Chase Darkness with Me
Page 30
Acknowledgments
We are all supporting actors in each other’s movie. I can only hope I am as much help to you as you all have been to me.
To my literary agent, Marc Gerald; Andrew Eisenman and the entire Audible Originals team; and Anna Michels and the entire Sourcebooks team. Thank you for believing in me, my story, and this new idea of crimesolving.
To John Mancini, for teaching me how to write a killer lede.
To Lisa Gregorish-Dempsey, for answering a cold message on Facebook and, instead of calling the police, gave me a job with television wizards Scott Eldridge and Jeremy Spiegel and the entire Crime Watch Daily crew.
To Patton Oswalt for letting me and Paul Haynes help complete Michelle’s book and for thrusting your grief into the light to help so many others. To Paul Haynes for being an excellent copilot in the I’ll Be Gone in the Dark whirlwind. And to Liz Garbus, Elizabeth Wolff, Julie Gaither, and the entire Moxie Firecracker team, who I know will cement the legacy.
To Paul Holes, for being a fantastic partner—we are just getting started. And, of course, thank you for gifting me the ending of this book by solving the Golden State Killer case along with Barbara Rae Venter, Ken Clark, and Erika Hutchcraft, and all the others who never gave up.
To Karen Kilgariff, for your wonderful friendship and for not calling security on me when we first met (I was not wearing a trench coat, btw). And to Georgia Hardstark (and Steven Ray Morris) and all the Murderinos, for keeping all of these stories out of the darkness.
To all the bookstagrammers, for using a visual medium to share your love of the written word.
To @Super70sSports, @DinosaurDracula, @HamillHimself, and @MJMcKean, for making me laugh on Twitter when I need it.
To every hockey player who has ever punched me in the face. I never took it personally.
To John Barg, LASD, and all the detectives who were willing to take a chance on a crazy idea and let me help them solve these homicides and find these fugitives.
To Alexis Linkletter, for helping me soar, and Jac Vanek, for keeping me grounded.
To Lenora Claire, Camille Dodero, Doron Ofir, Alicia Kozakiewicz, Paul Thompson, Ashley Hammen, Tom Forman, Jon Beyer, Adam Davis, Jeff Ross, Kevin Balfe, Nancy Miller, Mike Lacey, Jed Morey, Robbie Woliver, Owen Michael, Bob Mohler, Stephanie Schwartz, Denise Chandler, Dawn Friedman, Cori, Stacie and Mom, Gary Dellabate, Morrissey, David Bowie, Chuck D, Lenny Dykstra, Clark Gillies, Adam West, Jack Webb, and Rowdy Roddy Piper, for your friendship and/or inspiration.
To Carol Schweitzer, Angeline Hartmann, and everyone at NCMEC for never giving up.
To Rhonda Randall, Carl Koppelman, Todd Mathews, and all the citizen sleuths out there burning the midnight oil inside their various rabbit holes.
To Drexina Nelson, Hector Carillo, Scott Greene, Billie Jo Dick, and all of the friends and families of the victims.
To Kendall, Zoe, and Will for everything. Seriously, everything.
To Michelle McNamara. If there’s a heaven, you are there, solving an unsolved murder. It’s a different version of heaven than most people envision. But that’s your heaven. You are the patron saint of citizen detectives everywhere.
And to Dad, for teaching me how to throw a punch, take a punch, and never, ever give up. This is all still a rip-off, but I’m trying to make the best of it.
About the Author
Photo © Robyn Von Swank
Billy Jensen is a true-crime journalist focused squarely on unsolved murders and missing persons. But after seventeen years of writing hundreds of stories with no endings, he was fed up—and decided to try to solve the murders and find the missing himself. It worked. Combining the shoe-leather investigative tenacity and skills he learned reporting crime with radical techniques honed from his day job as a digital executive, Jensen has solved or helped solve ten homicides and helped locate missing persons. Law enforcement agencies now reach out to Jensen to help in cases that have them stumped, using him as a “consulting detective.” He was friends with Michelle McNamara and, after her sudden passing, helped finish her #1 New York Times bestselling book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, about the hunt for the Golden State Killer. He was a senior producer and investigator on the Warner Bros. show Crime Watch Daily and cohosts with Paul Holes the podcast The Murder Squad.
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