WEST McCRAY:
What did she mean by that?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She wanted to know if I … if I … how she put it was … God, it’s ugly.
She asked me if I fuck little girls.
WEST McCRAY:
Those were her words?
ELLIS JACOBS:
Her exact words. She had a knife against my throat and she asked me if I was … like Darren, and that’s what she meant when she asked. And of all the things she could’ve said, I wasn’t—that wasn’t anything close to what I was expecting.
WEST McCRAY:
What did you do?
ELLIS JACOBS:
I told her I didn’t know … I didn’t know about Darren. I told her how I met him online in a game and all that. She was … Okay, so when my parents kicked me out, I had to rely on other people seeing through me, you know what I mean?
WEST McCRAY:
Explain it to me.
ELLIS JACOBS:
Well, like when I was too proud or I was too angry … I was always putting on a front to keep people from giving me what I needed. I’d hurt them. Not—not physically, but I’d just put my pain on them because I didn’t know how to ask for help. So I always try to remember that, about other people. I always try to see past them and give them help, if I think I can.
WEST McCRAY:
So you decided to help her?
ELLIS JACOBS:
A little. I mean—it was more that I was shitting myself and I had a knife at my throat and I really thought I was gonna die, man. She was crazed. She just had this … wild look in her eyes … and that was all I had to work with, so I worked with it.
WEST McCRAY:
You talked her down.
ELLIS JACOBS:
I guess so.
WEST McCRAY:
How did you do that, exactly?
ELLIS JACOBS:
I said she was hurt and I could help her and she could tell me about Darren, because I didn’t know. I could kinda see that she … she was tired, man. She just looked like she was done. So I had that on my side. I think that was part of why she lowered the knife … but also, I guess—okay, so in the moment, I believed I was going to die. I truly believed that she was going to kill me. But after she left … I don’t know. Hindsight’s twenty/twenty. But after, I don’t think she would’ve gone through with it. Still cried like a damn baby when she let me go, though.
WEST McCRAY:
Walk me through what happened next.
ELLIS JACOBS:
We went back to the main office and I fixed up her arm, and she told me about—she told me about Darren.
WEST McCRAY:
By all accounts, Darren had been a very good friend to you. I know you offered to hear her out as an act of self-preservation but was that all there was to it? Did you believe her?
ELLIS JACOBS:
I mean, when someone comes at you with a knife and they’re not trying to shake you down for money or something like that, and the first words out of their mouth are askin’ if you mess with little kids … there’s got to be something to that, right? And even though I … I swear I never knew the Darren she was talking about, she found this—she found this stuff in his room.
WEST McCRAY:
What kind of stuff?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She’d found a bunch of fake IDs and they were all—they were all Darren, the pictures on the IDs, but they all had different names. And none of them were Darren’s name.
WEST McCRAY:
Do you remember any of them?
ELLIS JACOBS:
Just Keith, like you said. She said she knew him as Keith. And then the other things she had from his room were, uh … they were tags.
WEST McCRAY: Tags?
ELLIS JACOBS:
Tags like … they were cut out of shirts … and they had names—girl names—he’d written girls’ names on them. When I asked her what that meant … she said they were his trophies … his trophies from kids.
Sadie was one of the names.
WEST McCRAY:
Okay.
ELLIS JACOBS:
She didn’t say she was Sadie, though, and I didn’t even really think about it until you told me her name and then I remembered.
WEST McCRAY:
Okay, what happened after that?
ELLIS JACOBS:
Are you all right?
WEST McCRAY:
Yeah, just—what …
What happened after that?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She said Darren “did something” to her little sister, and he hurt kids, and that was the reason she was looking for him.
WEST McCRAY:
What did she mean by that?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She never said. I told her she should just call the police, get them to take care of it, if he was so bad … we fought about that.
WEST McCRAY:
She didn’t want to?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She didn’t want to. She made it out like she wanted to be sure he was there first, then she’d call the cops … but she had to be there because after everything he’d put her through, she needed to see it happen.
WEST McCRAY:
What did you do?
ELLIS JACOBS:
I bandaged up her arm … I mean, I bandaged it up as best as I could, which wasn’t very good, and then I sent her on her way.
WEST McCRAY:
You sent her to him.
You knew where he was.
ELLIS JACOBS:
Yeah.
WEST McCRAY:
Please tell me you called the police as soon as she left.
ELLIS JACOBS:
I didn’t.
WEST McCRAY:
Why wouldn’t you call them? Why talk to me and not the police?
ELLIS JACOBS:
Because I was—because I don’t know! Because if I sent them to Darren, and she was wrong, I betrayed a guy who was good to me! I can’t walk back from that! But if she was going there to call ’em herself, and if he really was guilty, then it was all going to work out anyway. I didn’t—I don’t know, man! It didn’t feel real, you know what I mean? I just wanted to forget about it. And then when Joe told me you were looking for a missing girl named Sadie, and I remembered that tag …
I don’t know.
WEST McCRAY:
My God, Ellis.
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]: Farfield, Colorado is five days from Langford. When I’m done talking to Ellis, I prepare to drive there, but I’m stopped by the thought of Sadie, relentlessly moving from one place to the next, grief-stricken, guilty, exhausted and hurt. It’s hard to think of someone so vulnerable and alone.
It’s hard to think of her, so vulnerable and so alone.
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]: I don’t think I can do this.
DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]: Yes, you can.
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]: When Keith was in their lives, Mattie was about the same age as my—as my daughter. And Sadie was only eleven. He preyed on them and they’re just—they’re just kids, you know?
Who does that to a kid?
DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]: You slept any?
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]: Yeah.
DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]: Liar.
WEST McCRAY:
When I arrive in Farfield, it’s seven in the morning. Ellis told me the last place he knew Keith to be, the same address he gave Sadie, and when I pull up in front of that house, I don’t wait for nine o’clock before I knock on its front door.
[FOOTSTEPS, SOUNDS OF KNOCKING]
[SOUND OF DOOR OPENING]
FEMALE VOICE:
Can I help you?
WEST McCRAY:
Hi, there. I’m West McCray. I’m a journalist with WNRK and I’m looking for a missing girl. I have reason to believe she was in this area, at your house, actually, and I would really appreciate if you could give me your time and let me ask you a few questions about that.
FEMALE VOICE:
I don’t know anything about a missing girl.
WEST McCRAY:
It would’ve been a few months ago—
FEMALE VOICE:
Uh, look, I just got off work and I’m very tired and it’s very early … but maybe you could— WEST McCRAY:
Wait, I just need—just a—do you know this man?
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]: I show her the picture of Keith. Darren.
FEMALE VOICE:
Oh my God.
WEST McCRAY: So you do know him? Is he here now? Was he?
FEMALE VOICE:
No. Yes—I mean … he was. But—
WEST McCRAY:
Where is he now?
FEMALE VOICE:
Well, he’s—
He’s dead.
LITTLE GIRL:
Mom?
THE GIRLS
EPISODE 8
[THE GIRLS THEME]
ANNOUNCER:
The Girls is brought to you by Macmillan Publishers.