The questions go on for pages and pages. On Michelle’s blog, True Crime Diary, we will begin to try to get the answers to the questions she had left open. The discussions of the case are ongoing, and we invite readers to join in and follow the numerous message boards that light up day and night with new clues and different theories about the killer. Michelle always said she didn’t care who solved this case, just as long as it got solved.
There’s no question as to Michelle’s impact on the case. In the words of Ken Clark, she “brought attention to one of the least known, yet most prolific serial offenders ever to operate in the United States. If I hadn’t read the reports for myself during my years of investigation on this case, the story would be almost unbelievable. Her professional research, attention to detail, and sincere desire to identify the suspect allowed her to strike a balance between the privacy of those who suffered while exposing the suspect in a way that someone may recognize.”
“It is not easy to gain the trust of so many detectives across so many jurisdictions,” Erika Hutchcraft told us, “but she managed to do so and you knew it was by her reputation, her perseverance, and the fact that she cared about the case.”
Paul Holes concurred, going so far as to say that he considered Michelle to be his detective partner on the case. “We were constantly in communication. I would get excited about something and would send it to her and she would also get excited. She would dig and find a name and send it to me to look into. This case is the ultimate emotional roller coaster—the highs are amazing when you think you have found the guy, and then you crash when you eliminate the promising suspect through DNA. Michelle and I shared in those ups and downs. I had my good suspects and she had hers; we would send e-mails back and forth in a growing crescendo of excitement only to experience the finality of an elimination.
“Michelle was able to accomplish gaining not only my trust but the trust of the entire task force and proved herself as a natural investigator, adding value with her own insights and tenacity. The ability to learn the case, have insights that many do not have the aptitude for, the persistence, and the fun and engaging personality all wrapped up in one person was amazing. I know she was the only person who could have accomplished what she did in this case starting out as an outsider and becoming one of us over time. I think this private/public partnership was truly unique in a criminal investigation. Michelle was perfect for it.
“I last saw Michelle in Las Vegas where we spent a lot of time together talking about the case. Little did I know this would be the last time I would see her face-to-face. Her last email to me was Wednesday, 4/20. As always, she let me know she was sending me some files she and her researcher had found and thought I should know about. She ended that email with ‘Talk to you soon, Michelle.’
“I downloaded those files she sent after I found out about her passing Friday night. She was still helping me.”
In an e-mail to her editor in December 2013, Michelle addressed what every true-crime journalist has to come to grips with when writing about an unsolved crime: how does the story end?
I’m still optimistic about developments in the case, but not blind to the challenge of writing about a currently unsolved mystery. I did have one idea on that front. After my magazine article was published, I received tons of emails from readers, almost all starting along the lines of, “You may have thought of this, but if not, what about (insert some investigative idea).” It really confirmed for me that inside everyone lurks a Sherlock Holmes that believes that given the right amount of clues they could solve a mystery. If the challenge here, or perceived weakness, is that the unsolved aspect will leave readers unfulfilled, why not turn that on its head and use it as a strength? I have literally hundreds of pages of analyses from both back in the day, and more recently—geo-profiles, analysis of footwear, days of the week he attacked, etc. One idea I had was to include some of those in the book, to offer the reader the chance to play detective.
We will not stop until we get his name. We’ll be playing the detective as well.
— PAUL HAYNES AND BILLY JENSEN
May 2017
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Afterword
MICHELLE WAS BORED BY ANYTHING WITH MAGIC OR SPACESHIPS. “I’m out,” she’d say with a laugh. Ray guns, wands, glowing swords, superhuman abilities, ghosts, time travel, talking animals, superscience, enchanted relics, or ancient curses: “All of that feels like cheating.”
“Is he building another suit of armor?” she asked during a screening of the first Iron Man movie. Twenty minutes into the movie, Tony Stark tweaks and improves his boxy gray Mark I armor into the candy apple red and regal gold supersuit. Michelle chuckled and cut out to go shopping.
Spaghetti Westerns were too long and too violent. Zombies were scientifically implausible. And diabolical serial killers with complex schemes were, as far as she was concerned, unicorns.
Michelle and I were married for ten years, and together for thirteen. There was not a single pop-culture point of connection between the two of us. Oh, wait—The Wire. We both liked The Wire. There you go.
When we met, I was a burbling, fizzing cauldron of obscure ephemera and disjointed facts. Movies, novels, comics, music.
And serial killers.
I knew body counts, and modi operandi, and quotes from interviews. Stockpiling serial-killer lore is a rite of passage for guys in their twenties who want to seem dark and edgy. I was precisely the kind of dork who, in my twenties, would do anything to seem dark and edgy. And there I was, all through the flannel nineties, rattling off minutiae about Henry Lee Lucas and Carl Panzram and Edmund Kemper.
Michelle knew those facts and trivia as well. But for her, it was background noise, as unimportant and ultimately uninteresting as poured cement.
What interested her, what sparked her mind and torqued every neuron and receptor, were people. Specifically, detectives and investigators. Men and women who, armed with a handful of random clues (or, more often than not, too many clues that needed to be sifted through and discarded as red herrings), could build traps to catch monsters.
(Ugh—that was the movie tagline description of what Michelle did. Sorry. It’s hard for me not to spiral upward into hyperbole when I talk about her.)
I was married to a crime fighter for a decade—an emphatically for-real, methodical, “little grey cells,” Great Brain–type crime fighter. I saw her righteous fury when she’d read survivor testimony or interview family members who were still reeling from the wrenching away of a loved one. There were mornings when I’d bring her coffee and she’d be at her laptop, weeping, frustrated and worn flat by another lead she’d chased that left her smashed nose-first against a brick wall. But then she’d have a slug of caffeine, wipe her eyes, and hammer away at the keyboard again. A new window opened, a new link pursued, another run at this murderous, vile creep.
The book you just read was as close as she got. She always said, “I don’t care if I’m the one who captures him. I just want bracelets on his wrists and a cell door slamming behind him.” And she meant it. She was born with a true cop’s heart and mind—she craved justice, not glory.