On the website OfficialColdCaseInvestigations.com, Betty posted, “Please, if you can help me . . . we just want to know if [my half brother] is safe and doing okay. He has 7 brothers and sisters in the USA that would love to know him. Until this day my mom still gets very upset about this. This was her firstborn child. She never expected this to happen.”
Betty went to law enforcement for help. “Are you serious?” was the only response she got from West Virginia police when she inquired about how to file a report for someone missing since 1957.
Betty found a San Bernardino County, California, deputy coroner’s investigator who had made a name for himself as an advocate for the missing. The California penal code requires police and sheriff’s departments to accept a missing-person report “without delay” and to submit it to the FBI’s NCIC database within four hours. It didn’t matter if the person had never been in California. The report was filed.
Several years and many dead ends later, a man came forward claiming to be Betty’s brother. Betty asked for a DNA sample. He said he needed money. His inability to make his way to the U.S. embassy in Yemen’s capital seemed fishy. Officials warned Betty that unscrupulous foreign nationals can target Americans as easy marks, and she never sent the money. She still has no definitive answer in her brother’s case, but in the process of searching she forged connections to the Doe Network, NamUs, Todd Matthews, and others in the web sleuth world. “I guess I’m trying to help families get closure because I don’t seem to be able to get it for myself,” she said. She meant her search for her half brother, but I wondered if there were other parts of Betty’s life that resisted tidy endings.
Through NamUs, Betty met fellow volunteer Shannon Vita in Arizona, who knew a Phoenix police detective named Stuart Somershoe. On Vita’s advice, Somershoe asked Betty for help with some of his seventy-plus unidentified cold cases.
In 1998, a Phoenix man committed suicide. He had no ID and his fingerprints revealed no arrest history. A trace of his gun came up with the name William Joseph LaRue. Somershoe couldn’t find any kin—couldn’t find anything on the guy.
“In order to find out where he ended up at, you need to find out where he started at,” Betty says like a mantra.
LaRue had apparently started out in Rochester, New York, where his birth was recorded in 1952. Along with his birth certificate, Betty found he had three siblings, and convinced the state to release the name and date of birth of one of his sisters. Betty plugged her first name, birth date, and “Rochester” into an Ancestry.com search; only one address popped up. A few phone calls later, Betty had secured a promise for a DNA sample. The test showed LaRue’s DNA matched his sibling’s; and Somershoe had his next-of-kin.
Another time Betty, in Sherlock-worthy fashion, spotted a tiny by critical clue.
A body of a fifty- to seventy-year-old man had been found in Phoenix in 2009. A suicide note, expressing his desire to be cremated, was signed only “M.”
“All they knew was, this guy who they thought was Hispanic was found dead in the street,” Betty said. “He was dressed really nice.” His clothes had been sold through Sears but labeled in French.
Meanwhile, a woman in Israel had contacted police in Canada. She was unable to reach her fifty-six-year-old brother living in Calgary. Police tracked him from Calgary to Las Vegas, where he had missed his return flight and stopped withdrawing money from his bank account. For some reason Vegas law enforcement had closed the case. No one had entered the man as a missing person into NCIC.
Photos of the suicide scene in Phoenix showed a pen lying near the body. The pen itself had not been entered as evidence, but from the photo, Betty could see it was clearly imprinted with words in a foreign alphabet. Thinking it was Arabic, she sent it to an acquaintance familiar with the language. He told her it was Hebrew.
She stopped in at a Winston-Salem synagogue, where someone translated for her the name of a solar hot water company based in Jerusalem. “Okay, this guy is not Hispanic,” Betty and Shannon told Somershoe. He could be Israeli. His clothes were likely purchased in French-speaking Canada. Somershoe contacted the FBI, which contacted the Canadian consulate and the Israeli embassy.
FBI agents contacted an Israeli police attaché in Los Angeles, who produced the name Maurice Marciano. Marciano was fifty-six, stocky, bald, blue-eyed, photographed once on a deck in a polo shirt and jeans, unsmiling.
Dental records from Calgary confirmed Marciano’s identity. “Betty did her magic,” Somershoe said. He’s certain the case would not have been solved without her.
On another occasion, Betty started to enter details into NamUs about a missing Arizona man named Elmer O. Sanchez. She decided to do a quick web search to see if there was anything on him.
Within an hour, she’d found newspaper articles from the late 1960s about a man by that name who had been arrested previously for public drinking and theft. He had been found dead in a vacant, burned-out building in Yuma.
Meanwhile, in Albuquerque, Sanchez’s sisters, in their seventies and eighties, never knew what had become of their troubled younger brother, who had been in and out of reform schools as a teenager. In 1969 he was thirty-four. He’d sent his older sister Rose a postcard: he was hitchhiking to California to take on migrant farmwork. He apparently never made it farther than Arizona. The Yuma paper described a body, dead for six months, on a cardboard bed surrounded by unopened cans of macaroni, spaghetti, and sardines and empty wine bottles. A wallet contained two dollars, a Social Security card, a Selective Service card, and a police mug shot.
An Albuquerque police detective speculated that an incorrect address and a one-digit mistake in the Social Security number had kept word of Sanchez’s death from his family.
“I found Elmer Sanchez; he’s deceased,” Betty told Shannon Vita, who contacted the Yuma coroner’s office, which confirmed Sanchez was long buried. Betty found the name of Sanchez’s father and siblings; the sisters were relieved their brother died of natural causes and had even received a proper burial, courtesy of a charitable organization. Wondering, questioning—the family had had this hanging over their heads for a long time, said Sanchez’s nephew.
In 2000, a young black man had been found dead in a canal in Florida’s Dade County. He had not been identified. A tattoo on his arm read “Hakim.” A visible tattoo of a name would most likely be the owner’s, Brown reasoned. An address search using “Hakim” as a first or middle name close to where the body was found turned up two Hakims in the young man’s age range. The first one turned out to be female. The second was an alias for a New Jersey man named Eric Todd, who had been arrested once for car theft. Fingerprints confirmed his identity.
Betty found out later that the Florida police contacted the family and reached a sister who had been with Todd when he converted to Islam, changed his name, and tattooed it on his arm. Unaware of her brother’s death, she thought his long silence simply meant he wanted nothing to do with his family.
After leaning over a computer screen for what felt like hours, we stood up and ventured out of Betty’s study. “Whatcha doin’, bubba?” Betty cooed to her son, placid after his after-school nap. Jonas has pin-straight blond hair, a captivating smile, and the round face and wide-set, almond eyes of a child with Down syndrome. “He’s ornery,” Betty confided affectionately. Where in the world, I wondered, could Jonas possibly have picked up that trait? Being ornery is a necessity for many parents of atypical children. Some days, advocating for Jonas took its toll on Betty. “I worry every day about my little one and how people have treated him in this world,” she once wrote. “I try to not let it bother me but . . . I wish people saw Jonas for the fun, lovely child he is . . . So disappointed in life and people at times.” But with her son, she’s upbeat. “He’s my little man,” she said, ruffling his hair. Betty’s husband, Joe, smiled and shrugged when I asked him about Betty’s web sleuthing. “It’s her thing,” he said. “You he
lp me out once in a while,” Betty interjected and then turned to me. “I’ll ask him: ‘Does this guy look like that guy?’” Joe didn’t disagree, but it was clear from his resigned manner he wasn’t a die-hard fan of Betty’s hobby.
It had gotten late. I told Betty dinner was on me; I offered to take the whole family out, but Joe stayed behind, sunk into a plush beige recliner with Jonas sprawled on his lap. We drove to a bar and grill in a strip mall where beefy, tattooed men perched at high-tops, drank beer, and watched the game on TV. Betty and I settled in a booth. The waitress called us “girls.” Betty laughed when the high-octane margarita I was served in a plastic tumbler made me toss my head back and forth like a horse shaking off a fly.
On the way back to her house, we cruised Betty’s neighborhood in her husband’s silver Dodge Ram. High-voltage power poles in the distance towered above rolling, grassy hills like monstrous Erector set men. The development was so new, houses were still emerging from bare lots. Betty pointed to an architectural detail she liked on someone else’s house, but the structures all looked the same to me: white or beige clapboard with pitched roofs, porches, and black shutters. They had backyards and central air and cathedral-ceiling living rooms, the American dream for $350,000, around a third of what the same kind of house would go for in Boston or San Francisco. Betty Brown had a lovely home, a beautiful boy, and a husband she was crazy about, but her life wasn’t perfect—no one’s ever is.
Back on her street she waved to a man loading something into a pickup. “That’s my father-in-law,” she said, and sighed about how Joe’s parents, who moved to Winston-Salem at the same time as Joe and herself, didn’t seem inclined to socialize. “In this neighborhood, if you’re not born and raised here, you’re an outsider,” she said.
It struck me that Betty Brown’s intense spell of web sleuthing coincided with Jonas’s birth and her move from Virginia to North Carolina. It must have been a stressful time: the challenges of a late-in-life baby; moving to a new state with a new husband and new in-laws; leaving behind her siblings—whom she had described to me as her best friends—and her grown children.
The Internet may have helped Betty escape to a different world, one in which she wielded power and control. “Making an identification—that’s power,” Todd Matthews pointed out to me one day. “You just changed something. You changed an unknown person into a homicide investigation.” The local paper calls, you do a story, a family is appreciative, and for a while you’re a hero. Then the hubbub dies down and you’re back where you started, dealing with your own potentially troublesome life.
As Betty said, to find out where someone ended up, you need to find out where they started. “For our family, I know how long it took me to search and research and get as far as I have,” she told me.
I was beginning to see how Betty Dalton Brown had ended up where she did.
8
SEEKERS OF LOST SOULS
Taking a break from the Tent Girl case, I was idly searching through archives when I came across an old newspaper article about the Lady of the Dunes with a byline I recognized: George Liles.
I had worked with Liles, an amiable fireplug of a guy with basset hound eyes, at Tufts University, where I wrote about people, events, and research before I left to accept a science writing job at MIT. Liles and I had both started our careers as newspaper reporters covering selectmen’s meetings that droned on about granite versus asphalt curbs and other mind-numbing small-town minutiae. Pre-Internet, reporters typically moved from the town government beat to the crime beat, where you paid a daily visit to the police station to chat up the cops, hoping they’d drop a newsworthy tidbit. If you’re on the crime beat for more than a year or two you’re considered a lifer, prone to becoming a cynical connoisseur of human misery and deviance. Neither George nor I had succumbed to that fate, but I knew George knew his way around an old-fashioned police log.
The byline on the article I’d found showed that in 1995, twenty-one years after the Lady of the Dunes was murdered, Liles was doing a stint at the Provincetown Banner. On a slow news day, he had ambled over to the station to see what was happening with the decades-old unsolved case.
He was ushered in to see tall, stocky Provincetown sergeant Warren Tobias, who struck Liles as an old-school gumshoe right out of a Dashiell Hammett paperback. To Liles’s surprise, Tobias was working on a lead and willing to share. Tobias said he believed the Lady of the Dunes was an alleged drug runner and gun smuggler named Rory Gene Kesinger, who had escaped from jail in 1973, the year before the body in the dunes was found, and vanished. Liles’s story had legs, as they say in the news business. Tobias’s speculation about Kesinger would appear in coverage about the case until 2002, when a DNA test showed definitively she was not the victim in the dunes.
Now a veteran newsman and science writer, Liles helps undergrads from around the country hone their writing skills as part of a summer program at the preeminent Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory on Cape Cod. A few weeks before he and I spoke, he kicked off the seminar as he always does, by showing the students examples of his own published pieces, including the one about the Lady of the Dunes.
Under a photo of a grave marker, the headline on Liles’s 1995 story read, “Is There a Killer Among Us?”
Liles told me that the headline always jarred the college students into looking up from their laptops and cell phones. They all wanted to know if the murderer had ever been found, and were surprised to hear the victim was still nameless.
Liles held that the Lady of the Dunes manifested a new twist on high-profile cases such as the Lindbergh kidnapping and reports of the survival of Anastasia, a daughter of Czar Nicholas II. Instead of a famous victim, the victim was unknown, yet the case had the same aura of intrigue as historically notorious mysteries.
Then there was the matter of her missing hands. Going to the trouble of hacking off and disposing of hands suggested the killer didn’t want her to be identified by her fingerprints. But in the 1970s, processing ten-print fingerprint submissions was a manual, labor-intensive task, and only federal employees and lawbreakers would have been certain to have fingerprints on file, Liles argued. Was she a fed or a criminal?
Liles asked me if I had been to the dunes. It’s an eerie place, otherworldly, he reminded me. Just a short walk away from Provincetown, this civilized little town, the dunes can feel like a different planet. The fact that the victim was found in the dunes added to her allure.
“The ‘Lady on the Sidewalk’ just wouldn’t have the same ring to it,” he said, and I laughed. I thought Liles was right: circumstances conspired to capture the public’s imagination on this case while others languished in obscurity. Still, if I was ever going to get my feet wet as a web sleuth, it might not hurt to start with a high-profile case.
During a trip to North Carolina, I quizzed Daphne Owings, the most prolific web sleuth I’d encountered, on tips for how to go about sleuthing out the Lady of the Dunes’s identity. In 2002, Daphne, a mother of two, had become engrossed in Sue Grafton’s Q Is for Quarry, a crime thriller based loosely on the Santa Barbara, California, sheriff’s investigation into Jane Doe 1969, a stabbing victim discovered near a quarry on Highway 1, south of the working-class city of Lompoc. Grafton herself helped pay for the body to be exhumed, which led to a facial reconstruction. Daphne became fascinated by the image of the bucktoothed, brown-haired young woman. When Daphne’s husband was sent to serve in Iraq, she started volunteering for the Doe Network to take her mind off the war. Daphne is blond, athletic, and sharp, and I quickly saw that besides the fact that I’d never catch up with her in a road race, my visual memory was no match for hers. She had the extraordinary ability to look at morgue photos and facial reconstructions and then scrutinize missing-person files until a spark of recognition, as she put it, struck her.
Daphne pointed out that, given the extensive media coverage of the Lady of the Dunes, it was quite likely she was n
ot in a database anywhere or she would have been matched already. Instead of going to the usual websites, she advised, plug in “missing woman,” “missing girl,” and “Massachusetts” in newspaper archives and genealogy databases. Ignore the hair on the reconstructions, which might not be depicted in an accurate color or style, and look at the basic facial shape, the line of the nose, the width between the eyes. Start hammering away at missing persons who fall within the age range and range of time: Look first at people who went missing in 1974, backtrack a few years, and work with those, she said. If I came up empty-handed, I could look for people who went missing earlier; who were younger or older, shorter or taller; who had blue eyes instead of brown. It was easy for errors to creep into the online data.
Daphne was not exaggerating when she called it work. This was hard. What’s more, she eschews relatively high-profile cases such as the Lady of the Dunes on principle. Owings said she never opted to spend any time on her case because so many others likely had. She prefers cases that haven’t garnered a lot of attention: they’re the ones that need it.
In 1995, my friend George Liles was one of many reporters who had written about the Lady of the Dunes. That same year, in Kentucky, almost no one was actively following the case of Tent Girl besides Todd Matthews, by then a twenty-five-year-old night shift worker in an auto parts factory.
* * *
Over and over, Todd mentally rearranged the meager facts about Tent Girl, like the squares on a recalcitrant Rubik’s cube, in a fruitless effort to force them into place.
If Tent Girl was a teenager, as he read in the newspapers, Todd figured someone must have filed a missing-person report. When he didn’t find one, he convinced himself that the only reason Tent Girl’s parents weren’t looking for her was because they had a hand in her disappearance. These murderous parents lurking in Kentucky horrified him until he remembered they likely existed only in his imagination.
The Skeleton Crew Page 14