Chase Darkness with Me

by Billy Jensen

  14.

  The Cantina Scene

  Los Angeles, 2017

  Mexico.

  Fuck.

  Barg had just told me the murder suspect he was looking for, the one who killed the father of two in San Jose, was hiding somewhere in friggin’ Mexico.

  This was going to be impossible.

  He said he was first going to issue a press release. If that couldn’t find him, he would hit me up. The release went over the details of the crime. On the night of November 8, 2016, a fight broke out in the streets near the corner of West Alma Avenue and Mastic Street in San Jose. Joseph Miller chased his victim for over a block. When he finally caught up to him, he crushed his skull in with a concrete block. When police arrived, they found fifty-one-year-old Alfred Perez with blunt-force trauma injuries. He died at the scene.

  The release went out. They got no response.

  Two weeks later, Barg contacted me. “Howdy, Billy.” He asked if I was still willing to help.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I was hoping he would now give me a more detailed location on where the suspect was hiding.

  “We think he’s staying in one of two areas in Mexico—Mazatlán or Puerto Vallarta,” he said.

  Two cities, with a combined population of 750,000 people. A campaign in Spanish. Terrific.

  “That’s a big area,” I said, trying my best to not be a downer.

  “Yeah, I know,” Barg replied. “That’s one of the reasons we haven’t been able to find him. But that’s all we have. Here’s a photo of the suspect.”

  I opened up the attachment, and my mood changed. The light from the heavens opened up to a feeling I can only describe as “glorious.”

  The suspect was a ginger. Red hair. Pale skin. In the photo, he’s standing in front of a house, wearing a baggy white T-shirt and baggy jeans. His right hand is holding a cell phone, and he’s throwing up a gang sign with his left hand—which is a good thing, as it let us clearly see the Chicano script-style of the tattoo on the back of his hand. It read “Daddy.” And then Barg told me the best part—he didn’t speak Spanish.

  I didn’t have a local store or bar to pin him to. I didn’t even have a city we were for sure he was in. But a redhead with a tattoo on his hand who didn’t speak Spanish? He would stick out like a sore thumb. People would notice him in Mexico.

  I wrote up the campaign in English, and Barg had his Spanish-speaking partner translate:

  Mazatlán: ¿Has visto a este hombre? Es buscado por un asesinato en San José, California, durante el mes de noviembre del 2016. Se sabe que está en el área de Mazatlán. Él tiene el pelo rojo, ojos azules, mide 1.8 metros de altura con un distintivo TATUAJE en su mano izquierda. Su verdadero nombre es Joseph Miller. Si lo ha visto, envíe un mensaje a esta página, o llame al Departamento de Policía de San José al 408-277-5283. Por favor comparta esta información y se ofrecerá una RECOMPESA.

  [Mazatlán: Have you seen this man? He is wanted for a murder San Jose, California in November, 2016. He is known to be in the Mazatlán area. He has red hair, blue eyes, is 6 feet tall with a distinctive TATTOO on his left HAND. His real name is Joseph Miller. If you have seen him, please, please message this page or call the San Jose Police Department at 408-277-5283. And please share. There is a REWARD.]

  I duplicated the same campaign in Puerto Vallarta.

  But I still didn’t know where or who I was going to target inside each city. They were big places. I needed some type of anchor. I looked at his picture again. A gringo, a shade paler than me, in two tourist towns. Where would he go? I searched for a Hooters.

  Unfortunately, the one Hooters in Puerto Vallarta had closed. I then searched for a cluster of sports bars, ones with American names. Any place where expatriate and tourists might congregate. I jammed my flag down in the middle of a handful of somewhat douchebag-sounding bars like Nacho Daddy and Players Sports Bar and circled a mile radius with a small, sixty-dollar buy.

  There was just one small problem—if anyone wrote to me, they would be writing in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish. I took four years of Italian in high school, and much to my mother’s chagrin, I can’t speak a word other than “molto bene.” I downloaded Google Translate onto my phone, took a screenshot of the ad, and sent it to Barg, and on November 14, 2017, I was using my system to hunt my first fugitive. Then I needed to get out of the house and into the world.

  • • •

  Being present is a constant struggle with a new case around every corner and a new tip ready to pounce in every Facebook comment. My son was now a senior in high school, applying to colleges. My daughter, now in her second year of college, had just declared her major would be plant protection. Our dog, a beautiful bull mastiff named Maisy, had just died of cancer. I would play hockey on Tuesday nights and get into the odd scrap to feel some semblance of being alive. Kendall would come visit in LA and drag me away from the investigations long enough to go have a drink at the Three Broomsticks pub inside the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios. That I had to go to a fairy-tale land in order to feel more human wasn’t lost on me.

  I pressed publish on the campaign to find Joseph Miller and headed to a bar called Frank ’n Hank in Koreatown to pregame with my fellow Hollywood Manchester City supporters before a Liam Gallagher concert. The former Oasis front man played “Live Forever,” “Rock and Roll Star,” and “Cigarettes and Alcohol,” and I got to pretend it was 1995 for the night.

  I woke up with a moderate hangover to a message from one tipster. He had seen him, all right. In Mazatlán. A ginger. Tattoo on hand. Didn’t speak Spanish.

  Another wrote me.

  Then another.

  I quickly learned the Spanish word for “reward.” Almost everyone asked about the recompensa, something very rarely mentioned by tipsters in the States.

  “Buenas tardes.”

  “Se dónde vive en Mazatlán.”

  “Yo lo conozco y se donde vive.”

  They had seen him on this beach. They had seen him at this bar. They had seen him in the stores around town.

  All in Mazatlán.

  Dime donde obtener informes acerca de la recompensa y yo junto a dos amigos lo buscamos y si lo encontramos lo retenemos hasta que llegue alguien por el.

  I copied and pasted that last one into Google Translate. It spit this back at me:

  Tell me where to get reports about the reward and I, together with two friends, look for him and if we find him, we hold him until someone arrives for the reward.

  Mexico was a different, helpful, frightening beast. I forwarded the tips to Barg.

  On top of the willingness of the tipsters to abduct the wanted man and hold him for the authorities (Barg was able to talk the tipster out of that plan), there were other surprising benefits to the Mexico campaign. No one was asking for a clearer picture of the killer. No one was crying foul over the police conspiring against him. No one was saying the typical and tired “snitches get stitches” that would come up once or twice during every campaign I ran in the United States. No one was even cracking jokes, saying it looked like this friend or that. Everyone was on board. And it was going viral within that one-mile radius.

  I wrote my responses in English, had Google translate to Spanish, and then pasted them into Facebook Messenger, asking questions about where exactly they saw him. When was the last time they saw him? And most importantly, where was he right now?

  I got their phone numbers and texted them to Barg, who called each tipster. We got women he had hit on. We got the apartment he was staying at. But we were still not sure. No one was mentioning the tattoo. Or his name. We needed proof that this was not just another ginger on holiday or someone trying to shake us down for recompensa. We needed a photo.

  My workday over, I headed to a new pop-up bar on Hollywood Boulevard called Scum and Villainy, which was supposed to be a
convincing replica of the Mos Eisley cantina from the original Star Wars movie. In the Uber, Barg texted me that he was on the phone with one of the tipsters I had sent him and asked me to check the private messages on Facebook. The tipster was going to send a photo of the man he thought to be the guy we were looking for.

  I walked into the cantina, ordered a blue milk, and settled into the back booth. A Jawa scuttled in front of me, holding a crimson-colored cocktail. An imperial officer sat at the corner of the bar, talking with what looked like a smuggler. The Instagram-model-esque bartenders were dressed like space pirates, fake blasters in holsters slung low on their hips. And I sat in the back booth like an antsy Han Solo, waiting for the photo to arrive.

  Like most kids born in the ’70s, when Luke Skywalker walked out of the blinding bright of the desert into the dark menagerie of the cantina, I crossed the threshold from the known into the unknown. Every one of us has had that moment. But the cantina also means something else to me. Before I learned how to solve murders, if you googled my name, the story that would come up first was a Star Wars mystery I had solved.

  When Obi-Wan Kenobi entered the cantina with Luke on Mos Eisley looking for a pilot, his first choice is a space pilot sporting arched eyebrows, killer muttonchops, and a black-and-white space suit more akin to an astronaut than a fighter pilot. While we cannot hear their dialogue, it is obvious that Kenobi asks him for a ride, and for whatever reason, the space pilot says no.

  And for whatever reason, no one ever knew what the actor’s name was. Kenobi went on to meet Chewbacca and Han Solo, launching a million action-figure battles on the rug in front of Dad’s La-Z-Boy. The other pilot, who we later learned was named BoShek, faded forever into the darkness of the Mos Eisley bar.

  I learned all this while attending Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim with my daughter. We were sitting in a panel called “Secrets of the Mos Eisley Cantina” when the speakers stated no one knew who the actor actually was. This was the most analyzed, most catalogued, most obsessed-over movie in history, and there was a mystery hanging out there.

  I turned to my daughter.

  “I’m gonna find this guy.”

  “Yeah, right,” she said.

  “I’m telling you. I’m going to find BoShek.”

  After months of talking to Star Wars extras, ancient casting companies, posting on all sorts of cinema fiend message boards in an attempt to get the crowd to help me, I woke up one morning and found myself gazing into the dark eyes of BoShek, sporting an incredibly spiffy shirt and those killer sideburns. His name was Basil Tomlin. His grandson saw one of my posts and contacted me. Unfortunately, Basil had passed away. But I had found him.

  I wrote a story about the quest on my website, and articles about the discovery in Gizmodo, A. V. Club, and dozens of other blogs made me a minor hero of geeks everywhere.

  Back at the cantina, I downed my blue milk in the booth, thinking about that incredibly geeky quest and how it might have actually been my very first missing-persons solve. It was nerd training wheels for what I was doing now.

  I ordered another drink and kept refreshing my messages on my phone, waiting for the photo of the fugitive murder suspect the tipster was supposed to be sending. After twenty minutes, I got it. He looked very, very good. I quickly opened up the picture Barg had sent me of Miller, then placed the two side by side. It was a perfect match.

  We had him.

  I used an app to paste the photos side by side and sent it to Barg.

  “That’s the same gringo,” I wrote.

  The detective sent me back three responses in quick succession.

  “Hell yes.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “I’m speechless.”

  This is actually working! I thought to myself. My first fugitive case, and we found him within twenty-four hours. In a whole ’nother country! I was becoming the world’s first digital consulting detective. I had solved a half-dozen homicides. Now I was finding fugitives. This was going to be my life.

  There was just one problem. Now we had to actually get him. And in Mexico, just because you know exactly where a fugitive is doesn’t mean the police will go pick him up.

  The next day, I got a text from Barg: “Turn off the juice—he’s running.”

  The federales didn’t act fast enough, and our fugitive was on the move. I deleted the ad.

  The next day, we thought he was probably headed out of town and going back on the run. I went to a Harry Potter–themed birthday party that day, where a bunch of twentysomethings were wearing robes and playing quidditch beer pong and making wizard staffs out of their empty beer cans—which grew taller and taller throughout the night.

  I kept checking my phone to see if the tipster had written back. He hadn’t.

  I shook off a somewhat large hangover the day after and played hockey, checking my phone in between shifts. Nothing.

  I was getting concerned. This was Mexico. This was a killer. What if he found out and turned on the tipster?

  I sent the tipster another message and waited. The next day, I finally got a message back. Sometimes tipsters take the day off too.

  But he had no new info.

  “He likely knows about the ads and that’s what prompted him to leave the area of Mazatlán,” Barg said to me.

  “Can we follow him?” I asked. “Can we trace him? Can we get the federales to go in as soon as we get his hotel address?”

  We had just found a needle in a haystack, and he was slipping away.

  Barg was frank. “Mexican law enforcement is so challenging to work with that I think a strategy of attrition is a good one. If we make him feel like he is being pursued, then he will either run back to the U.S. or screw up and commit a crime in Mexico and get himself arrested—which works in our favor.”

  Barg and his partner, Wayne Smith, met with the U.S. Marshals in an attempt to light a fire under local law enforcement.

  The tipsters kept talking. But Miller was running. We could be back to square one. Barg was optimistic. “We will bag Miller,” he told me, sensing the urgency in my texts.

  The undoing of a person’s life is as easy to accomplish as the justice is hard. All it takes is the squeeze of a trigger. But justice? So many things need to fall perfectly into place for justice to find its way.

  First, you need to identify the perpetrator. That’s the hard part. Then, you need to find them. No easy feat. That’s where we were at in Mexico. Next, you need to arrest them. Who knows what is waiting on the other side of the door when police bang on it, warrant in hand? And finally, you need to build a case so strong that it will convince twelve perfect strangers that the man or woman you identified, found, and arrested is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

  All four steps must fit neatly together. Something you have to always tell yourself whenever you’re yelling at your computer screen “Why can’t they find this guy already?” or “We know he did it. Why can’t they just arrest him?”

  Barg and Smith were able to identify the murder suspect—Miller. That in itself is difficult. One third of murders in America don’t even get that.

  Then the suspect jumped to another country: 761,600 square miles filled with 129 million people who speak another language.

  Barg tried a press release in Mexico. Nothing happened. I started a campaign looking for him in two cities, with a combined population of 750,000. We found him in one day.

  And yet we were helpless.

  We needed to be on the ground. Knocking on doors. That’s what these social media campaigns are: knocking on a thousand doors. Efficient. Concise. They’re not going to hit every door, of course. Not every person has an active Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter profile. But for the people who do, with the right wording of a post, a compelling picture, and the right amount of cash, you can hit almost everyone in town. It’s like having a team of detectives swarm a ne
ighborhood and talk to everyone within a few days. I can’t get the body language, facial cues, and speech patterns that police will pick up on when they come face-to-face with a neighbor who might know something. But I’m also not threatening. I’m just a post nestled in between pictures of your sister’s baby and your uncle complaining about Trump. Any place where people are looking for human interaction, this system can work.

  Barg was still optimistic. But it seemed like Joseph Miller had turned back into a ghost.

  • • •

  I couldn’t wallow in self-pity. I was gearing up for a Thanksgiving push on all the cases I hadn’t been able to solve. The holidays are a good time to reactivate older campaigns to try to get some new answers.

  I was betting $500 that would happen. I started with a case I had covered for Crime Watch Daily over the summer. The bodies of two women were found within a month of each other, dumped in fields outside Columbus, Ohio. Like many young women in southern Ohio, they had succumbed to the opioid epidemic that had taken over the area. Dozens of bodies of young women were being found across the state. Some were “body dumps”—people who overdosed and whose “friends” dumped their bodies instead of calling 911. But some of the women had signs of trauma indicating they were murdered. There was at least one killer lurking in southern Ohio using the desperation of women trapped in the opioid epidemic to feed their bloodlust.

  Do you live in Fairfield County? This Thanksgiving, please discuss with family and friends. Do you have any idea of who might be capable of killing these two women? A guy who likes to go into Columbus and pick up girls murdered Lindsey Maccabee and dumped her body on Lake Road near Pleasantville. Danielle’s body was found dead along Allen Rd. Four little girls lost their moms, and they need answers.

  I posted pictures of Danielle and Lindsey and shots of the locations where their bodies were found.

  Next, I tried to find anyone who might remember the Allenstown Four killer from when he was living in Texas.