Chase Darkness with Me

by Billy Jensen

  I reached for my phone to text Michelle what had just happened. I had just scrolled past the K’s on my contact list when I remembered.

  • • •

  The next morning, I met Drexina and Phyllis along the Chicago Riverwalk. We sat on a park bench in the bright sun, and I spelled out the entire investigation to them in detail: the Facebook page I had created, the boosted posts, the sports blogger I had reached out to, the retweets I got in Chicago. Everything leading up to the Snapchat video. Then I took out my phone.

  “It’s not going to be easy to watch,” I warned them.

  Drexina said she understood, but they needed to see it.

  I handed the phone to her and pressed play.

  The moment she saw Marques on the ground, she let out a wail and turned her head away from the screen while at the same time pushing the phone back into my hands.

  I didn’t think I could hate this Marcus guy even more.

  She took five seconds and a deep breath, then turned back around and reached for the phone. I pressed play again. We watched as the camera panned from her cousin lying motionless on the street to the Man in the Green Hoodie snarling at the camera.

  She only needed to watch it once.

  “He’s just a big bully,” she said.

  I showed them Marcus Moore’s Facebook page, presently featuring a new girlfriend and changed relationship status. Now that the villain was fully fleshed, seeing him in real life—or at least as real life as Facebook can be—was maddening for Drexina. I showed her the dossier I would be giving to the detectives, and then something struck me.

  “I wish I could go have a drink with Marques,” I said to her. “I just wish I could tell him about it. About how everything came together. That’s what we should be doing tonight.” My first solve was not what I thought it would be. It was elation swiftly followed by a numbing, hollow comedown.

  We hugged each other, and I told them I would do everything in my power to aid the police in apprehending Marcus Moore.

  I called the detectives to try to arrange a meeting to tell them what I had found. I left a message. I went to Drexina’s lawyer’s office and dropped off the dossier with all the information I had gathered, then had a courier drop off a duplicate to the police department, addressed to the detective in charge.

  All I got back from him was a confirmation that he had received the information.

  • • •

  Back home, I continued to monitor Marcus Moore’s Facebook page. In the fall, he changed his “current city” to Holbrook, New York. And in September, he posted a photo of himself in front of what looked like a work truck. From his background check, I knew his brother lived in Bloomington, Minnesota. Zooming in on the logo on the side of the truck, I could see a T surrounded by a red circle. A web search of businesses and city trucks in Minnesota revealed that the same logo was found on many transit vehicles in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. On September 14, Moore posted that he was in a relationship with a woman whose profile listed her as living in the Twin Cities area. Posting that he was living in Holbrook, New York, was a ruse. He was in Minnesota.

  I sent emails to the detectives with this information. I heard nothing back. I had to remember the mantra I always told victims’ families they needed to recite when dealing with law enforcement. “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” When a police department has an ever-growing mountain of unsolved cases, the ones that scream the loudest are going to get the most attention. I needed to continue to be the squeaky wheel for Marques.

  I would call or email the detectives around once a week. I instructed Drexina to do the same. We also reached out to the state’s attorney’s office, the local alderman, the two former Chicago cops who were my security the night in Chicago when we got confirmation of Marcus’s identity—everyone we could think of. I searched on LinkedIn for people with Chicago Police Department contacts and cold messaged a bunch of them. I needed to get someone, anyone, who might be able to move the ball forward on the investigation and put out a warrant for Marcus Moore’s arrest.

  Come Christmastime, I sent a plea to the police: it was the holidays, and there was a good chance that Marcus Moore could be back at his mother’s house in the Chicago area.

  Nothing.

  I called Drexina, and we mulled over options. She continued monitoring Marcus Moore’s Facebook page, getting more livid every time he posted a new photo of himself laughing, smoking, or showing off the new beads he was sporting in his hair.

  Right before the new year, I received a lifeline. A retired detective I had found on LinkedIn was willing to listen. He made a round of phone calls to his old contacts, then called me.

  “I found out something,” he said. “There’s a stop/arrest alert for Marcus Moore.” That meant that if he was picked up for anything in the Chicagoland area, he would be questioned about the Marques Gaines homicide. But if he was arrested in another state—like Minnesota, where I was pretty sure he was hiding out—that information would not come up in a background check and he could walk.

  I kept pressing. January 20 brought another call from my retired detective source. He told me that within the last seventy-two hours, an arrest warrant had been issued for Marcus Moore. The charge was aggravated battery. Chicago police were working with the U.S. Marshals Service, searching for him in an “upper Midwest state.” It felt like it was heating up.

  A week later, I was at the Crime Watch Daily newsroom, working on another case, when my phone rang.

  It was Drexina. I ran to the makeup room and answered the call. She didn’t even say hello.

  “They got him!” she exclaimed. I could hear her smiling.

  I felt like jumping up and down. I felt like screaming. But I tried to play it cool and instead punched the air as hard as I could as the word “Yes!” erupted out of my gut and echoed through the empty room.

  Marcus Moore was found in Minnesota. He waived extradition and was shipped back to Illinois. In his mugshot, he clowned for the camera, contorting his face into a slanted, grotesque snarl. The men who had robbed Marques in the street were still unidentified, but the Man in the Green Hoodie was king of the streets no more.

  Nine whole months had elapsed between the conception of the plan and getting him in handcuffs. Nine months plus nearly two decades of trying and failing. But finally, finally, it worked. My first solve was behind bars. I was over the moon.

  But once the euphoria subsided, I have to admit, all I could think of was the word rip-off.

  When someone would ask about my dad and I would say he was dead, that was the word that always came to mind: rip-off. It was just a rip-off that he had invested so much creating and molding and shaping me, and he would never see the end of my stories. Now, I had finally done it. The story he might have read in the newspaper would have a bow on it, neatly wrapped up. “Look at this,” he might have told the eight-year-old me. “This guy tried to solve crimes for seventeen years and finally got one. Remember, the lesson is nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.”

  But he wasn’t here, and it all just felt like a rip-off.

  I once read an interview with comedian Mike Myers, where he talked about his dad dying, and he gave me some better words to articulate what I was feeling whenever something good happened to me.

  “Things only became real when I would tell him,” he said. “And much of the work I was doing was for him, to make him proud, to make him happy. My dad was kind of like the cashier window at the casino. Things that would happen were just chips, but when I told my dad, it would turn into money. And that went away.”

  That was just my own selfish thought. Drexina and Phyllis were dealing with a far bigger rip-off. The arrest was not going to bring Marques back.

  The day after I learned the Man in the Green Hoodie was caught, I flew back to Phoenix. My wife, Kendall, turned to me in bed that night and asked me
how it felt. I reminded her of that quote from Mike Myers. Then I shrugged. “I don’t know what to feel,” I said. “I just know I want to find another one.”

  I opened my laptop and began scanning the headlines of other cases I had been collecting. Hit-and-runs and drive-bys and botched robberies and sex worker slayings.

  These were not the cases people built podcasts around. They were “ordinary” murders. Blink-of-the-eye murders. No twists. No turns. No one was going to be debating their theories about these murders over brunch.

  The world didn’t need another story about the Zodiac Killer or Jack the Ripper. The murders in the shadows add up to a hell of a lot more than the murders in the spotlight. The shadows are where I needed to tread, because that’s where the problem lay. The blood of the forgotten was just as red as the “famous” victims.

  There is one common thread between the shows that grabbed America’s attention in the true-crime renaissance of the 2010s. Making a Murderer, The Jinx, O. J. Simpson: Made in America, The Staircase. They all centered around white female victims.

  Their murders all needed to be solved. And there were a lot of people out there trying to solve them. The cases I was working on at night were not the types of stories that “rated” for crime shows like Crime Watch Daily or Dateline or anything on ID. There were none of the kinds of “oh, shit” moments that make Keith Morrison’s eyebrow raise or Karen tell Georgia, “Don’t worry, it gets worse!” on My Favorite Murder.

  Most of my victims were not suburban soccer moms. They were males of color. Or white female drug addicts. Sex workers. Or people in the wrong place at the wrong time. No love triangles or fancy intrigue. They were the victims who make up the bulk of the murders that go unsolved every year. Lives worth no less than JonBenét’s or Nicole Brown’s.

  There were few clues left behind by the killers I was going to be chasing. No intricately knotted pieces of rope. No coded letters. No DNA. Nothing that people like me—and everyone else who has ever swum in someone else’s blood while reading a true crime tale—could hang a clever theory on.

  What I did have with most of them was an image. Grainy, blurry, blown up, distorted. But still, an image. Taken outside a liquor store or above the counter of a pawn shop. Inside a parking garage or down a garbage-strewn alley so foul you could smell it through the screen.

  These were the neighborhoods where I would need to set up shop. Not an upscale block of million-dollar Tudors in Boulder or million-dollar condos in Brentwood. My victims would not be getting their own Lifetime movies. But their stories all deserved an ending. All two hundred thousand of them.

  That’s how many unsolved murders there are in America since 1980. We add five thousand more to that number every year.

  And I had just solved one.

  One.

  I scanned the files of the unsolved murders I had been collecting over the years, the villain now with 199,999 faces smiling back at me. All sorts of manner of death—stabbings, drive-bys, hit-and-runs, brutal beatings, arson. But I was excited. These were going to get knocked down one by one, I thought. I separated them into piles, the ones with surveillance footage of the suspect going to the top of the list. Lurking in another pile was the Golden State Killer, sitting atop just a fraction of Michelle’s files.

  9.

  The Villain with a Thousand Faces

  West Hollywood, May 2016

  Kendall and I attended the memorial for Michelle at the Largo Theater in West Hollywood. Waiting for the program to begin, the snare drum entrance of David Bowie’s “Five Years” crept up through the speakers, and it felt like a piano was sitting on my chest. It was crystal clear from the vibe in the theater that Michelle had so many people who loved her.

  Afterward, as family and friends and celebrities spilled past us in the lobby on their way to the reception, I spied a man with short blond hair and piercing blue eyes. It was Paul Holes, an investigator for the Contra Costa district attorney’s office in Northern California. A cross section between detective and crime-scene investigator, Holes had worked on cases ranging from the 1991 kidnapping of Jaycee Dugard to the Northern California serial killer Joe Naso. But for the last two decades, he had been working day and night to discover the identity of the Golden State Killer.

  Michelle had told me about Holes. He was sharp and confident. And a little dreamy. They shared information about the case, and he had placed a lot of trust in Michelle.

  After I wrote the tribute to Michelle, I had received an email from Holes. Michelle wasn’t exaggerating about the extent of their collaboration.

  I read your tribute—very true. Michelle earned our trust—it wasn’t just given. She proved over and over I could tell her something in confidence and she kept it that way. Between that trust and her tremendous natural investigative mind she was accepted into a very close-knit group. Quite frankly, I’m not sure anybody else could have pulled it off to the point she did… I didn’t know her at the same level as you but I feel like I’ve lost a member of my family.

  “I really considered Michelle my detective partner in this case,” he told me in another email. “We just didn’t ride together, but constantly were in communication. I would get excited about something I found out and would send it to her and she would also get excited.”

  I approached him, and we shook hands. I told him I was going to work with Patton to make sure Michelle’s book was published. And then I tried to show my bona fides by talking about some other cases I was working on, in a clumsy attempt to impress upon him that the book was in competent hands.

  “I just worked on a story about the Allenstown Four,” I told him. “Four bodies found in barrels, a woman and three little girls, still unidentified.”

  “Have they run DNA?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Nothing. They could be from Canada. Or overseas. They just can’t find anything…”

  I paused for a second.

  “They still haven’t tried familial yet.”

  He knew what that meant. Michelle had told me about her and Paul’s conversations about using familial DNA searches to catch the Golden State Killer. By entering DNA from a crime scene into a public database of DNA samples submitted by genealogical buffs across the globe, you could find a relative who could then lead you to the person you were searching for. Since Kendall, a neuroscientist, was with me, I steered the conversation toward how we might be able to get the GSK’s sample into a database like 23andMe or Ancestry. Paul was up for it, if they could get the okay from the companies.

  But he also mentioned that there was only so much of GSK’s DNA to go around.

  “We don’t have a ton of it,” he said.

  “Have they tried doing whole genome amplification?” Kendall asked him. “It’s pretty cheap. And you could get enough material to work with to do a lot of tests. You could do whole genome sequencing. Exome capture. SNP arrays.” If you could sequence the whole genome of a person from a sample found at a crime scene, you could map out every base in a person’s genome. Every change that makes them different from all other people. Other tests cover just parts of the genome, specific chromosomes (Y chromosome), or small single nucleotide changes. Unique identifications can be made using any of these strategies; they just differ in their completeness. But whole genome was the whole enchilada. If you were able to map the whole genome, you could enter it into the public DNA database. And it would connect not just with brothers and uncles but third and fourth cousins.

  If it could be used, thousands of cold cases could be solved. Rape kits sitting in storage lockers could be sequenced and compared with the samples in the database, and detectives could track down the thousands of attackers who thought they got away with it. The people spending ninety-nine dollars, spitting in a tube, and sending it off to 23andMe and Ancestry could hold the keys to unlocking so many unsolved crimes.

  Kendall and Paul talked geek for a little lo
nger. I was focused on the task of getting the book done. But getting a solve for Michelle would be an amazing bonus.

  • • •

  Every night around nine o’clock, I took a break from my cases to work on Michelle’s manuscript. It was less than two months since Michelle had died, and Patton was still in rough shape. But he connected me with Paul Haynes, whom Michelle referred to as “the Kid” in her Los Angeles magazine article about her search for the Golden State Killer. Michelle had met Paul (who was not a kid at all but a twenty-nine-year-old writer and cinephile living in Florida) on one of the East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker message boards and was impressed with his ability to mine data and find virtually anyone who was living in the neighborhoods where the attacker was hitting in the mid to late ’70s. She offered him a job as her research assistant, and he moved out to Los Angeles. She called him “the case’s greatest amateur hope.”

  Haynes sent me Michelle’s hard drive. “The total number of files I transferred over from Michelle is 4,296, totaling 38.33 GB,” he wrote. “That was on top of the 35 Bankers Boxes, and 2 outsize Sterilite-type bins of case files and evidence that we cajoled from the OCSD [Orange County Sheriff’s Department] January of this year. This feat represented the greatest development in our work on the case to date, really. Michelle and I considered this acquisition to be the ‘mother lode.’”

  I began sifting through the documents, each bearing a tantalizing file name: “Goleta Dog Stabbing,” “Remaining Questions,” and “I hunted the serial killer from my daughter’s playroom.” There were emails from Michelle to her book editor from the very start of her journey.

  I’m heading up to Contra Costa County (suburban area just east of San Francisco) for a couple of days. My sense is that Paul Holes, chief of the crime lab up there, is going to be an essential source for me, and he’s able to dedicate a day and a half for my visit, taking me to the crime scenes, to the lab, introducing me to some of the old-timers who were there back in the day. I’m thrilled. It’s a real mix of old and new, which is exactly what I’d hoped for.