by Billy Jensen
I sent a direct message to @FanSince09, a snarky sports blogger from Philadelphia whom I had interviewed a few months earlier when he helped solve a crime. @FanSince09 is a sports social justice warrior who anonymously fights the good fight against hatred.
When he heard about a gay couple who were brutally beaten in downtown Philadelphia, with one of his followers tweeting a CCTV video of the alleged assailants, it made him mad. Over Twitter, he teamed up with All-Pro Eagles lineman Evan Mathis and a Philly detective. The unlikely trio retweeted surveillance video images of the attackers—who looked like upper-middle-class college kids out for a night on the town—and asked for help identifying them. The crowd then jumped into the fray and searched the Facebook pages of restaurants and bars in the area. They looked into every person who had checked into every restaurant on the night of the assault and found a woman who had posted a group photo of a bunch of upper-middle-class college kids inside one eatery. Some of the males in the photo matched the males in the surveillance images. The information was sent to the detective. The suspects were arrested. This was crowdsourcing at its finest.
His Philadelphia connections wouldn’t help with this one, but sports tweeters are an incestuous bunch. @FanSince09 said he knew a guy and reached out to Dan Katz, a.k.a. @BarstoolBigCat, who ran the Barstool Sports Chicago blog. BigCat gave me a retweet, which in turn garnered a dozen more retweets. But by 9:00 p.m., I still had no leads.
I was $135 in the hole. The money didn’t matter, and I was used to the frustration. But I had thought I was onto something and was dismayed it wasn’t working. I kept monitoring the Facebook page and the Twitter feed throughout the night, racking my brain for the right scheme to reach that one person who could help. I drifted off to sleep about midnight.
I woke up at 3:00 a.m., reached for my phone, and opened Twitter. The Man in the Green Hoodie was staring right at me.
Someone had seen @BarstoolBigCat’s retweet and replied to him and me with an image of the puncher, almost a portrait of him, wearing the same outfit from the night of the assault.
“Hope this helps,” he wrote.
Holy shit, I said to myself. What the hell is this?
At first, I thought it was a mock-up—that this guy had done some sort of 3-D rendering like the woman said she was going to do earlier in the day. It was a clear, front-facing picture of the Man with the Green Hoodie looking directly into the camera.
I immediately tweeted back at him: “Thanks. Did you make this?”
I needed to talk to him right away. People are predisposed to be more truthful at 3:00 a.m. than at 3:00 p.m. Besides, my mind was spinning. Where did he get that photo? Was he there? Did he witness the attack? I followed him on Twitter and asked him to follow me back so we could have a private conversation. He finally responded.
He told me that one of his friends was at the corner of Hubbard and State that night and had taken the photo. I asked if he could put me in touch with the friend. And I waited. I waited for what seemed like forever. The next day, he responded. “He doesn’t really want to talk to anyone about it so it doesn’t sound like he is going to reach out.”
Dammit.
Now, I’m not a cop. I can’t subpoena someone’s phone records or bring someone into an interrogation room or make deals for less jail time or better TV privileges. I don’t have many weapons in my arsenal. I resorted to one of the few tactics at my disposal: I begged. “If you could plead with him,” I wrote back. “His name won’t be released—hell, he doesn’t have to use a name at all. We just need more information, such as if he heard the puncher talk, what the argument was about, and if he had an accent.”
The next day turned into night as I fell asleep waiting for an answer. I woke up at 3:00 a.m. (again) and checked my phone. It was him.
Hey man, FYI, I took a screen shot of this and sent it to him and haven’t heard back. I did find something that might help. This was from a saved snapchat he took that I found in the archives of a group message. You can hear the puncher yelling in it and get a better look at his face.
Below the message was an image with a white-and-blue play button in the center indicating to me it was made with the Snapchat app. Behind the button was a still image of a man lying in the street, his arms at his sides, his eyes closed. It was Marques Gaines.
His friend didn’t just take a photo—he shot a video.
I sucked as much oxygen as I could gather into my lungs. Then I pressed play.
The camera begins focused on Marques passed out in the crosswalk. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought he was sleeping. In a split second, the camera pans up and swings counterclockwise to the sidewalk. There, staring right at me, is the Man in the Green Hoodie. His hood is now off his head. Both fists are clenched. He walks straight toward me, stopping inches before the camera, his face filling up the entire screen. He yells something I can’t quite make out. Then the video ends.
I was frozen. It was like someone had just sent me a Super 8 movie of Oswald skulking away from his sniper’s nest at the book depository in Dallas.
I now had a clear, face-forward photo of the Man in the Green Hoodie that I could compare against the database of mugshots.
I played the four-second video over again. In addition to a clear image, I also now had another detail that I needed: the man’s voice. He did not have an accent. He sounded like a U.S. native. But what was he saying?
I closed my eyes and tried to isolate his words. After the fifth try, I finally got it.
Over the buzzing commotion following the assault, the Man in the Green Hoodie walks back toward Marques lying in the street and yells “Get your faggot ass up.”
I knew they might not be able to get him on murder—they might charge him with aggravated assault or, at best, manslaughter. But with this audio, there might be proof that this was a hate crime, which carries a stiffer sentence when coupled with an assault. It also showed why the initial group of people dispersed so quickly after the punch. The Man in the Green Hoodie had frightened them away.
Sending the video to Drexina cold—the last image of her cousin, lying helpless in the street just before a taxicab runs over him—would be devastating. I needed to wait and show her in person.
And I had mugshots to go through. Luckily, Cook County, Illinois, releases all its mugshots to the public. This has created a cottage industry—basically an extortion racket—in which websites publish the name and mugshot of everyone who is arrested for all the search engines to find. If your mugshot keeps showing up when a future employer or prospective lover googles your name, you can contact these sites, and they will take it down—for a substantial fee, of course.
This is where the investigation would get decidedly old school. I was not in possession of facial recognition technology, and while that software is becoming more advanced, it might not have been effective in this case. I was going to do this one photo at a time.
I was looking for a black man with a scowl, a heavy brow, and a widow’s peak. I reached out for help from a production assistant who was helping with the citizen-detective TV show I had created, which was going to be called Crowdsolve, and we split up the digital pile as best we could, working into the night to try to find the puncher in the haystack. Over the course of forty-eight hours, I went through more than three thousand photos. Every time I saw a widow’s peak, I set the photo aside. That left me with fifty. From there, I looked for the scowl and brow. That left me with three.
I placed each of them on my screen next to the Snapchat video of the Man with the Green Hoodie. They all looked good, but each one had something going against him: one was too old, one was too pudgy, and one was too tall.
The older guy just looked too…old. The pudgy guy was a little too short, as the puncher didn’t look like he was smaller than the people around him. I liked the tall guy, but he was listed at six foot four, and the puncher didn�
�t look exceptionally tall on the video. I’m six foot four, and when I see myself on video, I’m always alarmed by how freakishly gigantic I can look next to an average-sized person. I wasn’t getting that sense from this guy.
But he looked a lot like the man in the video. We ran a background report on him.
His name was Marcus Moore, and his rap sheet was considerable:
Obstruction of traffic 8/28/2013. Possession of cannabis (2.5–10 grams) 7/25/2013. Two counts of criminal damage of property, reckless driving, eluding police, speeding, and driving with a suspended license 2/21/2012. Panhandling. Reckless conduct.
Most importantly, two of the arrests took place within a few blocks of the incident with Marques.
I was maybe 75 percent sure he was the man I was looking for. The height was still bothering me, but he was for sure a big guy.
Then I found him on Facebook. I scrolled through his pictures: Marcus Moore wearing a Chicago Bulls cap, throwing up a peace sign and a sly smile. Marcus Moore wearing a Chicago White Sox cap, sneering at the camera. Marcus Moore wearing a stocking cap, grinning.
Then I saw a selfie from December 15, 2015. Marcus Moore wearing a wifebeater and a scowl, his brow furrowed over his dark eyes. This time, he wasn’t wearing a hat. His widow’s peak was in all its V-shaped glory.
It was him. It had to be him.
• • •
I talked to the production company in Los Angeles that wanted to film my citizen-detective show. Each episode was supposed to begin with me visiting with an amateur sleuth and helping shift their investigations into high gear by offering up multiple resources—DNA testing, facial reconstruction, sonar searches in lakes and rivers. But this would be a different show—just me. And the Marques Gaines case would be the first episode. After looking at the pictures, they agreed that Marcus Moore was most probably the guy who punched Marques Gaines, and we should go to Chicago and see if we could connect all the dots and prove it.
I flew to Chicago in August, film crew in tow. Drexina and her mother, Marques’s aunt, Phyllis, would meet me there. Before I could start the investigation on the ground, the crew had me re-create some moments that had already happened in order to craft a cohesive narrative. The scene of me watching the Snapchat video of the puncher for the first time had shifted from me lying in my bed in LA to me walking across the DuSable Bridge over the Chicago river.
I met with Drexina and Phyllis, and they told me stories about the type of guy Marques had been. Happy-go-lucky. Electric smile. They told me about their frustrations with the case, about how much they had cried. I couldn’t tell them about my suspect yet. I still had one more thing to do. I wanted to confirm that the guy I found online was the guy we were all looking for. I wanted as much evidence as I could get before I contacted the police with the name of the suspect. And I knew my luck would multiply if I waited until dark. With time to kill, we walked together toward the scene of the crime.
During the day, the corner of Hubbard and State pulses in the heart of a thriving business-meets-tourist district. There’s a bar or restaurant every twenty feet. It’s bright and sunny, nothing like the ominous and unpolished location in the video I had watched dozens of times. I stood in the spot in front of the 7-Eleven where Marques was confronted and walked in those final steps he took before he landed in the crosswalk. I saw how the slope of the sidewalk aided in the devastation of the punch; Marques was running away, but when he turned to face the puncher, his momentum took him down the slope toward the road. When the Man in the Green Hoodie reeled back, he planted his foot into the downslope and landed his right hook. The momentum of a man that big, walking swiftly downhill, made the punch that much more ferocious. Placed in the right location, it was enough to knock any man out.
Standing in the middle of a scene I had experienced only in photos and videos was like the first time I stood on the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza or peered over the fence into the Brentwood courtyard where Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman were murdered. Everything seemed smaller and closer together. I looked up and saw the camera that filmed the punch, perched above the traffic light at the intersection of State and Hubbard. I took photos and measurements of the area for a pseudoscientific experiment to see if I could compare my height with the puncher’s when I reviewed the video back at the hotel.
But mostly, I found myself looking down at the ground.
I stepped off the curb and bent down in the street, touching the part of the black asphalt where it met the thick white paint of the crosswalk. This was no place for anyone to die.
I wanted to grab every single person who was walking past me and show them the photo of the Man in the Green Hoodie that I was holding in my back pocket. To see if they had seen him, knew his name was Marcus, or maybe even knew where he might be. But it was still daytime, and at this intersection, daytime was a whole ’nother planet compared to what happens at night. I went back to the hotel and spent the next two hours rewatching the video.
My plan was to wait for the sun to set, then walk down Hubbard and show the photo to every valet, bouncer, and beggar I came across. The film crew would follow fifteen feet behind me, along with two armed, plainclothes former Chicago police officers, which the crew insisted on hiring.
With fifteen minutes to kill before darkness, I shuffled aimlessly around the block, circling past the 7-Eleven and the gutter where Marques died, past one of the two alleys where I believed the guys who scavenged through his pockets might have escaped, craning my neck to find every security camera that might have caught their faces.
The search for more cameras sat at the bottom of just one of the thousands of rabbit holes I’ve jumped down. The angle of the grassy knoll, the coded letters of Son of Sam, the cell phone records of a murdered DJ in Miami, the 1979 Merrimack County, New Hampshire, Yellow Pages looking for the names of the victims in the barrel. The unreturned phone calls. The no-outlet dead ends. Every editor telling me I’m too deep into the story and to wrap it up. Every detective telling me to just let it go. Every reader asking me how the story ends. “How does it end?” “I hope they catch the guy?” “How does it end?” “They catch him, right?” “But seriously, how does it end?”
But you keep going. No matter what is thrown in your way, you keep moving forward. Because these crimes, crimes like the Marques Gaines case or the Golden State Killer, they don’t solve themselves. They sit in boxes in evidence lockers collecting dust until someone comes along and says, “I’m not going to stop until I catch this guy.” And it’s probably not all that healthy to say that. But often, it’s the only way it will get done.
• • •
With the sun finally down, I was ready to begin, prepared to cover three square blocks starting down Hubbard. I walked at a brisk pace, the camera crew following discreetly, noticeable only if you were explicitly looking for them. I approached a valet in front of a steakhouse at the corner of Dearborn and Hubbard, pulled out the photo from my back pocket, and asked if he recognized the man. He didn’t. I approached the doorman standing in front of the Howl at the Moon bar next door. Another blank.
I was halfway to State Street when I saw an older man wearing soiled, ill-fitting clothes and a weathered face walking toward me.
“Sir, I was wondering, could I ask you a question?”
“Okay,” he replied in a gravelly timbre.
I leaned in close and pulled out the still image from the video.
“Do you recognize this guy?” I asked.
He looked at it and didn’t wait a beat.
“Yeah, that’s Big Dummy,” he told me. “Real name’s Marcus.”
A bolt of lightning went through me, cracking me in the chest and coming out my fingers, which started to shake. Keep it together. Keep. It. Together.
“Do you think we could move over here?” I asked him, wanting to get out of the way of passing pedestrians. He asked if we could go somewhere
else to talk. I had no idea who this guy was or what he could do. For all I knew, he was a friend of Big Dummy’s.
Thankfully, he followed me away from the street, and we stopped in front of the window of a bar called Rockit. I huddled next to him, leaning down to make sure I caught every word. In that moment, he was Gandhi, Buddha, Jesus. In that moment, he was telling me the secrets of the universe.
He told me Big Dummy spent his days in the caverns of Lower Wacker, a tunnel that travels underneath the skyscrapers just a few blocks away. At night, he came out around Hubbard and State. He hadn’t seen him for a while, but he was sure: “Big Dummy, real name Marcus.”
I handed him a twenty-dollar bill and thanked him for his help. I would have given him a thousand if I had had it on me. Within five minutes, I had gotten confirmation for my first solve. Marcus Moore was the puncher, the Man in the Green Hoodie. Now I wanted to find out where he was. I talked to a dozen more people in the streets and down Lower Wacker. I learned that Marcus liked to refer to himself as “the King of the Streets.” That he hadn’t been around the neighborhood for a few months. And that he might be holed up at a shelter north of the city.
I got back to my room around 10:00 p.m. on a high, seventeen years of scratching and clawing and I was so close to finally getting a result. I finished building the dossier on Marcus Moore that I would deliver to the detectives. It contained Moore’s background information, arrest record, known addresses, family members and associates, Facebook profile, and a description of how I had come to the conclusion that he was the man they were searching for. I was also running through my head how I was going to tell Drexina and Phyllis that I had discovered the identity of the man who had caused Marques’s death.