Chase Darkness with Me

by Billy Jensen

  This video is more defined, and details pop. You see now that her brown hair has blond highlights. Her cheekbones are sharp. Her cleavage ample. Her jeans worn and faded.

  I took screenshots of her close-ups and also cut the video so we just saw her approach the cashier and heard her speak. I set up the campaign for a four-mile radius, men and women, twenty to fifty-four. Tips started coming in.

  She looks like a girl named Eliza [name changed]. I asked someone I’m friends with that knows her very well and I said ‘who does this look like’ and she said the same.

  False alarm.

  Her name is Annett Rodriguez [name changed]. She always seemed rather sketchy, I would sometimes see her walking up and down hotel circle, in that area anyway. I didn’t see anything about tattoos but I recognize her for sure.

  Same result: nothing.

  It seemed like every female in Albuquerque looked like the girl with the pink top.

  One person claimed he saw her near the Elegante Hotel in town.

  “What made you think it was her?” I asked. “What was she wearing?”

  “That same clothes…n body.”

  “Was she loitering or walking with a purpose?”

  “She looked she was on a hurry,” he said.

  The tips came were coming in fast now.

  She has been in jail and still is in jail, my daughter was just saying that looked like her.

  She lives in this house with her mom Jennifer Hernandez [name changed]. I have seen her in those boots and that outfit before. She is only 16 or 17 but she is on probation for armed robbery already and has several felonies.

  That’s my friend on the bike.

  Go to Casa Liquors corner of Goff & Bridge. Looks like a girl who used to work there. Talk to the owner John.

  Some people were dead-sure they knew her:

  When I first saw the video, I thought it looked like her but started questioning myself because she is married to my older brother and I would have never thought her to be with another man (the one in the video) but my brother wasn’t telling our family around this time last year she started doing drugs and prostitution behind his back he eventually left her. The man that she’s with in the video is NOT my brother (whom she’s still married to) I showed the video to several people in my family and every single one of them named——and that included my children. It gave me the chills and I knew I had to say something.

  One guy was certain it was his ex-wife.

  Someone sent yearbook photos.

  “She looks like a girl that took me off to be robbed at gun point and left to die by a guy she picked up,” wrote another.

  “I see her on Central all the time she’s asking for money and beer.”

  “Where on Central?” I wrote back. “And when was the last time you saw her?”

  “About nine-thirty ten o’clock this morning on Central and Eubank.”

  “By the Walgreens?” I asked, Google maps showing me around a city I have never stepped foot in.

  “No Home Depot parking lot.”

  It was one wild-goose chase after another.

  Then someone posted a comment under one of her photos, intimating that she might know who she was. I sent the commenter a direct message.

  “Do you know this woman?”

  “Ya, I do.”

  “Could you tell us her name?”

  “I forgot her name.”

  “What can you tell us about her?”

  “She is my friend that is a homeless woman.”

  “Where does she hang out?”

  “She goes to St. Martin’s here.”

  She listed the address for St. Martin’s. I did a search and learned it was a homeless shelter on Third Street in Albuquerque.

  The next day, I got another tip.

  “I might know she is. Looks like a girl I know. At least from the camera view. And she has been around that area.”

  “What’s her name?” I wrote.

  “First name is [redacted]. I will find out her last name from my girlfriend without raising any suspicion. She lost her kids to the state because of drugs and stealing.”

  The tipster kept sending information.

  “She does heroin and is always stealin makeup now and selling it to make the cash for drugs for her and her girlfriend to get high.”

  I asked if she had any other identifying features. Scars? A tattoo?

  “Yes. One on her breast… It’s her I’m telling you.”

  A tattoo on her breast? That was a sticking point for me. I couldn’t see a tattoo on her breast on the video from the gas station interior. I watched it again. After the fifth or sixth viewing, I started to think I was conjuring one up. There was a dark spot on her breast—which I had taken to be a stray lock of hair or a shadow. Might that be a tattoo?

  The pictures they sent sure did look like the girl in the pink top.

  “I know it’s her,” the tipster continued. “I heard the voice on the video too. It’s her.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “She’s homeless now.”

  “Does she stay at shelters?”

  “She never stays at shelters,” they said. “But she goes to them during the day for food, etc…”

  “Which shelters does she go to?”

  “I know she goes to the one on 3rd street.”

  St. Martin’s.

  It all fell into place. The last two tipsters were talking about the same woman.

  All the police would have to do is wait outside St. Martin’s for a day and speak with her when she arrived. I told the detective, and he thought she looked good. But there was a snag.

  “St. Martin’s staff has not been cooperative with allowing law enforcement onto their property to conduct investigations without a warrant, and I don’t have enough probable cause to get one approved.”

  I would contact the detective every six months to see if he had found her. He hadn’t. By January 2018, twenty-one months had passed. They had a record number of homicides in Albuquerque in 2017, and the detective was underwater. But he told me to do whatever I could to see if I could find her.

  I called the shelter—they paged her name and said they had never heard of her. I went through back channels to find relatives on Facebook. I got nowhere. She was slipping away.

  I asked the detective if I should reach out to her directly.

  “Any help that she can provide would be great!” he replied.

  I sent a message to her directly on Facebook.

  When you send a Facebook message to someone who isn’t your friend, it gets stuck in the “Message Requests” folder, where it’s often not seen for months or even years. Up until 2016, you used to be able to pay a dollar to Facebook and have your message show up in the receiver’s regular inbox, but they took that feature away. I would pay fifty bucks a message to get it back.

  I requested a friendship with the woman and sent her a message, hoping she would see it.

  Hi. I’m a victim’s advocate and journalist living in Los Angeles. Someone reached out to me saying they know you. I was wondering if we could hop on a call this week? Thanks. Billy

  Six days later, she saw it.

  “WHAT IS THIS CONCERNING??”

  “Hi, thanks for getting back to me. Someone contacted me saying that she was in foster care with you at some point.”

  Two hours later, she replied.

  “I HAVE NEVER BEEN IN A FOSTER HOME BE4.”

  “Ok. She thought you went to St. Martins at some point,” I wrote. “I’m not from ABQ so am not sure what that is.” I saw that she had read the message but had yet to respond. I went for broke. “Someone also said they recognized you from this video as a passenger in a truck involved in a fatal accident at a gas station two years ago.”

  I pr
essed send. An error message popped up on my screen:

  THIS PERSON ISN’T RECEIVING MESSAGES RIGHT NOW.

  She had blocked me.

  I hadn’t even brought up the hit-and-run to her—she had blocked me as soon as I mentioned the shelter. Two different individuals who didn’t know each other ID’d her as both the girl in the pink top and a woman they know who goes to St. Martin’s. It seemed like I might be on the right track. I spoke with the detective. He thanked me for giving it a shot and said he would look into the Facebook page. I was left to wait again.

  • • •

  Back in Los Angeles, I was working with Pete Headley to identify any of the other victims of the Allenstown Four killer, who we could now at least call by his real name: Terry Rasmussen.

  After finding little Lisa’s family—and then identifying Rasmussen—Pete had been chasing down every West Coast lead that might be connected to the killer and looking into using familial DNA to put all the pieces together.

  There was one unidentified murder victim he liked in particular: the Lady in the Refrigerator. She was found on March 29, 1995, inside a fridge that had been dumped in a ditch in Holt, just outside Stockton, California, in San Joaquin County. She was killed by blunt-force trauma to the head and was tied up with electrical tape. All the earmarks of Rasmussen.

  This wasn’t a robbery—she still had a diamond ring on her finger. Her hiking boots were expensive. She wore a Victoria’s Secret bra, a blue sweatshirt, and Levi’s shorts. Her teeth were pristine. The tape was determined to have been bought at a surplus store in Oakley, California. A bag of ice found in the fridge was produced by the Glacier Ice Co. out of Freemont. The refrigerator was from the East Bay. Rasmussen lived in the East Bay and lived behind a convenience store. If we could trace the ice to that store, the woman in the fridge could very well have been another female who stepped into the killer’s path.

  But in order to see if she was a victim of Rasmussen, we first needed to find out who she was. We needed to pull DNA from the woman and run it through a public DNA database like GEDmatch, hopefully find a relative, then interview anyone who knew her to see who she was with at the time. If one of those people was Terry Rasmussen, there was a good chance he was the one who had killed her.

  There were other possible victims. Headley gave me a list of Rasmussen’s AWOLs from when he was in the navy. There were half a dozen. I had places and dates and was searching for any missing persons or unsolved murders that might match up.

  We knew he was seen with a woman and a little girl in Anaheim. We still didn’t know where Denise Beaudin was. And we were still trying to find the identity of the victims in the barrels.

  We would try to use familial DNA to get answers for almost everything.

  Pete had found Rasmussen using whole genome DNA and entering it into a public database to search for family members. He was lucky that the killer’s blood had been drawn—and stored—before his death. You needed a good bit of DNA—sometimes close to 250–1000 nanograms—to get the whole genome. That’s still less than a grain of sand. (With GSK, Michelle was just using the Y chromosome—one chromosome out of the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that make up the whole genome—and getting nowhere.) To solve a crime or identify a body via familial DNA, you have to find the right case, evaluate what DNA you have, and extract the DNA. If you are attempting to identify the perpetrator, hopefully they left enough DNA at the scene to process. If you are attempting to identify a body, you want to pull DNA from flesh or hair. Bones left out in the sun have a lot of bacteria, and getting a proper DNA strand from them is tough but not impossible. When you have your DNA, you send it to the genealogy lab, upload to a database like GEDmatch, see what matches you get, then consult with a genetics genealogist who will start building a family tree using all sorts of resources, from Facebook pages to census records. After that, you start eliminating people from the tree based on what you know about the crime or the body in question—locations, time periods, physical descriptions from witnesses or victims. From there, you will hopefully find someone who looks good.

  Of course, when it comes to a crime, the chain of custody for the original DNA—the unadulterated trail that is supposed to make a beeline from the crime scene to the crime lab to the courtroom—has now made a slight detour. A defense attorney might try to latch onto that detour in an attempt to muddy the waters and discredit the case. So if police have a solid suspect who is still alive, they need to be sure they have the right person and need a direct sample to compare to the crime-scene DNA. They follow the suspect around until they discard something with their DNA on it—a cup, a napkin, chewing gum. Lonnie Franklin Jr., the Los Angeles serial killer known as the Grim Sleeper, dropped a pizza crust. Then they test it and see if it matches the original sample. If it does, they get a warrant and make an arrest.

  It’s coming down to criminals vs. science. Facial recognition software technology is getting stronger, and in the future, some of the videos I’ve been using to find murder suspects might be able to be matched to a facial recognition database. But without a doubt, the ability to use familial DNA matches to find rapists and murderers is the biggest single tool to catch violent criminals the world has seen since the discovery of DNA itself.

  Some throw up the privacy balloon, claiming that the unsuspecting genealogy buffs who entered their DNA into the databases never consented to a law-enforcement search. But for most departments, the stumbling blocks are money and resources. Getting loud is the only way the backlog of thousands of rape kits that have been sitting in police evidence lockers across the country will be processed. Getting loud should force every agency to take the DNA found in every rape kit and at every murder scene and run it through familial databases, 24/7. We are at the precipice of being able to solve more cold cases than ever before. If the police claim they don’t have the manpower to build the family tree, we need to get loud. Start fund-raisers. Recruit volunteers. You reading this book are deputized. Go get a megaphone.

  Theoretically, with all the technology we have—the interconnectivity of social media, every person carrying around a hi-definition video camera in their pockets—we should be able to solve the bulk of murders. But people are people. Crime investigations are messy and complicated. And there are just too many bad guys out there with too many guns and too few people willing to tell the police when they have information about a crime. There is no reason that with all our tools, the United States solves only 61.5 percent of all homicides every year. Japan clears 95 percent. Germany between 88 and 94 percent. England and Wales clear 85 percent. Canada clears 75 percent.

  The politicians must deliver the resources to allow police departments to utilize crowdsourcing and familial DNA searches to find these criminals and ensure their capture. The answers are there. Science is catching up to the bad guys. It’s up to people to make sure it’s put to good use.

  Allenstown and Golden State were getting me trapped in a maze of chromosomes. I didn’t get into this to do science. I’ve watched Jurassic Park fifty times and love the little animated Mr. DNA that explains how they made the dinosaurs. But I also got a C in biology in high school.

  I needed a drink and an old-fashioned video search, getting back to the one thing I had finally found some success with.

  • • •

  On the morning of June 10, 2017, San Jose police officers responded to a 911 call and found an adult male with a stab wound outside a home on Everglade Avenue. The victim, Samuel Choi, died the next day. Police released video of the murder in August 2017. The image of the suspect was pretty clear—a Hispanic male walking down the street, his hands in the pockets of his hoodie. The video was in color. It was blurry, but you could tell he had a beard. He was wearing red shoes and carrying a khaki backpack.

  I called up the San Jose PD Homicide unit and talked to Sergeant John Barg. I gave him my spiel, and he was intrigued, much more than most detectives I
cold-called. I asked if I could have the raw video, and he said he would check. But his mind was on something else.

  “I have a murder suspect who fled,” he told me, introducing me to a whole ’nother case. “Do you think this could work to find him?”

  “I really just focus on unsolved cases,” I said. “I don’t do fugitives.”

  Fugitive searches are a different beast. For instance, on the TV show America’s Most Wanted, the producers had the name, height, weight, profession, hobbies, and, most importantly, a clear photograph of the person they were looking for. They would present the murderer’s photo on screen and say “Joe Smith is five feet eight inches tall, 160 pounds. He is trained as an electrician, and he likes to bowl.” Then one of the millions of people watching the show would register all that info and say to themselves “Hmm, that guy kinda looks like Phil from the Thursday night league down at Bellmore Lanes.” And the hope is that person would pick up the phone and call the toll-free number. The hope worked. The national dragnet of America’s Most Wanted nabbed more than one thousand fugitives, including seventeen people on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.

  With a fugitive search, you are up against the skills of the individual you are hunting. Did they alter their appearance? Did they have the resources to hide out overseas? Did they die in a ditch?

  What I was doing was different. What I had was simply the blurry image and the location of the crime. That was it. A specific needle in a haystack full of loads of other needles. In my crimes, the police had already gone to the media and struck out. Leaving the family waiting for a miracle. Waiting for a confession that was doubtful to come.

  Barg kept pitching me his fugitive. “Just let me send you his information. He killed a father of two, and we’ve been looking for him for over a year.”

  I gave in.

  “Okay.”

  Then he told me where he “thinks” the killer might be, and my face went straight into my palm.