Girl, 11 by Amy Clarke (grave mercy TXT) 📗

was right about one thing: he was committing a crime. Jimmy worked as a county commissioner, and he’d been accepting cash bribes in exchange for granting government contracts to certain businesses. He’d been burying money on a property out in the country that he’d bought with cash, without telling her. He thought once he had enough saved up, he could surprise her with their dream house and tell her he won the lottery or something.

Elle:

What about the way he reacted to the news story about the murdered girls? [redaction tone] said he sat up like he’d been shocked and couldn’t stop staring at the screen.

Sykes:

Ah right, yeah, we asked him about that. Apparently, he was looking at the moving chyron on the bottom of the newscast, where they show the stock market numbers. One of the companies he had invested in with some of his illicit cash had taken a dive. He lost a huge chunk of his investment. He told us he kept watching for the numbers to come around again, hoping he had imagined them, and he hadn’t realized his wife had noticed his reaction.

Elle:

So, you never found any reason to believe he was involved in the murders?

Sykes:

None whatsoever, and I want to make that clear. I’m not excusing political bribery, but what Jimmy did, he’s paid for. He lost his job, his wife left him after he was convicted, and he spent eight years in prison. There’s no way he could be TCK.

Elle voice-over:

It might seem like such an obvious thing that it doesn’t need to be stated, but suspicion of Jimmy has continued to circulate in online forums and the popular culture references of this case for two decades. Some online sleuths believe that he was the original Countdown Killer and then a copycat took over, or that he was partnered with someone else from the beginning who continued the work after he was in prison. They say this is why there were only two girls that first year, and also why there was a difference in the way they were treated. I want to make this clear: in my years of investigating this case, I have looked into Jimmy’s life extensively, and I can say with absolute certainty that he is not TCK. You don’t have to believe me, but if you want to save yourself hours of trying to pin these gruesome murders on an innocent man, rest assured that I have tried and failed.

What is true is this: while Detective Sykes and his team were reasonable in listening to Susan’s suspicion of her husband, their investigation took them off course. And while officers followed Jimmy from his work to his property and watched him bury stolen money, Tamera Smith’s body was found under the Stone Arch Bridge. Like Isabelle and Vanessa, she showed signs of manual labor.

Elle:

I’m wondering if you can clear something up about the timeline for me. A lot of people interested in this case find it confusing. If TCK took the girls three days apart, wouldn’t he have had them all together for at least one day? One girl on day one, two girls on day three, and three girls on day six?

Sykes:

Yes, that was commonly misreported at the time, and you still see it pop up now and then. Especially in online forums, where people want to dispute the patterns and numbers. There will always be people out there who don’t want to admit the existence of an active serial killer. The girls were taken no less than seventy-two hours apart—three full days. Some people find it easier to think of it in terms of nights, though. He had each girl for three nights before he took another.

Elle:

So, they were there six nights, not seven, before he killed them?

Sykes:

That’s right. They were usually dead before noon on the seventh day.

Elle:

Okay, that helps, thank you. I think it’s important to be clear about the pattern, and with a case this huge that has had so much information put out already, it’s good to make sure it’s accurate.

Sykes:

I’m all for accuracy, yes. Don’t see a lot of that in media these days.

Elle:

I only aim to tell the truth on my show, Detective. Now, despite the lead on Jimmy not panning out, you did get something when you found Tamera’s body—a clue that, despite TCK’s obsessive attention to detail, seemed to be a mistake.

Sykes:

Yes, on her pant cuff, there was a stain the lab later determined to be tea.

Elle:

Tell me more about that. Your department has said that it’s a special kind of Darjeeling tea, but there are people who have expressed doubts that you could tell what specific tea a stain comes from. What do you say to those people?

Sykes:

Well, first of all, it’s not my department saying it; all we did was pass on what the forensics lab told us. And our knowledge of this tea sample has evolved over time, as the lab technology has improved. Back in 1997, they were only able to tell us it was an oolong tea, because of the way the leaves were oxidized. Based on the flecks of tea in the stain, they were reasonably confident it was brewed loose-leaf, rather than from a sachet. But they did more testing on the sample last year, using a newer technique called direct analysis in real time, or DART, which they can do without diminishing the sample. That’s good because it was small to begin with, and now it’s almost gone. Several local teahouses donated boxes of all their teas, and a few of them made lists of signature ingredients for the lab techs to look for when examining the sample. This helped the lab identify markers they could compare the stain to.

Elle:

Yes, she didn’t want to be recorded, but the forensic biologist I spoke to, Dr. Forage, said they combined the DART process with something called a High-Resolution Accurate-Mass mass spectrometer. They were able to identify the specific tea the stain most likely came