by Billy Jensen
The technique was working.
I messaged William Ashworth, the detective in charge of the case. “We amped up ads in the Antioch area and NC to help find the 3rd suspect. A lot of people writing saying they know him, but one person wrote that he might be at his little sister’s house.”
The campaign was plastered across everyone’s feed in Santillan’s hometown. A digital posse a hundred thousand strong. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Santillan’s picture was everywhere.
The pressure must have gotten to be too much for him. Santillan turned himself in. Finally, a result—my first since the Marques Gaines case. The campaign may not have ID’d the suspects, but it got close and was able to put the screws on the last man standing. For his efforts, Detective Ashworth was awarded the Nashville Police Field Operations Bureau investigator of the year. It was well-deserved. Ashworth used everything at his disposal to solve the crime—including working with a guy he had never met who had a crazy idea about using Facebook to flush out the killers.
In December 2017, Teddy’s mother, Beatrice, made a post on Teddy’s memorial Facebook page. The poem was translated from her native French.
My sentence is infinite as teddy’s path now.
He fell, smiling as always, but this time life didn’t smile at him in return.
The head in the stars, he liked to be in the desert alone with his books.
Humanist and a dreamer, he liked to think that human is naturally good. He made his heart open to the world and to the others.
Without malice or hatred, he loved animals, children, their common innocence no doubt. Teddy was passionate about music. He was a tender and happy being in what he was doing.
And then…
“He liked to think that human is naturally good” hit me hard. We all like to think that. But Teddy was gone. I reached out to the next story.
Tips on murder and violent assault cases were often difficult to get detectives to act on. But missing persons had an edge. There was a definite urgency with missing cases. And there was often a lot of public activity and support. If I was able to get information, they might jump. I wasn’t getting discouraged about solving murders—I was still on the high of solving one, but I saw missing persons as an opportunity. I hadn’t attempted a missing-persons case since 2003, when I searched for a Catholic-school-girl-turned-Deadhead from Long Island who traveled to California and went missing in the scrub brush of Trinity County a decade earlier. Back then, I was just reporting for newspapers. Facebook and Twitter hadn’t been invented yet. This time was going to be different.
There are thousands of missing-persons Facebook pages on the web. They contain pictures of the missing person, information about where they were last seen and what they might have been wearing, and a missing-persons poster that they implore people to share on Facebook or print out and plaster on lampposts and in local businesses in their towns.
I needed to create a page that would stand out. But the case of Morgan Bauer would also bring with it a unique challenge. There was someone close to her saying she wasn’t really missing.
• • •
Morgan Bauer was a pretty, freckled nineteen-year-old who left her home in Aberdeen, South Dakota, for the big city of Atlanta on February 12, 2016. Her mother said she just wanted to make it on her own. She met a man through Craigslist and made arrangements to live in his house rent-free in exchange for housekeeping duties until she could find something full-time. The arrangement didn’t work out, and Morgan found herself out on the street in a strange town. But she was headstrong and refused to retreat. She started staying in hotels, and while she had worked as a waitress in South Dakota, she decided she needed more money to survive in her new city and started dancing at a club in Gainesville, Georgia. She was last seen on February 28, 2016, the same date when all her social media posts stopped and her cell phone stopped pinging.
A missing person, thousands of miles away from home. No fixed address. No fixed job. Morgan was a transplant and had no support system looking for her in Atlanta.
I asked her mother if she had a video of Morgan I could use in the campaign. There are numerous advantages to using video when trying to locate someone. For one, the Facebook algorithm favors videos more than pictures and will get it in front of more people. But more importantly, you can see the person’s mannerisms and hear their voice, things that don’t change with a new hair color or different clothes.
But here was the challenge. Morgan’s sister had posted on social media that her sister was not missing but was trying to escape their “domineering” mother. There were Facebook pages with the names “Morgan Bauer Is Not Missing” and “Morgan’s Safe Haven.” Posts on Reddit claimed that she was safe. There was a fake page someone set up for some unknown reason, called “Bauer Morgan,” that had people messaging me with false leads once I posted the ad targeting the club and the hotel where she had stayed. There were also stories about Morgan trying to buy a driver’s license from a fellow dancer so she could show proof of identity to get another dancing job—a requirement in Georgia.
I contacted anyone I could find who was affiliated with the club she was supposedly working at, from dancers to doormen to anyone who had used social media to check in or post photos of the club. I got nowhere. In July, a body was found in a suitcase along I-985 in Gwinnett County, just northeast of Atlanta. A lot of people thought it could be Morgan. The woman inside was in her twenties, five foot one to five foot five. But she looked to be Asian or East Indian and did not have tattoos matching Morgan’s.
At the time of this writing, Morgan was still classified as missing. At the request of Morgan’s mother, I took down the page to avoid confusion with a new Facebook page she had started, which has attracted more than seven thousand followers and a small army of volunteers who consistently hang flyers and send out mailers looking for Morgan all across the United States, from Vegas to Florida to Maine. In November 2017, Morgan’s mother posted three photos of her daughter with the caption “My name is Morgan Bauer. Please call and ask why they aren’t searching for me,” along with the number for the Atlanta police department.
The woman found in the suitcase is still unidentified.
• • •
I was late to the game on Morgan’s case. But for the mystery of Jamie Harroun, I was right in the middle of everything.
On Halloween night 2016, Harroun, a forty-year-old blues-rock singer, cut from the same cloth as Janis Joplin and Stevie Nicks, went missing in Southern Illinois.
Jamie’s sister Gerri told me that the previous two weeks had been a whirlwind for Jamie. She had gotten a Facebook message from a long-lost friend, Blu—a man she hadn’t seen in twenty years. They made plans to go for a drink one night.
The day after that drink, Jamie told her boyfriend, Brian, that she was moving out—and moving in with Blu. Now she was gone.
I launched a campaign, targeting Galesburg, the southern Illinois town from which Jamie went missing, along with the nearby city of Peoria. I learned Jamie’s cell phone had pinged north of town, so I targeted there as well. The ads I built included pictures of her truck, a black Ford F-150. I mocked up her license plate and found an image of the racing sticker she had stuck on her back window.
Blu told Gerri he had no idea where her sister was. He had last seen her at 6:00 p.m. on Halloween night. She was going to go back to Brian’s place to pick up some more clothes—and a boat—and was going to come right back. Blu said she had talked about going to Florida to swim with the dolphins, and that was where I should look.
I contacted the police to make sure there was a missing-persons report in place and that everyone was on the same page, that this was being looked at as a missing-persons case. They confirmed a report had been filed.
There was no one with a Facebook account within ten miles of Blu’s apartment who didn’t see the campaign looking for Jamie. I talked to dozen
s of locals. The ex-boyfriend, the new boyfriend, the sister, the guys at the diner, and the workers at the gas station. There were so many scenarios of what could have happened. Everyone was worried. People were pointing fingers at each other, and tensions were fevered. And everyone had their own theory. The investigator in me wanted to think I was putting the pieces together. That she didn’t just leave. That there was something nefarious at play. It was a sick notion. I wanted to think that there was a monster at the end of the story, that Jamie met with some end that I could help figure out. It was a shameful feeling. This wasn’t a movie. There was a woman missing a sister. A man missing his ex who he had lived with. And another man who thought he had just reconnected with the love of his life.
I wanted to see a happy result. I wanted to find her in Florida swimming with the dolphins. I wanted a homecoming.
Jamie was found dead behind the wheel of her pickup. She drove into a ditch right outside town that was covered by heavy foliage, making it invisible from the road. It looked to be an accident.
What the hell am I doing? I asked myself. I had just spent the last week entwined in the drama of these three people. And the result was still the same. No answers. Just death.
But unlike the other cases, I was living this all in real time. When I started, everyone I spoke with was hoping Jamie was still alive. And when she was found, the page I had built to find her morphed from one looking for a missing woman to one giving details about where and when her friends could attend her memorial. It wasn’t anything like the first missing-persons case I tried to solve.
10.
Losing Jade and Finding Mariah
Humboldt County, California, 2016
Jennifer Wilmer liked to question authority.
In grade school, she’d yell at the nuns when they picked on students who didn’t know the answers. In fifth grade, she asked her mother if she could have a Halloween party.
“Someone else in her class was having a party,” her mother, Susan, told me, “and Jennifer wanted to invite all the kids who weren’t invited to the other party. That was Jennifer. She hated inequities.”
So it came as no surprise that the Camaro-infested, big-haired mainstream of late 1980s Long Island drove the teenage Jennifer toward a kinder, gentler counterculture.
In 1993, at age twenty, she bolted for California, trying to, in her mother’s words, “make it on her own.” She left her full scholarship at St. John’s University for the seaside town of Arcata, two hundred miles north of San Francisco.
She tried registering at the two-year College of the Redwoods but was too late to get into any classes. She waitressed and lived on welfare for a spell, mainly hanging out in Arcata Plaza with the hundreds of other street people who had made the pilgrimage from all points east. Everybody around the plaza had some type of nickname. Skinny Bob. Ragman Pete. Jennifer had come to be known as Jade.
But not all was awesome in the city by the sea. Jade had bouts of depression and had started to see a therapist. Then, toward the end of the summer, her roommate announced she had to bail the scene, and Jade was forced to vacate her apartment.
Susan said Jade was ready to come home. So much so that she had purchased a return plane ticket for her, which she could have picked up and activated at any travel agency.
But Jade wanted to give California one last chance. “It’s so beautiful here,” she said to her mom. She left Arcata and told her mom she was moving in with some friends “out in the country.” The country meant Trinity County, thirty-five hundred square miles of mountainous desolation and marijuana crops.
She moved in with her boyfriend, a local named Tro Patterson. They shared a rented house in Hawkins Bar with a guy named Opie, another guy named Mingo, and a girl named Rebecca. But Jade still needed work. A friend told her about a farm up the road. They weren’t looking for any help at the moment, but maybe she should still go down and introduce herself.
At 7:30 in the morning on Monday, September 13, Jade set out to hitchhike the nine miles into “town” along Route 299. She left a note to her roommates:
Bye everybody,
Went to my 1st day at the farm. Wish me luck! Good luck to you, Mingo, and see you in a few months. If someone could give food to the kitten as needed, I’d appreciate it. Hopefully I’ll see you folks later.
Jade
She was never seen again.
A week later, Jade’s housemates went to visit the farm, where they were told she had never arrived. Susan Wilmer got a phone call from Jade’s boyfriend, Tro.
“I knew she wasn’t alive,” Susan said. “I knew.”
Frantic, Susan Wilmer called the county police. She FedExed a picture of Jennifer. It sat in the sheriff’s mail slot for days. The police wouldn’t help.
“You have to understand that her adult daughter was a walkaway,” said Martin Ryan, chief of the California Bureau of Investigations. “There is no evidence of foul play, other than the time that’s gone by.”
“Initially, I wasn’t convinced that [there was foul play] and I had my reasons,” said Trinity County under-sheriff David Laffranchini, alluding to Jennifer’s counterculture lifestyle.
But the evidence didn’t support their theory. Jade left all her identification at home. She left her clothes. Her address book. Her Bible. Her bank card. But most importantly, Jade left her sleeping bag.
“No self-respecting hippie leaves her sleeping bag!” screamed a furious Susan.
She felt helpless. She called her local congressman. His office called Trinity and got the excuse that she was a runaway. She contacted her local police department, where Nassau County PD Detective George Doherty checked the law enforcement database National Criminal Information Center. Jennifer’s name was nowhere to be found. It was Doherty, three thousand miles away, who filed the missing-persons report. (Laffranchini claimed that Trinity had filed a report, and Wilmer filing another one left two reports with two different case numbers.)
That was the last straw. Susan and her husband, Fred Wilmer, made arrangements for their fourteen-year-old son to stay with a friend and caught the next flight to California.
The Wilmers were familiar with the caravan of New Age hippies Jade traveled with. A few years earlier, their daughter had asked her mom if a bunch of Deadheads could sleep in the backyard while the band was playing a set of shows at Nassau Coliseum. Unlike many arenas, Deadheads were not allowed to sleep out anywhere near the Coliseum parking lot. Susan agreed and woke up the next day to a “street full of VW buses” and “wall-to-wall sleeping bags” in her yard.
“They were so quiet,” remembers Susan. “My neighbors didn’t even know they were there. They were very sweet.”
So when the Wilmers entered the house in Hawkins Bar, sixty miles west of Eureka, and were met by three Deadheads, they weren’t shocked—even with all three having shaved their heads, ditching their dreadlocks a few weeks earlier. The house was dirty, but Jennifer’s housemates, just like the Deadheads who had slept in her backyard in Baldwin, were “sweet” and pleasant.
The kids at the house showed her a picture of Jade. It was the same one she had FedExed to the sheriff’s office. The police, for some reason, had delivered it to the house.
“It was like a message,” Susan told me. “‘Here, take the picture back. We’re not taking the case.’”
The Wilmers met with detectives at the police station, whose lobby is presided over by a large painting of the sheriff, a big six-gun on his desk, a “don’t mess with me” look on his face. Susan, a tough-talking Long Island woman with a missing daughter, tried to get answers. She spied the manila envelope case file marked “Wilmer” in one of the detectives’ hands. It was empty.
Months passed. Then years passed. Susan kept pressing. She got loud.
She started a letter-writing campaign, with seemingly the whole town of Baldwin, Long Island, sending thousands of le
tters to anyone who would listen. They got the ear of the California Justice Department.
But it was far, far too late.
When I talked to Susan in 2003, I was writing a series for the Long Island Press I called “Long Island’s Lost Girls,” about three women, in three different decades, who left Long Island never to return. Susan was nine years and $20,000 in private investigator’s fees into her search. She was not going to give up, even though she had just made a crushing decision.
“I just had Jennifer declared dead,” she told me from her Baldwin, Long Island, home, referring to Jade by her birth name. “Two weeks ago. I did that for my children, for the rest of the family. The therapist said it was a good idea. But it’s not changing anything in my mind.”
She was in the process of preparing a memorial for Jade, something that she hoped would provide closure for her children. She gave me a handful of photos to accompany the article. There was that serious-looking photo of her from St. Mary’s, pictures of Jade at a party with friends, and one photo that showed her in transition from Catholic school girl to a Deadhead flower child. She was on a beach, holding a little girl—her niece Jessica. Jennifer had a gargantuan smile—the kind that could swallow darkness.
Susan had lost all faith in law enforcement. I have never had a family member refer to the person who was supposed to be looking for their loved one with such disdain.
“I don’t want to bad-mouth anyone,” John Mohon, the Wilmer’s private investigator, told me. “But they did mishandle some things.”
Susan was more to the point. “He’s an idiot,” she said of Under-Sheriff Laffranchini.
I needed to talk to Laffranchini.
I got his number and called him. He knew what Susan thought about him and was sorry he had no answers. He told me that sometimes when he’s driving across Route 299, the east–west road that connects Redding, Hawkins Bar, and Arcata, California, that he would ask himself one question.
