“Relax, Martín, I’m not going to wash them or anything. Natalie can do that—consider it payment for the gas money you spend carting her around everywhere while I’m at work.”
“Hey, the pleasure of my company is payment enough,” Natalie said as she tossed a braid over her shoulder.
Martín burst out laughing, and Sash hollered her daughter’s name from the kitchen. Pushing aside the pictures in her head, Elle chuckled too.
As she stood to help Sash clean up, her phone buzzed in her pocket. Elle stepped into the hall and looked at the screen. There were dozens of email notifications from her show account. She ignored the alerts on her social media; she’d deal with those later. Most of the subject lines were the standard fare, but one jumped out like a typo on a billboard:
I know who he is.
3
Justice Delayed podcast
December 5, 2019
Transcript: Season 5, Episode 1
Elle:
What happened after the press went wild with the TCK moniker?
Sykes:
We had almost nothing to go on, no physical evidence. You didn’t have shows like CSI or Law & Order: SVU back then, so the awareness of what could be done with DNA wasn’t there for most people. Yet somehow, this guy avoided leaving any trace of himself behind. Which led us to think he might have some sort of science or medical training.
Elle:
Or that he was a cop.
Sykes:
That was also an option, yes. Either way, we weren’t able to find anything that could help us stop the inevitable from happening. Within hours of connecting Isabelle’s murder to the 1996 killings, we figured out who his next victim likely was: a seventeen-year-old girl, Vanessa Childs, who’d gone missing three days prior while taking out the trash at her fast food job. When we told her parents our suspicions, they were understandably distraught.
Elle voice-over:
There is a special kind of helplessness, waiting for someone to turn up dead. Vanessa’s family hoped police were wrong about the connection, but the timing was so precise. And then, late in the afternoon on the day Isabelle’s body was found, another girl went missing. Sixteen-year-old Tamera Smith, a promising basketball player and straight-A student, vanished on the short walk between her school and the gym.
Detectives continued to search for suspects. Lab results were rushed, but no male DNA was found on Isabelle’s body. They had nothing to go on. The story was all over the news by then, and sales of mace and handguns shot up. Everyone was waiting for the next girl to disappear; everyone was determined not to be that girl. The mayor of Minneapolis reportedly considered instating a curfew, but was told it would send the wrong message that the women were to blame.
Vanessa’s family organized searches in the parks and wooded areas around the suburb of Roseville, where she was last seen, but it was fruitless. Three days later, a week after she had been taken, her body was found in some shrubs on the shore of Bde Maka Ska. There was barely time for the city to breathe before Tamera’s parents went to the media, convinced their daughter would be next and the police weren’t doing enough to stop it.
[SOUND BREAK: A phone ringing three times.]
Anonymous:
Hello?
Elle:
Hello, is this [redaction tone]?
Anonymous:
Who’s calling?
Elle:
Hi, my name is Elle Castillo, and I’m an investigator looking into the Countdown Killer case. I was hoping I could talk to you about—
Anonymous:
Are you a detective?
Elle:
No.
Anonymous:
I don’t talk to you journalists.
Elle:
Well, I’m not really a journalist either.
Anonymous:
Then who the hell are you?
Elle:
I’m an independent investigator specializing in cold cases of crimes against children. I share my work on a podcast.
Anonymous:
A what?
Elle voice-over:
It took some time to explain the concept of a podcast, especially an investigative podcast, but eventually I got her to come around. I’m keeping her anonymous, because it was clear she didn’t want to be associated with this case. For the purposes of clarity, I asked if I could call her Susan, and she agreed.
Elle:
So, can you tell me how you came to be involved with the Countdown Killer case?
Susan:
I came to be involved by sticking my nose where it didn’t belong, and I have regretted that decision for about twenty years.
Elle:
Can you explain what you mean by that?
Susan:
It was in 1997, after the second girl turned up dead. For days, I’d noticed my husband acting strangely: coming home disheveled and skittish hours after I expected him. At first, I thought it was an affair, but that didn’t explain the dirt.
Elle:
Dirt?
Susan:
Yes, his pants were filthy, like he’d been kneeling in a garden or something, only it was the dead of winter. It took me two washes to get his jeans clean. Then one night we were watching TV together, and they were talking about this serial killer on the news, how they thought he had killed two girls the year before, and now it seemed like he was back. And Jimmy, he’d been half asleep, but as soon as that segment came on, he sat up like he’d just been shocked by a bad outlet. He didn’t say anything, just stared at the TV until they moved on. It made my hair stand on end.
So that night, I started thinking and looking at my old calendar, and I realized that Jimmy had told me he was on a work trip a year before. Right at the same time those poor girls got killed. I just couldn’t shake the feeling it could be him.
Elle:
What did you do?
Susan:
If you can believe it, at first I considered not saying anything. I mean, I was only twenty-three. My husband was twenty-seven. We were young, and I was in love. I didn’t think he could do something like that, but the timing was just . . . uncanny. So eventually, I put all my notes together and visited the detective who was running the case.
Elle voice-over:
Detective Sykes was in that blurry stage of having too many leads and not enough time, so when Susan walked in with all the reasons why the killer had to be her husband, he initially brushed her off. She was halfway to her car by the time he scanned her notes and ran after her into the parking lot. Susan’s husband, Jimmy, became the first major suspect Detective Sykes had—a solid lead, after all this time.
Sykes:
You know in Greek mythology when they talk about the sirens, those beautiful women that lure sailors to the rocks and kill them? Well, [redaction tone] was a nice girl, but deep down, I think she had some siren in her. Of course, it’s mostly my fault. By the time Tamera went missing, I was so desperate to have something to tell these girls’ parents that I wanted to listen to her. And she wasn’t wrong—the timeframe of the murders did line up with her husband’s unexplained absences. But that was it. So, I got together a detail to follow this guy 24/7 for the next two days, to see if he would lead us to wherever the girl was being kept. We figured TCK visited his victims during the seven days he held them. He may even have kept them in his home—there was evidence on Isabelle’s and Vanessa’s bodies that they had been forced to do some domestic labor while they were held captive.
Elle voice-over:
This was an escalation. Beverly and Isabelle showed no physical signs of abuse other than the effects of poison and lashes on their backs, but TCK’s triad of victims in 1997 was different. Their hands were dried and cracking, and harsh cleaning chemicals were found on their skin. Their knees were bruised and their palms blistered. In addition to the lashings, TCK had clearly forced them to clean, probably for hours on end, but it was impossible to know what or where. Or, more importantly, why.
Also, while I think Detective Sykes is entitled to his view of her as a siren, nothing about my interview with Susan led me to believe she was being intentionally manipulative or distracting when she accused her husband. Even though she later divorced him, she clearly loved him at the time and agonized over the decision to come forward. And she wasn’t completely off base. The tail Detective Sykes put on Jimmy turned up a reasonable explanation for his odd behavior—although not an innocent one.
Elle:
Tell me about what you found out after surveilling Jimmy.
Sykes:
She was right about one thing: he was committing a crime. Jimmy worked as a county commissioner, and he’d been accepting cash bribes in exchange for granting government contracts to certain businesses. He’d been burying money on a property out in the country that he’d bought with cash, without telling her. He thought once he had enough saved up, he could surprise her with their dream house and tell her he won the lottery or something.
Elle:
What about the way he reacted to the news story about the murdered girls? [redaction tone] said he sat up like he’d been shocked and couldn’t stop staring at the screen.
Sykes:
Ah right, yeah, we asked him about that. Apparently, he was looking at the moving chyron on the bottom of the newscast, where they show the stock market numbers. One of the companies he had invested in with some of his illicit cash had taken a dive. He lost a huge chunk of his investment. He told us he kept watching for the numbers to come around again, hoping he had imagined them, and he hadn’t realized his wife had noticed his reaction.
Elle:
So, you never found any reason to believe he was involved in the murders?
Sykes:
None whatsoever, and I want to make that clear. I’m not excusing political bribery, but what Jimmy did, he’s paid for. He lost his job, his wife left him after he was convicted, and he spent eight years in prison. There’s no way he could be TCK.
Elle voice-over:
It might seem like such an obvious thing that it doesn’t need to be stated, but suspicion of Jimmy has continued to circulate in online forums and the popular culture references of this case for two decades. Some online sleuths believe that he was the original Countdown Killer and then a copycat took over, or that he was partnered with someone else from the beginning who continued the work after he was in prison. They say this is why there were only two girls that first year, and also why there was a difference in the way they were treated. I want to make this clear: in my years of investigating this case, I have looked into Jimmy’s life extensively, and I can say with absolute certainty that he is not TCK. You don’t have to believe me, but if you want to save yourself hours of trying to pin these gruesome murders on an innocent man, rest assured that I have tried and failed.
What is true is this: while Detective Sykes and his team were reasonable in listening to Susan’s suspicion of her husband, their investigation took them off course. And while officers followed Jimmy from his work to his property and watched him bury stolen money, Tamera Smith’s body was found under the Stone Arch Bridge. Like Isabelle and Vanessa, she showed signs of manual labor.
Elle:
I’m wondering if you can clear something up about the timeline for me. A lot of people interested in this case find it confusing. If TCK took the girls three days apart, wouldn’t he have had them all together for at least one day? One girl on day one, two girls on day three, and three girls on day six?
Sykes:
Yes, that was commonly misreported at the time, and you still see it pop up now and then. Especially in online forums, where people want to dispute the patterns and numbers. There will always be people out there who don’t want to admit the existence of an active serial killer. The girls were taken no less than seventy-two hours apart—three full days. Some people find it easier to think of it in terms of nights, though. He had each girl for three nights before he took another.
Elle:
So, they were there six nights, not seven, before he killed them?
Sykes:
That’s right. They were usually dead before noon on the seventh day.
Elle:
Okay, that helps, thank you. I think it’s important to be clear about the pattern, and with a case this huge that has had so much information put out already, it’s good to make sure it’s accurate.
Sykes:
I’m all for accuracy, yes. Don’t see a lot of that in media these days.
Elle:
I only aim to tell the truth on my show, Detective. Now, despite the lead on Jimmy not panning out, you did get something when you found Tamera’s body—a clue that, despite TCK’s obsessive attention to detail, seemed to be a mistake.
Sykes:
Yes, on her pant cuff, there was a stain the lab later determined to be tea.
Elle:
Tell me more about that. Your department has said that it’s a special kind of Darjeeling tea, but there are people who have expressed doubts that you could tell what specific tea a stain comes from. What do you say to those people?
Sykes:
Well, first of all, it’s not my department saying it; all we did was pass on what the forensics lab told us. And our knowledge of this tea sample has evolved over time, as the lab technology has improved. Back in 1997, they were only able to tell us it was an oolong tea, because of the way the leaves were oxidized. Based on the flecks of tea in the stain, they were reasonably confident it was brewed loose-leaf, rather than from a sachet. But they did more testing on the sample last year, using a newer technique called direct analysis in real time, or DART, which they can do without diminishing the sample. That’s good because it was small to begin with, and now it’s almost gone. Several local teahouses donated boxes of all their teas, and a few of them made lists of signature ingredients for the lab techs to look for when examining the sample. This helped the lab identify markers they could compare the stain to.
Elle:
Yes, she didn’t want to be recorded, but the forensic biologist I spoke to, Dr. Forage, said they combined the DART process with something called a High-Resolution Accurate-Mass mass spectrometer. They were able to identify the specific tea the stain most likely came from, an expensive loose-leaf Darjeeling imported from India that uses a patented fermentation process. Something called Majestic Sterling.
Elle voice-over:
Quick listener note: A local tea expert I interviewed talked to me for over thirty minutes about Majestic Sterling, and I’m sure he’ll be disappointed to know that I didn’t use any of the audio. I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t do that to you, although I’m deeply grateful for his time. I think the most important information he relayed boils down to this (pardon the pun): this is not your run-of-the-mill Celestial Seasonings Darjeeling. Majestic Sterling sells for almost a dollar a gram.
Sykes:
I’m a coffee guy myself, and the science always went over my head, but if you talked to Dr. Forage, you have the best information available. She’s the foremost expert in Hennepin and did the latest round of testing herself. Hates being on any sort of media, but she knows her stuff.
Elle:
As I understand it, the identification of the substance as oolong tea led to the first major debate within the investigative team over what information should be released to the public, and what should be kept secret. Ultimately, you decided to let the public know, hoping it might push someone who was already suspicious of their neighbor or family member into coming forward, isn’t that right?
Sykes:
Yes, that’s right. That was the first moment I can point to in this case where I can say, “That was a mistake.” We should not have done that.
Elle voice-over:
Next time, on Justice Delayed . . .
4
Elle
January 9, 2020
At the kitchen door, Elle told Martín and Sash she’d come right back, and then she raced up to her studio.
She opened the email on her desktop. It contained only one line of text besides the subject—a phone number. She dialed it on her cell and held her breath. On the fourth ring, a man with a Mexican accent said, “Hello?”
“Yeah, hi, this is Elle Castillo from the Justice Delayed podcast.” She glanced at the name on his email. “Is this Leo Toca?”
Girl, 11 Page 3