Dead of Night (3 page)

Chapter 4

As the investigation into Brianna Denison’s disappearance continued, extensive searches of the neighborhood where the MacKay Court home was located, as well as searches of adjacent neighborhoods, utilizing search dogs, consistently failed to turn up any sign of the missing young coed. As Jenkins and his colleagues continued working around the clock in their efforts to find out what had become of Brianna, the earlier nonlethal attacks against young college girls rose to the surface once again. Some investigators, including Jenkins, now began to believe that they could very possibly be linked to one another, either by physical evidence or the suspect’s modus operandi, or both.

It was along that line of thinking that prompted the substance that had been found on the rear door of the searched house—which investigators would not publicly identify—to be analyzed swiftly at the Washoe County Crime Lab. An unidentified male DNA profile was quickly developed from a swab of the doorknob’s exterior surface. The sample contained a foreign (meaning not specific to the residents of the house) Y, or male, chromosome that matched a foreign Y chromosome DNA profile that had been collected from the rape kit of one of the earlier sexual-assault victims. It matched the rape kit of Virgie Chin, twenty-two, an exchange student from Taiwan who had been attacked by an unknown male a month earlier.

Had the rear door, then, been the suspect’s entrance to the house? Or had it been his exit with Brianna? Or both? Jenkins continued to consider the possibility of the intruder’s choices at this point, but the evidence was beginning to suggest that he had used the rear door for both entry and exit. The rear door also provided a little more privacy, lessening the chances that the suspect might be seen by someone in the neighborhood.

Delighted that progress had been made so quickly and that the cops now knew that they were almost certainly dealing with the same perpetrator, Jenkins decided to review the Chin case once again to see if he could pinpoint any similarities that might exist between that case and the disappearance of Brianna Denison.

Virgie had been assaulted during the very early-morning hours of December 16, 2007, Jenkins read from the earlier case file. Officer Andrew Hickman, along with several other Reno police officers, had been sent to an address in the 1400 block of North Virginia Street to meet with the young coed who had reported that she had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted. When Hickman and the other officers arrived, Virgie told them that she lived in an apartment at the address where they took her statement.

Virgie had told the officers that she had arrived in her car in the parking lot outside her apartment at approximately two in the morning. She had just gotten out of the car when she was suddenly assaulted by a man she did not know, who knocked her to the ground and violently forced her into a nearby vehicle. He also attempted to choke her with her right arm, by pressing it down across her throat. When he failed in that effort, he placed his hand over her nose and mouth, causing her to pass out. She said that the assailant had covered her face with a hooded sweatshirt. He drove her a short distance, perhaps only three or four minutes away, to a dark and secluded area, where he stopped and threatened her with continued physical violence if she did not cooperate with him.

“If you see my face, if you tell the police, I will kill you,” he purportedly had said. He then forced her to commit oral sex, and he penetrated her vaginally with his fingers. Virgie said that when the sexual assault was over, her assailant kept the panties she had been wearing and drove her back to her residence. He also told her that he “might be back.”

Virgie was subsequently examined on the evening of the attack for evidence of the sexual assault. Several swabs were collected from her and submitted to the Washoe County Crime Laboratory for analysis and comparison of potential genetic, or DNA, evidence from the unidentified suspect. That was how the match was obtained by Washoe County Crime Lab analyst Lisa Smyth-Roam.

At one point, Reno police placed information on their website for the public concerning DNA testing and comparisons. The site explained that DNA is an acronym for “deoxyribonucleic acid,” which is the chemical inside the nucleus of cells that carries the genetic instructions for making living organisms. It is one of two types of molecules that encode genetic information. To the layperson, DNA can seem complicated when, in fact, it can be looked at simply as a blueprint of sorts for a person’s body and how everything inside the body works. A person’s DNA is unique, unless a person has an identical twin. DNA can be extracted from nearly any tissue, including hair, fingernails, bones, teeth, and bodily fluids. When DNA is left at the scene of a crime, such as what was left at the house from which Brianna Denison was believed to have been abducted, and where there is no known suspect for the investigators to focus on, it can be compared to databases of DNA profiles. Such a data bank is the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) of criminals or suspected criminals who have been arrested. Often a match to a suspect is obtained, which is what Jenkins and his colleagues were hoping for in this case. CODIS, it should be noted, is maintained by the FBI. It is one of the most frequently used databases by law enforcement personnel. However, Jenkins and his fellow officers were disappointed when the comparisons did not yield any hits in any law enforcement databases, including CODIS. This was a strong indication to the investigators that the suspect was not a known registered sex offender. Registered sex offenders are required to provide a sample of their DNA, which is kept on file indefinitely. All that law enforcement knew at this point was that the person who had assaulted Virgie Chin was the same person who had left his DNA on the outside rear doorknob of the MacKay Court crime scene.

Jenkins noted that Smyth-Roam had also examined clothing that had been worn by Virgie at the time of her abduction and assault. The crime analyst also had collected gray-colored fiber evidence that was consistent with carpet upholstery inside motor vehicles. Like the DNA, the fiber evidence held great potential if it could be conclusively matched up to a suspect’s vehicle.

Jenkins conducted a number of follow-up interviews with Virgie in an effort to obtain additional information. As a result, Jenkins learned from Virgie that her assailant was a white male, most likely between the ages of twenty and thirty years old. In her description of him, she said that he was taller than five-nine and shorter than six-three. He was a large man, with a somewhat heavy build. He had brown hair, and she described him as having a long face with a square chin. She said that he spoke English and did not have a noticeable accent or regional dialect. His hands were comprised of “thick, meaty” fingers, she said, and the skin of his abdomen, groin, and upper legs was noticeably lighter than that of his hands and forearms. Virgie said that he wore a mustache and a goatee, with a gap where there was no hair between the ends of the mustache and the top of the goatee. The hair below his chin was about a quarter to a half-inch long and was soft, not prickly like beard stubble normally is. His genital and groin area was without hair, she said, with smooth skin as if hair removal cream or some similar process of hair removal had been used. He also had an “innie” belly button; and his stomach was not excessively firm, but it was not flabby. The hair on his arms was described as light. She said that her assailant did not smell of alcohol, smoke, or cologne.

At one point, Virgie remembered that her assailant had been wearing a red short-sleeved shirt, with a medium blue neckline. Its finish was slick, like it was made of silk or polyester. It might have had a word embroidered on the upper left breast area. He wore pants that reminded her of sports pants, made out of a soft material with an elastic waistband, but no zipper. She also said that she had seen a baby’s shoe on the front seat’s floorboard.

Virgie also was able to provide Jenkins with specific details about her assailant’s vehicle. She told him that it was a late-model pickup truck, with an extended crew cab, and that it had reclining bucket seats. She described the upholstery as either gray or black, and the vehicle had a raised center console, with a hinged lid, between the bucket seats. It was also equipped with adjustable headrests, which extended up and down on metal posts on both seats, and it had an automatic transmission, she said. She said that there were interior cab lights mounted forward on the roof of the cab above the rearview mirror. The passenger seat height was approximately thirty inches from ground level, and it required a big step up to get inside the cab, she recounted. Virgie’s recall in describing the suspect, his clothing, and his vehicle was remarkable, especially considering the terrifying ordeal she had gone through at his hands.

She also told Jenkins that she had been at home when someone attempted to break into the back door of her apartment on the same morning that Brianna had disappeared. Whoever had attempted the break-in had nearly broken the door, as it had begun to buckle inward before the burglar had given up. The doorknob had been broken off in the process. She said that she had called 911, but the would-be intruder had fled prior to police arriving. When Jenkins read the report of that incident, he realized that it had occurred only a few hours before Brianna disappeared. Because Virgie’s apartment was located in the vicinity of the MacKay Court residence, Jenkins could not help but wonder if the same perpetrator had been involved in both instances.

Jenkins later took the vehicle’s description provided by Virgie and consulted with a number of local automotive collision and repair businesses. He discovered that a number of Toyota Tacoma four-wheel-drive pickups made between 2001 and 2006 matched the description she had provided of her assailant’s truck.

 

 

As with any investigation of great intensity, many lines of inquiry were being pursued simultaneously as each respective investigator did his or her part to help solve the case. It was no different in the investigation to solve the mystery of what had happened to Brianna Denison. As Reno investigators already were aware, the December 16, 2007, assault on Virgie Chin had not been the only such crime that had been committed against a female UNR student.

At approximately 5:00
P.M.
on November 13, 2007, a twenty-one-year-old female UNR student was walking through a parking lot at an apartment complex in the 400 block of College Drive, not far from where Brianna Denison had vanished, when an unknown male came up to her from behind and placed her in a choke hold. The suspect dragged the victim between two parked cars; at one point, he pushed her to the ground and groped her. She fought her attacker, and she yelled and screamed despite the suspect’s warnings to stop making noise and to be quiet. Apparently fearing that all the commotion would draw attention to what he was trying to do to her, the attacker stopped after kicking the victim in the head and arm. He then ran away, leaving behind a few packages of unopened Trojan condoms, which bore an expiration date of 5/2012 and a lot number of TT7135WZ908. Investigators believed that the condoms were possibly placed into circulation in October or November 2007. Jenkins believed that the would-be rapist had accidentally dropped the condoms as he fled from the scene.

As Jenkins had expected, the DNA evidence from the November 13 assault was ultimately linked to the December 16 sexual-assault case, which had already been linked to Brianna’s disappearance. The authorities now knew that they were looking for the same perpetrator in all three cases.

Another earlier attack against a female student in her twenties took place around 10:00
P.M.
on October 22, 2007, in a UNR parking garage, where campus security parked their vehicles. That incident was also looked at by Jenkins as possibly being linked to the other assaults. In that case, the UNR student reported that she had been raped on the first floor of the parking garage between two parked cars, as in the November incident. Astonishingly, the location where the crime occurred was within one hundred yards of a campus police station. It was clear to Jenkins that the circumstances of the assault and the attacker’s method of operation were similar to the other cases. However, the October case was not conclusively connected to the others by way of DNA or other evidence.

Nonetheless, according to Commander Holladay, the detectives were “not discounting the possibility these cases may be connected all together. Some of the characteristics are similar that she has given.”

Holladay added, “However, I wouldn’t go as far as to say they are an exact match by any means.” He said that “not consistent” would be a more accurate way to describe the October incident with the other incidents.

After analyzing the various cases, Jenkins and the other Reno investigators now believed that their unknown suspect might have been acting out, using dominance and power against his victims, and had evidently been escalating in the severity of his attacks. It was also noted at this early point in the investigation that all of the attacker’s female victims were all petite with long, straight hair. Even more chilling was the fact that the attacks against the UNR students, as well as Brianna’s abduction, had all occurred within a four-block radius. At the very least, everyone agreed that they had a predatory serial rapist on their hands, one who knew this neighborhood.

Because of the UNR students, it was an environment rich with potential victims. Aware that a large number of pretty young coeds were often out at night, coming and going at all hours, the rapist might very well have figured that he had hit the mother lode. If he had it in his mind that he was looking for a particular type of victim with regard to size and general appearance, as many serial predators do, all he would need to do to find one that fit his preferences was to troll the streets around UNR. Then he would eventually find a victim who was an exact match for the type that he desired. Many involved in the case also believed that their suspect was not necessarily new at this; he might have been victimizing young women, perhaps in a different locale, for some time. If he had a criminal record, which seemed likely, the information would eventually surge to the forefront, once they identified the person responsible for the crimes. And the authorities were determined that they would, eventually, find the man they were looking for. As the case geared up to become the biggest manhunt in Reno’s history, everyone involved in it also hoped that the suspect had not escalated his aberrant behavior to include murder in the case of Brianna Denison.