Chase Darkness with Me

by Billy Jensen

  I started a campaign in Texas and California looking for anyone who might remember Bob Evans, adding in every fact I knew about the case:

  Bob Evans was a white male, five foot ten to six foot one, with a thin build, piercing blue eyes, and brown hair. In most photos, he wore a mustache. He was born anytime between 1936 and 1952. He may have worked at the Manchester, Virginia, hospital as an electrician or mechanic.

  He was an alcoholic.

  He often lived in campgrounds, trailer parks, and motels.

  His vehicles may have included a late ’60s red Dodge pickup with a light-colored camper, a White ’78 Ford van, and a two-toned Volkswagen van.

  He may have attended Lowell Elementary School and North High School in Phoenix, Arizona.

  He may have been born in Evanston, Wyoming, as Ulos Jensen. He may have also gone by the names Jerry Edwards Gorman, Curtis Rollin Kimball, and Don Vannerson.

  During the 1970s, he may have been in Houston, Texas, working at Brown and Root as an electrician.

  During the 1970s, he also claimed to work in Bay City, Texas, repairing instruments.

  In 1977, he worked at Waumbec Mill in Manchester as head electrician under the name Bob Evans.

  On January 9, 1980, a certified letter addressed to Bob Evans was signed for by an Elizabeth Evans.

  Evans was arrested in Manchester in February and June of 1980 and listed his spouse’s name as Elizabeth.

  Ominously, when he was arrested by Manchester Police in October 1980, he did not list a spouse.

  In March 1984, he worked at an electric company in Los Alamitos, California, under the name Curtis Kimball.

  In 1984 and 1985, he may have worked in Anaheim, California, under an unknown name.

  In May 1985, he was arrested for a DUI in Cypress, California, under the name Curtis Kimball.

  In January 1986, he was working at the Holiday Host RV Park in Scotts Valley, California, under the name Gordon Jenson.

  In November 1988, he was pulled over in San Luis Obispo, California, under the name Gerry Mockerman, driving a stolen car. The car was registered in Idaho.

  In March 1989, he was arrested on warrants for child abandonment. He went to jail.

  In October 1990, he was paroled and vanished.

  In 2001, he “married” Eunsoon Jun under the name Larry Vanner.

  In November 2002, he was arrested for Jun’s murder.

  In December 2010, he died in High Desert Prison in Susanville, California.

  Authorities discovered writings of Evans in which he claimed he was an abused child, the youngest of six, who ran away from home at fourteen. He claimed he was arrested as a teen and spent time in a mental hospital. He claimed to have joined the military, moved to Canada, and met a woman named Denise LaPorte, who he later married in Virginia. There is no evidence any of these stories were true.

  In June 2017, police released video of Evans (when he was claiming to be Larry Vanner) being questioned for the murder of Eunsoon Jun in 2002. He is hunched over but not defeated. He is a talker. A manipulator. He thinks he can get out of this. At one point, he says “I’ve always tried to live by the motto ‘There’s no defense against the truth.’ But sometimes it’s hard to find what the truth is.” Police were hoping someone might see the video and tell the world what the killer’s true name was.

  When all we have is a grainy surveillance image, the guy who got away with it can sail into the wind. But if we have his DNA, there is nowhere to hide. For Bob Evans, the race was over. In August 2017, DNA came through again. It was one of his children, a son, who provided the link by entering his DNA into a public database. Unbeknownst to him, authorities were using the database to find the real name of a serial killer, and the two DNA samples collided. The name the killer was born with was Terrence “Terry” Peder Rasmussen. He was born in 1943 and grew up in Colorado before moving to Phoenix and then Redwood City, California. He was a navy veteran, with four children. His wife left him after 1973. Familial DNA solved another mystery that was thought to be unsolvable.

  Roxane Gruenheid came with me to New Hampshire so Strelzin could talk to the woman who came face-to-face with the murderer he had been chasing for so long.

  I started building a timeline of Rasmussen’s movements, trying to figure out every place he had been and if there were cold cases from those areas that showed his handiwork. Who else had he killed?

  I met with Pete Headley, the detective who had first handled little Lisa’s case in San Bernardino and stuck with it all the way—for more than two decades—helping her work with the genealogist to discover where she came from. And he wasn’t done yet.

  Pete has what is perhaps the best cop mustache I have ever seen. A perfect salt-and-pepper number that, coupled with his country drawl, gives him the air of a gentleman lawman from a bygone age. We got on pretty well, both of us understanding that familial DNA was the key for not only figuring out who the killer was but for the girls in the barrels, other victims Rasmussen might be responsible for, and thousands of other crimes across America.

  Headley and I started looking into other potential related cases in California. An unidentified redheaded woman found in a refrigerator in a ditch near Stockton, California, in 1995 had all the earmarks of a Rasmussen murder. We are in the middle of attempting to extract her DNA to find out first who she was and then if she had ever run into him. There were also unidentified women found in Connecticut in ’75, New York in ’91, and New Mexico in ’96—all wrapped in electrical cords. Could Rasmussen be responsible for any of those murders as well? And there was also the child who was in his car when he was arrested for DUI in Orange County in ’85? What happened to him or her?

  The Golden State Killer’s MO—breaking into houses, tying up the men, raping the women, and then killing them both—was horrifying, but I think Rasmussen might rival him. Using children to attract single mothers with children. Molesting the children, killing the mothers, killing the children when they got old enough to talk. In the competition for most sadistic fuckers ever, these two were running neck and neck.

  We still didn’t have any answers on the Golden State Killer. Michelle’s manuscript had been sent to the printer for a late February 2018 release date. There was no ending. There was no identification of the killer at the end of the book. It was still a mystery. But it didn’t matter. We would run the book without an ending. Because the case was so intriguing and because Michelle’s writing was so damn good.

  While I waited for the book to come out, I busied myself with the questions that were multiplying in my head.

  Who was the mother of the two- to four-year-old girl found in the barrel, the one not related to the other three? And was her mother murdered by Rasmussen too? And what happened to Denise Beaudin?

  Those questions were right behind who killed Brian Boothe, the man found dead in his New York City apartment on Christmas with a knife in his neck? Who was the Owl’s Head Park Killer? Where were the killers from Chesapeake and Tallahassee?

  Sometimes you have to travel five thousand miles away and walk through a medieval castle to get one of the answers you’re looking for.

  13.

  The Girl with the Serpent Tattoo

  Tampa, Florida, 2017

  Located in the center of Cardiff Castle in Wales, seventy-seven feet wide and thirty feet tall, the castle keep was built in the middle of the twelfth century. It sits atop a hill, giving it the best vantage point for the soldiers to see if the Welsh people were going to start rising up again, like they tried to do in 1136.

  I was in Wales visiting the BBC show Crime Watch, seeing if they would be interested in utilizing geotargeted social media campaigns to help solve the murders they have been reporting on since 1984. Great Britain has an estimated 1.85 million CCTV cameras, a lot of digital eyes for such a small country (in comparison, there are more than 40 million security ca
meras covering the entire United States, which is forty times as large). Many of the crimes in the UK are caught on tape and could be solved if the footage were seen by the right person.

  I watched the taping of the show in the morning and then walked to the castle, killing time before heading north to Manchester to tour the sites of the Moors Murders and the cemetery gates Morrissey sang about. Inside the keep was a grass-covered clearing. I was sitting on a bench looking out at the stones surrounding me, listening to the wind whip the Welsh flag above me, when I got a Facebook message on the Chesapeake Killer page, which I had launched nine months earlier to identify the tall, thin, dressed-in-black, dreadlocked suspect accused of killing Timothy “Pacman” Croskey in his driveway.

  “Hey, I’m just now seeing this video,” the message read. “And I recognize this person.” They left a phone number.

  I did some quick math, figuring out it was only five hours earlier in Florida, and I dialed the number from inside the castle keep.

  “This man,” the tipster told me, “he’s living in Jacksonville, in an apartment with his sister. Darrius Copeland. The sister’s name is Dequashia Copeland.”

  Darrius Copeland was the name I had gotten when I first ran the campaign trying to identify the man with the loping stride walking through the neighborhood right after the murder. I pulled out the souvenir map they handed me when I entered the castle grounds and began furiously writing.

  Copeland and his sister were at the Park at Alston, an apartment building in Jacksonville, Florida. The tipster gave me the full address. I thanked them for writing in and immediately shot an email with the new information to the investigators in Chesapeake.

  I got back only a curt “received.”

  Two months later, the U.S. Marshals arrested the two Copelands in Jacksonville. Turns out Dequashia had once dated Croskey and had his baby. The relationship fizzled. Then police say she later wanted him dead. Both brother and sister were charged with first-degree murder. Only 199,997 murders to go.

  • • •

  When I returned to the States, I continued to run my cases while checking the news for new murders I might be able to help solve. I began trading emails with a woman out of Tampa, Florida. Her name was Vanessa Hunt. And she had just lost her best friend. She sent me a video.

  A woman wearing a sleeveless top, skirt, and sandals walks slowly through a back alley in the rain. After twenty seconds, a man on a bicycle pulls up to her. He gets off the bike and walks it under the awning to get out of the rain. The woman follows him, walking behind him as she digs for something inside a large purse. The two seem to chat for a few seconds before he follows her down a side alley and away from the camera as the video ends.

  When they found Justin Dunn’s body, they initially thought it was a suicide. Then they saw the video. What the woman was digging for in her purse was most probably a gun. I could barely see her face, but I could see the tattoo of the serpent on her right shoulder. At least I thought it was a serpent. It could have been vines. Or a chain. Or a rosary.

  Vanessa said she was with Justin off and on for five years. But then she was able to kick her habit. Justin wasn’t.

  “After i got clean i talked to him daily but couldn’t be around him cuz I’d start using again,” she wrote to me.

  Justin was a junkie. But he had dreams like anyone else. He wanted to one day buy an RV and just ride across the country, to live off the grid and eventually leave as small a carbon footprint as possible.

  I asked if there was anyone she could think of who would hurt Justin.

  “No I can’t,” she wrote back. “He was the nicest guy ever. He may have been a junkie but he took care of people.”

  The tips came in fast: “She tricks near the batting cages.” “She’s outside of the Panera near the mall right now!”

  I sent them immediately to the detective. But he couldn’t jump on the tips because there was a bigger problem facing Tampa that week: an active serial killer who had shot and killed four random people in the Seminole Heights neighborhood. The detective asked me to help identify him, using the same grainy, faraway video of the killer walking down a side street that every news organization was running. I searched for three weeks. The suspect was finally caught as a result of a tip from his boss at the McDonald’s where he worked.

  Finally able to go back to the tattoo woman, I targeted females twenty-five to thirty-five who lived within a mile radius of the murder. That’s when I got a message. “This might be her,” it said. They provided a link to a woman’s Facebook profile. I scoured the page, looking at every photo the woman had posted, praying for a shot of her right shoulder. I found her mugshots. She was older than the detective thought, but it could be her. I needed to see that shoulder. I had started cross-referencing her photos with the thousands of pictures friends of friends had taken when I saw it: a photo of the woman and what looked like a serpent peeking out from her right shoulder.

  I sent the profile to the detective, along with the name of the motel the tipster said she was living in. But the woman was very mobile and incredibly on the edge. One day, she overdosed, but the detective found out too late that she was in the hospital and wasn’t able to interview her before she was discharged. Another time, she got arrested but made bail before the detective was able to see her. The next day, she was in the wind.

  She was clueless anyone was on her tail. Can it be a cat-and-mouse game when the mouse has no idea the cat is after her? I would have to wait and hope she didn’t kill herself before she got arrested again.

  I would continue to email with Vanessa.

  “I am checking in,” I wrote. “I have sent some tips over to the police, have you heard anything?”

  “No darlin’, if i had I’d done contacted you and [the detective] Smith… I wish I knew something it’s killing me to not be able to help.”

  “I had someone who I thought looked really good,” I wrote back. “They said they are opening up an investigation on her. But I haven’t heard back from them since.”

  “I truly hope they find her… I always took care of Justin and I feel like I’m failing him right now.”

  “Never think that. We will find her,” I replied.

  “Again darlin’ thank you for all that you are doing… Words can’t express my gratitude.”

  I asked Vanessa if she was okay with talking about their relationship and drug use.

  “I’m ok with that. It’s the facts and we are talking about my starshine here. He was an addict yes but more beyond that.”

  Everyone has someone who thinks of them as their starshine.

  • • •

  Female suspects are rare in the murder world. Eleven percent of killers in America are female. And of their victims, only 11.9 percent are strangers (41.5 percent of their victims are their significant others). Getting a video of a female murderer was unique, but the Girl with the Serpent Tattoo wasn’t the first female suspect I had searched for. That would be the girl in the pink top in Albuquerque.

  I saw the video on the Facebook page of a local TV station out of New Mexico. It’s equal parts grainy and brutal. A man and woman pull up to a gas station in an industrial pickup truck. There is a large spool of wire in the flatbed and what looks to be a triangular flag waving four feet in the air above the cab.

  The truck pulls up to the pumps, and they get out. Wearing jeans and a black jacket, the man walks purposefully to the gas pumps to his left, then appears to get into a conversation with another man. The woman gets out of the passenger side of the truck. She’s wearing jeans and a pink sweatshirt and has long brown hair. She walks to her right, toward another driver pumping gas, and looks to be asking him a question. Then she heads into the gas station store. The camera cuts to an overhead shot, and you see her more clearly. Her hair is brown, but you can now see her wavy curls. Her top is not just pink but bright pink and low-cut. Yo
u watch as she walks back out into the blurriness of the night and climbs into the passenger side of the truck. The driver guns the gas and drives the truck onto the sidewalk directly in the path of a man walking away from the gas station. Twenty-six-year-old Louis Chavez is struck down. He was the man talking with the driver just minutes earlier.

  “That video is one of the more brutal things I’ve ever witnessed on video,” Albuquerque police officer Tanner Tixier later said. “There is no doubt that this was an intentional act, which is why we’re looking at this individual for murder.”

  Chavez’s sister Jazmine was interviewed on the evening news. “It’s horrible. I don’t know how you could do that to a person. My brother didn’t deserve that. He didn’t do anything wrong.”

  She pleaded with the woman and the driver to turn themselves in. They didn’t.

  I originally focused on the truck. It looked to be a work truck and had a business logo on the door that I couldn’t quite decipher. I searched all the corners of the internet trying to identify that truck, posting photos on Reddit, on electrician’s message boards, on oil driller pages, going through every Albuquerque business web page looking for a logo that might be similar. If you want a list of all the commercial electricians in Albuquerque, I’m your guy.

  After a month, I learned the truck was stolen. There were no leads on who took it.

  With the driver being so far away on the video, I concentrated my focus on the girl in the pink top.

  I acquired a new video from the detective, who was looking for all the help he could get. The range of cooperation from detectives runs the gamut, from radio silence to constant updates. But once they understand that (a) I am not asking for money, (b) I am not looking for a reward, and (c) I just want to assist them in getting their collar (the arrest), most of them are very helpful. This new video was longer and had sound. When the female enters the gas station store, there is a man ahead of her at the register, straddling a BMX bike at the counter. The girl in the pink top walks up behind him, and he scoots ahead a few feet to give her room. She approaches the cashier with cash in her hand. “Can I get four on four?” she says, handing the money to the man behind the register.