Chase Darkness with Me

by Billy Jensen

  And I wasn’t getting anywhere. Was there anything else that might identify the gunman? Cargo shorts are common. Skinny, agile legs pointed to youth. What about his footwear? He was wearing high tops that looked like they might be expensive basketball sneakers.

  I requested admission into the subreddit /Sneakers. There was a remote chance that sneakerheads—as detail-oriented about kicks as gearheads are about cars—might be able to ID the gunman’s footwear. I asked the moderators if I could post something from an ongoing murder investigation and posted a close-up of the gunman’s shoes, zooming in as much as I could without full distortion. They were still pretty pixelated, but I had to give it a shot.

  “Trying to identify these sneakers—worn by a man who shot and killed an employee at the Jack in The Box in El Monte in October,” I wrote.

  I got my first comment within minutes: “JPEG 12’s. Limited run.”

  I actually laughed out loud. “All right, that was clever,” I responded. If you’re going to troll, at least be funny.

  A few more jokes came. I added some more pics along with the video.

  “In the first pic they kind of look like Nike Air Max 1s or Air Max 90s,” wrote the one sincere commenter. “And in the second pic they look a bit like some kind of Jordan Son of Mars or like a Lebron 10, not really sure though.”

  Dead end.

  I watched the video so many times, I was starting to see things. Playing it in super slow motion, I thought I saw a diamond-shaped black mark on the gunman’s shin as he leapt over the counter. I didn’t know whether it was a bandage, a tattoo, or just a bunch of broken pixels from the low-res camera at the Jack in the Box. But I made a Hail Mary post focusing on the possibility of a tattoo.

  Again, I got nothing.

  A couple of days later, Detective Torres called me. The police were releasing a new still image related to the attack. It was the getaway car. The problem was, it was practically a blur, looking like every late ’90s/early 2000s four-door sedan. You know how on CSI when they take a blurry photo of a car from a crime scene, press a button, and the pixels all jump around this way and that before coming together and creating a crystal-clear image? Yeah, that doesn’t happen in real life.

  I enlarged the photo and looked for anything that might identify the car. I had nothing, but I knew someone who might be able to make sense out of the blurs. I emailed the pic to my buddy Adam, who had come to Chicago and shot footage of my quest to find Marques Gaines’s attacker. Adam was a car guy. If he didn’t have any idea of the make and model, I would go to Reddit along with a few car message boards I knew of.

  It took just two hours for Adam to email me back.

  “It’s a Lexus IS300,” he wrote. “Early 2000s. You can tell by the angle of the back window most importantly, the extra brake light that was actually on the side of the bumper at the back of the car.”

  He included a photo of an early 2000 Lexus IS300 superimposed below the blurry car image still from the surveillance camera. It looked pretty damn close.

  I thanked Adam and sent Detective Torres the comparison. He thought it looked pretty damn close as well. I launched a new ad. No video this time. Just the overhead still of the gunman, a still of his legs, the photo of the mask, and the picture of the getaway car.

  I also changed the location targets, laying out a two-mile radius around each of the robbery locations. That widened the search into LA suburbs Rosemead and San Gabriel.

  The ad read:

  Irwindale, El Monte and vicinity: Do you know someone who might drive an early 2000s Lexus IS300? (The possible getaway car). Do you know anyone who might own this mask? (stock photo). This man attempted to rob the Jack in the Box on Flair Dr. in El Monte on Oct. 21 (suspected to have also robbed a Subway in Irwindale) and shot and killed a man. Pls do the right thing. message any info (do not post info in comments). And pls share. There is a reward.

  I got a few tips, including a photo of a man next to a car that someone sent me, thinking it might be the guy. I got excited and emailed Detective Torres with the information on November 29. I got a response right back. “Billy, I lost your cell. Can you call me?”

  I ran into the parking lot at Crime Watch Daily and called him immediately.

  “Did that photo look good?” I asked.

  “We ID’d him,” Torres cut me off.

  “Really!?” I said, clenching the phone tightly in my fist.

  “Yeah! Someone saw the Facebook ad and called us,” he said.

  It worked. A video of a killer wearing a Halloween mask and a blurry getaway car. All it took was hitting almost every adult in the surrounding areas of the murder with a Facebook page ad over and over and over again. I had spent about $900 to get it done. If I could bottle what I was feeling, I could sell it for triple the price.

  Torres asked me not to say anything to Juan’s family. He still had to build the case, and more importantly, he had to make it stick. Other than the gun, that is the biggest thing that separates me from law enforcement officers. I could write a story about the case, get every detail right, and the only three risks I faced were getting it wrong, getting sued, and no one reading it. Torres had to make sure twelve people on a jury would believe beyond a reasonable doubt that this was the man who had killed Juan Vidal. He thanked me for the help, told me he would email me as soon as he got an arrest, and hung up. I was left to do the one thing I am absolutely horrible at: wait.

  I busied myself through the holiday season trying my damnedest to ID that man seen walking in Brooklyn with a young mother who was later found dead in Owl’s Head Park. People were back home for the holidays. They drink and talk, and hopefully word of the case leaks into their conversation and into the face of the right person. I was spending way too much money trying find him.

  I kept my phone with me at the table for Christmas dinner, scrolling through each of my cases in between passing dishes of marshmallow-covered sweet potatoes and green bean casserole. Kendall understood why I had to keep checking, but that didn’t make it any less annoying for her. It was beyond a compulsion at this point. The endorphins would rush whenever I got a message to one of the victim’s pages. All I wanted for Christmas was my next solve.

  The following week, Torres was ready to announce the arrest of Juan’s killer. He invited me to the press conference. Out of respect for the family, I put on a suit and drove to the LASD homicide building in Monterey Park.

  Waiting in the hall as the TV crews set up, I recognized Juan’s mother from the video I had seen months earlier. I introduced myself and was gifted the biggest hug from her, followed by Juan’s sister. I was getting paid in hugs. Just like in Chicago with Drexina and Phyllis. I’ll take them. They don’t pay the mortgage, but at the moment I get a hug from a family member, I don’t need anything else in the world.

  We walked into the briefing room. Homicide chief Captain Katz began, announcing that an arrest had been made in the murder of Juan Vidal. The suspect’s name was Louie Herrera. He was twenty years old. He lived in San Gabriel.

  My tactic of widening the search had worked—San Gabriel was just two miles up the road from the Jack in the Box. Katz unveiled a large poster with a photo of the suspect. He had a baby face. He was charged with murder and held without bail.

  Torres then walked up to the podium to explain how Herrera was caught. He thanked the media and then turned to me. “Billy Jensen…put together a Facebook page titled ‘El Monte Jack in the Box Killer.’ Tips started coming in, and eventually, we were able to solve the case.”

  I was blown away. To get recognition from law enforcement that the work I did resulted in the arrest floored me—especially after the silence of the Chicago police department during the Marques Gaines case.

  But Torres told us that the work wasn’t done. The getaway driver was still unidentified and on the loose—Herrera wasn’t giving him up. A giant cardboard poster of
the car was on display. “We still want the driver,” he said. “We beg that you guys call and give us tips.”

  Juan’s mother then walked to the podium. “I want all of them to be in jail,” she said, tears streaming. She attempted to catch her breath. “The driver needs to be caught too.”

  After the press conference ended, the local media interviewed me about the case. I hugged Juan’s mom and sister again and then went back to work to find the driver. I crafted a new post, centered around where Louie Herrera lived. I also found his Facebook page and began the painstaking task of going through every one of his friends to try to spot a Lexus IS300 in the background of one of their photos or a mention of Louie or the car in one of their posts.

  After four hours of digging, I sent Detective Torres an email laying out some of the tips I had gotten. He replied with a stand down. Between the media blitz and the Facebook ad targeting, they had gotten a very promising lead on the driver, and they were working it hard.

  The day after the press conference, I got a call from Hector, the friend of Juan who had yelled at me when I originally posted the ad.

  “I’m sorry I doubted you, man,” he said, referring to the message he had sent me the night I sent up the page. “You’re the real deal.”

  He told me that Juan’s family had been getting some threats. I told him I had gotten some doing this as well.

  “Listen, I’m a second amendment guy,” he said. “I’ll take you to the gun range. You definitely have a reason to apply for a concealed carry permit. Let me take you.”

  I told him thanks, but I’d take a rain check.

  Guns scare the hell out of me. I’ve seen the damage they can do a thousand times over. But that doesn’t mean I would never carry one, to go along with the alarm systems and video doorbells, bulletproof panels, and the knife ever present in my pocket—which Dad said to only use if “someone was choking you.” I take precautions, everything they tell you to do: No patterns. Driving different ways to work. Giving myself an escape route whenever walking. But I also have to remember what one cop once told me—“Don’t be afraid of the bullet with your name on it. Be afraid of the thousand bullets without your name on them.” He said that to me ten years ago, and with the number of mass shootings rising in America, I take it even more to heart.

  “Okay,” Hector said. “But if you change your mind…” We kept talking, and he told me his cousin had been shot and killed in Long Beach a few years back. The police had surveillance video but had not released it and hadn’t made any arrests. I told him I would make some calls and see what I could find. We stayed friends on Facebook, like I do with so many other people connected with victims. I keep watching the videos of him restoring 1970s Buicks and dream of one day borrowing one and driving up the coast.

  One day. But there was a lot more work to be done. Three thousand miles away, one of my white whales was spotted in New Hampshire. Was I about to get the answers to a thirty-year-old murder mystery? Or would it just rip open another bag of questions in the most perplexing case I had ever tried to solve? Turns out, the answer was both.

  12.

  The Devil in Plain Darkness

  Contra Costa County, 2001

  In the spring of 1986, a man named Gordon Jenson and his five-year-old daughter, Lisa, moved into the Holiday Host trailer park in Scotts Valley, a small California town in between Santa Cruz and San Jose.

  Jenson explained to some of his new neighbors that Lisa’s mother, Denise LaPorte, had died in a car accident in Texas. He told others that Denise had died in a robbery gone wrong. Either way, he was a single father, working odd jobs, trying to make it in the world with a little girl who was about to start grade school.

  He found work at the trailer park fixing VCRs and other electronics. He was earning what money he could, but it just wasn’t enough for the kind of life he wanted for his little girl. They were sleeping side by side in the back of a truck covered with a camper shell that was open on one end. Lisa had no toys.

  Being the electronics handyman in the park, Jenson interacted with many of the residents. One day, he was visiting with Katherine Decker, who was passing through the park with her husband. As they sat on a picnic table in front of her motor home, Jenson talked about losing his wife, his daughter’s situation, and how it had all gotten to be too much for him. He broke down and started to cry.

  Decker felt horrible. She told him that their own daughter had been having difficulty trying to get pregnant. Suddenly, Jenson saw a way to help his daughter get a better life. And it was perfect timing. He said he was going out of town for a few days and asked Decker if they could watch Lisa for a three-week “trial” period. If the little girl liked her new home with Decker’s daughter and son-in-law in Fountain Valley, maybe they could start adoption proceedings.

  The Deckers were thrilled. They took Lisa home with them, and the little girl liked her potential new family. The three-week trial period was a success, but when it came time for Jenson to pick up Lisa and work out the details, he never showed. They searched the trailer park for him, but he was nowhere to be found. Gordon Jenson was gone.

  The Deckers didn’t know what to do. They attempted to adopt Lisa legally, but when they explained the circumstances to officials, the case was referred to the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department. Lisa was placed in foster care, and a $250,000 warrant was issued for Jenson for child desertion. Upon further interviews and examinations of Lisa, they also charged him with something far more sinister—child molestation.

  Police traveled to the Holiday Host trailer park and attempted to gather any evidence on Jenson that they could use for the warrant. They searched high and low for his fingerprints. After checking the usual spots and coming up empty, they dug deeper and discovered a set of prints on the inside of a VCR he had repaired at the park. When they ran the prints through the system, they got a surprise. There was no Gordon Jenson. The fingerprints belonged to a man named Curtis Mayo Kimball, who was arrested in Orange County in May 1985 for drunk driving and child endangerment.

  For two years, investigators searched for the dad who had abandoned—and was suspected of molesting—his child. They finally caught up with him after he was arrested for drunk driving in Los Angeles. Jenson/Kimball was tossed in jail, but the man who had been so talkative in front of Katherine Decker at the trailer park closed up in front of the police. He refused to admit that he even knew Lisa. After a year, he was paroled. He skipped town, violating his parole conditions, and was never heard from again. Lisa was placed with a loving family. Even though she went through a horrendous ordeal, she grew up to have a family of her own. And almost everyone else forgot about Gordon Jenson.

  Twelve years later, a forty-three-year-old chemist named Eunsoon Jun was eating at a restaurant in her Richmond, California, neighborhood when she got to talking to the owner. Her roof needed to be repaired, and she was looking for someone to help. Jun was a free spirit, a Korean immigrant, and gifted potter who had a pottery wheel and kiln in the garage behind the house she lived in by herself. But she didn’t have the skills to fix a roof. The restaurant owner referred her to a local handyman named Larry Vanner. While Vanner was working on her roof, the two began to talk. His bright blue eyes enchanted Jun. The talk led to romance, and the romance led to Vanner moving in.

  Jun’s friends were suspicious. Yes, she was a free spirit, but they felt her new beau was less a hippie and more a drifter—a “haggard and stoop-shouldered” street person, Jun’s friend Renee Rose remembered. “He smokes a lot. His skin was colorless.”

  Jun’s cousin, Elaine Ramos, said her family had warned Jun to “be careful” when it came to her new man, who was also two decades older than she was. They began to notice discrepancies in some of the things he would tell them about his background. He told them he was a retired colonel. He wasn’t. He told them he owned a convenience store. He didn’t. But the soft-spoken Jun wanted love, an
d this man seemed willing to give it to her. She told her friends and family to back off. She was happy.

  Jun and Vanner were married in a Star Trek–themed ceremony in the backyard of a friend’s house in 2001. The marriage was not official, and no records were filed with the state, but they began living as husband and wife, presumably after vows where they pledged to love each other, live long, and prosper.

  Less than a year later, Jun was supposed to meet a friend for a lunch date. She never showed. Then she missed a pottery class. Her friends began asking each other, “Have you seen Jun?” No one had.

  Days went by. Jun’s friend Renee Rose had spoken with her on May 31 and felt she was talking very hurriedly, a drastic change from her typical slow, deliberate manner of speaking. Rose and Jun were planning a trip to Mendocino, a coastal town three hours north of San Francisco, but Jun ended the call quickly. Rose presumed she had had a fight with Vanner and let it go. But the next day, she didn’t hear from Jun. And in the days that followed, her friend didn’t answer any of her calls. Was the trip still happening?

  Rose wanted to know what was going on. She called Vanner. He told her that Jun’s mother had suddenly fallen ill, and Jun had immediately flown to Virginia to be with her family.

  Okay, Rose thought. “Can I have the number there so I can call her?”

  Vanner said Jun was having trouble with her family and was staying at a hotel and he didn’t have the number. Rose continued to press. Vanner lashed out. “Renee, I’m sure she has more on her mind right now than wherever the fuck you guys were going.”

  Rose backed off. She waited a few days for him to cool down and then called back. Vanner told her that Jun had come back from Virginia but had just left for Oregon to work on a cabin he said the two had purchased together. Then he told Rose he was headed out of town to visit Jun, and she was in a fragile state and didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  None of this felt right to Rose. She kept asking about her friend and kept getting stonewalled by Vanner. By August, she had had enough and called the police.