Dead of Night (7 page)

On Tuesday, March 11, 2008, John Walsh, civilian crime fighter and host of
America’s Most Wanted,
after having aired three episodes about the case on his television show, expressed his disappointment to a reporter for the
Reno Gazette-Journal
that the suspect in Brianna’s case had not yet been caught.

“It’s a horrible fact that innocent women on the streets of this college town are vulnerable,” Walsh said. “Brianna was taken right out of a living room. This could be your beautiful daughter in college, and you have the hopes someday she will contribute to society, and her life is ended by some sicko nightmare.”

Walsh said that in his twenty years of doing
AMW,
experience had shown that many serial rapists escalated their level of violence and sometimes turned into serial killers. He said that he thought that this particular suspect would have been easier to identify and apprehend, particularly with the intricate descriptions such as a “shaved pubic area” having been made public.

“I’ve caught guys on
America’s Most Wanted
with less information,” Walsh said. “This is a dangerous guy who is preying on women. We have to catch him.”

Walsh explained that over the years that
AMW
had been on the air, the show had been responsible for catching nearly one thousand fugitives. A large number of such cases were solved simply by people calling in tips.

“This guy crossed the line from serial rapist to horrible coward murderer,” Walsh added. “He’s nothing but a coward. Someone needs to come forward, because someone knows him.”

Walsh said that female citizens in the community would continue living in fear until the suspect was identified and arrested.

“I’m sure when you go to your car at night when you’re leaving work, you’re going to be looking over your shoulder to make sure he’s not in the parking lot,” Walsh said to the female reporter and to the women in the community. “When these guys are out there, as cunning as they are, as lucky as this guy is, you are at risk.”

Chapter 9

On Thursday, March 13, 2008, Washoe County Crime Lab director Renee Romero revealed that their DNA backlog had finally been processed at an approximate cost of $150 for each sample. Much of the cost was covered from the appeal for public funding when, after all was said and done, approximately $292,000 was collected, leaving a shortfall of nearly $160,000. Unfortunately, the DNA from the serial rapist who murdered Brianna Denison was not among the more than three thousand samples that had been input into CODIS, as well as local systems. During the time frame in which police had been searching for the serial rapist and murder suspect, more than five hundred oral swabs had been collected from male subjects to analyze their DNA and these, too, had been included with the samples that had been processed.

“To have a DNA hit on the attacker would have been a long shot, since the backlog wasn’t that old,” said Brooke Keast, public information officer for the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office. “At the same time, it was worth the attempt to rule out the possibility. We did have thirty hits (not related to their murder suspect), and that’s thirty crimes that can be solved.”

Keast added that the thirty hits were for crimes that ranged from robbery and burglary to a very violent sexual assault. The perpetrator for the latter crime was already in jail for a different crime at the time the DNA hit was made for the violent sexual assault he had committed.

It is interesting to note that “touch DNA” technology, which is what linked two of the UNR sexual assaults to Brianna’s case, provides a suspect’s genetic makeup simply by testing of clothing items, weapons, and so forth, which often reveal skin cells that have been left behind and are invisible to the unaided eye. It is particularly useful when the suspect does not leave behind forensic evidence such as blood, saliva, or semen. The technology was fairly new, and had been in use for about three years at the time of Brianna’s disappearance. In 2008, it was used to gain the freedom of a Colorado man who had been falsely imprisoned in that state for more than nine years for a 1987 slaying that he did not commit. It also helped Reno police catch a suspected serial rapist in early 2008, a man who had been breaking into women’s homes in 2006 and 2007. According to Lieutenant McDonald, it’s difficult not to leave behind any DNA unless “you’re in a full hazmat bodysuit.”

It is not often, however, that touch DNA provides major breaks in cases, because the technology is dependent on the quantity of skin cells left on an item by a suspect, according to Renee Romero.

“People don’t leave a ton of DNA behind just by touching something,” said Romero. “But every now and then, you get more, depending on whether the person naturally sheds more cells, or if they had a longer period of contact. You can’t tell why one case received better results than the other.”

In the earlier Reno serial-rapist case, the suspect was arrested after crime lab analysts found his DNA in scratches that a middle-aged woman sustained during a robbery and assault. The suspect’s DNA was also found in his victim’s bathrobe, and investigators were able to link the suspect’s DNA in that attack to a 2006 assault, despite the fact that the assailant tried very hard to remove as much forensic evidence as possible from his crime scenes. He forced his victims to wash themselves, and he took away any clothing articles and bedding items that he touched. He also used cleaning products to wipe down the areas with which he had come into contact and had shaved his body. He had also worn a stocking cap. The rapist had previously spent twenty years in prison for raping and stabbing a girl from Douglas County, Nevada, but was paroled in 2002. Fortunately, his DNA was included in a database for convicted offenders. Reno investigators were also very pleased that touch DNA had provided the link between Brianna’s death and the other sexual assaults.

Still reeling over the death of her daughter, Bridgette Denison told the
Reno Gazette-Journal
on Wednesday, March 19, 2008, that her worst fear had been realized when she learned of Brianna’s murder.

“It’s a parent’s worst nightmare,” she said. “What’s the hardest for me, more than thinking about my daughter being murdered or what he did to her, is that I miss her.... I just miss her. I still don’t know how I’m going to . . . finish my life . . . without her.”

She recounted how her husband, Jeff, had committed suicide after ten years of marriage, when Brianna was six and her son, Brighton, was only fifteen months old. Brianna’s untimely death sent her into mourning a loved one again—this time her own flesh and blood.

“With what I went through with my husband and now this, I really blew it,” she said. “When I lost him, I thought that I had paid my dues and thought that I was home free. I know now it’s not good to think like that.”

Bridgette said that her husband’s suicide had brought her family even closer, that the kids all had to help out, and that they’d had to become more of a team. She said that Brianna had become very protective of her after her father’s death, and that their bond had become strong. Other people said that they had noticed that strengthened bond, too, and said it was like Brianna and her mother had become best friends—they did everything together. Even as she grew older, she remained close to her mother and always followed and respected her mother’s rules.

Bridgette recalled that when Brianna was in high school, the teenager seemed more like a roommate to her mom than a daughter. Brianna was occasionally more responsible than her mother, despite her young age. She said that when Brianna left for Santa Barbara to go to college, that first year she’d had to spend without her daughter living at home was horrible for her. She said she had felt sad because it was as though she had lost her
roommate.
Bridgette said that she cried often, even though she and Brianna talked and sent text messages to each other daily. Even though they had remained in close contact while Brianna was away at college, her mother had worried about her, as any mother would worry about her child that she could not see every day. As 2008 began, Bridgette said that she and her son, Brighton, who was fifteen, had been planning Brianna’s twentieth birthday party as they both tried to get accustomed to her not being at home as often.

“She was full of life, excited, and passionate about becoming a child psychologist,” Bridgette said. “She loved where she lived, and she just had it together more than other kids.”

Now that Brianna was never coming home again, she said, the only choice she had was to take things as they came, one day at a time. Bridgette also said that she planned to keep herself busy with her efforts to find Brianna’s killer, and to bring into being her idea about a Bring Bri Justice Foundation (BBJF), designed to provide support and assistance to other families of crime victims.

Bridgette said that she intended to make something positive come from her daughter’s murder by fighting for tougher laws to keep repeat sex offenders behind bars, and also to work for changes so that crime labs would receive adequate funding for processing DNA from offenders. Some of that work would be accomplished through the BBJF, of which she would become president. The foundation was a goal that she needed to keep alive.

Bridgette’s top priority, however, was catching the perpetrator who murdered Brianna.

“We are limited in what we can do to catch this guy,” she said. “But I am not going to stop until I find him. I can’t imagine one more family going through this situation. I am putting my heart and soul into finding and catching him. . . . If he’s not here near our campus, I can tell you he’s at another one.... He is a really twisted, crazy man, who is still out there. I . . . do not believe he is in control of himself and won’t do this again. I am amazed he hasn’t done this again already.... We are going to bring Bri justice, so maybe she can rest.”

Bridgette expressed her appreciation to the community for their support during such a difficult time, but she admitted that it was often difficult for her every time she saw someone wearing a blue ribbon. Despite that emotional difficulty, she said, she hoped that the community would keep remembering Brianna and would continue to support law enforcement until the killer was identified and apprehended.

“It feels really good,” she said of the community support. “I feel like I’m not alone. It really feels like she became Reno’s daughter. At least ninety percent of the people in this town have children and probably feel like it could have happened to them. And it could happen to another girl, if he’s not caught soon.”

For the moment, however, Bridgette was making plans to bury Brianna next to her father on March 29, Brianna’s birthday. She would have been twenty.

Chapter 10

By the third week in April 2008, investigators returned to the subject of the pair of black Pink Panther thong underwear that had been found with Brianna’s body, containing the DNA of an unknown man and an unknown woman. The authorities again made a public appeal during a press conference for the owner of the thongs to come forward and help them with their case.

Lieutenant Robert McDonald said that the investigators believed that the intertwined panties had not been “posed” by the suspect, which would likely have been the case if he had wanted investigators to find them. Instead, McDonald said, the detectives believed that he might have dropped them out of his pocket accidentally as he moved Brianna’s body. This theory would fit with the police contention that their man was a panty fetishist, who liked to collect his victims’ underwear. If he had left them there on purpose, the authorities believed, he would have used them to leave the investigators a message—if for no other reason than to taunt them.

“Those panties came from somewhere,” the lieutenant said. “They obviously belong to someone. Some woman is missing those. We’ve been hoping the person would come forward.... Did they come from another of the man’s victims of an unreported assault? Did he steal them in a burglary or from someone at a Laundromat? Did the owner once date this guy? Somehow, this woman came into contact with the killer. If she comes forward, it may be the break we need.”

McDonald said that there were a number of possible scenarios of how their suspect could have gotten hold of the Pink Panther panties. He added that detectives would have no way of knowing how he had gotten them until their owner came forward and identified them.

“We don’t care what her story is,” McDonald said. “We’d just like for that woman to come forward. She may know something that can help us, even if she doesn’t realize it. It could be the key to catching the killer.”

McDonald returned to the subject of the other pair of panties found with Brianna’s body and how the owner, who had lived at the MacKay Court residence, had come forward and said that she did not know how her panties had been stolen. McDonald hinted at the possibility that the killer could have stolen them at any time, since the residents of the house always left the doors unlocked. Was it possible that Brianna’s killer had entered that house earlier, before she was killed? If so, that meant that her killer had been watching the house. It was a chilling thought, but it was also possible that he had found the panties on the morning that he killed Brianna.

McDonald said that the detectives were interested in learning more about men who collected women’s underwear. He said that the team already had received a number of tips about the so-called underwear fetishists, but the information they developed from those tips had not provided anything to lead them to the man for whom they were looking.

Meanwhile, as one day followed another, and soon turned into weeks, and then months, the search for Brianna’s killer yielded few clues, leaving many of Reno’s younger women, especially those who were UNR students, wary about their safety. By June 2008, security was still high at UNR, even though the regular academic year had given way to summer sessions. UNR’s typical enrollment of about 16,500 students diminished dramatically when the spring semester ended in mid-May, but the summer session had approximately sixty-five hundred students enrolled for classes. Another five thousand or so middle-school and high-school students were also expected on campus during the summer months when they would be attending programs in “Kids University” or some of the other summer academic and sports programs held on campus. According to UNR police chief Adam Garcia, the UNR campus never closed, requiring the campus police to maintain normal staffing levels of twenty-eight sworn positions, as well as patrol officers and supervisory personnel.

“Our operations continue as always,” Garcia said. “We run as all police departments do, twenty-four/ seven, and we don’t take into account whether or not school is in regular session. We still have a lot of properties that we are responsible for.

“We (the police) can never let our guard down and must always remain vigilant,” Garcia added, saying that it is human nature to become complacent as time passed after a tragedy. “I would hope (non–law enforcement) people would do the same. With or without the specter of the unfortunate death of Brianna, we still encourage people to be aware of their surroundings, whether it’s dark or during the daytime. People need to take stock of their own safety and travel in groups and report any suspicious activity to the police.”

Some female students reported feeling safe on campus during daytime hours, but they admitted that fear usually began to set in come nightfall. Jung Eun Lee, a clinical psychology student, was one such student. Jung, who lived in a neighborhood near the university, said that she tried to avoid being on campus at night, or even anywhere near the campus outdoors during the evening hours. However, she sometimes had to do clinical work in the evenings at UNR.

“I still feel a little afraid,” Jung said, even though months had passed since Brianna was killed and the other attacks occurred. “Even though it’s still light now at seven-thirty or eight at night, I ask my cohorts to give me a ride home.”

A number of UNR’s administrative employees were also on guard about their safety after Brianna’s murder. Kathy King, fifty-seven, who worked in the cashier’s office of student services, told a reporter for the
Reno Gazette-Journal
that she typically walked across campus to the downtown area after work to catch a bus. Due to her safety concerns after the UNR attacks and Brianna’s murder, she said she began taking Virginia Street as an alternate route, instead. Virginia Street is a major thoroughfare between the campus and downtown and is heavily traveled. After awhile, however, feeling a little safer, she reverted to her old route of walking across campus.

“I felt it was a random act,” Kathy said. “And I always see the campus police patrolling everywhere, so I feel safe.”

She said that she still felt concerned for her safety at times. When she had those moments of insecurity, she simply used the campus-escort service—which was not being offered during the summer months because it was operated by students and required student participation. King said that she also carried a police whistle with her, which had the police telephone number printed on it. The whistles were blue in color and distributed earlier in the year as part of the campaign to find Brianna.

Journalism student Denise Parker, who worked at the Joe Crowley Student Union, told a reporter that when she worked late she would make sure that she could get a ride home with a friend or coworker. She said that she felt “pretty safe on campus,” but she tried not to think much about what had happened to Brianna.

In the meantime, the search for Reno’s elusive rapist-turned-murderer continued.