Missy’s mother didn’t follow current events, but news of the killings had trickled down to the tabloids she browsed at the drugstore during her breaks from work. In the note, Missy wrote that she wanted her mother to come to terms with the news and then, once she was ready, send the note to the editor of the Los Angeles Times so it would be published.
Mrs. Tompkins didn’t know where her daughter was, but she knew she would never see her again. She decided to burn the note, had started to burn it—the corner was jagged and singed—but then she pulled the sheet of paper back from the flame. She read Missy’s words again and decided they didn’t belong to her. She didn’t understand what Missy meant, exactly, but her daughter had been in the war and people would respect what she had to say. Mrs. Tompkins sent the note to the newspaper, where soon after it was printed on the front page.
“Jennifer asked me to help her and I don’t regret what I did,” Missy had written. “This is a different war, not an official one, but who decides which wars are legitimate?”
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The Jennifer Effect
Jennifer was already a national obsession, but after the publication of Missy Tompkins’s note, she became a national frenzy.
MISSING AIRMAN SAYS “THIS IS WAR”
Federal law enforcement swooped down on Mrs. Tompkins’s Reno apartment complex. She was questioned about her daughter for days with barely any food or sleep. Along with Missy’s brother, she appeared in a nationally televised press conference with FBI agents, military officials, and members of Congress, urging Missy to turn herself in.
Immediately after the press conference, Cheryl Crane-Murphy turned to her guest, a retired military general, and asked him if he wondered why Missy Tompkins had written a note and wanted it published. “Why broadcast her guilt? Excuse my language here, general, but that note is really just a big eff you to the military, isn’t it?”
The general, tightly gripping the armrests of his chair as if to restrain himself from lunging at the camera, responded without answering the question. “We do not train American women for combat so they can come home and use those skills on us.”
“Might Jennifer also be in the military?” Cheryl Crane-Murphy asked. Missy’s reference to “Jennifer” in her note bolstered the idea that there was a real person named Jennifer who was commanding others.
The general became so enraged at the thought that he turned to the camera and said: “We don’t know who you are, Jennifer, but we’re going to find you and kick your ass.”
Every aspect of Missy Tompkins’s life was examined, from her childhood in Reno to her enrollment in the Air Force Academy to her years of military service as a fighter pilot. It didn’t take long for investigators to discover that Missy Tompkins had spent her high school years in Southern California, where she lived with her father, and that during this time she had a classmate named Soledad Ayala.
“The plot thickens,” said Cheryl Crane-Murphy. “Leeta Albridge is connected to Soledad Ayala, the mother of tragic Luz, and now Missy Tompkins is connected to Soledad too.”
Soledad was supposedly in Mexico City visiting her sick aunt, but the police discovered that she didn’t have a sick aunt. They were searching for Soledad so they could question her about the events unfolding in the United States, but she seemed to have disappeared.
The FBI director appeared on television for what the media dubbed his daily “Jennifer” briefing. “We have issued an arrest warrant for air force captain Tompkins and a material witness warrant for army specialist Ayala,” he said. “We are actively seeking the identity of the person known as Jennifer—if such a person exists. If so, she is working as part of a large criminal network, one that appears to involve at least one female member of the U.S. Armed Forces, but possibly more.”
On The Nola and Nedra Show, Nola Larson King said: “Clearly we have some kinda lady terrorist group here with someone named Jennifer as their leader.”
“I’m not comfortable referring to members of our armed forces as terrorists,” said Nedra Feldstein-Delaney.
“Then what would you call them?” countered Nola Larson King.
Three days later, the editors at the Los Angeles Times received something new: a letter containing a “Penis Blacklist,” signed by Jennifer. There was a postmark from Phoenix and nothing more.
The Penis Blacklist comprised the names of one hundred men, whose penises, the letter said, “must not be given shelter inside any woman.” The editors didn’t know if it was legitimate or a hoax, but they published the list of names anyway. Anything Jennifer related was big news.