Chase Darkness with Me

by Billy Jensen

  But the key is this: you are not looking for the suspect. You are looking for people who might know the suspect.

  That’s a small but significant difference. It opens up your search from one person to around two hundred. When I look at a suspect, no matter how blurry they are, I ask that one question: who might know him?

  So write the post and add the photo and video, but instead of hitting publish, hit boost post.

  You will see a pop-up screen titled boost post. From there, it will ask you to choose an audience through targeting. (Or at least this is how it worked in the winter of 2018. Facebook often tweaks their dashboard and changes some steps, but it should be pretty close.) Hit edit, and here is where the magic happens. You can choose from gender, age, things people like (or have mentioned or commented on or liked), and, most importantly, locations. Enter an address closest to where the murder occurred. Then shrink it by whatever you can afford. One mile, two miles. It will tell you how many Facebook users you will reach inside that area based on the money you will spend. So you need to drill down as much as you can.

  With the Halloween Mask Murder at the Jack in the Box in El Monte, I knew I had a white or Hispanic male (from the paleness of his legs), who was very fit (as evidenced by the vault over the counter). I was able to narrow down the age to below twenty-five, within a mile of the two crime scenes he was spotted at. Then I tried to reach his peer group but also elders who might know him. Former bosses. Teachers. Location is always going to be your biggest threat, and if Facebook let you drill down to a quarter mile, it would make my life a lot easier. A mile is okay, but that can get very expensive. A mile radius in a big city could mean five hundred thousand people. You don’t have the money to hit all of them. You have to pick your spots. You then set the budget and duration. I usually go ten days, making sure I hit both weekends. You can also choose to run the ad on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. If you have a good image, do it. You will hit the younger crowd that way, and I have been using it more and more. Though it is impossible for something to be shared and go viral, the ad buy will get it in front of the right people.

  Then you have to enter your credit card information.

  Hit boost and hit publish, and you will wait for Facebook to approve the ad. Usually takes a couple of hours. Then you’re live. Inform both the family and the detective that you are boosted.

  Now you are using two social media platforms. If you want to use Twitter, you need to launch a whole new Twitter profile, which means launching a new Gmail account. It’s tedious, but Twitter led to my first solve, so I won’t discount it. Use the same strategies, albeit with more brevity. Write a tweet and search for locals with large followings and ask nicely for a retweet. That’s how I ended up with the video of the Man in the Green Hoodie.

  You’ll be running on three platforms now. The last of the quadfecta is Snapchat, which only offers ad buying around a specific radius, which can be very, very small and specific. You can draw a circle around just a couple of businesses and present an ad to anyone who tries to post a photo from within that circle. But it costs a big chunk of change. There is also Google, which I have used for a “telltale heart” campaign, betting that the guilty party is going to be googling the victim’s name, searching for new information. When they do, they would be met with the ad and their photo or sketch staring right back at them. It’s a long shot, but if you’re working on your white whale, toss that harpoon.

  Make sure your phone is sending you alerts from the platforms if you get a message. If someone direct messages you, reply as fast as you can—within five minutes if possible, so they don’t change their mind or sober up. If they ask who you are, don’t give your name. Just say you are a victims’ advocate working with the family.

  As tips come in, compile them in a Word document and send them to the police, at the most once per day. If there is something pressing, like a tipster saying they see the suspect “right now!” call the detective. Take screen grabs of interesting/unusual comments. If someone makes a comment saying they know the person, direct message them from the page and then delete their comment.

  You will get a lot of people commenting like idiots. Don’t mind them. They are helping your algorithm and getting the campaign seen by more people when they comment. If they make threats or name names, screen grab and delete.

  Bottom line: you are getting the image of the suspect in front of more people than television and newspapers and local news websites combined. You are canvassing the neighborhood, hitting up everyone with a Facebook profile. They will all see it. Whether they are willing to write you with information is up to them.

  The People Who Will Contact You

  The consequences of holding on to a murder or missing-persons secret differ from religion to religion.

  Eternal damnation for some. Karma for others. Instant karma for John Lennon devotees. Catholic shame. Jewish guilt. And then there is the telltale heart of a secret beating underneath the floorboards of your brain.

  The secret your ex-boyfriend told you that one night. The hit-and-run you and your friend vowed to never discuss again.

  It beats. Beats. Beats.

  If you have information about a violent crime, tell someone, anonymously if you have to. Stop the guilt from beating. The theater for the movie of your life is reserved. Will you want to sit in the front row or watch through your fingers in the back?

  People who know each other. Those are the crimes that most of the time get solved. So many of the ones you will work are stranger crimes. That doesn’t mean someone doesn’t know something.

  You first have to find them. Then you have to make a campaign compelling enough for them to message you.

  You will get friends of the victim, friends of the suspect, family members, local busybodies, local media.

  Treat everyone with respect. Tell them nothing except what has been publicly released about the case. And again, refer to yourself as a victims’ advocate helping the family.

  You will also get jokers, time wasters, and lonely people writing in. You can’t get mad. Just suss them out, and you’ll be able to tell if they are just yanking your chain or claiming to have psychic visions. People will tag their friends, saying it looks just like this friend or that friend. Send them a direct message asking them if they have information about the case. Nine times out of ten, they will say something like “I was just messing around.” But I have gotten great information that has led to arrests from comments that on the surface looked like utter bullshit. You have to check them all out.

  How to Act

  If the families ask you for updates, you have to be vague. You can’t say “We got the guy!” or even “We’re close!” That’s up to the detective to tell them. Just say tips are coming in or say “It’s slow going” if they aren’t. If the police have decided not to work with you and the family are frustrated, then you can start opening up with the information, sharing tips, and coming up with strategies.

  If the family calls or emails you a lot, never say “You know, I have a lot of other cases. I’m very busy.” They don’t care. They want to know about their case.

  It’s easy to bad-mouth the detectives to family members. Don’t. You are seen by these families as a symbol of hope. Superman didn’t fly around complaining about detectives not calling him back. It will seem like a Sisyphean task running a dozen investigations at once. Watching twelve boulders tumbling down toward your chest is never a good feeling. But you cannot let anyone you are working with feel your frustration. And not just because whatever you are feeling is nothing compared to the hurt the family is feeling.

  When psychologist Martin Seligman conducted an experiment putting animals in stressful situations seemingly beyond their control, they gave up trying to escape—even if a clear escape route presented itself. Seligman called the phenomenon “learned helplessness.” The point he wanted to make was that when some p
eople are in a bad situation, they don’t try to make it better, because history has proven time and again that it is futile and they’re helpless.

  Keep at it. Like the poster my dad had hanging on his wall: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.” The only thing you can control is how you react. Keep checking the comments and messages on the page you have created, even after your ad has stopped running. You can keep putting money into the ad, open up the radius, try to narrow down the demographics. Get new information and hit up other locations. But at some point, you will want to stop buying ads, unless you are independently wealthy. It hurts, but you have to do it. The page might have gotten a lot of likes, so you can keep making posts and asking for shares. And keep answering the family’s queries. Anything can happen. Remember, my success rate is around 15 percent. I lose a hell of a lot more than I win.

  Even though information will almost always be a one-way street—you will give the detective everything you have, and they will give you nothing in return—the squeaky wheel always gets the grease. But it’s not your job to keep drilling a detective. Guide the family or friends of the victim to do that. And anyway, unless you have a solid relationship with them, the police will be more willing to talk to the victim’s family or friends than to you.

  That’s what Sheila Wysocki did.

  In 1984, twenty-year old Angela Samota was raped and murdered inside her Dallas apartment. Her friend and former roommate, fellow SMU student Sheila Wysocki, waited twenty years for answers. She said the police told her “some cases just aren’t meant to be solved.” So she took matters into her own hands. She got a private investigator’s license, set up a “war room” in her home, and traced her friend’s final steps on earth.

  Samota had gone out barhopping that night with two friends. After visiting the Boardwalk Beach Club, Nostromo, and the Rio Room, she drove her friends home around 1:00 a.m., went to visit her boyfriend at his apartment, then went back home.

  A little later that night, a man knocked on her door and asked if he could use her bathroom. Samota let him in. Seconds later, her boyfriend got a call from Samota. She told him about the man she had just let in to her home. Then the phone went dead. Her boyfriend rushed to her apartment. On the way, he called the police using the mobile phone in his work truck. The police got there before him. When they opened the apartment, they found Samota’s bloody, naked body on her bed, dead from multiple stab wounds.

  DNA testing was in its infancy. All police could say was the semen collected on the scene was that of a nonsecretor. Samota’s boyfriend, Ben, was a secretor, so he was eliminated. The police suspected one of the friends she was out with, a nonsecretor, but they couldn’t place him at the scene. The case went cold.

  Twenty years later, the determined Wysocki took up the case. She called the Dallas police more than seven hundred times, trying to get them to pay attention.

  It worked. A DNA search was run again, and this time, it came back matching a convicted sexual predator named Donald Bess, who was out on parole at the time of the murder. Wysocki attended the trial. Bess was given the death sentence.

  Wysocki didn’t solve the case, but it’s doubtful it would have been solved without her. Calling a police department more than seven hundred times over the course of two years gets their attention. Cold cases are a giant train with more than two hundred thousand wheels. The squeaky wheel is going to get the grease. Work with the family and friends and strategize how to be in consistent contact with law enforcement.

  Go Bigger Than Just One Case

  You have to get loud. Do not take lack of resources as an answer. Push for a volunteer citizen-detective genealogy pilot program in your community (you can find the nuts and bolts on this in the PDFs that came with the book). Crowdfund to extract DNA from a hair fiber of an unidentified murder victim, and present the cash to the police if they claim they don’t have the funds to do it themselves. If they fail to act, contact the local media. Get loud.

  In the hall of fame of citizen detectives, it’s the ones who saw a hole in the system and worked hard to plug it that shine brightest.

  Meaghan Good of the Charley Project (named after one of the first high-profile abduction cases in American history, the 1874 kidnapping of four-year old Charley Ross in Germantown, Pennsylvania) has written close to ten thousand profiles of missing persons—all for free. Her writing is crisp and to the point, and the profiles of each missing person are extremely user friendly, with relevant information and multiple pictures.

  Good also lives with autism and bipolar disorder. She runs by the motto “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

  “Autism is a pain in the neck,” she told Vice in 2017, “and I wish I didn’t have it, but I wouldn’t be able to run the Charley Project without it.” Good found what she was good at—researching, being meticulous and organized, and put those skills to good use for justice.

  Todd Matthews was a factory worker who became obsessed with finding the identity of “Tent Girl,” an unidentified murder victim discovered by his father-in-law in the woods of Kentucky in 1968.

  Tent Girl was Todd’s call to adventure. He eventually used an online classifieds site to find her identity. She was a twenty-four-year-old woman named Barbara Ann Hackmann-Taylor.

  He found the answer. But Matthews didn’t stop there. He worked on building the volunteer missing-persons site Doe Network and had so much success that the government asked him to help create the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs). It is the only centralized database in the country for missing persons and unidentified remains. The database could be much larger, but most police departments are not required to enter missing persons or remains into the system. It’s all voluntary. There’s another thing you can get loud about.

  If you don’t want to spend money or devote all your free time to a cause, you can still solve a crime. You just need to keep your eyes and ears open.

  In May 2014, a nurse in a Quebec hospital told new parents that she had to take their newborn baby girl, Victoria, to another room for a few routine tests. She never brought Victoria back.

  Caught in every parent’s nightmare, the mom and dad called the police, who then issued an Amber Alert—be on the lookout for a red Toyota.

  That’s when boredom became an ally of justice. Four friends with nothing to do on a Monday night saw the story about the phony nurse. One of the friends looked at her photos and thought the woman looked like someone she knew. They drove to that woman’s house, confirmed the hunch, and called the police. Baby Victoria was back in her mother’s arms that night.

  In December 2016, Uber driver Keith Avila picked up a male and two females—one of whom looked very young—and drove them to a hotel in Elk Grove, California, just outside Sacramento. During the trip, he heard the male and female coaching the younger woman: “Okay, when we get there, the first thing you’re gonna do is give the guy a hug and you’re gonna ask if he has any weapons.” Avila dropped the three off at the hotel—then immediately called the police. Turns out the young woman was a sixteen-year-old girl being sex trafficked by the couple.

  That same year, Carmen Moreno was picking up garbage in a park in Seville, Spain, when she spotted a pile of bloody tissues. A woman had just overdosed in the park, and the police who were called to the scene had haphazardly left some debris behind, including the tissues. But Moreno had watched a lot of CSI. She wondered, If it was an overdose, why was there so much blood? So she took out a plastic bag and carefully collected the tissues. The tissues led to an arrest. The woman didn’t die of an overdose. She had been raped and murdered.

  Stay aware. Stay alert. You can help.

  What’s In Store for You

  If you do decide to try to solve a murder, you must prepare yourself to be beset on all sides by multiple factors of the case.

  In front of you are the bad guys. And they mul
tiply every day. Thirteen new unsolved murders every day.

  To your left is time. And boredom. The quest for answers and finding none. The no-snitch policy, less about a code on the streets and more about what people have co-opted from movies and songs.

  To your right is your bank account, rapidly depleting. Your credit card statement charting upward. Your family wondering what is taking so long as they wait for you to come to dinner.

  But behind you is the family of the victim. The late-night email from a woman still wanting to know what happened to her husband. The one she picked. The one who picked her. After every bad date and crappy relationship. Every teenage crush and heartbreak. She found him. They built things. They saved. “We can’t go to Disney this year. Maybe when the kids are a little older.”

  And then someone wipes it all away in the blink of a muzzle flash.

  Why? is replaced by Who? Who? is replaced by Where? Where? is replaced by How? How will we find this man who took everything away?

  Without the survivors behind you, you will fall down. They push you forward. When a promising lead turns out to be a crushing red herring, you fall backward. But you never hit the ground. Because the survivors are already there. They have already hit the ground. They have already lost so much and are still charging ahead.

  And then if you stay at it and catch a little luck, you get the euphoria. I’m not going to lie. It is euphoric. Seven months of searching for an answer every day, and then getting a call from a detective: “We got him.” It’s euphoric.

  But that’s not why you do it.

  You do it because how can you not?

  Now if you will excuse me, I have to go: I just got a tip about a killer I’m trying to identify in Dallas. I have to send the info to the detective. He looks pretty good.