Within hours, the police had subpoenaed the records of the phone sending the texts looking for a link with known gang members. They could tell the messages had been transmitted from Georgia, but the device was a burner, an unregistered phone bought with cash at a Walmart. There was nothing in the cellular records or purchase receipts that told investigators who owned the phone or where it was currently located.
Two days later, another text arrived from a different number, this time with an Atlanta area code. Here is 2 picture of you husband, it read and included photos of Janssen tied to a chair. If you can not tell me where my things are at tomorrow i will start torchering colleen father. None of the investigators had any idea what “things” the kidnappers were referring to. The texts also demanded that someone bring Melton, the incarcerated gang leader, a pack of cigarettes, as well as other commands. Jefe wants his things and he needs to get another phone fast so we can finish our business and if I don’t get word from him very very fast then we have problems with his people. The police didn’t know if “Jefe” referred to Melton or someone else, or why Melton would want cigarettes delivered to him since he could buy them inside the Polk Correctional Institution. More texts arrived with references to unknown people. Now he know ah playin games, one said. Tell him we got franno, tell him he better find a way to tell me where my things at an get my money or we kill these people in 2 days. Investigators were confused by these mentions of “Jefe” and “Franno,” and the threats to kill multiple people even though authorities were aware of only one kidnapping victim. If this was a revenge plot, why were the kidnappers sending so many ambiguous messages? Why hadn’t they made any ransom demands? One federal agent thought the kidnappers were acting as if they weren’t sure what was going on themselves, as if they didn’t have a plan.
The FBI asked Google to look for searches around the time of the abduction that had included Janssen’s address. The computer giant reported that someone using a disposable T-Mobile phone had Googled “Colleen Janssen address,” but what had come up was her parents’ home, where she had once lived. A new theory emerged: The kidnappers had intended to kidnap Colleen as revenge for prosecuting Kelvin Melton, but had accidentally grabbed her father.
Investigators determined that the Georgia phone sending the latest texts was also a burner, but this time, when agents approached cellular companies, their records proved more fruitful. The texts had been sent from Atlanta. Moreover, the phone had recently received a call from another number, which had been sending and receiving texts with yet another phone that police were able to determine was located inside the walls of Polk Correctional itself. That phone had placed almost a hundred calls to Melton’s daughters.
The kidnapping, investigators came to believe, was being directed by Melton himself.
The FBI phoned Polk Correctional and told the warden to search Melton’s cell. When Melton saw guards approaching, he barricaded the door and smashed his phone to pieces. It would take days to recover data from the device.
There was nothing the FBI could do to force Melton to cooperate with the investigators. He was already in prison for life. There was no additional information to be gleaned from any cellphone records. Agents had looked at surveillance tapes from the stores where the burner phones had been purchased and had scrutinized footage from cameras overlooking roads near Janssen’s house. None of it was helpful. The FBI had hundreds of pieces of information. There were numerous dots, but nothing to connect them.
Some agents hoped the FBI’s new computer system, a piece of complex software named Sentinel, might help unearth connections they had overlooked. Others were more skeptical. More than a decade earlier, the bureau had started building technologies that officials had promised would provide powerful new tools for solving crimes. Most of those efforts, however, were failures. One notable effort was abandoned in 2005 after $170 million was spent creating a search engine that crashed constantly. Another attempt was suspended in 2010 after auditors concluded it would cost millions more simply to figure out why the system wasn’t working. A few years before Janssen was kidnapped, the agency’s databases were still so outdated that most agents didn’t even bother inputting the bulk of the information they collected during investigations. Instead, they used paper files and index cards, like their predecessors decades before.
Then, in 2012, the bureau had rolled out Sentinel. Simply put, it was a system for sorting and managing evidence, clues, witness testimony, and the tens of thousands of other little pieces of information agents collected every day. Sentinel was tied into analytical engines and databases that the bureau and other law-enforcement agencies had developed to look for patterns. The software’s development had been overseen by a young man from Wall Street who had convinced the FBI to hire him by arguing that the bureau needed to draw on lessons from companies such as Toyota, and methods such as “lean manufacturing” and “agile programming.” He had promised he could get Sentinel working in less than two years with a handful of software engineers—and then he had delivered.
Now Sentinel was functional. No one working on the Janssen case was certain if it would provide any help, but they were desperate. One of the agents began inputting each piece of information they had collected thus far, and then sat back to see if Sentinel would spit anything useful out.
II.
When Rick Madrid showed up for his job interview at the old General Motors plant, he wore mirrored shades, an Iron Maiden T-shirt, and a pair of cutoff jeans he had once described as “the greatest aphrodisiac in Northern California.” It was 1984. Out of courtesy toward his interviewers—and because Madrid wanted this job—he had combed his beard and put on deodorant. He drew the line, however, at wearing sleeves that covered his tattoos.
Madrid was familiar with the plant in Fremont, California, because he had worked there until two years earlier, when GM had shut it down. Fremont was known, locally and nationally, as the worst auto factory in the world. Eight hours a day for twenty-seven years, Madrid had pounded rims into place with a sledgehammer, proselytized about the greatness of the United Auto Workers, and served rounds of “magic screwdrivers,” a high-octane mixture of vodka and orange juice that he poured into plastic cups wedged into car frames so coworkers could partake as the vehicles progressed down the line. Fremont’s assembly conveyors always moved smoothly, so the drinks hardly ever spilled. The bags of ice he put in the vehicles’ trunks often warped the liners, but that was the problem of whoever bought the car. “Work was an interruption in my leisure time,” Madrid later said. “I was there to earn money. I really didn’t care about the quality of the job and neither did GM. They just wanted to get as many cars out as they could.”