Chase Darkness with Me

by Billy Jensen

  What kind of a cop doesn’t request a hearing? A cop can shoot an unarmed man dead in the street, and within seconds, the police union is right beside him, ready to fight tooth and nail for their man, dragging a case out for months. This guy was arrested for shoplifting and just walked away?

  This was the guy. This had to be the guy.

  I am writing this as it’s happening. I know when you write in present tense, you are supposed to make the reader believe everything is happening right then. But in reality, you’re really writing in the future and faking it.

  But this is happening right now.

  ’Cause I can’t sleep.

  ’Cause we came to Chicago for a book event, but it was in this strange, giant church an hour outside of Chicago. And there was a coffeehouse inside it, and I had a weird green smoothie. And the Gone Girl was there. And Michelle’s family was there.

  ’Cause after the event, we went to a party at a bar but didn’t even stay for a drink, and we drove back to Chicago.

  ’Cause when I got back to the hotel, I decided to walk the ten blocks to the spot where Marques Gaines was killed two years ago, but the chill in the air and the threat of a 7:00 a.m. flight forced me to turn back around and go to sleep.

  ’Cause there was this camera crew here to film a documentary. And I just texted Liz Garbus, the director. “I know we just met six hours ago, but I think we got him,” I wrote, hoping she wasn’t thinking, I just took on this project with this lunatic, who for the next year is going to be texting me at all hours of the night with claims that the killer was just caught.

  ’Cause I think I am going to wake up from this dream and not remember any of it. So I am writing it all down.

  ’Cause I just saw his face.

  I did a search on Classmates.com for Joseph DeAngelo. An entry came up: Folsom High School, 1960–64. There was a link to his yearbook from 1962. He was just a sophomore. His cheeks are chubby. His hair is curly, styled in a modified, low-key pompadour. Not the feathered hair from one of the East Area Rapist composite sketches, which we tried to compare to the pictures in the Sacramento high school yearbooks from the late ’70s, where every boy we looked at was a carbon copy of the next. Another picture was emailed to me, a darkened shot from a newspaper above a story about his navy service.

  I wrote Debbi.

  “You’ve seen the pictures?”

  She hadn’t seen them.

  I paused before writing back. “Do you want to?”

  “Yes please.”

  I sent her his photo. It’s the first time she’ll see the face of the man who police think killed her mother.

  She wrote back. “Thank you.”

  I know she will send out the photo, along with some of the articles I sent over, to the sisterhood survivors. Jane Carson, victim #5. Michelle Cruz, the sister of Janelle Cruz, the Golden State Killer’s last known murder victim. And Margaret Wardlow, his youngest survivor, who he attacked when she was just 13. We’re all going to be together in a week at CrimeCon, the convention for true-crime fans, in Nashville. We’re supposed to be putting on a presentation about all the clues we think have the best chance to lead us to solving this thing. Well, those plans just went to hell.

  I’m thinking for a moment about the conference, and something strange just happened. After I confirmed to myself that this was the guy, the guy we have been chasing for so long, I think I gave myself maybe thirty seconds of happiness. Amazement transformed into a fist pump, then turned back into amazement.

  And then a switch flipped in my head.

  “Build a timeline. What else has he done?”

  The details of the cases we had pored over for years. The General Custer homework and the hand-drawn map found at the crime scene in Danville. The caliber of gun used in the Maggiore murder. The patterns of the china he stole. Those cuff links. The minute details of the twelve murders and fifty rapes. They all just wiped away, and I yanked the wheel of the thousand-mile-an-hour race car hard to the right, tires screeching below me.

  Where has he been? Summer camps? School trips? Second jobs? Weekend furloughs in the navy? Family vacations when he told his wife he was going for a walk and then did something evil? I need to build a timeline. Build a map. And match it up with any unsolved rapes and murders from those dates and locations. This guy did more than those twelve murders and fifty rapes. How many unsolved cases will find the monster at the end of their story to be this guy, Joseph James DeAngelo?

  But I knew one guy who was just going to be happy.

  I let Patton sleep another hour, then sent him a text at 4:30 a.m.

  “She got him. Suspect is in custody per two sources. Press conference at noon pst time.”

  “Is it HIM?” Patton wrote back. “They’re sure it’s him?”

  “I can’t see how they would announce a press conference and say they have someone in custody if they didn’t have a DNA match,” I wrote.

  “WOW!!!!!” Patton replied. “THIS IS FUCKING AWESOME!”

  At 5:00 a.m. I reluctantly stopped searching for more archived stories about DeAngelo, got dressed, and rushed down to the lobby to wait for the car to the airport.

  I caught Patton’s reaction when he walked out of the elevator.

  It only makes sense for it to go down in Chicago. After seeing her family. After being together for the first time. Sleeping in the Sofitel, the same hotel Michelle and Patton stayed in for the last ten Christmas vacations. Might as well rename it the Victory Motel.

  At the airport, as we waited to board the plane to New York, our giddiness betrayed any lack of sleep.

  “I really got hung up on the name,” I said to Patton. “The DNA was pointing us to an English or German name. It was like in Murder on the Orient Express, when Bianchi recalls the time he heard the name of Daisy Armstrong’s killer: ‘I remember feeling ashamed that he had an Italian name. Cassetti.’”

  Inadvertently, I had just wound Patton up, and for the next five minutes, we were quoting the 1974 movie version of the Agatha Christie novel.

  “Mr. Ratchett, I have made enough money to satisfy both my needs and my caprices,” Patton began, in a pitch-perfect Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot. “I take only such cases now as interest me, and to be frank, my interest in your case is, uh…dwindling.”

  Like I said, giddy.

  I was going back to New York to continue what was supposed to be a workcation. Kendall was scheduled to give a talk about her Parkinson’s disease research at an investigator’s meeting at the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and I was tagging along. I had bought us tickets to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, as well as The Iceman Cometh starring Denzel Washington. I missed New York and wanted a Fribble from Friendly’s. Crinkle-cut fries from Nathan’s. And a soft pretzel from a street vendor. Those plans were all going to go to hell.

  We landed in New York and started doing interviews on the fly with various news outlets as we waited for the press conference. Patton had a prior engagement downtown, so at 3:00 p.m., we went with the film crew to an office near the World Trade Center and huddled around my laptop to watch the press conference, which was streaming from Sacramento.

  One by one, district attorneys from Orange, Ventura, Sacramento, and Contra Costa counties took to the microphone and said little about the case. I could see Paul Holes in the background. It was evident halfway through that they weren’t going to let him speak. The press conference seemed less about giving out information and more of a victory lap in an election year with the hopes that this arrest might be able to drum up some votes.

  They talked about the groundbreaking method of finding DeAngelo with DNA. But they didn’t mention familial. But I knew that was how they got him.

  They didn’t mention he was a former cop, burying the lede many newspapers would run with.

  Then they opened up the floor to questions. After five or six,
a reporter asked, “Did the new book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, generate any new leads in the case that helped with the arrest?”

  Patton got off the couch he was sitting on and pressed his face close to my laptop’s tiny speaker. I leaned in with him.

  “I’m glad you asked that question,” Sheriff Scott Jones said. “Because that’s a question we got from literally all over the world in the last twenty-four hours. And the answer is no. Other than the fact that it kept interest and tips coming in.”

  He couldn’t wait to say no. The room was deflated for a brief second, then we both shrugged. What else were they going to say?

  Patton reminded us that Michelle never wanted any credit. She just wanted him caught.

  When the conference was over, I called Karen and Georgia for a special episode of My Favorite Murder. I put it out to all the Murderinos to join in helping me build the timeline and solve cold cases DeAngelo might have committed. I also snuck in a story about my desire to set up a pilot program to deputize citizen detectives to data mine and help solve cold cases. I did a couple more interviews, then stumbled back uptown.

  On the steps from the subway, one hour of sleep in the last forty-eight, I caught a glimpse of red in the corner of my eye. I turned and saw Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, wearing the iconic red jacket and beret of the civilian volunteers who patrol the subway stations, keeping them safe. One of the original citizen crime fighters. I must have ridden the subway a thousand times, and the one time I see him is the day the Golden State Killer is caught.

  I asked if he heard the news.

  “Yeah,” he said in his thick New York accent, simultaneously handing me a business card. “He was a former cop.”

  Ever a critic of the police, Curtis didn’t bury the lede.

  I reached my Times Square hotel and fell into bed around midnight.

  The next three days were a blur. I was answering rapid-fire questions from George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America, tear-inducing questions on 20/20. NPR, BBC, CBC, 48 Hours, New York Times, Times of London. I said no to the Sun newspaper in England and yes to Swedish Public Radio, because I thought it would be a fun thing to say I did.

  Toward the end of each interview, every reporter had the same question: “Do you think the book had anything to do with the capture of the Golden State Killer?”

  I fumbled with the answer at first. “Of course it did,” I’d say. “Michelle named him ‘the Golden State Killer.’ Saying her book had nothing to do with the capture of the Golden State Killer when she was the one who actually gave him that name is a bit disingenuous.” My righteous indignation matched the sheriff’s. “And Paul Holes referred to Michelle as his partner, and both pressed for familial DNA testing. Would you really say a detective had nothing to do with the capture if she passed away suddenly and her partner later solved the case they had been working on for years?”

  But on Thursday night, walking out of the CNN building through Columbus Circle on a quest to get some Nathan’s fries, I realized what my answer should have been. It wasn’t Michelle’s book that led to his capture. It was Michelle’s death.

  The tribute I wrote about her was all about her dogged quest to find the identity of the Golden State Killer and less about her being the wife of a beloved comedian. And once Patton tweeted out the tribute, reporters were introduced to the investigator and author Michelle McNamara, the woman who wrote the story about her quest for the killer in Los Angeles magazine. And they in turn wrote stories about her laser-focused drive to find him. The East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker, who Michelle thought had such a hard time being noticed because of branding, was introduced to the world right alongside her. Stories about Michelle McNamara and the Golden State Killer appeared in People magazine, Time, the Daily Mail, USA Today, the Washington Post, and countless others.

  Powerful people take notice when there are international headlines about a citizen trying to solve a crime that happened in their own backyard.

  Two months after she died, a press conference was convened in Sacramento, with DA Schubert announcing a renewed effort to find the killer, where her office would be devoting a lot more resources, as well as a stronger cooperation with the FBI. And there would be a new $50,000 reward.

  In his answer, the sheriff confirmed all this. “That’s a question we got from literally all over the world in the last twenty-four hours.” The whole world knew about the Golden State Killer because of Michelle. And the work she did pressed powerful people to find him.

  I posted that tribute to Michelle on April 23, two years to the night before we flew to Chicago for the book event. That was also the twentieth anniversary of my dad’s death. On that night in New York, Kendall and I had dinner at Delmonico’s Steakhouse, because that’s where the protagonists convened each night to try to catch the serial killer in Caleb Carr’s novel The Alienist. And also because my dad always loved a good steak.

  On the train back uptown, we got off a stop early at Penn Station, ’cause it always reminded me of Dad and him taking me to Madison Square Garden to see Andre the Giant or to the Thanksgiving Day parade to see the big balloons or to Greenwich Village to get me a fake ID.

  We walked down toward the Long Island Railroad terminal. Forever totemistic and nostalgic, I wanted to buy a comic book at the big newsstand Dad always took me to, the one across from the long ticket counter and train tote board. But when I turned the corner into the terminal, the newsstand was gone. Replaced by a drugstore. I was bummed. I dragged Kendall all over the station, looking for another newsstand. I finally found a bookstore that was open across from the Amtrak station. They had a small shelf of graphic novels. I bought one with a story about the Teen Titans being all grown-up, fighting crime in Manhattan before having to work together with their mentors to battle an unseen foe.

  • • •

  In the middle of the whirlwind, I got a text from the detective in Tampa who I was helping search for the Girl with the Serpent Tattoo. He had written me earlier that the woman we thought might be her was back in prison with a high bond. He was finally going to be able to visit her before she made bail and see if the tattoos matched up. I was sitting in a chair behind a desk, pretending to be on the phone while they shot B-roll for the 20/20 story when he emailed me.

  Not her… Back to the drawing board. Tattoo of cross on her left shoulder. No tattoo on back. Chinese symbol upper right shoulder.

  Fuck!!!!

  I said that in my head. They still run sound with B-roll.

  But seriously. Dammit. Well, I guess two in one week was asking for too much. I would start the campaign again—after the Harry Potter play.

  Two days later, back in Northern California, Paul Haynes and I were standing in front of the East Area Rapist’s first known crime scene in Rancho Cordova. It was the first time we got to walk the same streets that the man, now known as the Golden State Killer, had prowled.

  We had just had coffee with Paul Holes. He gave us the inside story of how he caught him. Sure enough, he entered his DNA profile—this time a full genome profile, not just the Y chromosomes—into a public database, GEDmatch, and got a hit on a third cousin. From there, he and a volunteer genealogist built a family tree and looked for someone the right age who lived in the Sacramento area. He saw DeAngelo, and he looked good, but he was a lot older than what he thought he would be.

  “I drove to his house and was sitting outside in my car,” Holes told us. “I was a day from retiring. I just wanted to know. I was thinking to myself: what if I just knocked on the door and asked him for a swab?”

  Holes was very close to getting out of the car. But the background check on DeAngelo said he had guns. A lot of them. Paul Holes decided against it and retired the next day.

  The police then staked out DeAngelo’s house and waited for him to discard an item containing his DNA.

  They tested a tissue fou
nd in his trash, and it was a match to the DNA of the killer.

  They had him.

  In the last few days, Paul Holes had been on TV constantly and had been transformed from retired investigator to true-crime heartthrob. The hashtag #HotForHoles was making the rounds, spurred by the Murderinos.

  As we were wrapping up, Paul asked me what else I was working on. I told him I was still investigating the Allenstown Four, creating a timeline for Rasmussen, to see where else he had been and what other crimes he might have committed, just like I was starting to do with DeAngelo. And I said Pete Headley, the San Bernardino detective who was working the West Coast portion of the Allenstown Four case, and I were working with a geneticist to amplify the degraded DNA of each girl in the barrels. We still needed to find their identity.

  “You know, I was on a conference call with Pete Headley in February 2017,” Paul said to me. “He told me about little Lisa and how they used a familial DNA match to find out who she was, which led to the killer. About creating the SNP profile, getting an extraction, and using the whole genome.”

  “Really?” I said, dumbfounded.

  “Yeah, I just wasn’t allowed to tell you at the time. I remember you telling me about the case at Michelle’s memorial,” he said. “Then we learned that it was connected to the Larry Vanner case. I told you I responded to Eunsoon Jun’s crime scene in Contra Costa, right?”

  Paul had learned from Headley how instead of just using a Y-STR profile (just one of the twenty-three pairs of chromosome that make up the human genome), which we had been using all these years and had led us down the road of an English or Germanic name, they should sequence the whole genome of the killer and upload it into the database.

  The two cases—Allenstown and Golden State—were destined to be forever linked in my mind ever since that night in Boston, when I learned Michelle had died just hours after I walked the woods where the bodies were found in the barrels. But I had just learned they were actually linked. For the whole world. Lisa, the little girl abandoned at the trailer park, the one who helped solve the Allenstown Four case and lead investigators to the serial killer Terry Rasmussen, actually helped catch the Golden State Killer. And in turn, she would help catch thousands more killers who thought they got away with it.