Chase Darkness with Me

by Billy Jensen

  And even if the person you found is guilty, do you really want to post something that could lead to a horrible outcome?

  When sixty-three-year-old Brenda Leyland was found dead in a hotel room in Leicestershire, England, police searched for her name online and found it on a website called McCann Hate Exposed. Much like JonBenét Ramsey’s parents in the States, the McCanns have been subject to immeasurable internet trolling since their daughter went missing from a Portugal holiday apartment in 2007. Using the handle @sweepyface, Leyland took to Twitter at least forty-three hundred times to talk about the crime and implicate the parents of little Madeleine. The McCann Hate Exposed page had “doxxed” Leyland and twenty-six other Twitter users who had been trolling the parents of Madeleine McCann. The site published Leyland’s private information for anyone to see.

  After a TV news crew showed up at her door to ask her about the trolling, Leyland fled town, checked into a hotel, and killed herself.

  Finding out information about someone you think is guilty is what we are trying to do. Publishing it on the internet for all to see, exploit, and possibly use for nefarious deeds is not. Collect the information and send it to the detective in charge.

  Rule Number 2: Do Not Expect to Get Credit

  “Okay, I’ll follow the rules,” you say. “But what if I do all this work, get a great tip, send it to the police, and they make an arrest? No one will know I got the guy. What if I don’t get credit for helping solve the case?”

  My answer to you: I feel your pain, but get in line.

  We all want credit. You will be spending hundreds, if not thousands, of hours on cases if you go all in. You will experience failure after failure. When you finally see something come to fruition, you will want to shout it from the rooftops. If you can get credit, that’s great. But whether you do or not is entirely up to the detectives. Some are willing to say that the success of the job was a team effort with multiple factors and multiple people pitching in, and others will take all the credit for themselves or their internal team. If they don’t thank you or call you out, don’t take it personally.

  So be pragmatic when it comes to credit. The bad guy is in bracelets. That’s the most important thing. The victim’s family will know how much work you did, and so will you.

  Rule Number 3: Be Safe

  Investigating crime is not a game. It can get very real, very quick. You need to take precautions and know when to say when.

  Set up new Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts separate from your personal accounts. Do not share information about yourself, other than the fact that you are a victim’s advocate helping the family. And never go “undercover.”

  Marie Parent was a Scottish grandmother living in Quebec and taking a private detective course. When it came time to choose a final assignment, she looked into the case of Louise Ellis, a journalist who went missing in 1995. Parent cozied up to the main suspect in the case, Ellis’s boyfriend, Brett Morgan, already a convicted killer. She spent time with him at his house. She recorded conversations. Police learned of Parent via the wiretap they had running on Morgan’s phone and asked if she would go undercover to catch him. She agreed. She got close. Too close. She kissed him “four or five times,” she said. He finally took her to where he dumped Ellis’s body.

  In those woods, Parent thought she was going to be murdered herself when Morgan put his hands around her neck…to tie a bandana around it as a gift. But she had uncovered enough info to nail him. Police offered her a reward of less than $5,000. She couldn’t even find a job as a private detective afterward, saying that she had “showed up” all the PIs in the area. This was some Silence of the Lambs shit—using a trainee to catch a killer.

  Dr. Maria del Rosario Fuentes Rubio was not so lucky. Rubio was a general practitioner living in Reynosa, Mexico. But on Twitter, the thirty-six-year-old mother used the pseudonym Felina (Catwoman) and posted detailed information about the drug cartel violence that was taking over her city. People followed her less to rubberneck than to know which areas to avoid getting trapped in if a shoot-out erupted. She often sent out her reports in real time, as they happened. The cartel felt this put their members in peril, not to mention the fact that Rubio often tweeted out cheers when cartel members were struck down.

  The cartel told her to stop. They threatened her life. She didn’t back down.

  In October 2014, they kidnapped her and commandeered her Twitter account. “Friends and family, my real name is Maria del Rosario Fuentes Rubio,” they tweeted. “I am a doctor. Today my life has reached its end. I have nothing left but to say to you all, don’t make the same mistake I have. You will gain nothing by it. To the contrary, today I realize that I have found my death in exchange for nothing. They are closer to us than you think.”

  “Shut down your accounts,” read the next post. “Do not risk your families’ lives as I have done.”

  Her captors posted photos. One showed the face of a woman, clearly understanding that she was going to die. The next showed the same woman with a bullet in her head.

  If you are threatened, tell the police. Being a citizen investigator is not worth dying over.

  • • •

  There are your three rules. They should, of course, work in tandem with the rules you should be living by every day: Be kind. Be true. Don’t be an ass. Use your head.

  And don’t be rude or dox other citizen detectives you encounter on Twitter, Reddit, or other message boards that you don’t agree with. Don’t show up at people’s houses or places of work.

  If you want to grab a bunch of friends or your book club and tackle a case, that could be great. Get that one friend or family member who spends too much time analyzing the Bachelor or Real Housewives (they know who they are) and pull them in as well. Create a private Facebook group, split up tasks, pool your money to start a campaign, drink some wine, and who knows, maybe you might actually solve one.

  How to Choose Your First Case

  So you have your rules. But there are five thousand unsolved murders every year in the United States and fifty thousand missing-persons cases. Where do you start?

  Start in your own neck of the woods. Location is key to so many crimes, and you’re going to know the ins and outs of your town or city or county. If you are effective within your city/county/state, you will begin to earn the trust of law enforcement. It’s a great feeling when you don’t have to cold-call a department every time you have a case you want to work. And if you help them clear some cases, they will start contacting you, looking for help.

  Start by scanning local news websites for unsolved crimes for which police have released a photo or video of the suspect or persons of interest but still don’t have any answers. Don’t just stick with murder. For many people, murders in your town may, thankfully, be few and far between. That doesn’t mean you can’t help. Hit-and-runs, sexual assaults, robberies—these are all crimes you could go after if the clues are good enough.

  Set up Google news alerts for terms like police, identify, surveillance video, and suspect, plus the names of all your local towns and counties. If you want to be on the alert for missing persons, the alert should read last seen and missing.

  You might want to sign up for a new dedicated Gmail for all your alerts to keep them separate from your personal account, as they will add up.

  When you get an email alert, open the link and check out the story. Watch or read it a bunch of times. And then wait. Monitor the story. Set up a Google alert for the victim’s name. But let it breath for a bit. I typically only act after three to four weeks from the time the story ran or the police asked the media for help. Then I call the detective. By that time, if they are still looking for answers, it means they are probably stuck.

  A quick scan of a recent Google alerts looks like this:

  PD: MAN ARRESTED FOR MURDER OF MOTHER, STEPFATHER LINKED TO 7 OTHER PHOENIX-AREA MURDERS

/>   BODY DISCOVERED ALONG MONTEBELLO BIKE PATH; MURDER INVESTIGATION UNDERWAY

  POLICE REQUEST PUBLIC’S HELP IN LAWRENCE MURDER INVESTIGATION

  The story about the man arrested and linked to seven other murders in Phoenix was caught in this alert thanks to the keywords police, identify, and surveillance video. But it is clear: they have already caught the guy.

  The body on the bike path is a next-day story about a body found with head trauma in Montebello, California. There is no video and not many other details. I could open a campaign, but there is not really much to go on to both capture someone’s attention in the split second you need to on social media and to get that someone to contact you with actionable information.

  The last one, about police needing the public’s help in a murder investigation in Lawrence, Massachusetts, is much more promising. A click on the link reveals a story about twenty-five-year-old Mindy Tran, who was found shot to death in a crashed car on Hillside Avenue on November 26, 2017.

  The accompanying video looks to be shot with a black-and-white surveillance camera, pointed toward a private yard with a street in the background. At twenty-seven seconds, two individuals enter the frame from the left, walking in the street. One is wearing light pants and looks to have his hands in the pockets of a dark hoodie. The other is wearing a light-colored top. By thirty-eight seconds, they are out of the frame. At forty-two seconds (the footage has been edited), you see the two individuals again, this time as blurs running from left to right and then out of the frame again.

  The video isn’t great. Someone wouldn’t be able to identify the people if they just casually knew them from the neighborhood. And we have no rallying point, such as a store or restaurant where people often go and would have stories about that they would want to share. But if the persons of interest are walking in this neighborhood, they might very well be local. And the police aren’t looking for a car, which doesn’t generate nearly as many comments as videos of people, even if they are far away.

  I would run this as a one-mile radius friends/family/enemies campaign. It would be geared less to find people to identify the individuals from the video and more to catching a person who might have heard something in the neighborhood about someone who was shot to death in their car and might have a hunch about who the shooter could have been. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, we need to ask the family and the police for permission.

  Reach Out to the Family

  The family is hurting. They want justice. And they are angry. Find them via Facebook or through a Google white pages’ search. Introduce yourself as a victim’s advocate. Don’t call yourself a journalist or a blogger or a citizen detective. Tell them you are sorry for their loss. Explain your method. A lot of them won’t get it. Say you want to help and you are not charging them any money. Repeat, you are not charging them any money. And you will not collect any reward. The reward, if any, is for the tipster. (And don’t ask them to pay for the ad. This is all out of your pocket.) Tell them it’s worked before—describe it as a digital wanted poster that can hit every Facebook or Twitter or Instagram user in town. Tell them the odds aren’t great, but it can only help. If they tell you no, reply “Thank you for your time, and again, I’m sorry for your loss,” and move on to the next case. If they tell you yes, ask them to inform family and friends that they will be seeing images of the people who killed their loved one on their social feed if they live in the area. It can be a real shock to them if they aren’t warned.

  Next, do the same thing with the detective working the case. He might stop you right there and say “we don’t need any help.”

  That’s great. Yes, you’ve just spent a few hours going through cases, finding one, looking at the video, and finding the right detective to call. It’s happened to me a lot. Be happy. The bad guy is on his way to being caught.

  But if the police need help, tell them you don’t charge anything. Tell them that there is this guy who has had success with this technique and wrote a book about it and thinks a lot of murders can be solved this way. Tell them you don’t want a reward. That you do this to help victims’ families. Tell them that you will send any tips that come your way.

  If it is a missing-persons case, they often will jump at the chance for any help. They want to spread the word far and wide, and they are more comfortable with you putting up what are tantamount to smart digital missing-persons posters than trying to find a killer. In fact, in my experience, there was only one time a family declined. If you do start a missing-persons campaign, you have a huge responsibility. It is a 24/7 job. Someone who might have information might make a comment or send a message, and you need to respond immediately and get the information to both the family and the authorities. It is not for the faint of heart. If you cannot devote the intense time, please don’t do it.

  Build Your Campaign

  First, you need a Facebook profile. Facebook is on the outs with young people, and I kick myself every day, wishing I had come up with this idea eight years ago when the kids were still active. But people still use it more than any other website outside of Google and YouTube. It is where they organize their activities and communicate with others. Facebook also had the forethought to buy Instagram, which is where many young people have migrated, along with Snapchat.

  But our hub is going to be Facebook. From your Facebook page, click on the triangle at the top right of the page and scroll down to the create a page link. After you click, you’ll be presented with two options: create a business page or a community page. Click the get started button under the community option. You will be asked to name your page. In the same way you first look at the sender whenever you get an email, your name is one of the first things people will see, and you need to make it count. “El Monte Jack in the Box Killer” was clear and concise. It gave people the town, the location, and the jarring effect of Killer. “River North Puncher” was close, but to be honest, I should have mentioned 7-Eleven or the intersection in the title. “Inkster Shooter at Fast Franks Party Shop” was another I used to find a killer at a local—and notorious—liquor store in Inkster, Michigan. For the Girl with the Serpent Tattoo, I used “Justice: Searching for Tampa Bay Tattooed Female,” just to try to get everyone who saw it to rack their brains for all the women they know with tattoos, then they would look at the image and see where the tattoo was placed.

  For one that caught a killer in Southern California, I used the names of two neighborhoods, then a question: “La Puente/Bassett: Do you Know Me?” You are grabbing the users’ attention by mentioning their neighborhood. Then you are giving them a call to action.

  If you are looking for a missing person, use “Have you seen” or “Where is” then the missing person’s name. “Have you seen Jamie Harroun?”

  Then you have to pick a category, which is a new Facebook requirement. I often choose website. If you choose something else, they will start asking for things like addresses.

  Now you need to add a profile picture. For Marques Gaines’s case in Chicago, I spent about ten minutes trying to grab the perfect screenshot of the Man in the Green Hoodie before I captured the best one to use. It’s not always going to be perfect. It just has to be the best one you can capture that someone might see and say, “Hmm, I might know that guy.” If you have a sketch, roll with that.

  For a missing person, use the most recent photo that the family is using. So often, I have seen people use older photos of missing persons, either because they are the quickest ones to access or their missing loved one looks the best in them. The pictures going out into the world need to be the best representation of what the person looks like right now. As I did with Morgan Bauer, ask for video of the missing person to use in the ad. People can change their hair, but they rarely change their voice or mannerisms.

  Upload the pic. Facebook will ask you for a cover photo. Here, I like to use a map of the area I am looking for information from. You could al
so use Google Street View photos.

  Upload, and your page is set. Now you have to build your post. This is the most important step.

  Start writing a post and adding a video or photo as you would on your personal page.

  Your words are key. You need to grab people. You need to be conversational. But the image—either still or moving—is most important. Marques Gaines in Chicago, Pacman in Chesapeake, White Boy Q in Tallahassee, the Halloween Mask Murder in El Monte. All had engaging copy and compelling video.

  For Marques Gaines’s murder in Chicago, I took on the persona of the puncher himself, the Man in the Green Hoodie. This was my first, and it’s a technique I use sparingly.

  This is the video where I punch a stranger—a stranger who later dies. It was taken 4:20 a.m. on Sunday, Feb. 7 outside the 7-Eleven on State and Hubbard in River North, Chicago. I am the man in the green hooded jacket and white sneakers. (The man who died is in the blue shirt. He just went to the store for some chips.) If you know my name or anything about me—anything at all—please message me here or leave a comment. If you don’t have any information, but have friends in Chicago, please share. His family desperately wants answers.

  With Pacman’s murder in Chesapeake, I gave the reader a task:

  Watch the way this man walks. Look at his thin frame. He is a murder suspect, wanted in the killing of a good man in the South Norfolk neighborhood of Chesapeake, VA in early August. Do you recognize him? Maybe someone who you haven’t seen around for a while, who left town in August? Please message with any information, no matter how small. Please.

  Teddy Grasset’s murder in Nashville was the same. You, the reader, have a job:

  See these two men walking? In a few seconds, one of them will be dead. See that car pulling up behind them? Do you know anyone who recently drove a Silver Chevy Impala with a glowing blue license plate holder? Watch the two men get out of that car. Do you recognize them? This happened behind the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville on Sept. 25. Please message with any information. And please share.