by Billy Jensen
There were maps and graphs and photos of sneaker treads and diamond knots left at the crime scenes. And a very, very long list of suspects. In one file was an inventory of all the items the East Area Rapist took from the houses he attacked: “Binoculars, scientific calculator, salt and pepper shakers, champagne, butter dishes,” with the heading “Unusual things to take in my opinion.”
“Paul [Haynes] and I are going through the major holes that are left within the narrative and seeing what we can find to fill them with her words only,” I wrote to Patton and Michelle’s agent. “I have an idea for Part 3. I was thinking it is very organic to just show some of the threads she would have kept following by going through her computer.”
Michelle had written a lot of chapters, but they were not in any kind of order, and we had to lay them out to create a coherent narrative. We settled on starting in the past with the Original Night Stalker murders, then on to the tale of the series of rapes in Sacramento by the East Area Rapist. These two seemingly unrelated story lines would converge in the “holy shit” chapter when the Orange County crime lab discovered that all the crimes were committed by the same unknown assailant. Part 2 would pick up with Michelle traveling to the crime scenes, meeting with investigators and victims’ family members. Interspersed throughout were stories about her home life and her motivations for telling crime stories. She never intended on covering all forty-nine rapes and twelve murders in the book, but there were some events that we needed to include, which we pieced together from her notes, emails, and early drafts of her Los Angeles magazine article. There was so much material to work with that the book could have been twice as long.
Haynes not only knew where the bodies were buried but also their state of decay and the alkaline percentage of the soil on top of them. We split up the chapters and went to work seeing where we could fill in gaps with her writing—plugging a hole with a note she had written in one document here, filling in missing details from an email there.
Part 3 would be written by myself and Haynes. Patton gave us one word of guidance when it came to the section we wrote: mechanical. He wanted just the facts and theories, free from emotion. We focused on the two methods Michelle believed would eventually lead to identifying the villain, geographic profiling and familial DNA.
Haynes had become adept at geographic profiling, or geoprofiling, a method used by law enforcement to map out a series of connected crimes to attempt to nail down where the offender might live, work, or spend significant amounts of time. He had compiled an impressive collection of 1970s phone books and census records from the neighborhoods where the East Area Rapist had struck. As he hit so many houses within such a small area, we thought for sure the attacker either lived, worked, or had some other reason to be close by, possibly in a “buffer zone,” close enough to where he was attacking to know the streets but far enough away to not be easily recognized.
With Paul writing about the geography of the attacks and the probability that the Golden State Killer was very familiar with the area, I focused on the other identification method Michelle thought would lead to a solve. Investigators had entered the DNA found at the Golden State Killer crime scenes into the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) database, searching for either an exact match or a familial match. But CODIS records only thirteen sites in the genome, which means that matches can be made only to close relatives—parents, children, and siblings. And CODIS only included the DNA from criminals.
Michelle had been corresponding with a volunteer genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick, and they had entered the Y-STR DNA profile of the killer into a public database called Ysearch. Ysearch only had a few hundred thousand samples, as opposed to the millions in closed databases like 23andMe and Ancestry. Michelle thought she had found GSK once when his DNA had matched more than twenty markers of a man with a unique British or Germanic surname. The match was far away—maybe eight generations. But it was a lead. We went up and down the family trees of that surname, pulling up old British census records, trying to connect him. It went nowhere. But Michelle knew the answer was undoubtedly sitting behind the locked doors of 23andMe and Ancestry. A third or fourth cousin of the killer who wanted to learn about his family history, who paid the ninety-nine dollars and spit in a tube. His spit would be processed on a genome-wide set of single-nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs, which are little changes in a single nucleotide, one of the three billion pairs of nucleotides that occur in a precise location in the human genome. They are known areas of personal variation. Multiply those variations by the millions of places that those changes occur in your genome, and you get the differences between people. Everyone is different, but if you find a sample with enough similarities to the sample you uploaded, it could mean that the two people are related. If Michelle was able to enter the GSK’s DNA into a large database, the service would send her an email with all the cousins they found who were related to the killer. She would then have to build a family tree, eliminate individuals based on age and location and other factors, and eventually land on the Golden State Killer. But 23andMe and Ancestry’s databases are fiercely guarded by the companies’ terms of service, which guarantee privacy against outside elements looking to exploit the data. For instance, if DNA profiles were accessible to a health insurance firm weighing the likelihood of people getting sick, it could cost users billions of dollars. So they remain closed.
Every other night, I would bang my head against the wall, knowing that the answer to this horrendous riddle was sitting inside the databases of 23andMe and Ancestry. All the time Michelle and Holes and dozens of other people spent looking into clues, like a piece of homework or shoelaces left at the crime scene, could have been saved if these databases would simply let us open the door to their DNA warehouse, find a good match of a second or third cousin, then search to narrow down the findings till we zeroed in on the perfect suspect. It was enough to drive you to drink. And I drank a lot of bourbon sitting in my living room, computer at my lap, working on I’ll Be Gone in the Dark while the TV played reruns of The Office.
True-crime podcasts were coming on like gangbusters, but I wouldn’t listen to any of them. The only time I spent away from crime was when I was in my car driving to work, and Sal and Richard’s buffoonery on Howard Stern’s show was what I required to keep me somewhat human. I might seek asylum by opening a prize inside a cereal box or sneak a read about Walt Disney and his Imagineers creating imaginary worlds at Disneyland. Things that didn’t take up much time, because whenever I would go astray for more than an hour, I would get trapped in an existential maze where every signpost was scrawled “Keep trying to solve the next murder,” right next to “How will Michelle be remembered?” Her legacy was lurking inside her hard drive, a living, breathing behemoth to be trimmed, organized, and then unleashed into the world. Not only for the words and work that could lead to an arrest but for Alice, the little girl who could hold onto her mother’s book forever. If this book failed, Michelle couldn’t write another one. This was her only shot. And at the same time all this was going through my head, there was a killer in the shadows needing to be identified, standing only slightly in front of the more than two hundred thousand other killers who needed to be brought into the light.
But no matter how many brilliant chapters she might have written—and they were intense, sparkling chapters filled with facts and empathy and a little frustration—the book was still not going to have an ending. He was still out there. Then I came across a file titled “Letter to an Old Man.” After ten thousand hours of hunting and one hundred thousand words, the letter is Michelle speaking directly to the killer. Just him and her. She begins with reminding him of the details of his crimes from so long ago, of the pain he caused, the things he stole, and how he got away. But then the letter morphs from a reminiscence to a plea for him to show his face, to give himself up. And then it mutates again, this time to a prediction bordering on a warning to the killer.
“You excel
led at the stealth sidle. But your heyday prowess has no value anymore. Your skill set has been phased out. The tables have been turned. Virtual windows are opening all around you. You, the master watcher, are an aging, lumbering target in their crosshairs. A ski mask won’t help you now.”
My hairs stood on edge. It was as if she knew she would be gone and this would be her coda. And it was one of the most intimidating things I had ever read. Her prose had turned the hunter into the hunted. To be honest, I could barely write a word of my own for six months after I read it.
• • •
I was tinkering with my new solving-crimes-with-social-media method, looking for the next case to tackle, confident that the success of the Marques Gaines case after so many years of frustration was going to open the floodgates of justice. But life was also going on around me. My daughter graduated high school. For her present, she wanted to go to Disney World. We hadn’t been there since she was seven.
“The crimes can wait,” Kendall said to me.
What? I had finally solved my first crime. After almost two decades of trying. And I’m supposed to go on a vacation? I didn’t want to hit pause. And this was the Magic Kingdom we were talking about, but I didn’t care. I wanted to dive headfirst into every case I’d ever come across and use this new technique to try to solve them all. But there was one fact I knew above all else. My dad would move mountains to take her, I told myself. So we booked a trip.
When you have tattoos, people ask you what they mean. I have a Tonka truck bulldozer on my back, with my son’s name on it. It is driving up from my side and recreating the scar my son got from the heart surgery he had as a baby. On my right triceps is a quill pen, because no matter what job I am doing, I will always identify myself as a writer and storyteller first. On my left forearm is a magnifying glass, because I am an investigator and am forever attempting to uncover a mystery. And on my lower left leg is the monorail coming out of the Contemporary Hotel at Walt Disney World.
I can explain the first three pretty easily, but the fourth is the one that raises the most eyebrows. “Why would you get a tattoo of a monorail and a Disney hotel?”
When I was little, my dad worked a lot. As a painting contractor who owned his own business, he had to go out on nights and weekends to do estimates—look at rich people’s houses and give them a price for what it would cost for him to put “colored liquid on their houses,” as he once called it. Then during the day, six days a week, he would paint them.
Because the meetings for the estimates were often at the whim of the homeowners, I never knew what time they were happening. So when I would ask my dad if we could do something—go to Toys“R”Us for a new G.I. Joe figure or go to the rocket ship playground—he would always reply “Maybe.” The maybes almost always turned to yeses. But there was always this uncertainty. I was always having to share my dad with his work. Except at Disney World.
He first took me there when I was two years old. And we went back every February break. At Disney, my dad was all mine. When I would ask “Can we go on the Pirates of the Caribbean?” the answer was always yes. “Can we go to the hotel arcade?” Yes. “The Mystery Fun House?” Yes.
I was twelve the last time he took me to Disney, and for the first time, we stayed at the Contemporary Hotel—the hotel that the monorail rides straight through. We rode every ride. We played every game in the arcade. And there were no maybes.
For me, that tattoo is my dad saying yes. Yes, there is no work to be done. Yes, it’s just me and him.
When the kids were toddlers and I was making $27,500 a year at the Long Island Voice and Kendall was a PhD student, we had no dispensable income, but I had to take the kids to Disney. I went on eBay and sold one of the few things my father had left me when he died: a Lionel Mickey Mouse train set. That gave us enough money to scrape together for the first trip. Now, fourteen years later, we were going back.
We arrived in Orlando and started out in Epcot, eating an obscenely priced dinner with the princesses before heading to Hollywood Studios and challenging each other at the Toy Story Mania ride.
The next day, we woke up at the Animal Kingdom Lodge, looked out our window at the zebras and giraffes, and went to breakfast.
On our way to the restaurant, I checked Twitter and read the news. Twenty people were reported dead at a shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, twenty miles from where we were staying. All that was known was a man carrying automatic weapons walked into the club, one of the biggest gay clubs in Orlando, and started shooting.
We sat down to breakfast at the happiest place on earth, and you would never know anything bad had happened. Cast members were still smiling, loading carved ham onto our all-you-can-eat plates. Families were either unaware that twenty people had been slaughtered less than twenty miles away or trying to forget so their kids could enjoy their vacation. Me? I felt sadness and anger.
But one of the redeeming things about being a journalist is that when something horrible happens, one emotion you rarely feel is hopelessness. When something horrible happens, as a journalist, you have a job to do—even if it seems insignificant in the grand scheme of things. You can go tell a story.
Amid all the pain, there is always a story of hope or heroism that can—and should—be told. Flashing through my mind that morning while reading the news was the quote from Mr. Rogers: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
Crime Watch Daily had wrapped up its first season just two days before I left for Florida. But our sister show Extra was still filming. I sent my producers a note saying that I was down in Orlando and wanted to help in any way possible.
In the time it took to send the note and check the news again, the death toll had climbed from twenty to fifty. It had become the largest mass shooting in American history.
My producers asked if I could go to the scene at Pulse and work the story for Extra. I checked my family into the Contemporary Hotel and took a Lyft to the crime scene. The Magic Kingdom would have to wait.
I got to the club around 2:00 p.m., twelve hours after the shooting had started and nine after it ended. I met my crew and searched for anyone we could talk to.
In an effort to speak to anyone whose story hadn’t already been told, we went down a side street and walked to the closest spot to the club that we could. Our sound technician snapped a photo of the holes the SWAT team had poked into the wall to breach the building and get people out. The police had put up temporary fencing to cover the parking lot of the club. We were alone, save two international photographers taking photos of the dead as they were being wheeled out in white sheets. For a split second, my first reaction was that this was exploitative. But that moved quickly to more anger, to wanting people to see what happens when guns get into the wrong person’s hands. Instead of their thoughts and prayers, every lawmaker should be forced to tour the inside of the club to see firsthand what these guns can do.
Two white vans carrying the dead drove past us.
I found a man who lives near the nightclub, who heard the first shots and spent the three hours of the siege watching from his balcony, closer than any news crew. He showed me the video he took on his phone of the final raid. It was nothing but flashes of light and a cacophony of bullets.
I went back to the Contemporary, the images banging around my head, but still wanting to ride the monorail and spend some time with my son. I was trying to capture the same feelings I felt with my dad when I was on the cusp of being a teenager, hoping they would transfer over to my son. It felt a bit forced—I was that dad dragging his too-old-for-this kids in front of every Chip and Dale and every other costumed character for the perfect photo. But there were some great moments. We had as good a time as we could, and I went to sleep at midnight.
I woke up at 5:00 a.m., took the elevator downstairs pas
t the monorail station, and climbed into a Lyft to take me back to the murder scene.
I talked to a man who was at the club the night of the shooting. He told me he dropped to the floor when a clubgoer next to him was shot. After he escaped, he helped a man who had been shot in the arm, using his bandana to apply pressure to the wound. Then he saw the bullet hole in the man’s back. He had no idea if he survived but said he would never forget him. I couldn’t help but hug him after we talked. It wasn’t professional, but I really didn’t care at that point. He didn’t need the hug, but I did.
I spoke to a woman outside the hospital, visiting her cousin who had been shot, and a man who was at the club alone and had managed to get out. I even spoke with a man who had grown up with the shooter.
The details began to emerge about the shooting. Pulse was hosting its weekly Latin night, and there were roughly three hundred people in the club at 2:00 a.m. A man walked into the club at 2:02, armed with a semiautomatic rifle and semiautomatic pistol. He began shooting anyone and everyone and held siege for three hours. People hid from the gunman in bathrooms and dressing rooms inside the club, sending text messages to their loved ones as the madman stalked around the building, plotting his next move. At around 5:15, a SWAT team using an armored vehicle broke a hole in the building, tossed flashbang grenades inside, and engaged the gunman in a firefight. He was shot eight times and died at the scene.
The news mentioned that the gunman had declared allegiance to ISIS before he started shooting. But only one person I spoke with mentioned the word terrorism. Every person I spoke with mentioned the words hate and guns. Easy access to guns. They were all resilient. And almost all of them had a message to deliver: at the end of the day, love would trample hate.