by Billy Jensen
Michelle had a saying. She didn’t believe in things happening for a reason or some divine fate. Everything was random, and the best we can do is be nice to each other. “It’s chaos. Be kind,” is what she would say. But there was some cosmically aligned chaos going on.
That night, Paul Haynes and I had drinks with Ken Clark, one of the lead investigators on the case with the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department. While Paul Holes was the scientist, Ken Clark was the detective. He has worked over two hundred homicides, but the GSK was as much his white whale as any of them. The drinks flowed, and Ken, a magnificent storyteller, told us about coming face-to-face with DeAngelo. About how when they arrested him at his home, he told them he had a roast in the oven.
I mentioned how crazy it was that at almost the exact moment that we were in Chicago answering questions about whether he would ever be caught, Clark was actually catching him.
Ken then told us a story about Chicago. He was once there for a conference, and he and a detective friend went out drinking late one night in an empty bar downtown. At one point during the night, Ken peered out the window of the bar toward the barren sidewalk and spotted a large man looking in at them. Ten minutes went by, and he checked again. The guy was still there. Ken knew for sure: this guy was menacing; he was casing them. He was sure they were going to get jumped once they got outside.
“And we had left our guns at the hotel,” he said. “And this was a big guy. At least six foot four. Angry-looking.”
Ken picked up a knife from the table.
“So I told the bartender, ‘I’m going to take this knife. I’ll bring it back.’ And I slide it up my sleeve, holding the blade like this.” He showed us how he carried the knife.
The two cops walked out of the bar. The large man gave them an intimidating stare, but he didn’t try anything. They got back to the hotel, and Ken, true to his word, returned the knife to the bar the next day.
“When was this?” I asked.
“About four years ago,” he said.
“And downtown Chicago? The tourist area?”
“Yeah,” he said.
I took out my phone and started swiping through photos, past the pictures of DeAngelo, close-ups of the Girl with the Serpent Tattoo, the truck from the hit-and-run in Albuquerque, the girl with the short shorts from White Boy Q’s murder in Tallahassee, the killer in the Halloween mask in El Monte.
I finally landed on the one I was looking for.
“This is crazy, but could this have been the guy?” I asked.
He looked at the still photo of the Man in the Green Hoodie that was sent to me over Twitter the night I was trying to find Marques Gaines’s attacker.
“Yeah,” he said. “That totally could be him.”
Okay, odds are it wasn’t him. But I liked the way the chaos was feeling this week.
• • •
After Sacramento, it was off to Nashville and CrimeCon, where Paul Haynes and I were set to deliver two presentations with the Sister Survivors on the Golden State Killer. Right before I boarded the plane, I got a text message from John Barg, the San Jose detective I was working with on finding the ginger murder fugitive who ran to Mexico. We had been playing a cat-and-mouse game with him for six months, ever since I found him while I was sitting in that back booth of the Star Wars cantina on Hollywood Boulevard. We would locate him, but the federales wouldn’t act, and he would relocate. Over and over. Barg said now it might be different.
Billy. New info and new issues with JM. I think we need a new ad. I will spare you the long-winded back story, but basically we believe we have found JM in a neighborhood in Guadalajara. A neighborhood called Santa Cruz Del Valle, north of the airport. Please check this area out and let me know what you think.
We have been assured by the feds (hold your breath) that they have boots on the ground ready to react to real time information that we receive about JM and his location in Guadalajara.
Our goal is to activate an ad campaign in this area and then respond to leads immediately.
We would like to flip the switch Tuesday morning.
How do you feel about all of this and can you help?
Thank you
JB
PS: When I read about the use of open source DNA on the Golden State case, I thought you might be involved…
“Let’s do it!” I wrote back. “I’m at the ready for Tuesday morning.”
“Super,” he replied.
Santa Cruz Del Valle: ¿Has visto a este hombre?
I listed all the murder suspect’s specifics. His red hair. His height. His tattoo. What he was wanted for. The phone number for the San Jose police department and, of course, the recompensa.
The ad was ready, waiting for Tuesday morning to hit publish.
I navigated through CrimeCon and the two thousand predominantly female attendees who packed the ballroom to hear our Golden State Killer talk. The biggest problem with true crime has always been its imbalance of villains to heroes. True crime is full of supervillains: Manson, Bundy, Gacy. But the superheroes are rarely acknowledged. They are anonymous civil servants. I always wanted that to change. And I wanted to give Paul Holes the rock-star introduction he was denied at the press conference. We brought him out, and he got a standing ovation.
The rest of the convention was not quite Beatlemania, but it was close. The last night, a bunch of podcasters fled the theme park–like atmosphere of the convention center for a meet-up at a bar on Broadway in downtown Nashville. After a couple of hours, I made an Irish exit and walked to the loading docks of the Country Music Hall of Fame.
I found the exact spot the surveillance video was trained on when Teddy Grasset and his friend were walking before the car with the glowing blue license plate holder crept up behind them. I followed the steps they ran as they were chased by the two men. They must have run right past a sprawling Johnny Cash mural, its peeling paint chips littering the sidewalk below, before Teddy was murdered.
• • •
The next day, I was back in Los Angeles. On Tuesday morning, I got the go-ahead from Barg. I hit publish, and the campaign to find our fugitive was live.
Three hours later, I got a series of texts from Barg.
“Shut it down now, buddy.”
“Right Now.”
“We have a live one.”
He sent a new photo. It was Miller, staring straight into the camera, almost attacking it. He was a lot thinner and had what looked like white powder on his nose.
“Roger that,” I replied. “Did they see the new post?”
“Oh, yeah. The phone lines exploded. I don’t want to get him spooked.”
I quickly deleted the ad. We had gone through this exercise before: we didn’t want any of his friends or family to see the post on Facebook and warn him that the search was heating up. So it was gone.
Four hours later, Barg wrote back.
“Bad news. Our guy went sideways. Let’s crank it back up. We need more tipsters.”
I created a new ad, set the parameters, and boosted a run for two days at two hundred bucks. This was a short game. I wanted to give it all we had. I just wouldn’t eat a steak for a while. The small radius meant we would hit about 80 percent of the Facebook users in the area.
Barg texted me three hours later.
“We have new intel. Can we re-center the location of the ad? Close, but a few blocks over.”
He gave me the coordinates, and I shifted the ad over about a half mile.
Tipsters started calling in again. Some asking for money up front. Some obviously fakes.
I kept checking the messages on Facebook. I had gotten very little. Everyone was using the phone number.
Then I saw a message.
It was in Spanish. I began talking to the tipster, jumping back and forth between the Facebook app and Google Translate. Af
ter fifteen minutes, I was able to convince them to give me their phone number. I texted it to John.
“They want you to call them.”
John rustled up his partner who speaks Spanish.
“We are calling him now… He sounds nervous… My Spanish speaking partner is smiling and giving me a huge thumbs up. So that’s a good sign.”
Ten minutes went by. John texted back. “Great info. Positive ID. He gave us the neighborhood. We are waiting on the exact address and phone number.”
Then I waited. And waited. The day turned into night. I guess the info wasn’t that great.
But the next morning, I didn’t get a text from Barg. I got a call.
He didn’t even say hello.
“We got him,” he said.
Hell yes!
“You have no idea the shit we had to pull together to make this happen,” he said. “It was ridiculous. But all started with that ad in Maz… Great job and thank you.”
No one would know about this one. No press conference. No fanfare. No Good Morning America.
He is suspected of killing a father of two. Not the numbers of the Golden State Killer. But he ripped a family apart. One of fifteen thousand that are ripped apart every year by a callous killer.
Later in the day, Barg sent over a photo of the fugitive, black handcuffs sitting atop the tattoo on his hand.
“A beautiful sight,” I wrote back.
• • •
I was exhausted. It had been ten days of little sleep and lots of celebratory toasts. I collapsed on my bed.
I woke up at 2:00 a.m., as usual.
I went to open up YouTube to watch some more unsolved murder videos, searching for another case to work from my bed. I was going to miss all the hubbub of the last few weeks. Not only for the solve but just for being around other people. I was back to doing this on my own again. Starting up another Facebook campaign to identify another murder suspect. Adding another few hundred to the $13,000 balance on my credit card. Wondering if this idea of crowdsolving would ever catch on and I could get some help to solve those 199,990 unsolved murders that I haven’t gotten to.
But first I opened up my Twitter feed. I had seen my follower list spike since the news of the Golden State Killer’s capture, and seeing all the retweets and comments from people was satisfying after tweeting for so long into the darkness to just a few thousand followers who were probably mostly bots. I read all the comments, then opened my messages.
Inside the inbox, I saw notes from friends. People offering congratulations and wanting to go out for more drinks to celebrate. One victim’s daughter from an older case, my first editor, John Mancini, a theme-park designer friend of mine.
I was about to open up YouTube to search for my case when I looked over at the “Requests” tab inside Twitter messages. If you don’t know the sender, this is where their messages go. Few people really ever check it.
I clicked on it. And my page lit up.
Hi Billy! I’ve been a Computer Forensics Investigator for four years. I have an MS in Cyber Forensics. I really support the work you are doing to encourage all of the able and willing sleuths interested in helping to solve cold cases! I would love to be a part of what you are doing.
Hi Billy, I heard you talking about a pilot program you were hoping a state might try out in which citizens who pass a simple background check do data mining work on a volunteer basis for cold cases. Can you please get back to me with more info about this? Perhaps I will propose it to my superiors as draft legislation for a future legislative session here in Connecticut.
Hi Billy. I’m an entrepreneur and run a software company and would love to help on the project any way I can.
Hi Billy. I have become fascinated with what you’ve promoted as “internet sleuthing.” I’m an engineer and a masters student and have found myself with a lot of time on my hands. I want to do something productive with it. My brother was killed and his killer was never brought to justice, so I know first-hand how it feels to be a family member with no closure. I’d like to help in any way that I can.
There were dozens of them. All people with skills. All wanting to help.
Mini Michelle McNamaras everywhere, all wanting to spend their every waking moment to help solve a crime. The army, the one I needed to take on the villain with a thousand faces, was going to happen. I was no longer going to have to do this alone.
I wrote all of them back, telling them that we would start working on building something that could bring a lot more justice to the families who need it. If we could do this right, we could solve so many unsolved murders.
Then I opened up my computer and ran through my cases.
I still needed to find the Girl with the Serpent Tattoo. And build the timeline for Rasmussen. And uncover all the places Joseph DeAngelo has been. And find the Owl’s Head Park Killer. And on, and on, and on.
The End.
No. It’s not the end. There can never be an end to this story. We still have more than hundreds of thousands of murders to solve and tens of thousands of missing persons to find. So come on. Let’s start.
But for the purpose of this chapter, I’ll play along.
The End.
Epilogue
Los Angeles, 2018
It’s well past 1:00 a.m. on a warm Tuesday night in May, and I’m rifling through old newspaper archives, searching for any information I can find about Long Island tattoo parlors that have since gone out of business. In 1997, the torso of a woman with a tattoo of a heart-shaped peach with a bite taken out of its side was found in Hempstead Lake State Park, not far from where I grew up. She was still missing a name. The detectives called her “Peaches.”
I first covered her story in 2002 in the Long Island Press. I would check back in on her every few years, but she remained nameless.
Then fifteen years after the story ran, there was a glimmer of hope.
They tested her DNA against bones that were found in 2011 near Jones Beach State Park. It was a match. Someone had killed Peaches and distributed pieces of her across two parks in Nassau County, New York.
They still didn’t know her name, but at least two mysteries had now become one.
Until they got another match.
The DNA of the remains of a toddler found near Jones Beach lined up with Peaches. She was a mother. And she was murdered along with her child. And detectives believed they were now both part of the Long Island Serial Killer investigation.
That was in December 2016. And tonight, we still had no idea who they were or who killed them. I broke out the credit card and entered the paywall of Newsday archives, going through old advertisements of tattoo parlors, hoping I might be able to track down someone who might have worked there and see if they could recognize Peaches’s tattoo. It’s a shot in the dark, something to do before I can convince the authorities to let me help connect them with someone who could perform a familial DNA search.
Three hours of looking at grainy newsprint images, and my brain began to wander.
I started looking at the other stories on the pages: students arrested in protests, ads for Jaws, Commodore desk calculators, and fancy, big-lapelled suits.
I was ready to call it a night when I decided to look for something else. That article my dad had told me about during that bedtime story when I was six. The one where he punched a detective and was arrested and refused to give his name, so they ran his photo with the headline DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN? I had looked for it before but never found it.
I couldn’t search under his name, since the fact that his identity was unknown was the whole point of the article. I had to try keywords. Unidentified. Punched. Detective. Arrested. Teenager. I came up empty-handed. I remembered the tattoo-covered kid my dad had bought the driver’s license from before he ran away to California. I tried “Chris Keer.” “Christopher Keer.”
; Still nothing.
Maybe I had the date ranges wrong. Maybe it was in another newspaper. Maybe my dad was telling me a tall tale just to get me to go to sleep. I was about to give up, when it occurred to me that I had no idea how Chris Keer might have spelled his name.
I searched Christopher Kear, K-E-A-R, and got one result.
I clicked on the link and came face-to-face with my dad.
His intense eyes were burning through the black-and-white photo, his expression at the same time both scared and angry. It was the only picture I have ever seen of him without his mustache. CHRISTOPHER KEAR? read the caption. POLICE STILL NEED NAME read the headline.
“Suffolk detectives yesterday hit another big roadblock in trying to find out who the real Christopher Kear is. It seems that the FBI doesn’t know either.
“First Squad detectives said an FBI report they received said the bureau had no record of the fingerprints of an arrested man who claims to be Christopher Kear of 25 Elwood Ave., Hicksville. Police said the Christopher Kear they tracked down at that address is currently in Kings Park State Hospital. And he’s got fingerprints and the testimony of relatives to prove it.
“Consequently, police still have a man who claims he is Kear in jail awaiting a hearing next week on a third-degree assault charge. When first arrested Aug. 26 by First Squad Commander Det. Lt. John Biscardi for allegedly punching the officer in the face, the man identified himself as Christopher Kear, 20. But during a preliminary court hearing Wednesday, he refused to give his name or address.”
The cops didn’t have a clue who he was. The FBI didn’t have a clue who he was. They turned to their last resort to find out who he was. They turned to the crowd. I printed out the page and hung it on my wall, my dad’s face looking down at me in the middle of all the pictures of the men I’m trying to find.
I smile every time I see it.
