Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders
Journalist Billy Jensen spent fifteen years investigating unsolved murders, fighting for the families of victims. Every story he wrote had one thing in common―they didn’t have an ending. The killer was still out there.
But after the sudden death of a friend, crime writer and author of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Michelle McNamara, Billy became fed up. Following a dark night, he came up with a plan. A plan to investigate past the point when the cops had given up. A plan to solve the murders himself.
You’ll ride shotgun as Billy identifies the Halloween Mask Murderer, finds a missing girl in the California Redwoods, and investigates the only other murder in New York City on 9/11. You’ll hear intimate details of how he used social media to identify suspects that the police can’t find. And Billy gives you the tools―and the rules―to help solve murders yourself.
“A breakthrough crime narrative.” — John Douglas, former chief of FBI’s lnvestigative Support Unit and New York Times #1 Bestselling Author of Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit
“Inspire a new generation of true crime viewers and readers to become true crime’s superheroes.”– Bustle
“In this engrossing memoir, journalist Jensen takes the reader on his quest to hunt down killers using internet sleuthing and crowdsourcing…For fans of true crime, this is a fascinating story.” — Publisher’s Weekly
“Part memoir, part how-to guide, Chase Darkness With Me includes rules for responsible citizen detective work…Jensen has poured nearly all of his free time and energy over the past three years into crowd-sourcing criminal investigations…Even when he accumulated $20,000 in debt from promoting his posts, he’s never given up on a case.” — Rolling Stone
Killers Amidst Killers: Hunting Serial Killers Operating Under the Cloak of America’s Opioid Epidemic
Our story begins in 2017, when two young women, best friends Danielle and Lindsey go missing in Columbus, Ohio, within weeks of each other, and their bodies are found soon thereafter.
As Jensen investigates Danielle and Lindsey’s cases, he comes across other missing and murdered women, and before long, he uncovers eighteen of them. All unsolved. And no one was talking about it.
These are not women who were raised in the street. They got hooked on pills. The pills were taken away. They get hooked on heroin. And when the money is gone, they have to sell themselves. It happens very quick.
Through his investigations and the help of experts, Jensen identifies serial killers in Cleveland and Columbus. Why there? Because it’s easy. Sharks go where the swimmers are. Serial killers go where the easy prey are: Ground zero of the opioid epidemic. The heart of America.
That is what happened to Danielle and Lindsey. But serial killers murdering sex workers in the 21st century will get 45 seconds on the local news, and page 3 in the local paper, and then can disappear in the wind.
Jensen hunts these predators to bring peace to the victims’ suffering families while putting a spotlight on a system that is leaving hundreds of thousands of bodies in its wake.
“Jensen (Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders) asks a lot of questions but gets few answers in this thought-provoking and disturbing examination of how serial killers could have operated unsuspected in areas of Ohio ravaged by the opioid epidemic during the 2010s. Factors include poor record keeping, unshared information (so that the m.o. of a murder in one county might remain unknown to investigators in a neighboring county), and lack of public concern about the lives of the victims, who were typically impoverished, abused, and addicted sex workers. Jensen gives the victims a vital presence through the voices of the loved ones they left behind. In particular, he focuses on the heartbreaking stories of two Columbus sex workers, best friends Danielle Greene and Lindsey Maccabee, whose bodies were found within a month of each other in 2017. As he seeks to identify the women’s killer or killers, he lays bare the devastation wrought by a system that delivers unequal justice for people deemed marginal by American society. Jensen also discusses the sad cases of 30 other women who either went missing or were murdered. Not just true crime buffs will want to check out this impassioned cri de coeur.” — Publishers Weekly Starred Reviewed
