Elle stumbled back outside, tears finally flooding her eyes as she looked up and down the sidewalk on their block. The evening sky glowed pale orange from the freshly fallen snow. The streetlights illuminated sparkling tree branches, parked cars, and a couple abandoned plastic sleds. But there was nobody in sight.
Natalie was gone.
22
Justice Delayed podcast
Recorded November 28, 2019
Unaired recording: Elle Castillo, monologue
Elle:
Every investigation has flaws. Every investigator makes mistakes. Over the decades since he officially became inactive, detectives and even a couple investigative journalists have blamed cases on the elusive TCK. Sometimes they did so with compelling evidence: a case of ricin poisoning, eleven-year-old girls who went missing or were killed at various times, another couple found dead in a cabin fifty miles north of the one TCK’s last victim escaped. Even Detective Sykes admitted to being fooled once, in 2008, by a series of four murders in Fargo that seemed to revolve around an obsession with numbers.
But they have all been wrong. We have all been wrong.
Longtime listeners might remember that I actually knew Ayaan Bishar, Commander of Crimes Against Children at Minneapolis Police Department, before we worked together on the Jair Brown case. We met when I worked in CPS, when I was put on a case that involved a missing child.
I responded to a call from neighbors concerned about a young girl named Maddie Black. They hadn’t seen her in several days, which was unusual as she often played on the swing set outside their apartment building. Her mother was separated from her father and lived with a man that the neighbors said was often verbally abusive. The mother and the boyfriend both claimed to have no idea where Maddie was, and based on witness statements from the girl’s friends, it seemed the last time she had been seen was when she got off the school bus to walk the two blocks to her house. No one saw her get taken, but she never arrived home.
We looked into the girl’s father, which was routine procedure. He lived two hours away and seemed to be shocked about Maddie’s disappearance, although a couple of her friends mentioned that Maddie had seemed afraid the last time she was supposed to spend the weekend at his house.
I . . . I should have listened. Those are the kinds of clues that make a good social worker’s senses fire up, but I ignored them.
The circumstances of her kidnapping were eerily familiar to me. Even at that time, I knew the TCK case inside and out. Maddie was eleven years old, and although her family was in much more turmoil than those of the other TCK victims, it seemed possible to me that he was responsible. Once I started looking at the similarities, it seemed obvious. She was the right age, from the right background. She had disappeared the same way most of his victims had—walking alone in the course of her normal daily routine. So when I spoke to Ayaan Bishar, who was the detective assigned to the case, I told her I was certain that TCK had decided to start killing again. By the time two days had passed and there was no ransom call or sign of a body, I thought I had her convinced. Not only had Maddie been taken by TCK, but another girl was due to be snatched the next day. Other clues came in, a couple of family friends saying we should really take a closer look at Maddie’s father, but TCK was so clever, I wouldn’t have even put it past him to choose a victim that would have us pointing the finger at someone else. Maybe it was an improvement, a sophistication of his technique that he had added over the years.
It was not. Four days after Maddie disappeared, Ayaan pursued a tip about an alias Maddie’s father used, and she tracked down an apartment he’d rented under the fake name. Having heard police busting down the door, the man decided that if he couldn’t have his daughter, no one could. They broke in just before he could shoot her. She was saved, but the next day when I went in to work, I had a resignation letter with me.
I was burned out at my job. I feared my mistake had nearly cost a girl her life. At the same time, in my personal life, I had my first and only taste of what it was like to be a parent through a burgeoning friendship with my neighbor and her daughter.
I spent a few weeks on my couch, mourning what felt like the end of my career and binge-listening to every true crime podcast I could find. Finally, late one night, drunk on sleep deprivation and half a bottle of Shiraz, I decided I could do one myself. Despite my failure with Maddie’s case, I hadn’t lost my passion for helping children who were victims of crime. Maybe I just needed to go about it a different way.
The thought of a predator going after my neighbor’s daughter—this perfect, tiny, bright-eyed girl with the stubborn chin and unfair dimple in her cheek—made me queasy with rage. But I knew it was a reality. There were men who preyed on girls like her. I had known too many of them in my life, seen too many get away with their crimes, and I knew I could do something to stop it. That night, I recorded the first episode of what would become Justice Delayed. A few months later, I released season one.
As it is with so many things in life, it wasn’t one event that led me to this work—it was a confluence of them coming together at the right time. We are a product of not just the experiences we have, but our reactions to them. If I had to point to one thing, though—one thing that started it all—it was Maddie Black’s case. Everyone has a catalyst, a person or event or message that sets them on their path. Something that when you look back at their history, you can see how everything that happened later all flowed out from this one thing.
Their origin story.
Part III
The Fuse
23
DJ
1971 to 1978
The first woman DJ killed was his mother. She died in childbirth, screaming as she expelled his writhing body along with too much of her own blood.
It was God’s will that she died; that was what his father reminded him whenever one of his schoolmates teased him for not having a mother. The Lord had made DJ for a purpose, and it was the last act of God’s plan for his mother to bring him into this world. Once he was born, her purpose was fulfilled and the Lord called her home. There was some comfort in that, knowing he must be special since God was willing to sacrifice his mother to put him on this earth.
DJ never felt like he lacked anything by not having a mom. The men in his family were strong stock. His father, Josiah, was a plumber who worked six days a week and never went to a doctor as far back as DJ could remember. His brothers were football players and part-time farmhands once they entered their teenage years. They had dinner together every night that Charles and Thomas didn’t have practice. They went to Mass every Sunday, and Josiah read to DJ from the Bible each night before bed. It wasn’t a remarkable life, but the familiarity of each day wrapped around him like a warm blanket.
Everything changed on a Tuesday in the middle of summer when DJ was seven years old. Charles and Thomas were off at Bible camp for a week, and DJ was alone with his father. They were playing chess on their front porch, listening to the cicadas scream. As the muggy afternoon slowly melted into cool evening, the phone rang and Josiah went to answer it. DJ was planning his next move when a loud, violent sound came from inside the house.
He ran to the kitchen, where his father was on the floor, holding the phone to his ear with the cord wrapped around his forearm. There were tears on his face. DJ had never seen him cry before. It took him several tries to get the news out of Josiah.
Charles and Thomas had sneaked a boat out onto Lake Superior the night before, and they had never come back. Josiah packed him up in the truck and they drove to the summer camp in Duluth, five hours in the car with DJ sitting quiet and numb. His father alternated between shouting denials and whispering prayers.
Nothing had changed when they arrived. The boat was still missing, lost on the great lake that stretched farther than any body of water DJ had ever seen. He wondered if this was what the ocean looked like. Surely, it couldn’t be any bigger than this. He scanned the horizon, as if somehow everyone had just missed it
, and there his brothers would be, waving for help or laughing in their natural carefree way, surprised that everyone was so worried while they were just out for an adventure.
The hours dragged by, and more search parties were dispatched. A helicopter beat the air over DJ’s head.
“Charles and Thomas will be back soon,” he told his father. His brothers were just making trouble. It was summer. They probably found some girls and went out with them for what Charles called a “night squeeze.”
As they waited, DJ noted down the number of police officers, vehicles, camp counselors, and other searchers that crawled the shore. He couldn’t believe the quantity of them. He liked numbers. He was no good at writing, and he was never an athlete like his older brothers, but when he was given his first math worksheet at six years old, it was like seeing a language he’d always spoken written down for the first time. Numbers formed the foundation of the world. Every angle, every atom, every cell could be defined by an equation. Learning this had allowed him to grip on to a world that usually slipped through his fingers. He tried to calculate the odds of the boys returning safely as the hours went by, but there were too many variables—too many unknowns.
Twenty-one hours. That was how long it took the police to find his brothers’ bodies. They washed up on the shore of Manitou Island, one of the Apostle Islands off the coast of Wisconsin. A storm had brought them there, thrashing their boat and their bodies against the rocks. DJ was never allowed to see them, which made it worse. He imagined his brothers’ broken bones, torn skin, crushed heads. He pictured their last moments, when they knew they would die. He later found out they had drowned, had already been dead before their bodies were broken, but the images still remained.
The night after they were found, his father brought DJ home. He said nothing in the car, spoke no words when they arrived at their stuffy, empty house. People came over every few hours during that first week, neighbors and church friends filling their refrigerator with lasagna and weird hot dishes. Then came the funeral and, after that, silence.
For days after, Josiah didn’t speak. DJ tried asking him questions. He tried pretending to fall and hurt himself. He did the things he knew annoyed his father the most: played Charles’s drum kit in the barn, whistled loudly while he peed, drank from the orange juice carton. None of it made a difference.
Then he remembered the plant. It was in his mother’s sunroom, the special sanctuary his father had built for her when they bought the house. The leaves were a bright, eye-catching red; she had planted it herself using seeds from the bigger version growing wild on the farm. He had brought it to school for show and tell once, without asking his father, and when Josiah found out, he had screamed at DJ until the vein in his jaw turned purple. He told him the seeds on the plant would make him sick and it was too dangerous to bring to school.
Maybe the plant would wake his father up.
DJ brought it out to the dining room table and set it in the center, pushing aside a week’s worth of dirty dishes to make room. He left it there and went up to his room when he heard Josiah coming. He expected to hear his father’s feet stamping up the stairs any second, but they never came.
When he went down for breakfast the next morning, his father was sitting there, drinking his coffee with the plant in front of him. It was like he didn’t even see it.
The anger swirled in DJ like a funnel cloud. His brothers were gone, but he was still here, and if his father didn’t even notice the bright colorful buds on this sacred plant, then what hope did he have? Then it came to him: if he got sick, his father would have to take care of him.
When Josiah left for work, DJ plucked one of the pods from the plant, cracked it open, and popped the brown seed in his mouth. It was oily, but not bitter.
DJ picked up his backpack and went to school.
* * *
At lunch, DJ’s stomach started cramping when he ate his peanut butter sandwich. His mouth and throat burned like he had swallowed a lit match. By the end of the day, his body was radiating fever. He stumbled home holding his gut and collapsed on the sofa with a glass of lukewarm water on the coffee table. He awoke to a sensation he’d never felt before: the pressure of father’s rough palm on his forehead. Josiah picked him up and brought him to his own bed, laying him down on what DJ knew was his mother’s side, even though he’d never had the chance to see her resting there.
He drifted back to sleep.
The next day, his father stayed home from work and cared for him, leaving cool compresses on his forehead and feeding him tepid broth. He sat by DJ’s bed and read from the Bible, just like he had every night before Thomas and Charles died. There was a warm comfort to it, the sound of his father’s voice wrapped around the poetry of Psalms and the wisdom of Proverbs. Those were his two favorite books; all the advice you needed in the world was right there—that’s what Josiah always said.
DJ shifted between sleep and wakefulness without being conscious of the transition. Once he opened his eyes and his father was lying down next to him, eyes closed and tears streaming down his face. “Please,” he was whispering. “Please, not him. You promised me.”
Each time that he woke, he only felt worse. A doctor friend of Josiah’s came and scanned his body, and DJ thought about telling him, but his father refused to leave the room, and he couldn’t bear the idea of the wrath he knew his confession would inspire.
But when the doctor came back the next day, DJ couldn’t even move, his entire body a mass of sore, dried-out muscle from days of vomiting and diarrhea. When he saw the grim expression on the doctor’s face, the childlike expectation that he would soon feel better was finally replaced with a spark of terror. “Can I talk to you alone?” he whispered to the doctor. The man looked at DJ’s father, who hesitated before leaving the room.
As soon as DJ whispered what he’d done, the doctor picked him up and rushed him out of the house. Josiah followed along, barking questions as the boy was shoved in the backseat of the doctor’s car. Both men got in the front, and the doctor gunned the engine.
The time at the hospital came and went in flashes. There was the needle in DJ’s arm and the beeping of machines and the concerned faces hovering over his as he opened and closed his heavy eyes. Then suddenly he was awake and remembered what it was like not to be in constant pain, not to feel like someone was turning his stomach inside out. His father was next to him, but when he saw DJ’s eyes open, his face did not look relieved. There was something else there instead, a darkness DJ had never seen before.
Three days later, he was allowed to leave the hospital.
Josiah said nothing to him when they walked into the house. DJ went to the kitchen, his body still shaky and weak from days of sickness and lack of movement. He poured a glass of water and sat at the table. The plant was still there, in the center of the table, as if that was where it had always been. He sipped his water and stared at the strange, colorful blossoms. When his father came in, DJ didn’t look away from the plant. He didn’t want to see the expression of anger and disappointment that he knew now might never go away.
“Is this what you want?” Josiah asked at last.
DJ continued to stare at the plant. The picture of his father’s face, twisted in agony when the police officers finally came to their hotel door in Duluth, wouldn’t stop flashing in his mind.
“Answer me, boy. You want to throw away the life God gave you? You want to torture me? You want all the attention, me and the doctors hovering over your bed?” DJ looked up in time to see Josiah’s eyes flash. “Go ahead, then. Eat some more.” He shoved the plant across the table. DJ moved out of the way and it crashed to the floor. The pot exploded on the gray tiles, dirt and spiky red blossoms scattering like globs of blood.
“You spoiled shit,” his father hissed. He stormed around the table and grabbed the back of DJ’s neck, pulling him out the kitchen door and into the backyard. The summer evening was muggy and thick with gnats. They swarmed DJ’s mouth and eyes as he cried. Hi
s father had never touched him like this before, holding on to his neck like he was a misbehaving dog. Josiah half carried, half dragged DJ to the tall grass that had grown up behind their old shed, the one he and his cousins used to play cops and robbers in. The seat of an ancient tractor separated the blades of waist-high grass, a relic from when his father’s grandfather owned the house. It was DJ’s favorite thing to play on, and now his father put his hands on it and told him to stand still. He pulled down his pants, and DJ felt a slap of cold air on his naked skin even though it was over a hundred degrees outside.
“‘Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.’” Josiah’s voice boomed over the sound of cicadas. “‘Spare the rod, spoil the child.’ I knew I was too soft on you boys. First your brothers go out on that boat, and now you—” He didn’t finish.
The first strike came down with such force DJ was sure his back had been ripped open. He locked his knees, trying to stay standing.
“My daddy used to whup me here. I swore I’d never be like him, but maybe he got this one thing right.”
He landed the belt a second time, followed by another, and another. His father gasped in between, words popping from his mouth like grease in a hot pan.
“You . . . did . . . this . . .” One word for each strike, repeated over and over.
The belt fell on DJ’s bare legs, lighting his calves and thighs on fire. He tried to count the seconds between them, but the numbers started blurring together. This made him panic, made his breaths come shorter and tighter as his hands trembled on the tarnished metal seat of the old tractor. Numbers were the only thing that mattered to him, the only thing that made sense. If he couldn’t think about numbers, he would never be able to escape this.
Instead of counting seconds, he tried counting the strikes, reminding himself what the numbers meant, what they signified. Seven, the number of oceans, the number of continents, the number of dwarfs in Snow White, the number of completeness and perfection. Eight, the largest single-digit even number, divisible by two and four, the smallest prime numbers cube, the number of new beginnings.
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