Chase Darkness With Me by Billy Jensen

August 8, 2019

Chase Darkness With Me by Billy Jensen

They call themselves citizen detectives.  Some are journalists; others are librarians or scientists or researchers; still others are retired or former law enforcement officers.  Their goal is to investigate criminal cases that have gone cold, to get justice for the victims and bring peace to the families. Some work on unsolved murder cases, others look for missing persons and what happened to them.  Some work alone and others form "murder clubs" where they work together using their various skills.  They wade through clues and conflicting reports, trying to establish a chronology for each case.  They use crowdsourcing and geo-targeted social media campaigns, spending hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars of their own money.

For decades, Billy Jensen had been a true crime writer, writing about unsolved murder and missing person cases.  But he found his writing to be unsatisfying, since the stories didn't have an ending or a solution.  So he began to research and study unsolved cases himself, solving ten cold cases and generating leads on dozens more.  When his close friend Michelle McNamara passed away suddenly and unexpectedly, her husband and Jensen were determined to bring Michelle's unfinished book about the Golden State Killer, I'll Be Gone in the Dark, to publication.  Although her book didn't solve the case, it kept the Golden State Killer in the public's eye so that police were able to identify and arrest the serial killer.

I have always been interested in true crime, especially missing persons cases.  When I retire, this is something I would like to do, join a crime solving group to try to bring closure to the families and friends of missing loved ones.  There are about 40,000 sets of unidentified human remains in the U.S. - I want to restore the names to those missing loved ones.