The Serial Killer's Apprentice

by James Renner

  “Amanda’s death occurred on what would have been her 17th birthday,” Dedeker’s voice claims confidently, soothingly. “This location where Amanda went with these three young men is somewhat isolated. It’s a park. It’s near the water. I can see the city.”

  * * *

  Barely over five feet tall, Mandy was nicknamed “Shortie.” She was an attractive girl, with Native American lineage—her great-grandmother was Cherokee—evident in her high cheekbones and brown eyes.

  She grew up on the side of Cleveland where the sun always sets, in a house on West 111th, so close to I-90 that commuter traffic was the ambient background music to her abbreviated life. She shut out the din of the city around her by escaping into books. She read with a ferocity that still amazes family members—books, magazines, anything she could get her hands on.

  Around the time Mandy became a teenager, her father skipped town and returned to family in Tennessee, leaving behind Mandy, her mother Louwana, and an older sister named Beth. They managed the best they could. When Beth got married, she moved into the apartment downstairs with her husband, Teddy Serrano, who became the de facto patriarch of the clan. Mandy babysat Beth’s children.

  Mandy attended John Marshall High, a public school on West 140th that is locked up tighter than some prisons. She hated it, wanted no part in the drama of inner-city high school life. So Mandy researched home schooling. She figured out a way to take courses online and paid for books herself. She organized her schedule in a way that allowed her to finish weekly classes in three days instead of five, locking herself inside while she studied, not answering the phone until all the work was finished. At home, Mandy excelled. She would have graduated at 17.

  At 16, Mandy got a job at the Burger King at the corner of West 110 and Lorain. It was a short walk from her house, but she often got a ride from friends or her mother because she didn’t want to walk alone. Beth’s husband, Teddy, worked there, too.

  April 21, 2003, a day before her 17th birthday, Mandy was scheduled to work at Burger King until 8 p.m. Louwana and Beth worked at a nearby factory and planned to return home at about the same time. Teddy also worked at Burger King that day.

  According to published accounts, Beth called Mandy on her cell phone around 7:45 p.m. Mandy told her that she had gotten off early and was going to get a ride home. She was last seen sitting at a table inside the restaurant, waiting, looking out the window.

  * * *

  Nearly a year later, Mandy’s “missing” poster hung in the window of that Burger King, slowly fading from white to cataract-yellow in the sunlight, as a 14-year-old girl named Georgina DeJesus walked toward a pay phone across the street.

  Georgina was older than most of her classmates at Wilbur Wright Middle School. She was in special ed classes and still learning how to read in the seventh grade. But she loved music—J-Lo and Aaliyah, mostly—and she loved to dance. She was active, always running off to slumber parties, baseball games, or to roller skate at the neighborhood rink.

  Georgina was her father’s mother’s middle name, a tribute to a woman who raised a large and sprawling family well known in the Hispanic community that surrounds their home on West 71st. Gina shared a special bond with her namesake. It was her grandmother who first felt that trouble was stalking Gina. Something was going to happen to the girl, she told her son. And he felt it too, like a slow-moving steamroller bearing down on his family.

  Felix DeJesus was so unnerved by this feeling of doom that he spoke to his boss at the factory where he ground down saw bands and asked if he could start leaving work early so that he could pick Gina up after school. For while, he did. But eventually, his boss grew impatient and asked him to switch back to full workdays. On Friday, April 2, 2004, Felix gave Gina money to take an RTA bus home and hoped that the feeling in his stomach was only a concerned father’s paranoia.

  That day, Gina wore a tan shirt, black bellbottom hip-huggers, and a white sweater. On her feet were white and blue Phat Farm specials. In her pockets was $1.25 for bus fare. But Gina didn’t take the bus. Instead, she gave 50 cents to a friend to make a phone call. The friend wanted to go to Gina’s for the evening. They could have walked the long stretch of Lorain to Gina’s house together.

  Gina’s friend used the pay phone at Lorain and West 105 at around 2:30 p.m. The friend’s mother said the girl had to come home, though, so after the call, they went their separate ways, alone. Gina was last seen walking east on Lorain.

  Mandy and Gina’s whereabouts remain unknown. Gina’s posters have joined Mandy’s in the abandoned storefront windows of Lorain Avenue. And while the public waits for news and hopes for closure, FBI agents and Cleveland detectives continue to investigate leads until they dead-end.

  * * *

  Mandy’s mother, Louwana Miller, died March 2, 2006. Doctors said it was heart failure. Her daughter Beth said she died of a broken heart, caused by Mandy’s disappearance and exacerbated by a recent visit to the Montel Williams show where a psychic told her that Mandy had been murdered.

  Both girls’ names appeared in the news again in September 2006 when police and FBI raided a home on West 50th and held the owner and a tenant in jail under suspicion of murdering Gina. They got a tip that owner Matthew Hurayt had buried the girl under concrete in his garage. Hundreds of people gathered around the house, lured by news helicopters that hovered over the house for hours. Word on the street was that Mandy was buried there, too.

  Hurayt seemed like a good suspect. He was a registered sex predator with a history of assault, convicted in 1987 for forcing a boy to have sex.

  A pair of women’s white shoes was found in his attic. But they were not Gina’s. And there were no bodies under the garage, so police eventually let the men go. Hurayt’s lawyer proclaimed his innocence, but vigilantes dealt their own dose of justice to the man with the shady past living in their midst. He still owned the house on West 50th a year later, but, by then, each window had been broken and video cameras were mounted around the perimeter.

  * * *

  In early 2007, members of Mandy and Gina’s families met with me inside FBI headquarters on Lakeside Avenue. Gina’s parents, Nancy Ruiz and Felix DeJesus, sat on one side of a large conference table. Mandy’s sister, Beth, and aunt, Theresa Miller, sat on the other. Also present was FBI spokesman Scott Wilson and a victims’ liaison.

  Rarely does the FBI grant access to those involved in open investigations. The hope was that this story might spark new leads. The agents and detectives still searching for the girls want these cases solved as much as the families do. But as the conversation progressed, Wilson made sure certain information was kept secret, especially information involving uncharged suspects. And for good reason, after the incident with Hurayt.

  Beth was the first one to talk. She’s tiny, like her sister; her body was nearly engulfed by the office chair in which she sat. But she was also confident. Since the death of their mother, she had assumed the role of family spokesperson.

  “Mandy loved Eminem,” Beth said, smiling. “She had seen his movie. She had a crush on him, thought he was cute.

  “She started working at Burger King about a month or two after her 16th birthday, so she was there almost a year. She liked it. She got along with everyone.”

  According to Beth, six months before her sister disappeared, Mandy began dating a young man named D.J. Diaz, a handsome, light-skinned African American teen with a cool smile. But he never came around the house, and Louwana thought he was disrespectful. Sometimes, he and his friends would give Mandy a ride after work.

  The last time Beth spoke to her sister was about 7:45 p.m. on the day she went missing. Mandy told her, “I’m going to get a ride. I’ll call you when I get home.”

  “We got home about 8 p.m. and she wasn’t home,” said Beth. “A little after eight, we called her again. No answer. She always answered her phone. But we weren’t sure something was wrong until 11:13 p.m.”

  “Louwana knew something was wrong when Mandy
didn’t come home by 11,” said Theresa, the aunt. “That was her curfew. And Mandy would always call if she was going to be late.”

  They left messages on Mandy’s cell phone until it was full. They called the police. The next day, they made flyers and passed them out along Lorain. Louwana stayed up for three nights straight, said Theresa.

  The police asked if Mandy could have run away, but Louwana showed them the money Mandy had left behind—money for a manicure and styling for her birthday party. Then, about a week and a half after Mandy disappeared, someone called Louwana from Mandy’s cell phone.

  “The first time he called he just hung up,” said Beth. “We were watching TV and a report had just come on about Mandy. And then he called back and I picked up the other phone when my mom answered it. He sounded older. And he said, ‘Your daughter is with me. And we’re married. She’ll be coming home in a couple days.’ ”

  FBI spokesman Wilson confirmed that the call did indeed originate from Mandy’s cell phone. The man has never called back.

  “We checked in with her boyfriend to see if he saw her,” said Theresa. “They always talked on the phone. But he said he hadn’t heard from her.”

  “This has to be someone who knew her,” Beth said, emotion welling up inside her slight frame. “I believe it was someone she knew well.”

  Across the table, Felix DeJesus sat quietly next to Nancy Ruiz. He’s a large, imposing man. Stoic, but thinking. He listened to Mandy’s story but he’d heard it all before. He thought about his own daughter.

  Gina’s parents weren’t married, but they’d lived together for 28 years. They had two other children and a vast army of relatives and friends who kept them going.

  “It was someone she knew,” said Felix. “Gina would never have taken a ride from a stranger. Never. Not even from my own brothers. Not from my own friends. We raised up our kids like that, never to approach nobody. We taught them to run away.”

  By 4 p.m. on April 2, 2004, Nancy was on the phone, calling Gina’s friends’ parents, trying to find out why her daughter wasn’t home and why she hadn’t called. “I was crying, they were laughing,” said Nancy. “They didn’t think she could really be missing. But I told everyone I talked to to call 10 other people to look for Gina. We called police at 5:30.”

  When he got home and found Nancy hysterical, Felix knew his intuition had been right, that trouble had caught up with his daughter. “I started driving up and down streets,” he said. “My mind was just gone. And then anger set in. I didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know what to do. I felt it coming. And it just kept eating at me.”

  “We were supposed to go to the mall that night. Just her and I,” said Nancy, drifting someplace in her memory. “It had to be someone close to the family. She was spending a lot of time sleeping over at friends’ houses and it started to make me feel uncomfortable. But once something like this happens, you’re suspicious of everybody. Everyone’s a suspect.”

  Investigators used bloodhounds to track Gina’s scent from the pay phone. The dogs didn’t go far. “They stopped at Lorain and 104,” said Nancy. Gina’s scent ended just before McKenna’s Tavern, near an alley that leads back to a garbage bin and a set of steps to upstairs apartments. The dogs did go across the street, then, but Nancy believes it was just so the animals could find a proper place to urinate.

  “My life has totally changed,” said Felix. “Every time I sit on my porch, I find myself looking at license plates on vehicles that go by. I look at the drivers and remember what they look like. Could that person have done it? I don’t look at people the same.”

  * * *

  Wayne Gonce is an amateur magician from Maryland, a pale kid with wide, troubled eyes and a vast imagination. A fan of horror movies and sci-fi conventions and the TV show 24, he calls himself Jack Bauer, and he’d like to be the hero in this story, the one who finds Mandy.

  After a fight with his father in early April 2003, Gonce moved from Maryland to his uncle’s place in Newburgh Heights. He got a job at Burger King in Parma. Not long after he settled in, Mandy went missing, and Gonce became transfixed with her story. He always wanted to be an FBI agent, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to hone his detective skills.

  He attended a vigil for Mandy at the Burger King on Lorain and that’s where he introduced himself to Louwana and Beth. “Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked.

  Louwana told him about D.J., Mandy’s boyfriend. Gonce talked to Mandy’s friends and co-workers, sometimes introducing himself as an investigator who was working the case, assisting the FBI. He learned that D.J. was also dating a girl named Flannery while seeing Mandy and that Flannery was going to confront Mandy the day she disappeared.

  The FBI, however, seemed more interested in Gonce himself than in the information he provided. Gonce received a call at work from Special Agent Tim Kolonik who wanted to know why he was so interested in the case. “He interrogated me and all that,” says Gonce. “I told him I was interested in joining the FBI in a couple years. I helped him a little bit after that. But he doesn’t call me back anymore.”

  When Gina went missing a year later, Gonce contacted the DeJesus family and spent his free time tracking down “leads” in that case as well. He still calls Gina’s family regularly.

  After Gonce sent the psychic’s reading to me, it became apparent that he had a slippery view of social mores. For instance, he didn’t bother getting permission from the psychic first. When Robin Dedeker learned that he’d sent tapes meant for Louwana to a reporter, using an alias and fake return address, she was angry. And then there’s the strange urge that Gonce has to play “bad cop.”

  “I’ve always wanted to talk to D.J. and Flannery,” he says. “I want to get them in separate rooms and play them off each other. Give one immunity, you know? And tell the other one that their partner has admitted everything. If they can do that for terrorists, they can do that for a missing girl, right?”

  Gonce has since returned to Maryland and signed up to join the Marines. He maintains a MySpace page devoted to Mandy. The FBI did follow up on his leads, even if they eventually cut off contact with Gonce. D.J. was questioned. So was Flannery.

  When I caught up with D.J. in 2006, he was washing his turquoise SUV. “I can’t talk about Amanda,” he said, smiling. “You can believe what you want, but I’m not gonna say anything about that.”

  Flannery used to live down the street from D.J. but had since moved out of her father’s house. He still lived there, though, and was walking his dog while D.J. washed the SUV. “I asked my daughter about D.J. and if she knew anything about what happened to Amanda,” he said. “I knew she was dating him at the same time but I never met him. She was vague about it when she answered me. But she said she didn’t think D.J. was involved.”

  Co-workers at Burger King say Mandy had just found out that Teddy, her sister’s husband, was having an affair (Teddy and Beth have since separated and Teddy has moved out of state). Mandy told co-workers the affair had made her sick to her stomach and she wanted to leave before the shift was over. On top of all this, someone called her with bad news.

  “The day she left work early, she got a call here and she was crying,” says Latarra Gary, who worked with her in 2003.

  A law enforcement official who worked on the case, and spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, confirmed Teddy’s affair and revealed more interesting information, never released to the public.

  The most shocking revelation is that Mandy didn’t disappear from Burger King. She made it home first.

  Mandy must have changed out of her uniform, the official says, because each uniform she owned was accounted for. One uniform, possibly the one she wore that day, was found balled up and stuck behind her dresser. No one is sure if she was alone, but she could not have been there long, because Beth and Louwana returned a little after 8 p.m.

  D.J. told detectives that he was at a friend’s house at the time Mandy disappeared. His buddies backed him up and
passed polygraph tests. Flannery, the official said, did not have an alibi but is not considered a serious suspect.

  And that cell phone call, the one Louwana received from her daughter’s phone a week and a half after she went missing? Investigators triangulated the signal and found it had originated somewhere near West 58th and Clark.

  * * *

  Persons of interest in Gina’s disappearance have also been easy to find, though none has been charged with her abduction.

  Across the street from where bloodhounds lost Gina’s scent is a little coffee shop owned by Rich Giachetti, a boisterous Italian who inherited the property from his father. On the last day of un-enforced public smoking, I found him chaining cigarettes inside his java joint. Most of his clientele are in recovery. He doesn’t want to begrudge them their last vice, but he is hanging signs alerting them of the new law so he doesn’t get fined. “I don’t know what it’s going to do to my business,” he says.

  When asked about Gina, he nods and says, “The FBI came in and looked over every inch of this place. I had hired a guy with a history of sex crimes to do some painting for me the day Gina was taken. I just thought everyone deserves a second chance.”

  The man had a prior conviction for rape and gross sexual imposition. He has recently run afoul with the law again for not registering his whereabouts with authorities.

  But he wasn’t the only convicted sex offender within striking distance. Detectives looked closely at the parents of Gina’s friends after her disappearance. One of her friend’s stepfathers was arrested for having sex with an underage girl, according to the unnamed official. The day of Gina’s disappearance, this man was working at a business within sight of the phone booth where Gina and a friend placed a call. He left work early that day and does not have a solid alibi, according to investigators.

  “We’re looking at every possibility,” says FBI spokesman Scott Wilson. “We are looking at the possibility that they are connected. Do we have a serial killer out there? But these cases might not be connected. So we’re looking at unsolved sexual assaults, we’re looking at unsolved missing person cases nationwide. We’re looking at every possibility.”