by Billy Jensen
“It’s devastating,” he said, “but you have to turn that devastation into motivation, and I want to give her her name back.”
That night, I flew to Boston, and the next morning, I drove to Allenstown, New Hampshire, to the park where the bodies in the barrels were discovered.
There I met Ronda Randall. Ronda didn’t grow up in Allenstown. She never lived there. But she knew every tilt in the landscape, every placement of every skinny tree, every home—and most every occupant—on every lot in the trailer park that sat a quarter mile west of the woods. She started working on the case in 2011 and became an obsessed citizen detective, just like Michelle. They were both fortysomething Irish-American women. Both dedicated to cases that had baffled investigators for decades. Both seemingly unrelenting.
I followed Ronda down a narrow trail into the woods. About one hundred yards from the road, she began to veer us off the path. Twenty feet later, we stood in a small clearing.
“Right here,” Ronda said, pointing to a bare spot on the ground.
In November 1985, two brothers were out hunting when one came across a fifty-five-gallon barrel on its side, up against a birch tree sapling. Spilling out of the barrel was a plastic bag.
“One of the brothers told me that he saw a small human foot sticking out of the bag,” she said. Ronda was standing right in front of where the barrel had been, but I could tell she was being careful not to step on the exact spot where it had sat thirty-one years ago.
The brothers called the police. The police had nothing to work with. No clothes or jewelry were found with the remains. And they were careful to say “remains.” This was not an intact skeleton but a jumble of bones inside a bag inside a barrel. At first, they thought it was one victim. Then they looked closer.
AUTOPSY: TWO VICTIMS read the headline in the Concord Monitor.
GIRL AND WOMAN WERE MURDERED, POLICE SAY.
The locals were stunned. Two bodies? And one a little girl? (They didn’t know that fifteen years later the horror would multiply, when two more bodies would be found just a hundred yards away. For now, it was just the Allenstown Two.)
Dr. Henry Ryan, the Maine chief medical examiner, crossed state lines into New Hampshire to help and brought in Dr. Marcella Sorg, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Maine. Over the course of an eleven-hour examination, they deduced that:
The little girl was between 5–11 years old, 4’3” tall, with light brown to blond hair, and had been beaten about the head. The adult woman 23–33 years old, was 5’4” to 5’7” with light brown curly hair. She was cared for at some point in her life, as her teeth showed numerous dental work. Eye color and weight were undetermined.
The bones were “commingled,” but Ryan stated that the difference in ages between the two victims meant reconstruction was fairly simple.
Their forensics team told them the remains had been there anywhere between six months to three years. That was a lot of time for a killer to get away.
Authorities checked records from elementary schools, campgrounds, and missing-persons reports, looking for names that might belong to the woman and little girl. They followed a lead about a mother and daughter who had gone missing from an Indian reservation in Maine. That turned out to be a dead end when they were found alive and well. Another pair that was brought to the attention of law enforcement were found alive in Arizona. Sketches were created of the two females, whom everyone assumed were mother and daughter.
In 1985, DNA testing for criminal investigations was one year away from its first case. (DNA evidence was first used in 1986 to identify a seventeen-year-old attacker in two sexual assaults/murders in Leicestershire, England.) The best bet to identify the woman and girl was going to be through their teeth. They brought in a forensic dentist, but no records matched.
In May 1987, the two bodies were finally laid to rest, buried together inside a steel casket in a corner plot in St. John the Baptist Cemetery in Allenstown. A local donated a headstone. HERE LIES THE MORTAL REMAINS KNOWN ONLY TO GOD OF A WOMAN AGE 23–33 AND A GIRL AGE 8–10. MAY THEIR SOULS FIND PEACE IN GOD’S LOVING CARE. Below the words was an image of a woman and little girl, holding hands.
Thirteen years went by. In 2000, the case was given to State Police Sergeant John Cody. Cody knew the area where the barrel was found had been picked over time and time again, but he wanted to get a sense of the place, and he followed the trail from the road down to where the remains were found fifteen years earlier. All he saw was a small, empty clearing in the forest. As he walked back toward the road, he spotted a few fifty-five-gallon drums, around one hundred yards from where the barrel with the woman’s and child’s remains were found.
He walked up to one of the barrels and gave it a push, just to see if it felt full. It did. He peeled off the lid, and in a split second, the mystery in Allenstown multiplied.
Inside, he saw the remains of two little girls. The first aged between one and three. The second two to four.
Had the second barrel been there since 1985 and was just overlooked? The police were cautious about declaring whether the two “new” remains were connected to the two remains found in 1985. But they knew. All they had to do was look at the heads of the two new victims, which both had gaping holes in the back sides of their skulls. The same injuries as the woman and little girl found fifteen years earlier.
The earlier victims’ remains were exhumed, and the now-routine DNA tests revealed that one of the newly discovered victims was related to the woman and child from the first barrel.
Now they had three victims who were biologically related to each other, who were murdered and dumped in fifty-five-gallon drums, accompanied by one victim who was not related but still shared the same fate.
And that’s all they had.
It takes a special type of person to devote their life to trying to solve a murder of someone who is unidentified. There are no mothers calling you in tears saying they just buried their babies. No candlelight vigils filled with friends and families asking for answers. There is no support system. You are the only voice of the dead.
Today, there are anywhere from 40,000 to 60,000 unidentified remains sitting in police storage lockers or anonymous graves across the country. And there are about 110,000 missing persons on the books at any given time. The trouble is, there is no single database where the information and samples of their DNA live. NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, tries its best to capture this information, but most police departments are not required to enter every set of remains they find or every missing person who is reported to them, and many don’t bother. A year earlier, I had worked a case where a woman lost her son. Every year, she put up flyers looking for answers. Three years after he went missing, she learned that his body had been found just six months after he went missing only a half mile from her house. As she put up flyers year after year, her son’s remains were sitting on a shelf in an evidence locker just down the block.
Pulling DNA from unidentified remains and running it through ancestry databases looking for familial matches would lead to thousands of answers. Answers to the identity of the remains. Answers to the fate of the missing. And for those who died a violent death, answers to who might have killed them. But every time I ask, authorities give me the same answer: “We just don’t have the money or the resources to do the tests.”
Ronda, who had dedicated years of her life to the Allenstown Four case, just wanted to find out the names of the woman and the three little girls.
“The case hooks you,” she said as we walked out of the woods. “It’s so impossible to understand how they just dropped off the face of the earth.”
Blunt-force trauma to the back of the head? Of an entire family unit? This was not some crime of opportunity. It had to have been committed by a friend or family member. If no one had reported them missing, he had to have set up a plan. Maybe he told peo
ple that he and the woman were moving out of town and would contact them as soon as they were settled. This was before social media. People didn’t keep tabs on each other like they do now. People could get lost. Disappear.
I left Ronda and Bear Brook and traveled to the state capital in Concord to talk to New Hampshire assistant district attorney Jeff Strelzin. Strelzin was supportive of Ronda and her blogging about the victims. “In a case like this, there is really no harm that you can do by putting information out there,” he told me.
Strelzin had crystal-blue eyes and kept details close to the vest. He said the case was still active and he wasn’t going to tell me much. But it was his answer to my last question that shocked me.
“Do you ever think this will be solved?” I asked.
“I think the chances are pretty slim,” he replied.
Driving back to Boston, I kept thinking about those words. I guess it was easier for him to say the “chances are pretty slim” for this case, because the victim’s family wasn’t banging on his door every day searching for an answer. The victims were nameless. He wasn’t stealing hope from a living, breathing person with that statement.
But there is no way in hell Ronda or Michelle would ever say that. I saw Michelle’s despair when a promising lead didn’t pan out or a juicy clue turned out to be a red herring. She ate a lot of frustration. But she never once thought the Golden State Killer case would forever stay unsolved.
I got back to Boston around 8:00 p.m., enough time to grab some sleep before an early morning flight. But I was restless. I called up some old newspaper friends and made plans to meet up for a drink. Taking an Uber to the Back Bay neighborhood, I got out near the entrance to the Public Garden and hiked the length of Beacon Street, which had officially shaken off winter and was already in bloom.
I walked past Marlboro Market, where two months after I arrived in Boston twenty-five years earlier, I stumbled in with a girl who lived down the hall in my freshman dorm. We had drunk four tequila slammers each and were there to rent a movie to finish off the night. We secured the VHS tape and went back to a friend’s apartment to watch our find. With the dialogue of Beetlejuice as our soundtrack, we had our first kiss. We were married five years later.
I then walked past the Wishing Tree, my name for the giant oak that hunched under the overpass at Charlesgate East road, which I would sit under and think about the world and my place in it and all the other things you wonder about when you are eighteen years old and in a strange city, and it’s a weeknight, and you’re too young to buy alcohol. Two decades earlier, I had placed a guitar pick inside the folds of the tree’s bark, and I gave a cursory glance over where I thought it might be.
I passed by Myles Standish Hall, my freshman-year dormitory at Boston University, where my dad came up and painted the walls of my room black for me to make it feel more like home. I continued walking west, under the blinking Citgo sign, behind my first apartment across from the Victory Gardens, and straight into a waking nightmare.
7.
The Wrong Side of Broken
Hollywood, 2016
My shoes were still caked with dirt from the woods in Allenstown as I stood at the bar of the Verb Hotel behind Fenway Park. I was surrounded by my former colleagues from the Boston Phoenix, an alternative paper I worked at for a couple of years after I left Long Island. We were swapping stories and laughing, the commiserating foxhole-type of laughter writers share when lamenting late nights and late edits.
I was two beers into the night when I absentmindedly scanned my Facebook messages and stopped at a note from a stranger. Not sure if you heard. So very sorry, the woman wrote, with a link to an article. I stared blankly at my phone, rereading the headline of the article six or seven times, trying to wish the words away:
MICHELLE MCNAMARA, WRITER AND WIFE OF PATTON OSWALT, DEAD AT 46.
I looked back up from my phone and excused myself, stepping outside to the hotel’s pool deck. I made a few phone calls and searched for more information, hoping it was a hoax, that someone was somehow messing with me. The first thing I thought of was the Golden State Killer. Had he won? Then I thought of Michelle’s young daughter, Alice. Then I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know what to feel. I just knew to order another drink.
Three drinks turned into ten. I have no idea how I got back to my hotel that night, but a check of Facebook the next morning showed I had logged on and posted a status update a little after midnight. It was two words: “Fucking devastated.”
On the plane ride home the next morning, I read a bunch of articles relaying the news, all saying Michelle died in her sleep, all referring to her in the headline as the “wife of Patton Oswalt.” I opened the Notes app on my iPhone and began writing.
Michelle McNamara, True Crime Writer
Michelle McNamara was dogged. Fiercely dogged. Don’t-take-no-for-an-answer, don’t-leave-any-stone-unturned dogged.
She was a mother and a wife, but after she took her daughter to school or put her to bed, she spent seemingly every waking moment working on her book about a series of unsolved rapes and murders that took place across California in the ’70s and ’80s. Her ultimate goal? To identify the villain, to give the real name to the unknown assailant who goes by the monikers “the Original Night Stalker” and “the East Area Rapist.” She had written about the case in Los Angeles magazine—where she rechristened him “the Golden State Killer”—and on her site True Crime Diary.
Every month or so, we would meet for lunch or drinks, where she would tell me about the latest clue she had uncovered—some bit of information that had been missed all those years ago. Her eyes lit up like Christmas as she walked me down the path of how the new clue might fit into the ever-expanding jigsaw puzzle she was putting together.
Then we would meet the next month, where she would excitedly tell me how that piece fit into the picture…or how it sent her down one of many rabbit holes.
She was unearthing an intense amount of information—boxes and boxes full of documents and police reports, old phone books, news articles. The kind of stuff you just can’t google. She went digging—into dusty archives, newspaper morgues. She knocked on doors. Shoe-leather work.
But her most amazing skill—what set her apart from any writer I have ever seen—was getting grizzled detectives from different police departments and law enforcement agencies to talk to each other and share details about their individual cases, something they never did at the time of the crimes. If they did, they could have helped solve the case and brought this serial killer to justice. But they are doing it now, because of Michelle. It’s not always easy talking to detectives about a cold case they worked on. It’s their unfinished businesses. Imagine if someone called you up to get you to talk about a project you failed to complete forty years ago. Now imagine telling that person no. Now imagine that person not going away until you talked to them about it. Now you have an idea of Michelle.
She knew more about this case than anyone, and I truly believe she would have solved it. Hell, I bet she already has solved it. I bet she has the name of the bastard in one of her thousands of pages of notes. She texted me earlier this month saying she had a real good lead on a suspect. “A lot of tiny details in his favor,” she wrote. “We’ll see. Have been here before. But God I would be so happy.”
I don’t know what is going to happen to the book, but if asked, I would do my damnedest to help get it out there.
After the book was finished, Michelle and I were going to start a cold case group, a sort of Los Angeles Vidocq Society, where we would invite the smartest people we knew from Hollywood, law enforcement, and journalism to a dinner one night a month and review an unsolved murder case. We would then give each person a task, and at the next meeting, they would present their findings, which we would deliver to law enforcement before introducing the next case.
Michelle was really excited to do this, as was
I. We were building a list of people to invite and a list of cases to work. The only thing we didn’t know was what to call this little group. The Vidocq Society was named after the French criminal-turned-detective who is credited with ushering in a new era of detective work. Michelle was ushering a new era of citizen sleuthing, and her investigation is going to illustrate what a dogged woman who wouldn’t take no for an answer could do for justice. If I can ever muster up the strength to start this group without her, I guess I now know what it will be called.
I posted the story on my website and tweeted out a link. On the day she passed, Patton had posted two photos of Michelle with the words “A beautiful friend/She opened up her heart and let me in…” but had since gone silent. He was still looking at Twitter, however, and saw my post and retweeted it. For the first few days, what I wrote became the de facto memorial for Michelle, and journalists began sending me messages asking if I could comment on her death. I could not and would not. I forwarded the requests to Michelle and Patton’s nanny. She got back to me a day later, saying Patton wanted me to call him at noon on Sunday.
I had barely spoken with Patton, but he had made me laugh a thousand times with his whip-smart observations about comedian magicians, Stella D’oro Breakfast Treats, and the Star Wars prequels. What do you say to someone who just lost his copilot in life?
That night, I didn’t sleep. And the next morning, I was so anxious waiting for the call at noon that I couldn’t stay at home. So I went to Target.
I walked around aimlessly through the action figure and cereal aisles. After an hour, I dialed his number.
A man on the wrong side of being broken answered. My hands started to shake.
“I am so, so sorry,” was the only thing I could think to say. Then I said the only thing I could think of: “I will do anything I can to help finish the book.”
