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Ayaan leaned forward, steepled her hands under her chin. “I’m sorry. You must be very frustrated.”
“He . . . he sounded genuinely scared on the phone. That’s why he wouldn’t meet me at a restaurant. I thought maybe he was being paranoid, but apparently he had reason to be afraid.” If he really did know who TCK was, that information could have gotten him into trouble. “Could someone have been tapping his phone? How would they know he’d reached out to me?”
Sam wrote something down on the pad in front of him and then looked up at her again. “I highly doubt Leo was killed for saying he had a tip for your podcast investigation. You saw Duane Grove next to the body moments after Leo was killed. I just spoke to the landlord, who said he overheard Leo and Duane fighting about their business at the mechanic’s last night. Right now, his partner is a strong person of interest. Do you remember what he said when you got there?”
“Just that he had found Leo like that. I think he said he’d come over to borrow something, and Leo was dead when he got there.” Elle clenched her hands. If Leo really did get shot over a business dispute just minutes before she arrived, she must have the worst luck in the world. “I can’t believe this.”
“What did you do after you arrived and found Leo murdered?”
“I took his pulse to make sure, and I told Duane he was dead. Then Duane ran off, and I called 911, then texted Ayaan to let her know.”
“And you didn’t find or touch anything at the scene before I arrived? You didn’t see what Leo was supposedly going to show you?”
Elle grew very still, her eyes focused on his. “No, nothing. That’s why I’m so pissed.”
Ayaan nodded and stood up. “Well, I think that’s enough for tonight. Detective Hyde or I will be in touch if we have any other questions. Are you feeling distressed at all? We have a liaison you can speak to if you want to get some numbers for counseling. Discovery of a body can be traumatic.”
“I’ve seen worse things,” Elle said, then winced at how flippant it sounded. But it was true. Death was by no means the worst thing that could happen to a person; surely Sam and Ayaan knew that. She stood and followed Ayaan out.
After collecting her gun and saying goodbye, Elle headed to her car on autopilot. Maybe Sam was right. Duane was the obvious suspect, and if he and Leo had fought the night before, it didn’t look good for him. But she couldn’t shake the memory of the fear in Leo’s voice. He had known someone was after him, and it didn’t make sense that he’d be that scared of someone he still worked with. If Leo knew he had key evidence against a serial killer, though, that would certainly be cause for fear.
She wished she had a way to find out what was on that flash drive. But if Leo protected his files, it might take the police lab weeks to get access to it, and that was if they made it a priority. Even if they did, they wouldn’t share that information with her. The only way she might be able to find out what he knew was by looking into him herself.
Back in her car, Elle turned up the heat and sped off into the night toward home.
5
Justice Delayed podcast
December 12, 2019
Transcript: Season 5, Episode 2
Elle voice-over:
The history of tea has deep roots in colonization and stolen land. White settlers are responsible for the experimentation and exploitation of the tea planting process all across the continent of Asia, and Darjeeling is a classic example of this. A British doctor named Archibald Campbell is the person credited with planting the first tea in the Darjeeling region of India, using Chinese tea leaves. Similar to Champagne, which is a sparkling wine from a specific region in France, Darjeeling is prone to bastardization by companies wanting to leverage the name to sell a substandard product. Only teas from the Darjeeling region are meant to bear the name, but identifying and stopping the fakes from selling is a nearly impossible task. As with so many things in life, people are willing to accept a fraud if it saves them money. But that was not the case with the tea found on Tamera’s clothing. While they didn’t have the technology to show it at the time, it would turn out that tea was one of the most expensive of its kind, imported from the region itself. But all they knew in 1997 was that it was an oolong, and that’s what police told the media.
[THEME MUSIC + INTRO]
Elle:
Can you explain why you feel you shouldn’t have released the information about the tea to the public?
Sykes:
Let’s just say, it led to the community exhibiting . . . suspicion of a certain group of people.
Elle:
Asian people, specifically, right?
Sykes:
That’s right. As soon as we told the media about the tea stain, our office was inundated. Oolong tea isn’t all that exotic, but at the time, it wasn’t a common household drink for the majority of the population in the area, who were mostly descended from Scandinavian and German immigrants. Which meant the suspicion laser-focused on marginalized communities, even though that was completely illogical. But, as I’m sure you know, racism isn’t logical.
Under the guise of being good citizens, every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the state who didn’t like brown people seemed to find a reason to call us. For all we knew, the killer was some snobby white guy who liked imported tea, but this was the biggest case in the city at the time. We had to vet every tip, no matter how ridiculous.
Elle:
And a lot of them were ridiculous, weren’t they? I have information that you received tips about Pakistanis, Koreans, Chinese people, even one Saudi. Did any of those result in arrest?
Sykes:
No.
Elle:
Did you bring any of them in for questioning?
Sykes:
No, there was no need.
Elle:
You have to understand, I’m not trying to berate you about this. I know you made the best decision you thought you could at the time, but the resulting chaos led to a spike in hate crimes in the city. Indian and Chinese restaurants were targeted with vandalism and bomb threats. Minneapolis PD wasted some five hundred hours of police resources over the following weeks as you tried to sort through the thousand or so tips you got.
Sykes:
That’s correct. Of course, I’m not excusing it. As a Black man on the force in the eighties and nineties, I certainly faced my share of discrimination—both within and outside the department. Now I can see that I was too hasty, releasing that information without thinking about the possible consequences. But I still think that information is important. The tea, I mean. I still think it will matter, especially now that we have the specific kind down to the brand.
Elle:
I hope you’re right.
Elle voice-over:
The tea is a clue, but it could also be a needle in a haystack. My best estimate, based on the historical records I’ve been given access to, is that approximately five thousand tins of Majestic Sterling tea were ordered by individuals in the USA in the three years preceding the Countdown murders. A further seventy-five thousand had been ordered by specialty tea sellers throughout the Midwest. Trying to narrow down a list of suspects, even if police could get subpoenas for all of the vendors’ records, would be next to impossible—and then there’s always the chance TCK just walked in and bought it from a store with cash. The clue was important, but it didn’t solve the case.
Elle:
Now, can you talk to me about how the case changed after Tamera was found? There were no more bodies until a year later, but of course no one knew at the time how long the reprieve would be. Tell me about that gap.
Sykes:
The public moved on after a while, started to calm down, but my work never slowed. I knew that unless he’d been caught, he was just biding his time, waiting to strike again and continue his spree. For months, every time a fifteen-year-old girl was reported missing anywhere in Minnesota or Wisconsin, I asked the local squad if I could review the case notes. Police departments ge
t a bum rap for bad cross-departmental communication, much of which is justified, but I never had much issue. I chased down a few of the missing girls myself, but no one fit the profile. Thankfully, most of them turned up eventually.
Elle:
What was that time like for you?
Sykes:
I . . . huh. No one’s ever asked me that . . . It was pretty tough. I once stayed up three days straight, just researching all the possible meanings behind the numbers three, seven, and twenty-one until I finally got sent home after I vomited into the trash can by my desk. When you’ve been a detective for as long as I have, you start to put the cases you’ve worked into categories. There are the ones that blur together, but you remember bits and pieces from over time. There are the ones that you forget entirely, either because they didn’t stick out or because you’ve forced the memories down. And then there are cases that stick with you no matter what—the ones that wake you up in the middle of the night like a spider crawling across your face, even decades later. I guess I don’t have to explain that to you, of all people. I was only six years into my career when I got the TCK murders, but I knew right away that I wouldn’t be able to let that case go until we found the guy.
Elle voice-over:
But they didn’t find the guy. Detective Sykes worked the case on top of his other caseload, but nothing panned out. And then, after a year of chasing fruitless leads and vetting wildly unsubstantiated tips, he was called to the scene of yet another girl’s murder.
[SOUND BREAK: Orchestra instruments tuning up, with a particularly sour note from a violin.]
Elle:
Can you say your name and your job title, please?
Terri:
I’m Terri Rather, and I’m the music teacher at Hillview Academy.
Elle voice-over:
Hillview is one of the most expensive private schools in the Minneapolis area. Its student body ranges from first to twelfth grade. While it’s technically a Christian school, approximately 20 percent of their student body is non-Christian. In 1998, that number was probably slightly lower, but fifteen-year-old Lilian Davies was one of the secular attendees whose parents enrolled her for the excellent music education. Lilian played clarinet—she was something of a prodigy, in fact. She had her heart set on applying to the New England Conservatory of Music. On February 2, 1998, she was walking to the main road from the school’s music hall after rehearsal when she disappeared.
Terri:
Back then, there was no road up to the entrance of the music hall—it was set back a couple hundred yards, and it was a pain for parents to drive all the way around campus to the parking lot at the back. So, a lot of students who needed to get picked up would walk across the big lawn and through a cluster of trees to get to the sidewalk next to Hamline Avenue. There was a path over the lawn which the school kept shoveled all winter. Usually, the kids all walked up together, so we didn’t worry about their safety. But Lilian had to leave a little early that day for a doctor’s appointment, so she was by herself.
Elle:
When did you know something was wrong?
Terri:
I was packing up after rehearsals finished, and her dad came rushing in, ready to give her a talking-to for making them miss her appointment, I think. He thought she’d just forgotten. When we both realized the other didn’t know where she was, we started to panic. We called the police right away. One witness thought he saw a girl that looked like her getting into an unmarked van, but she wore a gray stocking cap and a black coat. There was no guarantee the person he’d actually seen was Lilian. Other than that one possible witness, it was like she’d just vanished into thin air. But then . . . then a few days later . . .
[A nose blowing.] I was . . . I was close to Lilian and her father, Darren. He and I had been seeing each other. So, I was with him when the detective showed up at his house and let him know another girl had disappeared. He told us they couldn’t be certain, but he was fairly confident Lilian and this other girl, Carissa, had been taken by the Countdown Killer.
Elle:
That must have been devastating.
Terri:
It was like if someone strapped a bomb to your chest and handed you the timer: you know exactly how long until everything explodes. Darren and I went on the news, tried to talk directly to the killer. We told him we knew he had Lilian. We . . . we begged him not to hurt her. We begged him to change his mind, even though some people told us that seeing our pain might have been part of the thrill for him. What choice did we have? She was going to die anyway. We had to try. By the time it got to day seven, Darren was going out of his mind with terror, knowing any moment the police would call and say they had found Lilian’s body. In the end, he had to be sedated. I was the one who answered the phone when they found her.
Elle voice-over:
A tattoo artist in St. Paul discovered the body of Lilian Davies lying on a dirty piece of cardboard in front of the door to his shop seven days after she was taken. Detective Sykes was the second cop on the scene, but as usual, there was nothing to be found. No physical evidence, no unidentified DNA. Lilian’s young future had been snuffed out in the same way as all the other girls’—with poison and twenty-one lashes.
Elle:
I appreciate that this isn’t an easy conversation for you to have.
Sykes:
In all my decades doing this job, I’ve never seen the spirit leave a man’s eyes the way it did when Darren Davies found out his daughter was no longer in this world. When I saw that, I was more determined than ever to get justice for her—for all these girls. I left his house believing I could save the next one. I had to. She only had three days left, but she was just a child.
Elle voice-over:
Carissa Jacobs was fourteen. A talented young gymnast who loved riding horses and visiting her grandparents’ California vineyard during the winter holidays. In fact, she had just returned to Minnesota two weeks before the day she went missing. Carissa spent every weekday afternoon at her aunt’s house while she waited for her parents to get home from work. It had been more than thirty minutes since Carissa left for the six-block walk between her school and her aunt’s when her cousin asked why she wasn’t there yet. They went out searching, and after calling around to her other friends and her parents, they finally reported her missing. By the time police were notified, she had likely been gone for more than two hours.
I wasn’t able to get any of Carissa’s family or friends to speak to me on the podcast about her murder, and I respect their desire for privacy. As you know, one thing I always try to do is focus on the victims. As in every case, the victims extend well beyond those who were killed. Their families, friends, and communities were damaged irreparably. I know what it is to experience trauma, to live and breathe it every day. I know what it’s like when grief embeds itself in your skin, rushes through your bloodstream, leaks out in your sweat. And I know what it’s like to have people ask you to relive it, rehash it, until it feels like you’re enduring every second of it all over again.
Nothing will undo the damage TCK did to people. I want to bring him to justice, make him pay for the lives he ruined, but I will never knowingly cause more harm to any of his victims on the way to doing so. That being said, if you’re listening and you knew Carissa Jacobs, I would love to hear from you—on the record or off. I would love to be able to honor her memory more fully.
Elle:
Is it true you didn’t get confirmation there was an eighth victim until she’d already been missing for nearly four days? That must have caused confusion. The records I have indicate Katrina Connelly didn’t show up in your police file until just hours before Carissa’s body was found. What did you think had happened—that TCK broke his pattern?
Sykes:
To be honest, it was chaos. The media was in a frenzy, with Lilian’s body having been discovered and Carissa just hours away from the time we knew she would die, and we still had no idea if TCK had taken his third
victim of the set. She should have gone missing the day Lilian was killed, but we had no new reports. I remember the spark of hope I felt, that maybe he had died or been arrested, and there would be no more missing girls. But then we got the call. Katrina had been missing for a full three days before her parents realized what happened. They were recently divorced and she had lied to both of them about going to the other’s house in order to spend the weekend with her friend. Classic kid stuff, you know. She was thirteen, angry about her parents’ separation, all the rest of it. Just wanted to go blow off some steam.
Elle:
Most of the girls were taken doing something routine, right? Or at least, something the killer could have learned about by listening in on phone calls or outside the girls’ houses. But this was different. This was something even her parents didn’t know she was doing.