Chase Darkness with Me

by Billy Jensen

  We talked about all the work Michelle had done and how it had to see the light of day. Of the giant amounts of police reports, witness statements, and other documents she had collected in banker’s boxes in Alice’s playroom and the thousands of files on her computer. But also that so many of the dots to be connected in the case were in her head.

  “I feel like Sherlock just died,” Patton said to me, “and I’m Watson and I have to solve this mystery.”

  I just about lost it in the office supplies aisle of Target.

  I was going to help finish the book. I had no idea how much Michelle had written, but it was going to come out to the world. But there was something else at play. Patton sounded just as concerned about finishing her investigation and actually catching the killer as he was about making sure the book would be published.

  I bought a pen, a notebook, a box of Lucky Charms, and walked out of Target, thinking one thought: How am I ever going to help solve a case that Michelle worked on nonstop for half a decade when I can’t even help solve any of my own cases?

  8.

  The Man in the Green Hoodie

  Chicago, 2016

  It was a few weeks after Michelle died when I first saw the video of the killing of Marques Gaines on that street in Chicago.

  In bed in my Los Angeles apartment, I watched it over and over and over again. I began to learn every step like it was a dance. I knew every inch of that street corner. Every mannerism of the Man in the Green Hoodie. When Marques was punched, I still winced as he fell to the ground. When the two thieves ran over to rifle through his pockets, I still shook my head in disgust. When the cab drove on top of his chest, I still looked away, focusing on the other cars, the bystanders, anything but what was right in the center of the screen.

  The homicide of Marques Gaines isn’t the type of true-crime story most people gravitate toward. It’s a street crime. There was a think piece to be written about the bystander effect on the crowd as they rubbernecked from the sidelines, a Kitty Genovese redux unfolding in 2016 America. But most true-crime addicts don’t want to hear that. They want twists and turns. They want love gone bad. And most of all, they want solves.

  People read and watch and listen to true crime because it restores order from chaos. That’s the answer to give when someone asks you why you like hearing about real-life murders. It’s the comfort of watching everything be put in its place after an episode of outright, sickening bedlam. Read along with me in your best Keith Morrison, true-crime voiceover voice: “Everything is perfect (a sleepy town, high school sweethearts, a loving marriage), then everything goes wrong (a love triangle, a missing woman, a body found in the woods), then everything is right again (the killer is caught and convicted, and society is back to where it should be).” True crime satisfies the same urge as watching blackhead-popping videos: there is a foreign element in an otherwise perfect environment, and it must be removed. Then everything resets to normal.

  I spent my life writing stories that begin with those first two parts, the perfect-then-chaos parts. It was the third part that I was always missing. But that missing piece was what had compelled me to work on the stories in the first place. People don’t like stories without endings, but I wrote them anyway. Because families pleaded with me to. Because I felt like I might be able to help. And because maybe, just maybe, I might be able solve one. But so far, I hadn’t.

  I watched the video again, trying to block everything out except the Man in the Green Hoodie. I was trying to find something distinctive beyond his imposing frame. A crooked nose? A scar on his chin? A neck tattoo? I scanned his body, looking for anything that stood out.

  And then I found it. Peeking out from underneath his hood was a distinctive hairline, a widow’s peak, giving off a kind of Dracula vibe. I peered down at his clothes, and they didn’t look dirty, and his white sneakers showed few scuffs, leading me to believe that this wasn’t a guy who slept on the street. He had an address. Bottom line: he was identifiable.

  “Why the hell haven’t they found this guy yet?” I asked the darkness.

  The police couldn’t identify him; otherwise, they wouldn’t have released the video to the media asking for help. The media couldn’t identify him; all the local TV stations, the local newspapers, and even a few national broadcasts had run a story about the crime. Admittedly, their motive was less to help identify the suspect and more for the eyeball-grabbing nature of the footage. SHOCKING VIDEO SHOWS CHICAGO MAN LEFT TO DIE IN THE STREET read the headline of the NBC story. It was the kind of video that forced a viewer to look up from their morning corn flakes.

  Yet no one knew who the Man in the Green Hoodie was.

  Thirty years ago, having your story run on every local TV station and in every newspaper in your city would be tantamount to sending a text message with a picture of the wanted man to everyone within a twenty-mile radius. If a body was found at noon, people heard about it first from their local anchorman, then read the fleshed-out version the next day in the morning paper. If a body was found at night, it was the newspaper that first delivered the story, and they waited until the evening news for the accompanying video. If the story was interesting enough, the locals talked about it with their coworkers, the clerk at the deli, and later with their family over supper. The half dozen television stations and the multiple newsstands speckled across the city made sure that information reached every person, every day, in some way, shape, or form.

  Then the internet happened.

  By the time I was watching the video of Marques Gaines being attacked, people had been cutting the cord to their cable boxes for years. Newspapers were a shell of their former selves. Most people under forty—the kind of people who would be out on the street at three in the morning—were getting their news from the internet. They chose what they wanted to watch, as opposed to having to wade through a series of local crime stories to get to the sports highlights or the weather. Before the internet, if you wanted to hear about anything that was going on around you, you were forced to sit through stories you wouldn’t look at today, including the crime story showing a picture of a wanted man.

  The American media diet has gone from a fixed menu to an all-you-can-eat buffet. People are just not seeing the news anymore.

  But there is one thing almost everyone is seeing: social media.

  There are more than two billion active Facebook users. Twitter has more than three hundred million tweeters. Most every person under forty visits Facebook or Twitter or Instagram at least once per week. It is where you find news and where the news finds you. But even if you are following the local news station’s Facebook page, you will not see every story they publish. Most stories that are posted by a media publisher reach only 7 to 10 percent of their fans or followers. Of those that are reached, it’s another small fraction that actually clicks on the link and reads the story or watches the video. If you are a TV station airing a video showing a man getting murdered and asking people to identify his killer, most people are not going to see it. How is the public ever going to help with solving the crimes if they never even see the news?

  The death of old media meant the people who might recognize the Man in the Green Hoodie would never know someone was even looking for him.

  But here’s the thing: I knew all this. It’s been written on the urinal wall of every newsroom and tattooed on my brain for a decade. And not only did I know all this, but I was an expert at it.

  “This is my job,” I said to myself, sitting up in bed. I’m the guy who finds the people who don’t read the newspaper or watch the news anymore. I travel to where you now live. Your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feeds. As you’re scrolling through Family Guy memes and pictures of your nephew’s new baby, I’m the one interrupting your bliss with FRESNO GANG MEMBER’S HOT MUGSHOT GOES VIRAL, 32 MOST MEMORABLE JUGGALOS WE SAW AT THE GATHERING, or MOM CAUGHT ON CAMERA POISONING YOUNG SON TO DEATH IN HOSPITAL. I try to make it
so irresistible that there is no way you are not going to click on the link, come to the websites I work for, and see the story alongside the accompanying ads. The evisceration of newspapers forced me to create this particular set of skills for myself.

  I have directed dozens of social media editors at newspapers and TV shows to post at least a million stories, photos, slideshows, and videos. And every time before they hit publish, I forced them to ask them themselves two questions: “Will this post stop someone from scrolling long enough to grab their attention?” and “Will that person think the post is interesting enough to share with a friend?”

  “Learn it. Know it. Live it.” I had the rules posted on the wall like All American Burger in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. After not messing with cats (people on the internet are very protective of cats; you just don’t post anything negative about cats, or there will be hell to pay), these were the two most important rules of the internet: get your users’ attention—and then turn those users into sharers.

  What if I used the same strategy to find someone who might recognize the Man in the Green Hoodie?

  The video of Marques Gaines’s homicide would surely grab people’s attention—it was as compelling as it was gruesome. People would watch. But that wasn’t enough. I needed to get it in front of a specific person: the person who would recognize the attacker. Fifty thousand people across the country sharing the video might get it in front of the right set of eyeballs, but it would be like tossing a bunch of darts at a map while a hundred feet away and blindfolded. I had to reach people in a very specific location—to make them care enough to watch and try to identify him. “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once said. You might watch the video, but unless the crime happened near you, you’re not going to care as much. But watch a video of someone dying at an intersection right by your house, and your ears prick up, your face leans in, and you scan each frame to see if you recognize the street, the stores, and maybe the man they are looking for.

  To find the Man in the Green Hoodie, I would have to reach people who not only lived in Chicago but lived, worked, or played in the neighborhood where the crime occurred, River North. People who would see the story and share with their friends: “Look what happened outside that 7-Eleven we always go to after the bar.” If I could get the video in front of everyone in a three-square-block area, I thought I could find him.

  My day job and my night job were about to crash into each other. I was going to solve this murder myself.

  • • •

  I set the alarm on my phone for 6:00 a.m. and was able to grab a few hours of sleep. In the morning, I rolled over, opened my laptop, and began my quest. I started with Marques’s cousin Drexina, who was on a YouTube video speaking at a press conference at the scene of her cousin’s homicide, pleading for anyone with information on the man who attacked him to come forward.

  Drexina was really more like his sister than a cousin, as Marques’s mother and father had both died when he was nine years old, and he had gone to live with his aunt Phyllis and Drexina in Atlanta. A quick search revealed that she ran a beauty parlor in Atlanta. I called and identified myself as an investigative journalist.

  “I saw the video of Marques. I am so sorry for your loss,” I said. “Have you heard anything new in the case?”

  “No,” Drexina replied. “The detectives don’t even call me back anymore.” Her voice revealed a level of frustration I have become accustomed to when talking to family members of victims.

  I told her I wasn’t sure who I was going to write this story for—or if I was going to write a story at all—but that I wanted to try some new techniques to attempt to identify the man in the video. “Would that be okay?” I asked. I could tell she didn’t really believe it would go anywhere, but after months of no answers, Drexina sounded willing to accept any help she could get.

  Before I start reporting any story, I always contact the detectives in charge, not only for information but to make sure they don’t have a suspect in their sights. If they do, I back off. I don’t want my digging to spook a suspect into running. But if law enforcement didn’t get back to me, the case was fair game. I would follow the same code in this endeavor.

  After my conversation with Drexina, I called the detective in charge of Marques’s case and left a message. Chicago homicide detectives are a busy bunch. The murder rate skyrocketed in 2016 to 762 homicides, up from 496 the year before. The department simply didn’t have enough detectives to cover all the investigations as thoroughly as they needed to. A few days later, I left another message and sent a couple of emails. Nothing. There was also another factor I was aware of: some cops like dealing with journalists, some don’t. Chicago cops don’t. I had given them enough time. I had the family’s blessing. I was moving forward with my plan.

  I opened Facebook and began building a new community page. I named it “River North Puncher,” using as the profile pic the cleanest screenshot I could grab from the surveillance video of the Man in the Green Hoodie. All the images of the attacker were shot from above, which was going to make an identification difficult. I had gone through a few hundred mugshots on a public Cook County database, but the image I had was just too distorted. I was hoping his distinctive feature—the widow’s peak hairline—would be that one detail that would make the difference between someone recognizing him on Facebook or passing on by.

  Then I had to build a post. That was what would show up in people’s Facebook feeds.

  The post needed to stand out and away from the same tired “Information Wanted” posters law enforcement has been distributing—and the media have been echoing—ever since they were searching for John Wilkes Booth in 1865. Always fact-heavy, leading with heights and weights and age ranges, the bulletproof native language of cops. “Just the facts” was not going to be effective. I needed to tell a story. I selected eleven screenshots from the video—all different angles of the Man in the Green Hoodie. And then I wrote the post in the killer’s voice, speaking directly to the reader.

  This is the video where I punch a stranger—a stranger who later dies. It was taken 4:20 a.m. on Sunday, Feb. 7 outside the 7-Eleven on State and Hubbard in River North, Chicago. I am the man in the green hooded jacket and white sneakers. (The man who died is in the blue shirt. He just went to the store for some chips.) If you know my name or anything about me—anything at all—please message me here or leave a comment. If you don’t have any information, but have friends in Chicago, please share. His family desperately wants answers.

  The next part of the plan would be geotargeting—identifying the location where I wanted to share the photo of the suspect and delivering content directly targeted to the people in that location. Even if I had a million fans on my own personal page, I would never get the video in front of the people I needed to reach: the people from that neighborhood. The right people. That meant I had to break out my credit card.

  As I wrote the post—the same way you would write any post on Facebook—I was asked by Facebook if I wanted to “boost” the post. I clicked on that button and was met with a series of options. Depending on how much I spent, I could target a certain number of people based on a certain set of characteristics. Under the audience section, I entered the location of the incident—418 North State Street in Chicago—and drew a circle around it encompassing a two-mile radius. I kept the age range the boosted post would reach at eighteen to sixty-five plus. I did not select any interest targeting. (In later campaigns, I would narrow down the reach to the most specific of groups, say “Females, ages thirty-five to forty-five, who are interested in the Oakland Raiders and Martha Stewart.” Yes, you can get that specific.) For the budget, I entered $100, a number I would soon realize was paltry. With a hundred bucks, I would reach 4,400 to 12,000 out of the 240,000 Facebook users who lived or worked in the area. If I added mo
re money, I could reach more people. This is how Facebook has become a $328 billion company.

  With the photos, caption, and geotargeting parameters set, I pushed publish.

  Comments immediately began to trickle in.

  Hope there’s justice.

  I hope they catch the mfer.

  People just let him lie there in the middle of the road and walk off? What is wrong with these people?

  One woman volunteered to help make the man in the image more identifiable.

  Ima do a 3d on this photo and also google the address and blow this photo up it will give me a clear message. I will post this after turned in to police. Take 3 days…and yes I am a computer geek.

  I was hoping it would be the start of a crowdsourcing relationship. I reached out to the woman, but she never produced the image.

  Another woman wrote:

  This depicts the death of a beloved coworker of mine. Marques Gaines was a beautiful human being and he deserves justice.

  The post was undeniably hitting the right neighborhood.

  With the Facebook boost set, I moved over to Twitter. I edited the video down to forty seconds and shrank the text to fit Twitter’s frugal 140-character limit at the time: “Chicago, corner of State+Hubbard. Please help identify man in green hooded jacket. #JusticeforMarques.”

  I purchased a boost of thirty-five dollars to reach Twitter users within a one-mile radius of the 7-Eleven. That first night, I got a handful of retweets but little else. I had to get resourceful. Who did I know in Chicago with a lot of followers who could retweet the video and get it in front of more people?

  The crime happened in the middle of an assortment of sports bars, so I went back to my origins. The first time I was in Chicago was when my dad took me on a vacation to Wrigley Field to watch the Mets play a four-game swing against the Cubs. We shouted loudly for New York, Dad relishing being the lone dissenters surrounded by thirty-four thousand rabid Chicago fans. Chicago is a sports town, and the sports writers, bloggers, and TV personalities have passionate followers on social media. I reached out to a dozen of them, but they didn’t know me from Adam, and for them to ask their Twitter followers if they recognized a killer wasn’t exactly on brand. But there was one sports guy I knew who might be willing to help.