Cool!” she texted back. “And I think I sold a book to HarperCollins :)”

  • • •

  I met with a production company who said they liked the idea of The Murder Circle, but the back-and-forth and lawyer fees were just the first of many throat punches Hollywood would land. I would get close to producing a show, then get it pulled at the last second for the same reason over and over again—I couldn’t guarantee a solve by the end of each episode.

  “Our viewers want a resolution,” each network executive would say.

  “But look at all the people who are discussing unsolved murders online,” I countered. “They can be a part of solving the mystery.”

  “Yes, our market research says our viewers want to watch more unsolved stories,” one network executive said to me. “But we know that they actually just really want to see things solved in the end.”

  Trying something I could have slightly more control over, I decided to throw my hat into the ring when the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) Festival, the Austin, Texas, conference where tech nerds converge to talk about the next big things in digital, announced their call for proposals to present sessions at their annual conference the following March.

  I had just started working on that story for Rolling Stone about the citizen sleuths who used their considerable skills and tenacity to find the kitten killer, Magnotta. I wanted to show how that type of crowdsourcing could be replicated and used to solve all types of crimes. Michelle was not only a top researcher but had also written an excellent story on her own digital sleuthing methods while searching for the Golden State Killer. Those were two positives on the amateur detective front. But I would also have to address the negative. The citizen-detective community was still reeling from the crowdsourcing failures in the aftermath of the Boston bombing, when amateur sleuths were drawing circles around bulging backpacks and misidentifying the bombers responsible for the blast.

  Citizen sleuthing was ready for its close-up, and Michelle was the perfect partner to help deliver the message.

  I created a presentation that I hoped would catch the attention of the hipsters, digital nerds, and other assorted riffraff who voted on which panels should be presented at the conference. The slides featured statistics and examples of private individuals who had used the internet to solve crimes: The Gawker commenters who fingered a New York City mugging suspect after they identified the fraternity sweatshirt he was wearing while committing the crime. Blogger Alexandria Goddard, whose quick-thinking screenshots of social media posts of high school students boasting about the rape of a sixteen-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio, provided crucial evidence. And the citizens on Websleuths who dug up incriminating information on DeeDee Moore, the woman eventually convicted of murdering Abraham Shakespeare, the part-time garbage collector turned lottery winner.

  It would be the first-ever crowdsourcing crime presentation, designed to show the tech world that crimes could be solved by regular people. But with more than three thousand entries for SXSW and only a few hundred slots, we needed a title that would stand out from the crowd.

  I texted Michelle. “I was thinking Catching Murderers with Social Media.”

  “That’s good,” she wrote back. “Some others: @murder: Internet as Dragnet. Catching Serial Killers with Search Engines. Okay, I’m done :)” she finished. “Your first one is clear & understandable.”

  But having seen the other entries, I knew the winning panels often had names that were a bit over-the-top. I came up with a header, typed out the title, cringed a little, and pressed send.

  “How does this sound: Citizen Dicks: Catching Murderers with Social Media.”

  “Like it though idk about the ‘dicks’ part :/” she replied.

  Michelle relented, and thanks in part to Patton tweeting out the link to our proposal, it got enough votes and was selected.

  In March 2014, Michelle and I traveled to Austin and ran through a PowerPoint deck detailing examples of crowdsourcing crimesolving and how regular people can aid investigations if they have specific knowledge.

  We talked about Michelle scouring eBay looking for cuff links that were taken from a crime scene by the Golden State Killer, buying a pair that fit their description, and mailing them to one of the detectives on the case.

  And we discussed the Boston bombing aftermath, how web users throwing out the names of suspects on social media was damaging to the crowdsourcing effort, but also highlighting how the crowd did produce two key pieces of information. Redditors swiftly identified the logo on the hat Bomber #1 was wearing in the grainy video released by the FBI (it was a Bridgestone Golf hat), and a Facebook user produced the only clea
r photo of Bomber #2 walking away from the scene of the crime.

  The panel was a success, and Shadowpulp was fun, if under the radar. But in between the time we launched Shadowpulp and when we presented the panel in Austin, Michelle went all in on the Golden State Killer. From Sacramento to Goleta to Irvine to Walnut Creek, she bought lunches for retired detectives, hustled police reports, and talked to survivors, putting together material for her book.

  We still met for our monthly lunches. She would tell me how hard-nosed detectives were opening up, sharing information not only with her but with each other. The Golden State Killer had committed crimes in multiple jurisdictions, and either red tape or blind ego halted the exchange of vital clues between the departments. Michelle used her unassuming charm to break down those walls, and my eyes would widen and my jaw would drop whenever she told me about the pieces of info she was able to squeeze out of her contacts. We talked about how we both couldn’t sleep sometimes and would wake up in the middle of the night and grab the computer to compare multiple angles of blood spatter photos from a crime scene in Orange County or google photos of tread patterns of Adidas jogging shoes manufactured before 1979.

  We talked each other up from every rabbit hole we jumped down. She had an early sample of the Golden State Killer’s DNA profile and was entering it into public DNA databases like Ysearch to try to find some distant cousin who could lead to the killer. She thought she came close a few times, but they were false alarms. We were both sure there would be a familial DNA match inside 23andMe or Ancestry.com, but those were closed databases—the public and law enforcement were not allowed to access them due to the privacy terms of each company.

  In between discussing our obsessions, we dreamed long term. Although I hadn’t been able to get The Murder Circle TV concept off the ground, I wanted to start a group in Hollywood that would meet once a month and attempt to solve an unsolved crime. It would be a casual, unconventional squad, filled with detectives and forensics scientists and prosecutors and psychologists, but also writers and actors and people who had both the brains and the instinct to think a little differently than the average person on the street.

  It would be loosely modeled on the Vidocq Society, a group of select law enforcement types who meet once a month in Philadelphia and investigate cold cases. Individuals would work on different parts of the case—DNA extraction, witness interviews, facial reconstruction—then return the next month and present their findings to the group. If we felt we had a case—and enough evidence of who might have committed a crime—we would present it to the local police department in charge of the investigation.

  Michelle was interested and wanted to host the group at her house. But first, she had to finish the book. “Once the book is done” became a constant refrain, which led to me giving her gentle pushes every time we met. I would quote Steve Jobs to her, “Real artists ship,” trying to impress upon her that at some point, she needed to let the manuscript go and send it into her editor’s hands. But there was always one more lead to track down, one more witness to call.

  “Please finish the book so we can start our West Coast Vidocq Society,” I texted her near the end of 2015. “You can pick the name.”

  “Michelle McNamara and her Dicks,” she wrote back, finally embracing the name of our SXSW panel.

  “I can already foresee the lazy porn parody,” I answered back.

  “Srsly though,” she said. “West Coast Vidocq is really the only project I’d do right now after my book.”

  At the end of March 2016, we made plans to meet at the Golden Road Brewery, a brewpub next to the railroad tracks in Glendale. “Just a head’s up,” she warned. “Turns out I found out EAR or GSK, whatever I’m calling him, possibly wrote a letter taking responsibility for the bombing at LaGuardia. While I was researching it, I saw that you wrote about it! He claimed that it was to kill a girl that had rejected him. I’m pretty sure it’s bullshit but just would love to talk to you about that case.” There was always another lead, and I was happy that this time I could help a bit more than usual. A decade earlier, I had spent months going through the dusty facts of the still-unsolved 1975 bombing at LaGuardia Airport, interviewing everyone from the lead detective on the case to the main suspect’s girlfriend for a Long Island Press story.

  At lunch, she grilled me about the case. Killing eleven people, it was the third most deadly terrorist attack in New York history, behind 9/11 and the 1920 bombing of Wall Street. We quickly dismissed the idea that there was a connection to the Golden State Killer, just more unfounded boasting from unstable people in the heydays of madmen.

  When it was my turn, I told her about my latest case. I was investigating the Bear Brook murders, four unidentified bodies found in barrels fifteen years apart in the New Hampshire woods, also known as the Allenstown Four. I just didn’t understand how a family unit—a woman and three children—could disappear, be murdered, and still remain unidentified.

  She knew the case well but had never written about it. It was just one more murder that had to wait until the book was done. She told me she was planning on shipping the manuscript to HarperCollins by the end of the year, and then we could start our crimesolving group. I pulled out a notebook and showed her a list I’d scribbled of a few people who could take part. At the top was John Mulaney, a comedian whose specials I had been binge-watching. He was a great storyteller, did a brilliant bit about Law & Order, and his parents were lawyers; maybe he would want to look into some murders?

  Michelle looked at the notebook. “Oh my God, I just met with him!” she yelled. Turns out he was into true crime. Michelle and I were on the same wavelength. This was going to happen. We were going to bring people together and solve murders.

  We finished lunch and walked to the parking lot. I hugged her goodbye and drove away.

  Over the next couple of weeks, we texted bits of crime news to each other.

  “Another true-crime fan: Kesha,” I texted, half jokingly. “She took the Manson tour yesterday with that guy we interviewed.”

  As soon as I learned that one of the Manson girls had gotten parole, I sent Michelle a message.

  “Leslie Van Houten Ok’ed for parole,” I wrote on April 14.

  “Holy shit,” she wrote back.

  I would be in the middle of one of my stories when an idea would pop into my head about the Golden State Killer, and I would immediately text Michelle. “Have you ever looked into anyone who was killed in a home invasion by a homeowner around the time EAR/ONS stopped?”

  “Yes!” she wrote back. “I did a lot of combing back through media etc. for that very thing, and also suicides in the year after. We have a pretty good suspect right now. Fingers crossed. Unfortunately, he’s a world traveler who doesn’t seem to come back to the US very often (not surprising) but they r tracking him down. If it turns out to be him, his getting away will be what I suspect: weak elimination based on Chinese Whispers between agencies. One agency who had eyes on him said he had an ace bandage. Somehow Sac [Sacramento] is told crutches and cast. He was a ‘10’ on Sac’s suspect numbering system of 1 (weak) 10 (strong). Then I found out he transferred to UCSB at exactly the right time. Among a bunch of other tiny details in his favor. We’ll see. Have been here before. But God would I be so happy.”

  A week later, on April 20, I texted her again. I had just gotten a call that A&E was going to order a pilot for a new show I had created on DIY citizen detectives. And I was preparing to fly out to DC the next day to begin filming my investigation into the Allenstown Four.

  “I think I just sold a show,” I wrote. “Want to do lunch or dinner next week?”

  6.

  The Absolute Worst Humanity Has to Offer

  New Hampshire, 2016

  I hadn’t received Michelle’s response by the time I landed in Washington, DC. I was there to interview Joe Mullins, a forensic imaging specialist at the National Center for Missing a
nd Exploited Children headquarters. He was the artist who had worked on reconstructing what the Allenstown Four, the woman and three little girls found in barrels in New Hampshire in 1985 and 2000, might have looked like when they were alive.

  With dark features, a dapper orange-and-blue-striped tie, and a high-top haircut split in two by a shock of white hair, Mullins looked like the kind of character a CBS crime drama would cast as the “forensics guy.”

  He sat down at his computer and opened a file containing a 3-D rendering of the smallest victim’s skull.

  “We are looking at the absolute worst that humanity has to offer,” he said as he maneuvered his stylus to rotate the skull 180 degrees so we were looking at the back of the child’s head. A series of cracks and holes came into focus on the back left side. “A two- or three-year-old little girl who looks like a brick has been used to smash her head in.” He ran his pinky along the cracks in the skull on the screen.

  The cracks in the back of the skull were jarring, but I was determined to show them on Crime Watch Daily, a syndicated daytime true-crime show I had started working on as a producer and investigator, which landed me a steady paycheck so I could move out of hotels and into an apartment in Burbank. No one outside of law enforcement had ever seen the wounds of the victims before. Maybe the images would tug at someone’s conscience.

  Mullins spun the skull of one of the other girls on the screen so that it was staring straight at us, and I watched over his shoulder as he began to add each layer of digital flesh to the bone. The image on the monitor transformed from a skull to what looked like a baby doll to a clay version of a little girl. Then he added digital pencils, layering flesh tones and hair. But it was only when he added the eyes that the girl looked like a person, like someone somebody might remember.