by Billy Jensen
I contacted Billie Jo and was met with a combination of excitement and relief. Finally understanding what she was putting her mother through, Mariah found a police officer, and the two of them called Billie Jo together.
I changed the title of the page to “Update: Mariah Bertolini has been found.” I then edited the targeted post:
Update: I just spoke with Mariah and she is safe, I also spoke with Mariah’s mom, Billie Jo Dick, and Mariah met with an officer and they both called her mother. Thank you to everyone who took time out of their busy lives to share this post. When we work together, great things happen.
I checked back in with Billie Jo every few days in the week that followed. Frantic had been replaced with frustration. Mariah was in withdrawal. Billie Jo was trying to get her into rehab, but Mariah was on a waiting list for a bed. “She said some pretty horrible things to me yesterday,” Billie Jo told me. “I know it was the drugs, but man, it was bad.”
After a few more days, she finally caught a break.
“Sunday morning Mariah has a bed in a treatment center in Oregon,” she texted. “I’m so grateful.”
Helping find Mariah just made my resolve that much stronger to try to put her sister’s murderer behind bars—and to maybe help solve the other Humboldt Five cases along the way.
And then something weird happened. Ten days after finding Mariah, I received a private message:
Hi my name is Jessica Milone and I’m a cousin of Jennifer Wilmer, who you have written an article about and also helped some of her story get aired on crime watch daily. I wanted to thank you for that… I’m trying to get her case reopened even though my aunt had her declared dead well over 10 years ago. It’s my life’s work to resolve her case for my family.
I quickly wrote back, saying that I would help any way I could.
She responded:
Thank you. I’m actually the little girl in the picture with her that you put in the article you have written about her on your website. Thank you so much for all your help you have no idea how much it means to me. If there is anything I can do to help please let me know I would love to be involved as much as possible.
The little girl that Jennifer was holding in her arms at the beach—the one with the chubby cheeks squinting in the sun as Jennifer beamed that gigantic smile? Fifteen years later, she was writing me. Writing me on Facebook—something that didn’t even exist when I wrote the story.
This is what murder does. It consumes everyone around it.
I doubted Jade’s case was related to the others in Humboldt, other than the fact that the place was a breeding ground for something sinister. But they are all linked by the name Humboldt Five.
I asked Brenda Condon to make me an admin on the Humboldt Five Facebook page, and I started a campaign, focusing on a ten-mile radius from where Danielle’s skull was found. I set up the page, and then as my family was in town, we went furniture shopping for the new apartment I was able to afford with that steady paycheck from Crime Watch Daily. We were in Silver Lake, looking for one of those burnt-orange mid-century modern couches when my Facebook messages started to explode. I ran into a store and bought a notebook and pen, then sat on the sidewalk and called one tipster after another.
Many were scared. Most had solid information. They all wanted justice. And they were all pointing to two men.
I got names. Places. Stories about blood in a pickup truck and a drug dealer who had kids lining up outside his house to trade in their iPads and Nintendo DSs for a fix. I called one woman who told me her daughter had overdosed at this guy’s house. That she knew Danielle and Danielle had been at the house too. “My daughter left here, went back to Humboldt, and she’s dead in a month,” she told me. The same story Danielle’s mom told me. The same story Jade’s mom told me. And there were many stories about Jim Jones.
I talked to the detective in charge who said there still wasn’t enough evidence to bring anyone in. I began what I call a “telltale heart” campaign. Any time these two individuals—the drug dealer and the last man to see both Sheila and Danielle alive—would go on Facebook or Twitter or even Google themselves, they might see a picture of Danielle. Her heart would beat under their floorboards. Maybe one day, it would beat loud enough for them to stop being cowards and tell the truth about what happened to her.
I added Danielle’s name to the expanding list of murders I was trying to solve using social media. I bought a giant poster board and created a chart to keep them all straight. The names of each case ran down the first column: Danielle, Morgan Bauer Missing, White Boy Q. The next columns listed where I ran the campaigns—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Then a space for the best tips that came in. Then two columns that read Solid ID and Arrest and left spaces for check marks. Those columns were mostly left blank. I added River North Puncher, Nashville, and Chesapeake just to fill out some of the check marks in the last column so when I saw it, I wouldn’t get too depressed, which was an all-too-real threat.
I hung the poster board in my office in my Los Angeles apartment, which doubled as my daughter’s bedroom for when she visited from college. The cases hung right behind my chair, the same way my dad had hung his painting contracts behind his desk. Next to the chart, I hung pictures of the suspects. If I thought they looked like apparitions in video, printing them out on computer paper made them look even more ghostly. I bought a stuffed animal of Zootopia’s Officer Judy Hopps to put on my daughter’s bed, hoping to brighten up the room with a little anthropomorphic Disney magic for when she came home. That didn’t stop her from referring to where she had to sleep as “the murder room.”
• • •
The names and blurry faces on the poster board began to add up. But in October, I added one that looked less like a phantom and more like an actual person. The crime had gone cold for the detectives, but it was still fresh in the Sunset Park neighborhood, near Owl’s Head Park in Brooklyn. The video was so crisp and the suspect was so distinctive, I knew people would pay attention. People would see him. People would message. He would be identified. He would be caught.
The victim’s name was Jennifer Cohen. She was blond and blue-eyed. The lead picture the media ran with showed her with ruby-red lips. Another showed a more natural appearance, her freckles peeking out in the sunlight. The media loves pretty, white, blond-haired victims. Just like the old monster movies. The creature grabs the pretty blond girl and takes her to his lair, and the people grab their pitchforks to chase after him.
But with Jennifer, the media quickly lost interest, because the pretty blond girl was a drug addict. And the media doesn’t like drug-addicted murder victims. Even a pretty white girl.
Jennifer started using as a teenager. In 2001, she found out she was pregnant, and she kicked the habit. She had two children. Boys. Gaetano and Joshua. But by 2010, she was using again. She was in jail. Out of jail. In jail. Out of jail. In jail on September 26. Out of jail. Two days later, she was dead. Her body was found in Owl’s Head Park, with “trauma to her head and face,” according to the police.
I spotted the case on the WPIX website, which carried Crime Watch Daily in New York. I did a search for Jennifer’s relatives on Facebook and found her brother, Andrew. He knew his sister was using, but he didn’t think she was killed over drugs. Jennifer had scored in the morning, he told me. He had no idea why anyone would do this.
But the police had a video of the man she was with that night. It was clear. I can’t emphasize enough how clear it was. It was taken at 2:45 a.m. in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. The man was wearing an Adidas track top, shorts, and a flat-brimmed, snapback hat with a logo on the front and another on its side. He had on a backpack with two straps covering his chest. I watched his distinctive gait as he ashed his cigarette—held in his left hand—somewhat gracefully on a sidewalk grate. His face was angular. A strong, sharp chin, covered with about a week of stubble. Well-defined eyebrows.
The video lasted but a dozen seconds. But it was golden.
I will get this guy in a week, I said to myself.
I set up the campaign. One-mile radius, which in Brooklyn is the population equivalent of a whole damn midwestern state.
Do you know this man? Sunset Park, Brooklyn—seen with murder victim in Sept. Pls msg any info. And pls share.
Tips trickled in—blue-sky tips. One guy said the man in the video was a rapper he had met when visiting New York over the summer. He sent me his Facebook page. It looked promising, and I sent it to the detective. Then it bottomed out.
Another tipster said the man was Egyptian and he had seen him by the halal food stands at Eighty-sixth and Fifth.
I ran an ad in Arabic targeting the area. No luck. I ran an ad in Spanish. No luck.
I kept pressing. Adding more money to the pot.
Around the time the video had gotten more than eighteen thousand views, I checked the post and read the most recent comment. It was only four words.
“That was my mom.”
I clicked on the commenter’s profile. It was Jennifer’s son. I stared at his pictures. Pictures of a little boy growing up without a mom. It shook me to the bone.
My campaigns always have a chance to land in the feed of a family member. I try to make sure everyone involved knows that the campaigns are coming. But never before had I read a comment like this.
Motherfucker. I poured another $1,000 into the campaign, hoping to get any little tidbit of info that could lead to an arrest. I got nothing. Owl’s Head Park Man was becoming my white whale, getting away again and again and again. I was not as obsessed as Michelle was with her Golden State Killer, but I was starting to see his face in every person I walked past, three thousand miles away.
11.
The Halloween Mask Murder
El Monte, 2016
In the six months since I had started on this social media murder-solving quest, I had gotten one solve (Marques Gaines’s attacker in Chicago), one found missing person (Mariah in California), one assist on a murder investigation (getting the ID of Joseph Santillan, the final suspect in the Nashville murder of Teddy Grasset), and a handful of cases where I was pretty sure I had identified the suspect but police didn’t have enough to make an arrest (Pacman’s killer in Chesapeake, White Boy Q’s killer in Tallahassee, Danielle and Sheila’s killer and potential accomplices in Humboldt). And then there were the cases that I was striking out on. Dozens of them. Random shootings and hit-and-runs across America.
I knew I was hitting the right neighborhoods, and I knew people with information were seeing the videos or sketches of the killers, but the “no snitch” ethos pervades many communities. On top of fears of reprisal, when you are in a community that has been fucked over by the actions of a few bad police officers, the ripple effects are massive.
In October 2004, seven Milwaukee police officers sadistically beat Frank Jude Jr. outside an off-duty police party. The Journal Sentinel newspaper in Milwaukee investigated the crime and published photos of Jude taken right after the beating. The officers were convicted, and some reforms were put in place. But the city saw an unexpected side effect. Calls to 911 dropped dramatically—twenty-two thousand less than the previous year. You know what did rise? The number of homicides—eighty-seven in the six months after the photos were published, a seven-year high.
That information comes from a 2016 study done by Matthew Desmond, an associate social sciences professor at Harvard University and New York Times bestselling author of Evicted. He told the Journal Sentinel that a case like Jude’s “tears the fabric apart so deeply and delegitimizes the criminal justice system in the eyes of the African-American community that they stop relying on it in significant numbers.”
With shootings of unarmed civilians being captured on cell phones and shared on the internet, the distrust of the police is not relegated to that local community. The stories of the high-profile wrongful death cases of Tamir Rice in Cleveland or Eric Brown in New York spread fast across the country. We were in a worse place than we were twenty years earlier, when the vicious police officer beating of Rodney King went unpunished and Los Angeles went up in flames. It meant more and more crimes would go unsolved because the police were just not trusted. Why risk your life telling an organization about a crime when you think that members of that organization are out to get you? And how can that ever change?
Those were the thoughts rattling around in my head when I exited the I-110 freeway in downtown Los Angeles and headed toward the Hall of Justice. I was meeting with the Los Angeles sheriffs, hoping to find cases to cover for Crime Watch Daily. Cases that were unsolved but salacious enough to get some ratings.
Downtown Los Angeles is riddled with famous crime landmarks, both tall tales and true. I drove past the Bonaventure Hotel, where Secret Service agent Clint Eastwood chased down assassin John Malkovich in In the Line of Fire and Arnold Schwarzenegger rode a horse into the elevator in True Lies. One block south at Fifth and Flower was where De Niro, Pacino, and Kilmer unloaded bullets in the epic shoot-out in Heat. I made a left on Spring, behind the Bradbury Building, where Harrison Ford fought Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner and passed the Los Angeles Times building, the site of what, in the area, is referred to as the crime of the century: the 1910 bombing by a union member that killed twenty-one newspaper employees. I pulled up to Los Angeles city hall, which pulls double duty in American popular crime culture as both the icon for the show Dragnet and as the Daily Planet headquarters in the original Adventures of Superman TV series.
Across the street from city hall stands the Hall of Justice, where the autopsies of Marilyn Monroe and Bobby Kennedy were performed and the circus-like trial of Charles Manson took place. I walked into a conference room and took a seat at a large table surrounded by a group of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s homicide detectives. They were all dressed the same—Men’s Wearhouse suits a half size too big, close-cropped haircuts, department-issued facial hair. I was there to talk about their cold-case files. The LASD is the second-largest police department in the country, and they had plenty of bodies that were looking for answers. As we talked, I looked at the detective to my right, whose legs were crossed, and spied the bottom of his shoe. It was worn thin, with three big holes peppered across the heel and sole. Shoe-leather investigating. Door-to-door footwork. I made a joke to the captain, not only about the work ethic clearly on display but also questioning how much our man was getting paid. I got a laugh from the room—and a bit of a sneer from the captain.
The captain handed me off to a helpful sheriff, who brought me into their warehouse at the homicide headquarters a few miles away in Monterey Park. Imagine a Costco, but in each aisle were the stories of thousands of murders, stacked one on top of the other. I went right to the special cage with the high-profile files. Boxes on one shelf held the evidence for the Richard Ramirez Night Stalker case. Nearby was a box with “Sal Mineo” written in Magic Marker on the side, referring to the 1976 West Hollywood murder of the Rebel Without a Cause star.
In one corner was a large stack of boxes with Bradford written on the side. I knew what was inside. Bill Bradford was a serial killer from the early 1980s who used his hobby as a photographer to lure women to remote locations and murder them. When he was nabbed, police searched his apartment and found thousands of photographs of women who posed for him, clothed and nude and everything in between. The sheriffs identified most of the women, but in the end, there were fifty-four women in the photos who remained unnamed. They held a press conference and distributed the pictures to the media in an attempt to match names with faces. They said that any one of the women could have been a victim of Bradford’s. And they were right. Someone came forward when they recognized Number 28 on the list. Her name was Donnalee Campbell Duhamel. Her body was found in 1978, decapitated. Bradford wouldn’t talk, but they linked him to Duhamel via a bar called the Frigate i
n Culver City. He was never charged with her murder, but everyone was sure he did it. He died in prison in 2008. Seventeen women in the photos have still not been identified.
I wondered if a few social media campaigns could help identify some of the unknown seventeen. To my surprise, the detective in charge gave me any files I wanted to take back to the office to make scans and copies. I loaded up a large box with police reports and hundreds of photos of women. Number 26 was a girl wearing a halter top in front of a Confederate flag. Number 27 was in bra, panties, and stockings, posing awkwardly in front of a 1970’s-era rec room paneled wall. Number 14 wore an Uncle Sam hat as she stood in front of military equipment, including what look liked a fighter jet.
After scanning them all back at the Crime Watch Daily offices, I was getting ready to send them back when I went to my computer to double check the LASD homicide address. For some reason, I searched LASD on Facebook instead of Google, and when I opened the sheriffs’ Facebook page, I was met with a video of a woman weeping.
“I miss my son,” the small woman, standing at a podium at a press conference flanked by men in dark suits, said between sobs. “I miss him deeply. I don’t know what kind of sick person would take him away from me. My son lived with me. We went everywhere together. I know some boys and some moms—they drift apart. My son still called me from work and said ‘Mom, I’m going to go to my buddy’s. I will call you when I leave his house.’ He hasn’t come home since he left.”
She was shaking, pushing each word out while at the same time trying to catch her breath.
Her son’s name was Juan Vidal. He had been shot and killed in an attempted robbery at a Jack in the Box in El Monte, California. Juan was twenty-five years old. He wasn’t involved in gangs or drugs. He had just earned a pharmacy technician degree from UEI College and was working the register at Jack in the Box while he was interviewing for drugstore jobs. He wasn’t even on the schedule that night but had come in to cover for a coworker. He had also just asked his girl to marry him.
