The Case of the Vanishing Blonde 

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.” 

“No.” 

“Foreign accent?” 

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

“What?” 

“You were right.” 

No.” 

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

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. 

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

“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. 

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

“Oh, no. He said that he “never had any problems” paying women for sex, and that he “did not get a kick” out of hurting women. Did you have anything to do with it?”

“No, of course not!” “I’m telling you, Ken, this ain’t the guy,” he said. 

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. 

“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. “I only have sex with white women,” Jones said. 

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. “Once other jurisdictions start checking their DNA files on cases when this guy was at large, I guarantee you they will find more.” 

After several weeks, “we were dried up,” recalled Allen Foote, the detective handling the case. 

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. 

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

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. Cecil argued that their cases showed a “common plan, scheme, or design” that was as much Jones’s signature as his trail of semen. 

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

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. It means that when a DNA sample exists a case can never be classified as entirely “cold.” 

So he Googled it and found that “Verado” was the name of a new outboard engine manufactured by Mercury Marine, the boat-engine manufacturer. 

“Any blonde women?,” Foote asked. 

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.

“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. “No way.” 

His Miami victim won a $300,000 settlement from the hotel and the hotel’s security company. “Get a subpoena,” the executive suggested. 

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. 

The “Mercury” Man 

Brennan called a meeting at the hotel on November 17, 2005. He explained his manhunt and asked if Ovations employed a 300-plus-pound black man with glasses named Michael Lee Jones. 

On a laptop screen, Brennan pulled up the image of the large man pulling his suitcase off the elevator. 

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. If you’re willing to give me the resources, I’ll track this guy down.” 

“Look, you and I both know there’s no fucking way you can investigate this case,” Brennan said. 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”. 

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. 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. As Foote recalled it later, he asked Jones about meeting women in Miami, and Jones said he had “hooked up” once. That girl is inside that suitcase.” 

For some reason, I thought, Fuck it, it’s time to go.” 

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. 

This ain’t the only time he’s done this.”

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. 

You’d be solving a horrible crime!” 

Unless this crime had been pulled off by a team of magicians, the victim had to have left through the front door. 

I’m not going to hurt her.” 

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. 

“Look at how cool this guy is,” he told them, replaying the video. 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. “I did not hurt that girl,” Jones said, pushing the photos away, his voice rising to a whine. You’ll see it when you put his DNA into the system.” 

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. 

I won’t do anything to fuck it up for you.” 

Thrumston had no leads, and the case had sat for two years until DNA collected from the victim matched that of Michael Lee Jones. 

After she entered the lobby elevator, she was not seen again by any of the cameras. 

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. 

The other New Orleans victim told a similar tale, but failed to pick Jones’s face out of a photo lineup. 

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. Brennan described his process of elimination, how he had narrowed and narrowed the search, until it led him to this man.

“Didn’t the victim say that she was attacked by two white guys?” The man has to give the bag a tug to get it unstuck. 

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. Sex crimes are not committed by determined teams of attackers who come with padded ropes to lower victims from fourth-floor windows. 

“This ain’t a one-fucking-time deal,” Brennan told Foote. 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? At one point she said their accent might have been not Hispanic but “Romanian.” What this man’s demeanor suggested to Brennan was chilling.