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Leave No Man Behind

Since World War I, 88,000 Americans have disappeared at war, never to be seen again. But our government has never stopped trying to find them. This is the story of one search—for a B-24 bomber shot down over the tiny island nation of Palau in September 1944—and the extraordinary effort to bring those bodies home.

By Wil S. Hylton

Photograph by Christopher Perez/U.S. Navy

May 2008

when tommy doyle’s mom died in 1992, Tommy inherited a big wooden trunk. It was about four feet long and two feet wide, and sitting on the floor of his ranch house in West Texas, it came up to his knee. Tommy could remember seeing that trunk all his life, but he couldn’t remember ever looking inside. There had always been something private in the way his mother regarded the trunk, so for a while, Tommy left it closed.

His wife, Nancy, was more curious, but she didn’t want to seem nosy. "I decided to let him open it in his own time," she said recently. "But it seemed like he never would." Nancy was patient. She waited weeks, then months, then a year. Finally, after about two years, she couldn’t wait any longer. "Is it okay to open your mother’s trunk?" she asked one night. And Tommy said, "Sure," so she did.

At first, when Nancy looked inside, she found mostly old blankets and sweaters, family photos, and a handmade overcoat, but down near the bottom, something else caught her eye. It was a large shoebox, worn at the edges and falling apart. When she lifted the lid, she almost stopped breathing.

Tommy had been just 15 months old when his father shipped off to World War II, and Jimmie Doyle hadn’t ever come back. Or anyway, that’s what Tommy’s mother had told them: His plane went down in the South Pacific, some patch of islands called Palau, and it wasn’t ever found. But Tommy had heard another story growing up, a story he wasn’t supposed to hear. As a child, he heard his uncles whispering: Jimmie was alive, they said. He’d come back a long time ago. He lived in California with a whole new family. He just didn’t care about Tommy anymore.

Tommy never believed that story. Mostly, he didn’t. But he wondered. He’d grown into a powerful man, tall and muscular, played football in college at Texas Tech, still coached the local high school team in Snyder. He was quiet and reticent, not prone to flights of imagination about the things he’d lost, but underneath, the hurt and suspicion coursed through his life. In fifty years, his mother had almost never spoken of his dad. She kept him close, like she couldn’t stand to share what little she had left, not with anyone, not even Tommy.

Now there was this shoebox.

When Nancy showed Tommy what was inside, hundreds of letters he had never seen in his dad’s loose cursive, Tommy walked out of the room. Later, he told Nancy that he couldn’t read them. Just seeing them, his chest got tight. So Nancy read the letters alone, one by one, curled up on the sofa when Tommy wasn’t around.

She was struck by how often Jimmie had written, filling four to eight pages almost every day. "Sure wish you could be with me," he wrote in May of 1944, just months before he disappeared. "If I loved you any more than I do, I would have to get another heart to hold all my love." In June: "I’m dreaming of the time when I can come home to you, and sleep on a really soft bed again, and where it gets a little cold once in awhile. So we can take Tommy to church and carnivals. We are going to get him a dog, just about his size. And I want to build him a swing in the apricot tree." In July: "Just holding your letters makes me feel so very much closer to you, and they are so sweet no one could help loving you even if they tried." In August: "I know this probably seems a little foolish to you, but at the oddest moments I see your quick smile and the way your hair looks when you let it loose, and I hear the tone of your voice. It isn’t the big things that seem so important now, but the thousands of little things you are always doing that have endeared you so terribly much to me. I know this war can’t last forever, and when it’s over and I get back home to you, we’ll make up for all this time we’re losing now."

At the end of August, the letters stopped.

And on September 1, Jimmie Doyle was gone.

Reading those letters got Nancy wondering. They were clearly written by a man who yearned for his family and was desperate to see his son again. So why had Myrle kept them secret from Tommy? And why did Tommy’s uncles say Jimmie had abandoned him? Why did they say they’d visited Jimmie in California? Had they told Tommy’s mom the same stories? Had she believed them? Had she tried to protect Tommy from the truth? To bury Jimmie in that trunk by the bed?

Nancy decided to investigate. Over the next few years, she would contact the Department of Veterans Affairs, the office of Military Personnel Records, even the local Army recruiter, searching for anything related to Jimmie Doyle. But there was almost nothing to find. The Army had no personnel records for Jimmie. No record of his crash. No record of who his crew had been. Not much more than his name in a file. All the rest, they said, had disappeared—probably burned in a fire in St. Louis.

And then one day—it was a Sunday, in fact, Memorial Day weekend 2000—Nancy saw an article in Parade magazine. Some doctor in California named Pat Scannon was searching for World War II planes in Palau. Nancy practically ran to the computer, looked him up, called his home in San Francisco.

"My name is Nancy Doyle," she said, "and my husband’s name is Tommy Doyle, and his father was Jimmie Doyle—"

Pat Scannon interrupted. "And his plane went down on September 1, 1944, and the tail number was 4273453, the pilot was Jack Arnett, the other crew members were Charles Goulding, John Moore, Leland Price…"

Nancy listened for several minutes while Scannon rattled off details she had never heard. When he paused, she whispered, "But how do you know all that?" And Pat Scannon said, "Because I’ve been searching for that plane for six years."

*****

the human instinct to bury the dead is as old as civilization itself, yet one group has traditionally been deprived of the honor: fallen American soldiers. Having made the greatest sacrifice of all, for the first 150 years of American life, many of our troops were denied the most basic thanks: their bodies abandoned on battlefields, stripped of valuables and left to rot, or jumbled into mass graves. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that the military began issuing dog tags, and it was another forty years after that—during World War II—before the government made any formal promise to bring home the men who wore them.

Today, despite a policy to "leave no man behind," the number of Americans still listed as missing in action since World War I stands at 88,000. To find them, the Pentagon has established a unit known as the Joint POW/MIA Account Command, or JPAC, with an annual budget of $52 million. Yet even this amount barely scratches the surface; working at a rate of one hundred recoveries per year, it may take centuries for JPAC to complete its mission—and that’s assuming the funding continues. Over the past decade, the unit’s budget has stagnated, not only because the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the military’s resources thin, but also—and more pointedly—because many Americans don’t believe the mission is worth a penny more. One popular Web site recently blasted the recovery work as "ancient history," suggesting that $52 million was particularly egregious "at a time when the economy sucks and the federal government is sucking the life out of everyone with taxes."

If that assessment seems dead-on to you, chances are you don’t have any missing soldiers in your family. Among survivors of the wartime disappeared, the sense of grief and loss is anything but "ancient"; in many cases, the wounds actually deepen with time, festering a generation later, sometimes two. This can be difficult for people outside the MIA community to grasp, but one way to gauge their collective grief is to consider the frequency with which MIA families construct what might be called "survival narratives"—elaborate conspiracies in which the missing soldier has, for convoluted reasons, remained hidden on purpose. What is striking about these stories, aside from their prevalence, is how unsoothing and discomforting they usually are. In order to create a more plausible scenario, many families are forced to concoct a narrative that stings nearly as much as death itself: the soldier abandoning his family for a pretty new wife, or suffering a horrific psychological meltdown, or being held and tortured in a secret dungeon. It is a testimony to the fierce desperation of the MIA survivor that, given a choice, so many prefer the torment of uncertainty to the fixity of death.

At JPAC, this is a phenomenon that hovers over every aspect of the unit’s work. When I visited their offices in Hawaii this year, I sat down with Johnie Webb, who has supervised parts of the operation since its founding in 1976 and now, in semiretirement, remains the principal liaison for family outreach. A large Vietnam veteran with sad, heavy eyes, Webb had filled his office with mementos of his travels for JPAC—colorful knickknacks from Vietnam, China, Cambodia, and Laos. But what he wanted to show me that day was a small, plain box at the corner of his desk.

"On the tough days, I look at this and remember what it’s all about," he said, removing a silver bracelet. "This was for a young NCO in the Special Forces during Vietnam who was lost in a helicopter crash. Over the years, I got to know his family very well. We became, I would say, friends. A very patriotic family. But I watched over the years as we searched for their son, and they began to lose some of their patriotism. I can remember the father telling me many, many times, ‘Johnie, I don’t want you to send me a bunch of bones. I gave the government my son. I expect you to give my son back to me.’ " Webb stopped and swallowed. He twirled the bracelet between his fingers, studying it as if for the first time, and it seemed clear that however much Johnie Webb believed in his work, he did not, strictly speaking, love it. "Shortly after we excavated the site for his son, I met the dad at a National League of Families meeting. I told him, ‘You know, you need to prepare yourself. We’re going to have some information for you in a short period of time.’ And again, he reminded me that he didn’t want any bones. He wanted his son back." Webb stopped again and cleared his throat. "Well, eventually we made the identification. There was a huge military funeral. A lot of politicians turned out. And after maybe three weeks, I received a packet in the mail. It had a very simple card with the POW/MIA logo on it and a note that said he wanted to thank me for all that we had done. He wrote, ‘To show my appreciation, I am sending the POW/MIA bracelet of my son that I have worn for the last 20 years.’ " Webb’s voice cracked, and he ended the story.

With six decades of distance, it can be tempting to imagine that the anguish of families was somehow less crippling during the Second World War, that the men and women of the "greatest generation" were imbued with a special storehouse of stoicism, and that the survival narratives we associate with Southeast Asia were as much a product of the Vietnam era as the Vietnam war—a time when trust in the government had reached a nadir and many families were disinclined to believe anything the military told them. In fact, this is mostly a modern fantasy. At the JPAC offices, I was reminded of this when I stopped to chat with one of the unit’s historians and noticed the screen saver on his computer—a series of white words floating across a red background. The message, taken from a letter to the unit, said, "If those bodies or bones aren’t recovered and returned home I hope all 19 boys haunt you nite and day—until you die." It was written in 1947.

For the 400 men and women who work at JPAC, this grief and frustration have created a special set of challenges, unique within the military. Each investigation requires a fragile balance, between the science of recovery and the faith of the bereaved. On the one hand, JPAC must excel at military logistics, preparing for long deployments to remote locations, sorting and transporting millions of pounds of equipment, and coordinating tens of thousands of man-hours of labor. Yet at the same time, there is a uniquely human challenge to the work: the fear of disturbing a grave site unnecessarily, the risk of damaging human remains, the challenge of knowing when to give up, and the prospect of raising a family’s hopes prematurely. If the nature of JPAC’s work is military, its purpose is humanitarian: not only to locate the casualties of war but to salve the psychic wounds of war. On the most fundamental level, its mission is to write a new narrative for each family, in the hope that truth allows life, finally, to go on.

It is with this goal in mind that JPAC teams can be found on almost any day of any month in some of the most remote locations on earth. No other unit in the American military deploys as often: Whether in peacetime or war, employees spend a quarter, or a half, or even three-quarters of every year on missions. They go deep into the jungles of Papua New Guinea, building cities of bamboo, camping in the rain forest, bathing in the rivers, fishing for food, and chewing on the nuts of palm trees for energy. They trek high into the Himalayas, setting camp above 16,000 feet, an altitude where oxygen runs thin and men have trouble sleeping, eating, even breathing. They ascend glaciers in Greenland, visit enemy nations like Burma and North Korea…and sometimes even descend into the ocean to search for long-lost airplanes in the deep.

Which is how I found myself, in January of this year, strapped to the wall of a cavernous KC-135 transport jet, rocketing over the Pacific Ocean on a seat made of red mesh, surrounded by a thirty-six-man crew of airmen and Navy Divers, shouting and cursing and barreling toward the distant islands of Palau in search of Tommy Doyle’s dad.

"Listen up!" the steward of the plane shouted as we sped through the black tropical night. "I’m not going to bore you with safety bullshit. If this plane goes down in the middle of the ocean, it’s going to break up into a million fucking pieces. So just hold on for the ride."

*****

in the days before Jimmie Doyle’s plane went down, he was stationed just north of New Guinea, on a satellite island called Wakde. Although the jungles of the South Pacific are notoriously remote, at the height of World War II, Wakde had been transformed into something resembling a small American town, with a single paved airstrip for Main Street and electrified neighborhoods of tents on both sides. In Jimmie’s letters home, he described swimming in the ocean, climbing trees for coconuts and bananas, and chasing lizards with his friend John Moore. But if life on the base was like a cheap imitation of home, the illusion did not extend to the unit’s missions.

Seven hundred miles to the north, the islands of Palau lay deep within enemy territory, defended by more than 35,000 troops as the regional headquarters of the Imperial Japanese Navy. But as the American military marched across the Pacific toward Japan, Palau would be in the crosshairs: With General Douglas MacArthur advancing from the southeast and Admiral Chester Nimitz approaching from the northeast, the islands were trapped between two columns of American attack. It fell to Jimmie Doyle’s bomber group—the 307th—to help soften the target for a Marine invasion.

By the end of August 1944, the 307th was firmly in place, making air raids daily. To do so, they had to cross an invisible line into one of the deadliest sites in the Pacific war.

The flight alone was grueling, a four-hour endeavor that pushed the outer limit of what a B-24 could travel. To make the distance, the planes had to be retrofitted with additional fuel tanks—but since the only place to store those tanks was in the bomb bay, that meant the planes arriving in Palau were not only manned by exhausted crews at the end of an arduous flight; they were also spectacularly underarmed, with half the normal -munitions. If the flight was punishing, the mental trip was even worse: The men of Jimmie Doyle’s bomber group were flying directly into the heart of a Japanese garrison fiercely armed with antiaircraft artillery—a garrison that would eventually take 1,500 American lives and wound several thousand more. Today the battle for Palau is largely forgotten, eclipsed by the horrific fighting at Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and Guadalcanal. Yet Palau is by many accounts home of the third-bloodiest battle in the Pacific war, dubbed "the forgotten corner of hell."

Each day, airmen like Jimmie Doyle flew directly into that hell, reporting to the airstrip at the crack of dawn, boarding more than a dozen bombers, and heading out to the open ocean. As they neared their target, there was no mistaking it: Antiaircraft artillery lit up the skies, and shells whizzed past at 1,800 miles per hour while the plane’s gunners, like Doyle, rattled off .50-caliber rounds in response and the pilots struggled to navigate a path through the haze of incoming fire. When at last they arrived at their target, they would unleash their payload—the enemy soldiers scattering and shouting and erupting in flames as the bombs landed in their bunkers and offices—and then the men of the 307th would turn toward home, fighting back to the open water and to Wakde Island for a night of sleep before starting the journey again the next day.

Day after day, into the horror of battle they brought touches of home, painting a nude woman on the side of their plane, along with the words Babes in Arms. But on that final mission, the men of Babes in Arms would not be on their own plane. For reasons that are lost to history, they were transferred to another B-24, tail number ’453, and early on the morning of September 1, 1944, Jimmie Doyle and his crewmates joined a fifteen-plane formation heading for the northern island of Koror. The night before, Jimmie went to the camp’s makeshift theater and distracted himself with a movie; then back in his tent—probably kneeling on the floor like he often did, using a toolbox for a table, with a candle at the end of his bunk—he wrote a final letter home to Myrle.

"Sweet, my mind is nearly a blank tonight, for I am all took up with thoughts of you and home. Maybe it won’t be too long until the day when I will be home, and we will be together again. With your arms around me, I can forget all this and settle down to spending years with you. Gee, what a glimpse of you would be worth! I’ll have lots of time for just feasting my eyes on you. How I miss you! Sweet Darling, tomorrow is a busy day, and I have to get up early. So I’ll stop for tonight, and tomorrow I’ll do better. But you know I love you with all my heart and will for always. Tell the folks hello, and write as often as you can. Good night, Sweetheart. With all my love, Jimmie."

The next morning, he manned a .50-cal as the ’453 sped toward Koror, reaching its target and dropping its payload, when a shrieking blast of antiaircraft fire tore into it, ripping off the left wing and sending a cloud of shrapnel in all directions. Arching to the side, corkscrewing down in a black streak of fire and smoke, the ’453 hurtled toward the water while the men on the other American planes could only watch, helpless. The last thing any of them would remember was the sight of three parachutes popping off into the sky, and a Japanese boat heading out to the crash, looking for survivors.

*****

sixty-four years later, landing in Palau still has the feel of crashing into the ocean: As you approach, you see nothing but water for thousands of miles, then a speck of land, then two, then three, until suddenly the plane banks and descends, certain to overshoot such a small airstrip; stepping onto the tarmac, you are instantly drenched in sweat.

"Get used to it, guys," the senior team leader, Captain George Mitroka, called out as we piled off the KC-135. "You won’t be dry till you get home."

Mitroka was a huge man stacked with muscles that seemed just slightly softened at the edges; he looked like someone who might have won a bodybuilding competition a few months prior and then taken time off to relax. But on the plane he hadn’t been relaxed at all: While the rest of the team struggled to fall asleep, shifting in awkward and contorted positions, Mitroka crouched forward in his chair, clutching a Sony PlayStation with both hands and pounding the keys for hours on end with a determination that seemed to border on madness. We had left Hawaii at 3 a.m. and arrived in Palau half a day later, and we had crossed the international date line plus five time zones; and just stepping from the plane into the equatorial sun, my body sank into the hot pavement, aching for a bed or a soft patch of grass, but Mitroka was having none of that. From the moment we landed, he was a flurry of motion, sprinting across the airfield, unloading cargo, orchestrating the activities of a handful of JPAC staff, and coordinating the rest of the day’s logistics. Within ten minutes, he had emptied the plane of its luggage, corralled a small motorcade of minivans, loaded the team inside, and commenced speeding through the overgrown jungle toward our hotel, where we dumped our bags and assembled in the lobby to begin the day’s work: visiting the local hospital and docks, devising a medical-evacuation strategy, inspecting the island’s hyperbaric recompression chamber, and running a test of the smaller chamber that JPAC had brought. For the next six hours, Mitroka never let up, holding meetings in the hotel restaurant, barking orders to mysterious people on the other end of a cell phone that he had already switched to a Palauan carrier, and negotiating the details of the week’s agenda with a local crew.

The unrelenting pace would continue for the duration of the mission: eleven hours a day, six days a week. Each morning the team would wake at 5:30, convene for breakfast no later than 6:30, and be out the door of the hotel by 7:00. By 7:15, we were aboard a pair of speedboats racing into the open ocean, and by 7:30 we stood on the deck of a 40-by-120-foot metal barge, our staging base for the operation, where we would remain until the onset of dusk. Throughout the day, there would be no food provided, no water, and no lunch break—nor, for that matter, any other kind of break. It was each man’s private task to scavenge food and water on his own time, either in the Palauan markets after dark or early the next morning before we left.

As we loaded equipment onto the barge the first morning—massive container-shipping boxes filled with thousands of pounds of diving, camera, and archaeology gear—I joined a few of the Navy Divers on a speedboat to pinpoint the location of the wreck, for which we had been given a set of coordinates.

To lead that trip, and to oversee all the mission’s underwater operations, the Navy had assigned a man named Rod Atherton, whose roguish exuberance stood in marked contrast to the military precision of Captain Mitroka. If Mitroka was a man streaking forward in his career, Atherton had already peaked. At 37, with two decades in the Navy diving program, he had reached the rating of Master Diver, the highest distinction any diver can receive. To reach the rating, a man not only has to excel from his first day in the program; he also must possess a variety of intangibles, like the ability to discern by instinct the native talents of the men around him, to command their loyalty through the innate gift of leadership, and to absorb, process, and recall huge volumes of data in a relatively short time. At any moment, Atherton was able to recite, verbatim, endless swaths of diving literature, history, and statistics, including complex multiple-dive decompression tables; then, just as rapidly, he could switch to an assessment of which parts were essential, which were marginal, and which needed to be reconsidered by the Navy—all the while laughing and joking and munching a hot slice of pepperoni pizza he had mysteriously procured on a barge in the middle of the ocean. Among all the men on the mission to Palau, including two Ph.D. anthropologists, a physician, and several officers, each with a mastery of innumerable skills, it was entirely possible that Atherton—a farm boy from Pennsylvania with little formal schooling—possessed the sharpest mind of all.

As we approached an indistinct patch of ocean where the GPS indicated the wreck’s coordinates, a few divers jumped into the water and swam around, shouting and pointing when they saw the shadowy mass of the ’453 below them. We positioned the boat nearby, and Atherton stood to test his men.

"Here’s what I want to do," he snapped. "I’m gonna stand back and let you dive. I want the chief to supervise, and I’m gonna see how you do. So go ahead like I’m not even here." Atherton sat down as Chief Paul Wotus, a fourteen-year veteran with the ripped and tattooed physique to prove it, stood up, pulling out a pair of stopwatches and looking somewhat pleased.

"Chief Wotus has the side!" Atherton shouted.

"Chief Wotus has the side!" the rest of the boat shouted back.

"Okay," Wotus said, removing a spiral-bound handbook from his pocket and starting into a pre-dive checklist: Had anybody dived that day? Did everyone feel okay? Was everyone wearing all the right equipment? Were the regulators attached to the tanks properly? Eventually, Wotus completed the checklist, and two divers splashed into the water.

"Now, how long did that take you?" Atherton asked, sounding irritated.

Wotus looked surprised.

"A long fucking time," Atherton answered. "It took you twenty-two minutes to get divers in the water. Twenty-two minutes! It should take you seven." He grabbed the spiral notebook. "This is you," he said, burying his nose in the book. "Mah mah mah wah wah. Reading into the book! Next time, I’m going to take the book."

"Okay," Wotus said, staring at the deck.

"It doesn’t matter what the book says," Atherton continued, shaking his head. "You have to know which part is important. That’s what this is all about. Anybody can read the book and run through the rules one by one. A Navy Diver doesn’t have to."

Wotus continued looking down.

"What was the weather forecast this afternoon?" Atherton asked.

Wotus shook his head.

"It’s supposed to rain," Atherton said. "When is high tide?"

Silence.

"Is it coming in or out?"

Nothing.

"I’m not trying to bust your balls. It’s the first dive and all that. But I’m gonna get you sharp on this trip. We’re gonna work it out."

Atherton turned away, and the boat was quiet for several minutes, until one of the divers emerged from the wreck and climbed in. As Wotus debriefed the diver, Atherton checked the volume of air left on his tank and splashed into the water to see the wreck for himself. He was gone less than fifteen minutes, but by the time he returned, all the divers on the boat had agreed: Being supervised by such a hard-ass for the mission, having every move second-guessed, and being untaught the rules of the Navy dive manual, which had always been regarded as a holy book, was purely a stroke of good luck. In diving, there is no other safety net besides ability, and a man like Atherton could eliminate the illusion that there was. On any given year, a Navy Diver could spend between 500 and 1,000 hours underwater, his life dependent for every second on his capacity to read the environment around him. For every thirty-three feet that he descends, his body is subjected to as much weight as the entire atmosphere of the earth. At sixty-six feet, he is at three atmospheres of pressure; at 165 feet, six atmospheres; at 231, eight. But in the Navy’s diving program, 231 feet is just the beginning. In the course of his career, Rod Atherton had dived well below 300 feet; in compression chambers, he had surpassed 850 feet of pressure; and at the Navy Experimental Dive Unit in Panama City, Florida, a few men had actually breached 2,000. To go so far beneath the ocean, men spent days, even weeks, in a compression chamber, the weight on their bodies rising higher and higher. Finally, at the target pressure, a chamber could be lowered into the water and cracked open at depth, where the divers would begin their mission—maybe repairing a substation on the ocean floor or installing a beacon. It might take hours or days or weeks to perform the task—sleeping and eating inside the chamber—then weeks more to return to the surface. At any time, a mechanical failure or a biological quirk—an air bubble lodging in a diver’s brain or saturated nitrogen gas boiling out of his blood—might throw the operation into chaos. When that happened, the divers found themselves alone. A doctor could not be pressurized in time to save them. Because of this, a Navy Diver faced an irreducible risk every time his fins hit the water. Even in training, it was common to make mistakes and black out in the pool, being resuscitated on the deck by a medic. During missions, this job fell to a man’s partner: sharing oxygen, stemming blood loss, and maintaining the proper depth and decompression regimen for the eternity that it took to return to the surface. Among divers on any mission, a certain camaraderie was born, a closeness of necessity and mutual advantage that resembled the brotherhood of men at war.

Brotherhood like the men of Babes in Arms.

*****

the coordinates of the ’453 had come from Pat Scannon, whose search for the plane evolved over ten years into an odyssey that nearly consumed his life.

Scannon, who is 60, with a neat gray beard and wire-rimmed glasses that belie a lifelong addiction to adrenaline, had discovered Palau in the early 1990s, when a friend invited him to help solve a mystery. During the 1992 presidential campaign, rumors had circulated that President George H. W. Bush, a former Navy pilot, attacked and sank an unarmed fishing trawler in Palau during World War II. Bush claimed that the boat was armed, but as the fiftieth anniversary approached, the Palauan government wanted to find out. They sponsored a search for the trawler, and Scannon’s friend invited him along. With his Berkeley biotech company, Xoma, running smoothly after a decade in operation, vacation time was not hard to come by; he invited his wife along, and when the expedition was complete—finding the trawler heavily armed in a channel just off the coast—the Scannons stuck around, hiring a tour guide and asking to see "other wrecks," never imagining that their lives were about to change forever.

In Palau, the number of World War II wrecks is surpassed only by their pristine condition. After more than sixty years, it is still common for boaters gliding across the turquoise water to glance over the deck and spot a warplane resting on the ocean floor, untouched since the day of its crash, or to gaze back toward the shore and discover, on the bare limestone and volcanic bluffs, the gaping mouths of caves once manned by Japanese gunners, with twenty-five-foot cannons still protruding and the bones of soldiers half buried inside. Even deep in the jungle, hikers frequently stumble upon massive artifacts—tanks lying sideways with a hole through the middle, or upright and intact, as if parked for a few hours.

From his first dive at one of these wrecks, Scannon was transfixed by the time-capsule quality of the islands. He remembers standing frozen in the water, gaping at a sixty-five-foot airplane wing, which he recognized as part of an American bomber. "I literally saw the wing and I was a different person," he says. "The only thing I could think was, Where’s the rest of it? I was absolutely convinced that people had died on that site, and I had to know what happened to them."

Back home Scannon flew to the Air Force archival center in Alabama to research planes that had disappeared in Palau. He developed a theory about the wing, matching it with a plane that had gone missing during the war; then he began assembling records of other missing aircraft. He read books on the Pacific theater of World War II, studied maps and journals and military records, and committed to memory the various tactical events that marked the Palau campaign. "I was possessed," he says. "I had no idea where it was going, but I promised myself that I would let it take me."

He returned to the islands, and in a mangrove swamp, he discovered the wreckage of a Marine Corsair; his determination intensified. The following year, he returned again, and the year after that, 1996, he recruited a team of history buffs and diving pros to join him, spending weeks on the hunt, asking locals for tips, scouring each wreck they found for details, and matching them with the list of lost planes.

As the years passed, Scannon’s group evolved into a core of about twelve members. He named the team The BentProp Project, developed a volunteer relationship with JPAC, and submitted a thick written brief before and after each trip. With each plane he found, his commitment became more personal, even intimate: When he identified a fighter plane whose pilot had survived the crash, he found the man still alive in the States and called him, saying, "My name is Pat. I found your plane." When he discovered a TBM Avenger in shallow water, the pilot killed on impact, Scannon folded two American flags over the wreckage, then flew to St. Louis to deliver them to the pilot’s sisters.

But as time went by, it was the ’453 that began to haunt him.

He had been searching for the plane since his first mission in 1994, and everything he had read suggested that it would be easy to find. For one thing, other airmen in the skies that day had submitted detailed reports of the crash, even providing approximate coordinates in files that Scannon’s researchers dug up. Then, too, as Scannon’s team consulted with Palauan locals, they learned that tribal elders in the area remembered the crash. Standing on the shore, these elders pointed to a muddy channel known as Toachel Mid, recalling how a plane made impact there; it was the same location described in American records. But as Scannon scoured the channel each year, he came up empty-handed every time.

He visited the National Archives in Maryland, hunting for clues and information. He flew to Japan and studied records there. He interviewed former Japanese soldiers, probing for anything that might lead to the plane. Where had the ’453 crashed? How many parachutists had escaped? Had any of them survived? He listened to stories that turned his stomach and broke his heart—tales of American prisoners being starved and de- capitated—but nothing led to the ’453.

When Parade magazine ran an article about his work, he was contacted by Tommy and Nancy Doyle; hearing their story inspired him to search harder, but the Doyles had little information to add. He shared what he knew and continued looking.

In 2003, the first lead surfaced: One of the BentProp volunteers, Flip Colmer, had discovered an obscure warehouse in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, owned by the National Archives and full of photographic records. There was film inside from the Pacific war. Some of it was taken by airmen over Palau. Some of it dated from the fall of 1944. And some of it was shot on September 1—the day the ’453 went down.

Scannon flew out that night. The next morning, he and Colmer waited anxiously while an archivist wheeled a white cart into the viewing room with a dozen black canisters on top; as they cracked the lid of the first canister, the stench of acetic acid wafted into the room—it had not been opened in sixty years. Wearing protective cotton gloves, they gingerly removed the film and began to study each image, frame by frame.

"We found it on the last two frames," Scannon told me recently with a smile that still hinted of disbelief. "The last frame said ‘End.’ And on that frame and the frame before it, there were splashes in the water where we had never been."

As we spoke, Scannon had been sitting at a small table in his Berkeley office, but when he recalled the film, he jumped to his feet and rushed to his computer. "I can show you," he said, hammering at the keys until a digital image appeared. "There!" he pointed. Looking at the screen, I became aware of how absurd Scannon’s task had been. Even with the photograph in front of me, with Scannon pointing at the critical spot, explaining precisely what it was, I could barely make out the "splashes" against the grainy, faded black and gray background. They were minuscule specks that might easily have been a photographic error, or a breaking whitecap, or a trick of the eye. It was almost inconceivable to think that Scannon and Colmer, looking at the same images in a series of hundreds, had spotted those specks and known what they were.

With the photos in hand, Scannon returned to the island that spring and asked one of his Palauan friends, Joe Maldangesang, to interview locals about the site. Joe reported that a fisherman remembered seeing something in the area. A few days later, he brought Scannon and two other BentProp divers to the spot, including Jennifer Powers, who was filming a documentary on the team. They geared up, dropped in…and Powers landed directly on top of the ’453. "I grabbed the propeller and held on," she says, laughing. "I wasn’t about to let go until the other divers came around and saw it!"

In time, Tommy Doyle would join them, earning a scuba certificate near his home in West Texas, then flying halfway around the world for his first open-water dive at the scene of his father’s crash. Sixty feet below the surface, holding on to the fuselage with one hand, he felt a sensation he hadn’t known since he was 15 months old: the presence of his father. He saw a handful of .50-cal bullets lying in the sand and scooped up a spent casing, wondering if his father had been the last man to touch it. He imagined Jimmie there with him, and he spoke to his father, private words. But he couldn’t be sure that anyone was listening. Pat Scannon had found the ’453. Tommy Doyle had come to see it. But there was no way of knowing whether Jimmie was inside.

*****

that would be up to jpac.

As we boarded the barge early each morning, a marked shift in power took place between Captain Mitroka and a man named Eric Emery. On land, Mitroka had filled the role of "senior team leader" with the driving force of a locomotive, but on the barge, he almost disappeared, ceding total authority to Emery, a civilian archaeologist working for JPAC. If the challenge of JPAC is to blend military zeal with scientific care, this was where the two met: On land, it was George Mitroka’s mission; on the barge, it was Eric Emery’s laboratory.

Emery had no military background, but he carried himself with a distinctly martial bearing. Where Pat Scannon seemed the very picture of an academic explorer, excited by the adventure and eager to share it, Emery was terse and tense and spoke in jargon laced with military acronyms, using terms like "osseous material" and "high-impact deceleration" instead of "bones" and "crash." If Scannon, in skintight wicking fabrics and a custom BentProp hat, seemed like he could hardly wait to return to the jungle each year, Emery—in the same faded khaki T-shirt for days on end—looked like he was rarely anywhere else.

Emery’s focus was absolute; it came from a deep and personal place. When he was a graduate student in the late 1990s, his life was torn from him and irreparably changed. He was working a site in the Andes with his friend Jon Faucher, searching for signs of a pre-Incan civilization at the bottom of a mountain lake. But from the moment their team set camp, everything began to go wrong. First, the seasonal rains picked up. Then, the helicopters that were supposed to bring their food stopped coming. Then, a group of local miners began acting suspicious, then hostile. After a little over a week, huddling together through cold, wet, hungry nights, Emery’s team decided to get the hell out. But as they packed their gear and boarded a helicopter, rising slowly from the edge of the water, then circling back over the tarps and bamboo huts, a grinding noise pierced the air, and the chopper lurched to the right, spiraling and plummeting toward the lake, crashing into the ice-cold water. As the chopper rolled onto its side, Emery could see Faucher sinking into the water, tearing off his seat belt and kicking a door open, then swimming free. Emery struggled to remove his own seat belt but realized it was jammed. He was pinned inside the sinking bird.

At the surface, Faucher took a gasp of air and felt a shooting pain in his back, but he turned back toward Emery, then scrambled over to help him break free, when the chopper shifted and rolled again, swishing Emery below the surface. Ignoring the pain, Faucher—who would later discover that one of his vertebrae had been crushed—shouted for another passenger to give him a knife, then dove underwater to Emery’s unconscious body, sawing through the straps of his seat belt. When he ran out of air, Faucher raced back to the surface, took another gulp, and swam back down to Emery again, finally slicing him free and hauling him to the surface.

"He was gray," Faucher told me. "And his eyes were open and fixed. That was the worst part."

Treading water, Faucher began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until Emery sputtered back to life, his eyes blinking frantically. He hadn’t breathed in four minutes. If not for the cold water, which slows the absorption of oxygen, he probably would have died. If not for Faucher, he definitely would have.

That’s when Eric Emery decided to give up. Or anyway, to give up underwater archaeology—to give up the thing he had spent his adult life working for, which now seemed almost entirely meaningless. He had always believed that life was a journey of calculated risks, but to risk his life for a bunch of relics? "You know how they say your whole life flashes before you?" he says. "Well, the thing that flashed in front of me was ‘What the hell am I doing here? I can’t believe I’m risking my life for this.’ " Back home, Emery confessed to another student that he was planning to drop out of school, but when that student began telling him about a part-time job he had taken with the military’s recovery unit, Emery felt like a light came on. He would join that unit. He would search for those men. He would go underwater and retrieve their bodies.

He understood the meaning of that.

In 2001, Emery was hired as an underwater specialist, but for the first three years his specialty proved mostly nominal. In practice, there weren’t many underwater operations, and he spent almost all his time on land recoveries, bringing remains home from places like Cambodia and Laos. It was work with a purpose, and Emery was more fulfilled than he had ever been. But when Scannon announced the discovery of the ’453, Emery would have a chance to get back in the water.

In 2005, he led the first recovery team to the site, diving nearly every day and trying to piece together, from the position of the wreckage, what had happened as the plane struck water. The debris was clustered at two main spots on opposite sides of a mound of coral. Emery designated them location A and location B. At location B, he found the nose of the plane, smashed into dozens of pieces; on the other side of the coral, at location A, he found the plane’s tail in a single massive piece. Most likely, he theorized, the plane had struck the water nose-down, the impact demolishing the front half, while the back simply snapped off, gliding to rest on the ocean floor.

Emery prepared to begin digging. He designed a screening station on the deck of the barge and showed the divers how to bring sediment up from the wreck, then sift through the pebbles in search of human remains. When the team was ready, Emery splashed two divers and parked a chair by a video monitor, watching through cameras strapped to the divers’ helmets. But as the operation picked up speed in the weeks to come, Emery hit a devastating snag. He was approached one day by the Master Diver. The plane was becoming unstable, he said. It wasn’t safe to keep divers near it. Emery called off the operation immediately and gave the divers a new task: Send down the men with experience in metal fabrication. Have them study the site and draft a blueprint. If the plane wouldn’t hold itself up, they would build a cradle to hold it up.

Back in Hawaii, he submitted the blueprint to the naval shipyard at Pearl Harbor, then deployed to other recovery sites, staying in constant contact as the cradle was built.

He also made contact with the Doyles.

At JPAC, this was a major taboo. Because the unit’s work is so sensitive, the stakes high and the emotions raw, most employees are forbidden from speaking with families. Even now, after seven years, Emery can count on one hand the number of families he has ever contacted—in fact, he can count them on one finger. But when he received an e-mail from a JPAC officer in 2006, telling him that the Doyles were eager to speak with him, Emery leapt at the opportunity. The more he learned from the Doyles, the more mysterious the ’453 became.

In all the records of Jimmie Doyle’s career, Jimmie had been listed as a tail gunner. That meant he sat in the rear of the plane, firing a .50-cal out the back. But as Emery excavated the tail in 2005, he’d never seen a turret there. And as the 2007 mission got under way, loading the massive four-piece cradle onto a cargo jet, then lowering the pieces underwater in Palau, Emery kept his eyes peeled—but the tail turret simply wasn’t there.

Moving on to the nose at location B, Emery tried to imagine what might have happened. It was possible that the turret had simply broken off during the crash, landing with the front of the plane. He waited eagerly when the divers opened the plane’s cockpit, collecting debris and sediment, and when the material came aboard the barge, it was an archaeological gold mine: bones and dog tags from half a dozen men. They were beautifully preserved in the salt water, and the cockpit had protected them from the tides. But as each dog tag was rinsed off, each name matched to the flight manifest, none of them said "Doyle." Emery filed for an extension and kept looking, but when his time ran out, he had no turret. No Jimmie Doyle.

"I don’t want to give the wrong impression," he says now. "I wanted to find every single one of the guys on the ’453. But I had become curious about Doyle. I knew the family history, and there was a lot riding on this. By the time I left in 2007, I was placing personal pressure on myself to produce results for the Doyles."

As Emery flew back to Hawaii at the end of the mission, he tried to remind himself that in every other respect the trip had been an overwhelming success, finding perhaps six of the men—men with wives and children and grandchildren; men missing for six decades; men finally coming home to rest. But he couldn’t shake the sensation that he’d failed. He had once asked Jon Faucher to explain why he dove into the icy water that day, with his back broken, to retrieve his lifeless body, and Faucher told him, "I didn’t want to face your parents and tell them I did nothing."

For Emery, the fear had become his own. He didn’t want to tell the Doyles he had found nothing. He would return to Palau in 2008.

*****

sitting at the edge of the barge this January, Emery looked tense, his face drawn and tight. It had been four days since the team’s arrival, and the barge was finally ready. Each of the container-shipping boxes was positioned in a discrete spot, dividing the deck into a series of interconnected rooms: one for medical equipment, one for fins and masks, one for tanks of air, one for communications equipment, and the room where Eric Emery sat now, surrounded by diving helmets and massive air hoses, staring into the water.

"Bring it in," Mitroka shouted, and Emery stood to address the men.

"Before I left, I got an e-mail," he said, careful not to mention the Doyles by name. "I’m going to read part of it to you, so you understand what you’re doing here. This is from a football coach whose father was on this plane." He unfolded a sheet of paper and began reading. "Eric, looks like this is going to be the year that you will finish the excavation. Whatever we find out, we will always be grateful to you. Of course, our first concern is for your safety and for that of your team of divers. You are, and will continue to be, in our thoughts and prayers. Please give our best to your team. Tell your parents that we are thankful to them for raising such fine men."

As Emery refolded the paper, the deck was hushed.

"Okay," Atherton shouted, breaking the spell. "Let’s bring these boys home."

"HOO YAH!"

Within minutes, the barge was a hive of motion. Divers splashed into the water, -descending to the wreck and using six-inch-diameter vacuum hoses to fill giant baskets with sediment from the wreck. As each basket filled, it was hoisted onto the deck by a foot-foot crane parked in the middle, and then the lid was lifted and a dozen divers gathered, loading two-gallon buckets with the silt and sand, then hauling them over to the screening station where they could be analyzed. With the system humming—baskets rising, emptying, and descending again—I found myself standing on the edge of the barge, staring into the turquoise water and struggling to make out the activity below. But the tide was moving, churning up clouds of debris, and I could see only a few feet.

After a while, I was joined by the team’s physician, Andy Baldwin. I had spent the first days of the trip slightly wary of Baldwin, for no other reason than that he had just wrapped a season as The Bachelor on ABC, which seemed a dubious distinction. But I had come to admire him in spite of it. He was the most senior officer on the boat (ahead of Mitroka by a hair) but also possibly the hardest working—constantly volunteering to push a broom or lift something heavy. Over the next few weeks, despite being the mission’s doctor, he would log more hours underwater than any other man, and in his free time, he visited local villages, providing free medical care. He was also a competitive athlete, who followed eleven-hour workdays with long runs through the islands and had completed eight Ironman triathlons. Now, as we stared into the water, I complained to Baldwin that it was frustrating not to be able to see the wreck, since JPAC rules forbid civilian diving. Baldwin shot me a mischievous look. "I can get you down there," he said.

As we fitted ourselves into masks and fins, he explained the basics of free diving: We would swim over to the wreck, fill our lungs, and plunge down, kicking as far and as fast as we could. The only risk, he explained—aside from inhaling water—was something called "shallow-water blackout," a phenomenon he made every effort to explain but which I was too jittery to comprehend. I nodded and dove into the water, struggling to remind myself that Baldwin was an actual doctor, and didn’t merely play one on TV.

We swam out from the barge, and the difference between our abilities was obvious. The second we arrived in the correct spot, Baldwin grabbed a breath and shot down while I gasped on the surface, winded from the swim. When my breath returned, I began making stabs into the water. Each time, I felt confident at first, plunging down into the chalky blue, then less confident as the pressure increased, then not very confident at all as I panicked and raced back to the surface. Finally, resigning myself to the possibility of shallow-water whateveritwas, I took one last breath and forced myself down, surging deeper and deeper into the void until finally, like a shade lifting from a window, the water opened before me and the divers appeared. I looked around and saw Baldwin nearby, floating calmly upside down.

As I gazed over the site, the wreck was unmistakable—massive mangled chunks of metal overgrown with coral and dancing with fish The coral was like an underwater -mountain, with a huge propeller at the base and the divers maybe a third of the way up, hunched over their vacuum hoses, using one hand to brace the tube, the other to sweep debris inside. It was like seeing astronauts on the moon, taking soil samples. Behind them, the tentacles of their hoses disappeared into the distance, filling baskets that would be lifted by the massive crane to the top of the barge, but here, in the fluttering streams of sunlight and the gnarled wreckage of the ’453, those baskets and the crane were a world away. Here, we were trapped in a place without time, under the shadow of the hulking warplane. Here were the men of Babes in Arms, falling from the sky and through the ocean, to rest in this spot; here were their lives, their dreams—not ended, but paused.

When I couldn’t stay under any longer, my lungs surging involuntarily, I shot to the surface and looked for Baldwin. A minute later, he surfaced, grinning. "I found the tail," he said. "It’s a lot deeper, but you can try if you want." I didn’t, but I nodded anyway, and we paddled a few yards, then dove again, to forty feet, then fifty, then sixty, with rays of sun slicing through the darkening waters until the veil lifted once again and the enormous tube of fuselage appeared, shimmering on the sand below, with a rectangular opening on its side: the waist gunner’s door. In a flash, I pictured Jimmie there, leaning into a .50-cal and spitting rounds at the man who’d shot him, but this wasn’t Jimmie’s gun position. He was in the tail turret.

Or was he?

Back on the barge less than twenty minutes later, I was just drying off and trying to process the sight when a shout rose from the screening station. I hurried over and saw a diver standing by one of the baskets with a bone. It was ten inches long and fat at both ends. When Baldwin arrived, he took it with both hands and turned it over gently; then he pressed it against his own forearm. "It’s a right radius," he said quietly. "You can recognize the triangular shape at the tuberosity—that’s the radial head. It’s what allows you to supinate and pronate your arm." He turned the bone over again, and no one spoke, the initial excitement morphing into something different; each man, in his own mind, was drifting back to Emery’s letter, to the reality of what had happened in this place, in that awful moment, and for the first time, I imagined what it must have looked like: the sky above us lit up with artillery and the red fury of a burning plane screaming toward this spot from land, spiraling down as it fell, its left wing shorn off, a black streak streaming behind as it pounded into the water.

"This was somebody’s dad," Baldwin said, still gazing at the bone. "I wonder if his ghost was waiting for us to find him."

Over the next five weeks, the pile of bones would grow—pieces of rib, arm, leg, hip—each carefully removed by the divers, noted by the anthropologists, and returned to the lab in Hawaii for DNA analysis. Each sample would be matched with a surviving relative, and by summer or fall—with a little luck—the men of the ’453 would be identified.

But there was one discovery that wouldn’t take so long—something unearthed near the end of the mission, near the front of the plane, where nobody ever expected to find it. It was a single skeleton, almost whole, with a gold wedding ring…and Jimmie Doyle’s tags.

*****

the doyle house in West Texas is modest but cozy, with wall-to-wall beige carpeting and a large stone fireplace; around the main living room are paintings and photographs of their two children, Brandi and Casey, who served with the Marines in Iraq and is the spitting image of his grandfather Jimmie. When I visited a few weeks ago, Nancy, who is compact and pretty, brought out several plates of cookies, then invited me to a long coffee table where she had laid out a small collection of memorabilia. Tommy, who is tall, with a long face and a white crewcut, sat nearby in his easy chair, watching.

"This was given to Tommy’s mother," Nancy said, pointing to a folded American flag. "I don’t know when she got it or what for. She didn’t talk about it much." Nancy turned to a small array of medals. "And that’s his Purple Heart, and these other medals Tommy’s mother had never gotten. After she passed away, we found letters from the government that said what medals he had earned, and there was a self-addressed envelope, but she’d never sent it back. It took us two years, but we got them."

"Why do you think Tommy’s mother never got them?" I asked.

Tommy shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "I don’t know," he said. "We’ve discussed it a lot and never come to any conclusions."

Nancy said quietly, "She never really believed he was gone."

As we began to discuss the rumors that Jimmie Doyle had survived, I realized that something was off: We were speaking in different tenses. When I asked whether they had believed the stories, they responded in ways that suggested they still did—or anyway, might. It took several minutes to figure out what was happening, but finally I asked, "Have you talked to JPAC about what they found on this trip?" and Nancy said, "Johnie told us they expected to have news very soon."

"I don’t know what to say," I said. Then I blurted out, "They found Jimmie’s tags."

Nancy gasped. Her face turned white, and she grabbed her cheeks, rocking forward on the sofa. "You’re the first one who’s told us," she whispered.

Tommy sat rigid in his seat, then his face crumpled, and the tears began to fall. "If they hadn’t found him," he said after a while, "after they found everybody else, I would have spent the rest of my life thinking he’d left us." He wiped an eye with his big hand and said, "What I want to know is: What did I do to deserve all this? There’s no way to express our thanks to all these people, like Pat Scannon and Eric Emery and Johnie Webb, all the divers and everybody else. Why do I get to have all these people working so hard, making sacrifices just so that I have an answer?"

"You made a pretty big sacrifice, too," I offered.

Tommy Doyle shook his head. "No," he said. "There are lots of people just like me. So many." He looked me in the eye. "Why am I the lucky one?"

decent read

The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

After a woman living in a hotel in Florida was raped, viciously beaten, and left for dead near the Everglades in 2005, the police investigation quickly went cold. But when the victim sued the Airport Regency, the hotel’s private detective, Ken Brennan, became obsessed with the case: how had the 21-year-old blonde disappeared from her room, unseen by security cameras? The author follows Brennan’s trail as the P.I. worked a chilling hunch that would lead him to other states, other crimes, and a man nobody else suspected.

By Mark Bowden

December 2010

Private investigator Ken Brennan (foreground) and retired Miami-Dade police detective Allen Foote. Photograph by Harry Benson.

From the start, it was a bad case.

A battered 21-year-old woman with long blond curls was discovered facedown in the weeds, naked, at the western edge of Miami, where the neat grid of outer suburbia butts up against the high grass and black mud of the Everglades. It was early on a winter morning in 2005. A local power-company worker was driving by the empty lots of an unbuilt cul-de-sac when he saw her.

And much to his surprise, she was alive. She was still unconscious when the police airlifted her to Jackson Memorial Hospital. When she woke up in its trauma center, she could remember little about what had happened to her, but her body told an ugly tale. She had been raped, badly beaten, and left for dead. There was severe head trauma; she had suffered brain-rattling blows. Semen was recovered from inside her. The bones around her right eye were shattered. She was terrified and confused. She bent English to her native Ukrainian grammar and syntax, dropping pronouns and inverting standard sentence structure, which made her hard to understand. And one of the first things she asked for on waking was her lawyer. That was unusual.

Miami-Dade detectives learned that she had been living for months at the Airport Regency Hotel, eight miles from where she was found. It is one of those crisply efficient overnight spots in the orbit of major airports that cater to travelers needing a bed between legs of long flights. She was employed by a cruise-ship line and had severely cut her finger on the job, so she was being put up at the hotel by her employers while she healed. The assault had begun, she said, in her room, on the fourth floor. She described her attackers as two or three white men who spoke with accents that she heard as “Hispanic,” but she wasn’t certain. She remembered one of the men pushing a pillow into her face, and being forced to drink something strong, alcoholic. She had fragments of memories like bits of a bad dream—of being held up or carried, of being thrown over a man’s shoulder as he moved down a flight of stairs, of being roughly violated in the backseat of a car, of pleading for her life. Powerful, cruel moments, but there was nothing solid, nothing that made a decent lead. When her lawyer soon after filed a lawsuit against the hotel, alleging negligence, going after potentially deep corporate pockets, the detectives thought something was fishy. This was not your typical rape victim. What if she was part of some sophisticated con?

The police detectives did what they could at the hotel, combing the woman’s room for evidence, interviewing hotel employees, obtaining images from all of the surveillance cameras for the morning of the crime, going over the guest lists. The hotel had 174 rooms, and so many people came and went that it would have taken months working full-time to run checks on every one of them, something beyond the resources of a police department in a high-crime area like Miami-Dade. The sex-crimes unit set aside the file with no clear leads, only more questions. After several weeks, “we were dried up,” recalled Allen Foote, the detective handling the case.

So the action was all headed toward civil court. The hotel engaged a law firm to defend itself from the woman’s lawsuit, and the firm eventually hired a private detective named Ken Brennan to figure out what had happened.

Foote was not pleased. It was usually a pain in the ass to have a private detective snooping around one of his cases. Brennan was right out of central casting—middle-aged, deeply tanned, with gray hair. He was a weight lifter and favored open-necked shirts that showed off both the definition of his upper pecs and the bright, solid-gold chain around his neck. The look said: mature, virile, laid-back, and making it. He had been divorced, and his former wife was now deceased; his children were grown. He had little in the way of daily family responsibilities. Brennan had been a cop on Long Island, where he was from, and had worked eight years as a D.E.A. agent. He had left the agency in the mid-90s to work as a commodities broker and to set up as a private detective. The brokering was not to his taste, but the investigating was. He was a warm, talkative guy, with a thick Long Island accent, who sized people up quickly and with a healthy strain of New York brass. If he liked you, he let you know it right away, and you were his friend for life, and if he didn’t … well, you would find that out right away, too. Nothing shocked him; in fact, most of the salacious run-of-the-mill work that pays private detectives’ bills—domestic jobs and petty insurance scams—bored him. Brennan turned those offers away. The ones he took were mostly from businesses and law firms, who hired him to nail down the facts in civil-court cases like this one.

He had a fixed policy. He told potential employers up front, “I’ll find out what happened. I’m not going to shade things to assist your client, but I will find out what the truth is.” Brennan liked it when the information he uncovered helped his clients, but that wasn’t a priority. Winning lawsuits wasn’t the goal. What excited him was the mystery.

The job in this case was straightforward. Find out who raped and beat this young woman and dumped her in the weeds. Had the attack even happened at the hotel, or had she slipped out and met her assailant or assailants someplace else? Was she just a simple victim, or was she being used by some kind of Eastern European syndicate? Was she a prostitute? Was she somehow implicated? There were many questions and few answers.

Vanishing Act

‘I used to be a cop and a federal agent,” Brennan told Detective Foote, introducing himself at the Miami-Dade police sex-crimes-unit offices. Foote had long strawberry-blond hair, which he combed straight back, and a bushy blond mustache. He was about the same age as Brennan, who read him right away as a fellow member of the fraternity, somebody he could reason with on familiar terms.

“Look, you and I both know there’s no fucking way you can investigate this case,” Brennan said. “I can see this through to the end. I won’t step on your dick. I won’t do a thing without telling you about it. If I figure out who did it, you get the arrest. I won’t do anything to fuck it up for you.”

Foote saw logic in this and did something he ordinarily wouldn’t do. He shared what he had in his file: crime-scene photos, surveillance footage from the hotel security cameras, the victim’s confused statement. Foote had interviewed a couple of hotel staff members, but they hadn’t seen a thing. He’d gone about as far as he could with it. He thought, Good luck.

The insurance adjuster had fared no better than Foote. As Brennan reviewed the adjuster’s detailed summary of the case in early November of 2005, eight months after the victim had been found, it was easy to see why. The woman’s memory was all over the map. First she said she had been attacked by one man, then three, then two. At one point she said their accent might have been not Hispanic but “Romanian.” There was no evidence to implicate anyone.

The hotel had a significant security system. The property was fenced, and the back gates were locked and monitored. There were only a few points of entry and exit. During the night, the back door was locked and could be opened only remotely. There were two security guards on duty at all times. Each exit was equipped with a surveillance camera. There was one over the front entrance and one over the back, one in the lobby, one at the lobby elevator, and others out by the pool and parking lot. All of the hotel guests had digital key cards that left a computer record every time they unlocked the door to their rooms. It was possible to track the comings and goings of every person who checked in.

Brennan started where all good detectives start. What did he know for sure? He knew the victim had gone up to her fourth-floor room at the Airport Regency at 3:41 A.M., that she had used her key card to enter her room at about the same time, and that she had been found at dawn in the weeds eight miles west. Somewhere in that roughly three-hour window, she had left the hotel. But there was no evidence of this on any of the cameras. So, how?

The victim was colorfully present on the video record, with her bright-red puffy jacket and shoulder-length blond curls. She had been in and out all night. After months of living in the hotel, she was clearly restless. She made frequent trips down to the lobby just to chat with hotel workers and guests, or to step outside for a smoke, and the cameras caught her every trip. She had gone out to dinner with a friend and returned around midnight, but she wasn’t done yet. She is seen exiting the elevator at about three in the morning, and the camera over the front entrance catches her walking away. She told investigators that she had walked to a nearby gas station to buy a phone card because she wanted to call her mother back in Ukraine, where people were just waking up. Minutes after her departure, the camera catches her return. The lobby camera records her re-entering the hotel and crossing the lobby. Moments later she is seen entering the elevator for her final trip upstairs. A large black man gets onto the elevator right behind her, and the recording shows them exchanging a few words. The police report showed her entering her room 20 minutes later, which had led to much speculation about where she was during that time. The victim had no memory of going anywhere but directly to her room. Brennan checked the clock on the camera at the elevator and found that it ran more than 20 minutes behind the computer clock, which recorded the key swipes, solving that small mystery. After she entered the lobby elevator, she was not seen again by any of the cameras.

The surveillance cameras were in perfect working order. They were not on continually; they were activated by motion detectors. Miami-Dade detectives had tried to beat the motion detectors by moving very slowly, or finding angles of approach that would not be seen, but they had failed. No matter how slowly they moved, no matter what approach they tried, the cameras clicked on faithfully and caught them.

One possibility was that she had left through her fourth-floor window. Someone would have had to drop her out the window or somehow lower her, presumably unconscious, into the bushes below, and then exit the hotel and walk around to retrieve her. But the woman showed no signs of injury from such a drop, or from ropes, and the bushes behind the hotel had not been trampled. The police had examined them carefully, looking for any sign of disturbance. It was also possible, with more than one assailant, that she had been lowered into the grasp of someone who had avoided disturbing the bushes, but Brennan saw that such explanations began to severely stretch credulity. Sex crimes are not committed by determined teams of attackers who come with padded ropes to lower victims from fourth-floor windows.

No, Brennan concluded. Unless this crime had been pulled off by a team of magicians, the victim had to have come down in the elevator to the lobby and left through the front door. The answer was not obvious, but it had to be somewhere in the video record from those cameras. “Needless to say, the big mystery here is how this woman got out of the hotel,” read the summary of the case prepared by the insurance adjuster. It was a mystery he had not been able to crack.

Brennan penciled one word on the memo: “Disguise?”

He began studying the video record with great care, until he could account for every coming and going. Whenever a person or a group arrived, the camera over the front door recorded it. Seconds later, the entries were captured by the lobby cameras, and then, soon after, by the elevator cameras. Room-key records showed the arrivals entering their rooms. Likewise, those departing were recorded in the opposite sequence: elevator, lobby, front door. The parking-lot cameras recorded cars coming and going. One by one, Brennan eliminated scores of potential suspects. If someone had left the hotel before the victim re-entered her room, and did not return, he could not have attacked her. Such people were eliminated. Those who entered and were not seen to leave were also eliminated, and likewise anyone exiting the hotel without a bag, or carrying only a small bag. Brennan eliminated no one without a clear reason, not even women or families. He watched carefully for any sign of someone behaving nervously, or erratically.

This painstaking process ultimately left him with only one suspect: the man seen entering the elevator behind the victim at 3:41 A.M. He was a very large black man with glasses, who looked to be at least six four and upwards of 300 pounds. He and the woman are seen casually talking as they enter the elevator. The same man emerges from the elevator into the lobby less than two hours later, at 5:28 A.M., pulling a suitcase with wheels. The camera over the front door records him rolling the suitcase out toward the parking lot at a casual stroll. He returns less than an hour later, shortly before dawn, without the bag. He gets back on the elevator and heads upstairs.

Why would a man haul his luggage out of an airport hotel early in the morning, when he was not checking out, and then return to his room within the hour without it? That question, coupled with Brennan’s careful process of elimination, led him to the conclusion that the victim had been taken out of the hotel inside the big man’s suitcase.

But it seemed too small. It looked to be about the size that air travelers can fit into overhead compartments. But the man himself was so big, perhaps the size of the bag was an illusion. Brennan studied the video as the man exited the elevator and also as he left the hotel, then measured the doorways of both. When he matched visible reference points in the video—the number of tiles to each side of the bag as it was wheeled out the front door, and the height of a bar that ran around the inside of the elevator—he was able to get a close approximation of the suitcase’s actual size. He obtained one that fit those measurements, which was larger than the bag on the video had appeared to be, and invited a flexible young woman whose proportions matched the victim’s to curl up inside it. She fit.

He scrutinized the video still more closely, watching it again and again. The man steps off the elevator rolling the bag behind him. As he does, the wheels catch momentarily in the space between the elevator floor and the ground floor, just for a split second. It was hardly noticeable if you weren’t looking for it. The man has to give the bag a tug to get it unstuck.

And that clinched it. That tiny tug. The bag had to have been heavy to get stuck. Brennan was now convinced. This is the guy. No matter what the victim had said—that she had been attacked by two or maybe three men, that they were “white,” that they spoke with accents that sounded Hispanic or perhaps Romanian—Brennan was convinced her attacker had to be this man.

The detective was struck by something else. His suspect was entirely collected. Cool and calm, entering the elevator with the woman, exiting with the suitcase, pulling it behind him out to the parking lot, then strolling back less than an hour later. Brennan had been a cop. He had seen ordinary men caught up in the aftermath of a violent crime. They were beside themselves. Shaking. Panicky. If a man rapes and beats a woman to the point where he thinks she’s dead, and then hauls the body out to dump it in the weeds, does he come strolling back into the same hotel as if nothing happened? An ordinary attacker would have been two states away by noon.

What this man’s demeanor suggested to Brennan was chilling.

He’s good at this.
He’s done this before.

The “Mercury” Man

Brennan called a meeting at the hotel on November 17, 2005. The owners were there, the insurance adjusters, and the lawyers—in other words, the people who had hired him. They met in a boardroom. On a laptop screen, Brennan pulled up the image of the large man pulling his suitcase off the elevator.

He said, “This is the guy that did it. That girl is inside that suitcase.”

There was some snickering.

“How do you come up with that?” he was asked. Brennan described his process of elimination, how he had narrowed and narrowed the search, until it led him to this man.

They weren’t buying it.

“Didn’t the victim say that she was attacked by two white guys?” one of them asked.

“I’m telling you,” said Brennan. “This is the guy. Let me run with it a little bit. If you’re willing to give me the resources, I’ll track this guy down.”

He told them that it was a complete win-win. The hotel’s liability in the civil suit would go way down if he could show that the woman had not been attacked by a hotel employee. “What could be better?” he said. “Think how good you’ll look if we actually catch the guy responsible. You’d be solving a horrible crime!”

They seemed distinctly unmoved.

“Look at how cool this guy is,” he told them, replaying the video. “He just raped and beat a woman to death, or thinks he has, and it’s not like he’s all nervous and jittery. He’s cool as a clam! Tell me the kind of person who could do such a thing and be this nonchalant. This ain’t the only time he’s done this.”

A discussion ensued. There were some in the room who wanted to find the rapist, but the decision was primarily a business calculation. It was about weighing the detective’s fee against a chance to limit their exposure. Brennan didn’t care what their reasons were; he just wanted to keep going. Old instincts had been aroused. He had never even met the victim, but with her attacker in his sights, he wanted him badly. Here was a guy who was walking around almost a year later, certain he had gotten away with his crime. Brennan wanted what all detectives want: the gotcha! He wanted to see the look on the guy’s face.

It was close, but in the end the hotel suits decided to let him keep working. Having overcome their skepticism so narrowly, Brennan was even more determined to prove he was right.

The hotel’s records were useless. There were too many rooms and there was too much turnover to scrutinize every guest. Even if the hotel staff remembered a 300-pound black man with glasses, which they did not, there was no way to tell whether he was a registered hotel guest or a visitor, or if he was sharing someone else’s room. Even in cases where they photocopied a guest’s driver’s license, which they did not do faithfully, the image came up so muddy that there was no way to make out the face.

So he went back to the video. Now that he knew whom he was looking for, Brennan scrutinized every appearance of his suspect, at the elevator, in the lobby, at the hotel restaurant, at the front door. In one of the video snippets at the elevator, the suspect is seen walking with a fit black man wearing a white T-shirt with the word “Mercury” on the front, which meant nothing to Brennan. His first thoughts were the car company, or the planet, or the element. There was nothing there he could work with. The manner of both men on the snippet suggested that they knew each other. They walked past the elevator and turned to their right, in the direction of the restaurant. So Brennan hunted up video from the restaurant surveillance camera, and, sure enough, it captured the two entering. As Brennan reviewed more video, he saw the big black man with the other man quite frequently, so he suspected that the two had been in town together. The man in the T-shirt had an ID tag on a string around his neck, but it was too small to read on the screen. Brennan called NASA to see if they had a way to enhance the picture. He described the camera and was told that it couldn’t be done.

Again, back to the video. In the restaurant footage, the man in the T-shirt is momentarily seen from behind, revealing another word, on the back of the T-shirt. The best view comes in a split second as he sidesteps someone leaving, giving the camera a better angle. Brennan could see the letter V at the beginning of the word, and O at the end. He could make out a vague pattern of script in the middle, but could not be sure of the exact letters. It was like looking at an eye chart when you need stronger glasses; you take a guess. It looked to him as if the word was “Verado.” It meant nothing to him, but that was his hunch. So he Googled it and found that “Verado” was the name of a new outboard engine manufactured by Mercury Marine, the boat-engine manufacturer.

There had been a big boat show in Miami in February, when the incident happened. Perhaps the man in the white T-shirt had been working at the show for Mercury Marine, and if he had, maybe his big friend had, too.

Mercury Marine is a subsidiary of the Brunswick Corporation, which also manufactures billiards and bowling equipment and other recreational products. Brennan called its head of security, Alan Sperling, and explained what he was trying to do. His first thought was that the company might have put its boat-show employees up at the Airport Regency. If it had, he might be able to identify and locate the man in the picture through the company. Sperling checked, and, no, Mercury’s employees had stayed at a different hotel. Brennan racked his brain. Had any of the crews who set up the company’s booth stayed at the Regency? Again, the answer was no.

“Well, who got those shirts?,” Brennan asked.

Sperling checked and called back two weeks later. He said the only place the shirts had been given away was at the boat show’s food court. The company in charge of food for the show was called Centerplate, which handles concessions for large sporting events and conventions. It was a big company with employees spread across the nation. Brennan called the head of human resources for Centerplate, who told him that the company had put up some of its people at the Regency, but that it had hired more than 200 for the boat show, from all over.

“Somebody has to remember a big black guy, 300 pounds at least—in glasses,” said the detective.

A week later, the man from Centerplate called back. Some of their workers did remember a big black man with glasses, but no one knew his name. Someone did seem to recall, he said, that the company had initially hired the man to work at Zephyr Field, home of the New Orleans Zephyrs, the minor-league baseball team in Metairie, a sprawling suburb. This was a solid lead, but there was a bad thing about it: Hurricane Katrina had devastated the city just months earlier, and the residents of Metairie had been evacuated. It was a community scattered to the winds.

Good News, Bad News

Brennan was stubborn. He was now months into this effort to identify and find the man responsible for raping and beating a woman he had never met. There was no way that what he was being paid for the job was worth the hours he was putting in. Nobody else cared as much as he did. What the hotel’s insurers really wanted, Brennan knew, was for him to tell them that the victim was a hooker, and that she had been beaten by one of her johns, which would go a long way toward freeing them from any liability. But this wasn’t true, and he had told them at the outset that the truth was all they would get from him. Detective Foote was openly skeptical. He had given Brennan all the information he had. He had more pressing cases with real leads and real prospects.

But Brennan had a picture in his head. He could see this big man with glasses coolly going about his business day to day—smug, chatting up the girls, no doubt looking for his next victim, comfortable, certain that his crimes left no trail.

Katrina was the bad thing about the New Orleans lead, but there was also a good thing. Brennan had a buddy on the police force there, a Captain Ernest Demma. Some years earlier, on a vacation to the French Quarter with his kids, Brennan had risked his hide helping Demma subdue a prisoner who had violently turned on him.

“The guy had broken away from me,” Demma recalled, “and out of nowhere comes this guy in a black jacket flying down the sidewalk, who runs him down, tackles him, and held the guy until my men could subdue him. He was fantastic.” It was the kind of gesture a cop never forgets. Demma dubbed Brennan “Batman.” New Orleans may have been down for the count, but when Batman called, Demma was up for anything.

The captain sent one of his sergeants out to Zephyr Field, where the club was working overtime to get its storm-ravaged facility ready to open the 2006 season. Demma called Brennan back: “The good news is: I know who this guy is.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“His name is Mike Jones, there’s probably only a million of them, and he doesn’t work there anymore, and nobody knows where he went.”

Still, a name! Brennan thanked Demma and went back to the Regency database, and, sure enough, he found that there had indeed been a guest named Mike Jones staying at the hotel when the attack occurred. He had checked in on February 14, seven days before the rape and assault, and he had checked out on the 22nd, one day after he was seen rolling his suitcase to the car. The full name on his Visa card was Michael Lee Jones. The card had been canceled, and the address was for a Virginia residence Jones had vacated years earlier. He had left no forwarding address. Brennan lacked authority to subpoena further information from the credit-card company, and the evidence he had was still too slight to get Miami-Dade police involved. The phone number Jones had left with registration was a number for Centerplate.

But the trail was warm again. Brennan knew that Jones no longer worked for Centerplate, and the people there didn’t know where he was, but the detective thought he knew certain things about his prey. Judging by the nonchalance he showed hauling a young woman’s body out of the hotel stuffed in a suitcase, Brennan suspected that this was a practiced routine. The Centerplate job had kept him moving from city to city, all expenses paid, a perfect setup for a serial rapist with a method that was tried and true. If Jones was his man, then he wouldn’t give up an arrangement like that. If he wasn’t employed by Centerplate anymore, where would somebody with his work experience go next? Who was facilitating his predation now? Brennan got some names from Centerplate and went online and compiled a list of the food-service company’s 20 to 25 top competitors.

He started working his way down the list, calling the human-resources department for each of the competing firms, and one by one he struck out. As it happened, one company on the list, Ovations, had its headquarters in the Tampa area, and Brennan was planning a trip up in that direction anyway, so he decided to drop in. As any investigator will tell you, an interview in person is always better than an interview on the phone. Brennan stopped by and, as he can do, talked his way into the office of the company’s C.O.O. He explained his manhunt and asked if Ovations employed a 300-plus-pound black man with glasses named Michael Lee Jones.

The executive didn’t even check a database. He told Brennan, who was not a law-enforcement official, that if he wanted that information he would have to return with a subpoena. All the other companies had checked a database and just told him no. He knew he had finally asked in the right place.

“Why would you want someone working for you who is a rapist?” he asked. He was told there were privacy issues involved.

“Get a subpoena,” the executive suggested.

So Brennan got a fax number for Ovations and called Detective Foote at Miami-Dade; before long a subpoena spat from the machine. It turned out that Ovations had an employee named Michael Lee Jones who fit the description. He was working in Frederick, Maryland.

The Interrogation

Michael Lee Jones was standing behind a barbecue counter at Harry Grove Stadium, home of the minor-league Frederick Keys, when Detective Foote and one of his partners showed up. It was an early-spring evening in the Appalachian foothills, and Foote the Floridian was so cold his teeth were chattering beneath his mustache.

When Brennan had called him with the information about Jones, Foote was impressed by the private detective’s tenacity, but still skeptical. This whole effort more or less defined the term “long shot,” but the name and location of a potential suspect was without question the first real lead since the case had landed on his desk. It had to be checked out. The department had a requirement that detectives traveling out of town to confront suspected criminals go as a team, so Foote waited until another detective had to make such a trip to the suburbs of Washington. He got the detective to agree to take him along as partner. Together they made the hour-and-a-half drive to Frederick to visit Jones in person.

Foote had called Jones earlier that day to see if he would be available. The detective kept it vague. He just said he was investigating an incident in Miami that had happened during the boat show, and confirmed that Jones had been working there. On the phone, Jones was polite and forthcoming. He said he’d been in Miami at that time and that he would be available to meet with Foote, and gave him directions to the ballpark.

Jones was a massive man. Tall, wide, and powerful, with long arms and big hands and a great round belly. His size was intimidating, but his manner was exceedingly soft-spoken and gentle, even passive. He wore clear-rimmed glasses and spoke in a friendly way. Jones was in charge of the operation at the food counter and appeared to be respected and well liked by his busy employees. He was wearing an apron. He steered Foote and the other detective away from the booth to a picnic area just outside the stadium.

As Foote recalled it later, he asked Jones about meeting women in Miami, and Jones said he had “hooked up” once. The detective asked him to describe her. “I only have sex with white women,” Jones said.

Foote asked if he had had sex with anyone at the Airport Regency, and Jones said no. He said that the woman he had had sex with in Miami had been working at the boat show, and that they had hooked up elsewhere.

“Any blonde women?,” Foote asked.

“No.”

“Foreign accent?”

Jones said the woman he had sex with in Miami had been German.

Foote was not making Jones as a suspect. The big man acted convincingly, like someone with nothing to hide. The detective was freezing in the evening air. Foote preferred coming right to the point; he was not given to artful interrogation. Besides, he felt more and more as if the trip had been a waste of time. So he just asked what he wanted to know.

“Look, I’ve got a girl who was raped that week. Did you have anything to do with it?”

“No, of course not!” said Jones, appropriately shocked by the question. “No way.”

“You didn’t beat the shit out of this girl and leave her for dead in a field down there?”

“Oh, no. No.”

“Are you willing to give me a DNA specimen?,” Foote asked.

Jones promptly said he would, further convincing the detective that this was not the guy. Do the guilty volunteer conclusive evidence? Foote produced the DNA kit, had Jones sign the consent form, and ran a cotton swab inside Jones’s mouth.

He called Brennan when he got back.

“I’m telling you, Ken, this ain’t the guy,” he said.

“No, man, he’s definitely the fucking guy,” said Brennan, who flew up to Frederick himself, traveling with his son, and spent time over a three-day period talking to Jones, who continued to deny everything.

Months after he returned, the DNA results came back. Brennan got a call from Foote.

“You ain’t gonna believe this,” said Foote.

“What?”

“You were right.”

Jones’s DNA was a match.

Brennan flew up to Frederick in October to meet Foote, who arrested the big man. It had been 11 months since he took the case. Foote formally charged Jones with a variety of felonies that encompassed the acts of raping, kidnapping, and beating a young woman severely. The accused sat forlornly in a chair that looked tiny under his bulk, in an austere Frederick Police Department interrogation room, great rolls of fat falling on his lap under an enormous Baltimore Ravens T-shirt. He repeatedly denied everything in a surprisingly soft voice peculiar for such a big man, gesturing broadly with both hands, protesting but never growing angry, and insisting that he would never, ever, under any circumstances do such a thing to a woman. He said that he “never had any problems” paying women for sex, and that he “did not get a kick” out of hurting women. He did admit, once the DNA test irrevocably linked him to the victim, that he had had sex with her, but insisted that she was a “hooker,” that he had paid her a hundred dollars, and that when he left her she was in fine shape, although very drunk. They showed him pictures of her battered face, taken the day she was found.

“I did not hurt that girl,” Jones said, pushing the photos away, his voice rising to a whine. “I’m not violent.… I never hit a fucking woman in my whole fucking life! I’m not going to hurt her.”

Brennan asked him why a man would roll his suitcase out to the parking lot and stash it in his car at five in the morning, two days before he checked out of the hotel.

“I couldn’t remember if we were leaving that day or the next day. I wasn’t sure.… For some reason, I thought, Fuck it, it’s time to go.”

Brennan was able to trip Jones up with only one small thing. Jones said that his suitcase had only his clothes, shoes, and a video game in it, but when the detective noted the extra tug Jones had needed to get it off the elevator, Jones suddenly remembered that he had had a number of large books in it as well. He said he was an avid reader.

When Brennan asked him to name some of the books he had read, Jones could not. He could not name a single title.

But Jones was unfailingly compliant, and his manner worked for him. Even with the DNA, the case against him was weak. He had ample reason for not having volunteered initially that he had paid a woman for sex—he had a prior arrest for soliciting a prostitute—so that wouldn’t count against him, and if he had had sex with the victim, as he said, it would account for the DNA. The fact that Jones had willingly provided the sample spoke in his favor. In court, it would come down to his word against the young woman’s, and she was a terrible witness. She had picked Jones out of a photo lineup, but given how foggy her memory of the night was, and the fact that she had seen Jones before, unlike the other faces she was shown, it was hardly convincing evidence of his guilt. Her initial accounts of the crime were so much at odds with Brennan’s findings that even Foote found himself wondering who was telling the truth.

Miami prosecutors ended up settling with Jones, who, after being returned to Miami, pleaded guilty to sexual assault in return for having all of the more severe charges against him dropped. He was sentenced to two years in prison, an outcome that Brennan would have found very disappointing if that had been the end of the story. It was not.

Three More Hits

Brennan never doubted that Jones was a rapist, and given what he had observed, first on the surveillance video and then after meeting him in person, he was convinced that sexual assault was Jones’s pastime.

“This ain’t a one-fucking-time deal,” Brennan told Foote. “I’m telling you, this is this guy’s thing. He’s got a job that sends him all over the country. Watch him on that video. He’s slick. Nonchalant. He’s too cool, too calm. You’ll see it when you put his DNA into the system.”

The “system” is the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). The F.B.I.-administered database now has well over eight million DNA offender profiles. Local, state, and federal law-enforcement officials routinely enter DNA samples recovered from convicts and from the scenes and victims of unsolved crimes, and over the years the system has electronically matched more than 100,000 of them, often reaching across surprising distances in place and time. It means that when a DNA sample exists a case can never be classified as entirely “cold.”

Michael Lee Jones had left a trail. The Miami-Dade police entered Jones’s DNA into CODIS in late 2006, and several months later, which is how long it takes the F.B.I. to double-check matches the system finds electronically, three new hits came up.

Detective Terry Thrumston, of the Colorado Springs Police Department sex-crimes unit, had a rape-and-assault case that had been bugging her for more than a year. The victim was a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman who had been picked up early in the morning on December 1, 2005, by a stranger—a very large black man with glasses, who had offered her a ride and then talked his way into her apartment and raped her, holding his hand tightly over her mouth. Thrumston had no leads, and the case had sat for two years until DNA collected from the victim matched that of Michael Lee Jones.

There were two victims in New Orleans. One of them, also a blonde, had been partying in the French Quarter a little too hard, by her own admission, and very early on the morning of May 5, 2003, she had gone looking for a cab back to her hotel when a very large black man with glasses pulled his car over to the curb and offered her a ride. As she later testified, he drove her to a weedy lot and raped her. He pressed his large hand powerfully over her face as he attacked her, and she testified that she bit his palm so hard that she had bits of his skin in her teeth afterward. When he was finished, he drove off, leaving her on the lot. She reported the rape to the New Orleans police, who filed her account and took DNA samples from the rapist’s semen. The case had sat until CODIS matched the specimen with Michael Lee Jones. The other New Orleans victim told a similar tale, but failed to pick Jones’s face out of a photo lineup.

Jones, it turns out, had been in both Colorado Springs and New Orleans on the dates in question. So in 2008, as his Florida sentence drew to a close, he was flown to Colorado Springs to stand trial. It was a novel prosecution, because the Colorado woman had died in the interim, of causes unrelated to the crime. As a result, Deputy District Attorney Brien Cecil had no victim to put on the stand. Instead he fashioned a case out of two of the other rapes, calling as witnesses the Miami victim and one of the New Orleans victims, both of whom supplemented the DNA evidence by pointing out Jones as their attacker in the courtroom. Cecil argued that their cases showed a “common plan, scheme, or design” that was as much Jones’s signature as his trail of semen.

The New Orleans victim proved to be a very effective witness. Her memory was clear and her statements emphatic, the outrage still evident six years later, along with her chagrin at the poor judgment she had displayed that night. The Miami victim, on the other hand, was every bit as bad on the stand as the Miami prosecutors had feared. One of Jones’s lawyers made much of the different stories she had told police. Her struggles with English further confused matters.

Jones pleaded not guilty to all charges in the Colorado case. He argued through his lawyers (he did not testify) that the sex had been consensual, and that the woman claiming rape had been a prostitute. But where jurors in Colorado might have been able to accept two prostitutes in different states at different times unaccountably filing rape charges after turning a trick, and in both cases immediately describing their attacker as a huge black man with glasses, they clearly choked on a third. There was no evidence that any of the victims were prostitutes. And then, of course, there was the DNA.

Michael Lee Jones is serving what amounts to a life sentence at the Fremont Correctional Facility, in Colorado. He received a term of 24 years to life for one count of sexual assault with force, and 12 years to life for the second count, of felonious sexual contact. He is 38 years old and will not be eligible for his first parole hearing until 2032. The state estimates his term will last until he dies.

His Miami victim won a $300,000 settlement from the hotel and the hotel’s security company.

Ken Brennan is back doing his private-detective work in Miami. He is enormously proud of the efforts that have locked Jones away. “The cases they got him on, they’re just the tip of the iceberg,” he predicted. “Once other jurisdictions start checking their DNA files on cases when this guy was at large, I guarantee you they will find more.”

So far his hunches have been pretty good.