Chapter 11
THE LAPD COLD-CASE Unit was located at the Ahmanson Center training facility near the airport.
Stilwell had never been there. He took the first boat over from Catalina, carrying Angela Metier’s camping backpack in a drawstring trash bag from his kitchen.
He kept an old Bronco in the long-term lot at the Express dock, but it had been two weeks since he’d been there, and the fifty-year-old engine failed to start.
This was becoming routine. He called to the lot attendant, who eventually came over with a battery pack and cables and jump-started the car for twenty bucks.
Stilwell didn’t arrive at Ahmanson to meet Renée Ballard and Tom Laffont until ten a.m.
The cold-case investigators worked in a pod of desks that were dwarfed by the rows of unsolved-case files surrounding them.
So many cold cases kept coming in that the shelves were on tracks that could be pushed together like a giant accordion to make room for more.
Stilwell noticed that someone had used a Sharpie to write Library of Lost Souls over the entrance.
Ballard and Laffont were waiting for him.
Ballard was a dark-haired, deeply tanned woman in her early forties.
She looked like a surfer and was dressed informally in a black polo and cargo pants.
Laffont looked like a stiff. He was in a jacket and tie, his arms folded as he stood next to Ballard, who was seated at the head of the pod. There was no one else present.
After shaking hands all around, Stilwell held up the trash bag.
“Here it is,” he said.
“Has it been processed?” Ballard asked.
“Not yet,” Stilwell said. “I went through it before I knew what it was, and our office manager looked through it when it was first brought in.”
“Okay, we should process it,” Ballard said, taking the bag. “What about the key ring?”
Stilwell pulled a zip-lock bag containing the key ring from his pocket and held it out. Ballard took that as well and told him to have a seat. Laffont also sat down.
“So,” Stilwell said. “Where are we?”
“I talked to my captain and we are good to read you in on this,” Ballard said. “We just need to be clear that LAPD is lead. We’re already a year and a half down the road on this guy.”
“Not a problem on my end,” Stilwell said. “I’ll do anything I can on Catalina. If it’s anywhere else, my captain is going to get hives. He’s kind of allergic to me leaving the island.”
“How’d you end up on Catalina?” Laffont asked. “You’ve got a lot of experience that probably doesn’t get tapped out there.”
The question told Stilwell they had checked him out before bringing him into the fold. He believed that his history, especially the eight years he’d spent in the homicide unit, would work in his favor.
“It’s a long story,” Stilwell said. “But if you checked me out, you probably heard a version of it. I got some people upset with an investigation I was on. They sent me out to Catalina to cool my heels for a little while, but something happened—I liked it out there. I told them I wanted to stay.”
“Well, we don’t know how much of this involves Catalina,” Ballard said. “But we’re going to run it down for you and maybe something will pop up now or later.”
“Sounds good to me,” Stilwell said. “And by the way, for what it’s worth, I have this.”
He unfolded the printout of the fuzzy still from the harbor video of the man who’d left the backpack. He handed it to Ballard.
“Damn, it would have been perfect if we could ID the guy,” she said. “You think it’s worth turning the video over to our photo techs to see if they can clean it up?”
“The camera was at least a hundred and fifty feet away,” Stilwell said.
“Probably not, then,” Laffont said.
Using a tag-team approach, Ballard and Laffont proceeded to describe the investigation they had been working on for the past eighteen months.
“This whole thing started in Griffith Park,” Ballard said. “A hiker up there, just below the observatory, found some bones that had been disinterred by animals.”
“Excavation led to the recovery of the full skeletal remains of a young woman,” Laffont said.
“Cause of death was likely strangulation—her hyoid was crushed—but the date of death was unknown. Near as we could tell, she had probably been in the ground eight to ten years before the animals found her.”
“That made it a cold case,” Ballard said. “We got stuck with the bones.”
“But the lab was able to extract DNA from the marrow,” Laffont said.
“It connected to a missing persons report. Increasingly with missing persons cases where foul play is considered a possibility, they put the DNA into the databank. Our victim was named Candace Neary. She was twenty-eight, lived in Los Feliz, and loved hiking in Griffith Park. She went up there often by herself. She was reported missing in 2016. There was a search but nothing was found. Except for her car, which was parked at the observatory. A Ford Mustang. Locked, no key.”
“This didn’t look like a one-and-done,” Ballard said. “So we profiled Neary and started looking for other cases that might be similar. Angela Metier was one of the cases we found.”
“We were looking for women who were hikers, in their twenties, dark hair, athletic, confident, known to hike and camp on their own,” Laffont said, ticking things off on his fingers. “When these women were reported missing, it was thought that they were lost. No foul play was suspected at first.”
“And sometimes not for months or even a year, the thinking being that their bodies would eventually show up in a crevasse or at the bottom of a cliff,” Ballard said.
“How many did you come up with that matched the Neary profile?” Stilwell asked.
“Four,” Ballard said. “Neary, Metier, a woman who went missing on a hike in Angeles National nine years ago, and a 2011 case where a mother of two young children disappeared in Malibu Canyon.”
“But there are five keys on the key ring,” Laffont said. “We might be missing one.”
That brought a somber moment of silence before Stilwell spoke.
“Those last two you mentioned,” he said. “Malibu Canyon and Angeles National. They’re in the county. Have you brought in the sheriffs?”
“Actually, they’re National Park Service jurisdiction,” Ballard said. “We’re working with them, but they don’t have a homicide team.”
“And what about the suspect?” Stilwell asked. “Do you have enough to profile him?”
“We thought we did until the backpack showed up,” Ballard said.
“We had him as very smart, likely some kind of professional. A planner. A hiker himself. He probably stalked these women for weeks before the kill. The grave where he buried Neary was four feet deep. That took some work and planning. He clearly didn’t want her found.
Usually four feet is below foraging depth.
That tells us a lot—or we thought it did.
We figured he was an untraceable—a killer who flies below the radar, whose psychological gratification comes from the hunt and the kill, not from the public horror and fear generated by the discovery of the victims.”
“And not from engagement with law enforcement,” Laffont said. “They don’t care about the cat-and-mouse, I-am-smarter-than-you of it all.”
“But that whole profile seems to be wrong now,” Ballard said. “He apparently wanted that backpack and key ring found. Something with him has changed. I think he’s trying to engage now. He wants our attention. He’s got a big ego.”
Stilwell nodded.
“So where do we go from here?” he asked.
“Our focus has been on connecting the victims,” Ballard said. “Trying to find commonalities beyond the fact that they were all hikers. They didn’t know one another, as far as we’ve been able to determine. But there has to be a nexus where they crossed paths with our bad guy.”
“We think we’re looking for a guy who knows these trails and encounters his victims as a fellow hiker,” Laffont said.
“Have you thought about going public?” Stilwell said. “You know, putting it out there and seeing if any hikers come forward with encounters they’ve had on the trails?”
“Until now, no,” Ballard said. “We haven’t wanted him to know we’re onto him.
But given his backpack move, that might be the way for us to go.
The thing is, we don’t have evidence tying these cases together.
It’s all circumstantial and based on similarities between the victims. I’ll talk to my captain about it.
Maybe we’ll put out that grainy photo and see what comes in. ”
“That will undoubtedly be a circus,” Laffont said.
“Yep,” Ballard said.
“What do you want me to do?” Stilwell asked.
“I think go back to Catalina,” Ballard said. “Do a deep dive on Angela Metier and find something that was missed before.”
“Her roommate told us she was going to hike something called the Trans-Catalina Trail,” Laffont said. “You know it?”
“That’s thirty-eight miles all over the island,” Stilwell said.
“She was covering it in pieces,” Laffont said. “It was her third time out there when she disappeared.”
Stilwell knew through Tash about the TCT. She had hiked it numerous times over the thirty-five years she had lived on the island, also doing it in pieces.
He nodded.
“Okay, I can do that,” he said.
“Good,” Ballard said.
“Do you have a media file you can share with me?” Stilwell asked. “I’d like to take a look at the news coverage these cases got.”
Ballard looked at Laffont and nodded.
“Give Tom your email and he’ll get it to you,” she said.
“Any sense in me reinterviewing the roommate?” Stilwell asked.
“I won’t stop you, but I think we got what’s there,” Ballard said. “Tom will also send you summaries of the interviews so far.”
“Excellent,” Stilwell said.
“We appreciate it,” Ballard said. “This is an all-volunteer unit—except for me. We’ll take all the help we can get.”
“Copy that,” Stilwell said. “I’ll stay in touch.”
“We will too,” Ballard said.