Dead of Night (8 page)

Chapter 11

By the time mid-July 2008 rolled around, the police were still just as actively trying to identify Brianna’s killer as they had been from the outset of the case, but what had seemed at first to be the most promising leads had all but dried up. Members of law enforcement, as well as the citizens of the community, were left wondering who and where the killer was and whether or not he would strike again. Many people began to lose faith in the investigation; some began questioning whether or not Brianna’s murderer would ever be caught.

According to Lieutenant Robert McDonald, the investigators now believed that their suspect had gone underground and was keeping a low profile. They theorized that he had even moved to another community, since none of the sex crimes that had been committed in Reno after Brianna’s murder had been linked to the DNA of the unknown suspect.

“It’s frustrating to have this guy’s genetic name, but not their given name,” McDonald said. “It’s frustrating we haven’t had the right lead to develop the right suspect. Yet. For [Brianna’s] family and the community, we want to bring some resolution and catch this person so everyone will feel safer [when] he’s behind bars.... Eventually this person will return to their pattern.... We don’t want to displace the problem elsewhere and have more women raped, because we know that other communities do not have the same sense of heightened awareness. We know he was stalking and targeting his victims, who were opportunities, but not at random.”

Many people, however, such as UNR employee Kathy King, still mistakenly believed that the attacks had been random.

McDonald said that investigators believed the man they were looking for was not a ladies’ man. They speculated that he would be “comfortable standing in the back of a room, unassuming.” He stressed that when the perpetrator got caught, this man’s family, friends, and coworkers would be surprised and would likely say that they could not believe he was capable of committing sex crimes and murder.

During the months since Brianna’s murder, investigators had focused on leads about a number of suspects, with detectives thinking that several of them had been
the one
that might crack their difficult case. However, once a suspect’s DNA was compared to that of the DNA collected during the investigation—and there would prove to be no match—the detectives would move on to another potential suspect. This was a process that had occurred several times so far.

“We’ve been down that road before, where we have thought a certain lead was ‘the one,’ and then the bubble burst,” McDonald said. “But we have not lost our focus or our enthusiasm.”

Although leads seemed to be getting more and more scarce with the passage of time, they were still coming in steadily; each day there were tips for the detectives to follow up on.

According to Sergeant Chuck Lovitt, of the Robbery/Homicide Unit, more than six thousand tips had come in by the end of July 2008—two thousand more than they had in April. He said that he reviewed the tips each and every day, and did not discount any of them, no matter how insignificant they might seem, until they had been thoroughly checked out. Even though the leads had become scarcer, Lovitt said those that were more vague in nature, such as calls about a man having a goatee or about a man who drove a particular type of truck, had declined. This, then, usually resulted in the tips that came in later in the case sometimes being of potentially greater value to investigators. In other words, he said, the later tips most often indicated
why
a particular person was suspicious as opposed to someone simply calling in a matching general physical description. And even though leads had slowed to a trickle when compared to the numbers they were getting during the first few months of the investigation, they were still coming in. The key seemed to be to keep the case alive and in front of the public. Every time new information was released or older details repeated, an influx of new tips would come in. Lovitt suggested that area residents should consider the descriptions of the suspect and his truck carefully. If either seemed familiar to them, residents should try and remember whether the person they were thinking of had gone through any changes in behavior or appearance around the time that Brianna disappeared.

“Every day I wish it would be the day we catch him,” Lovitt said. “This has been a significant part of my life, and everyone’s life who has been involved. We are deeply invested in this case and will be working hard until we catch this guy.”

 

 

Even seasoned detective David Jenkins admitted the difficulty that he and other investigators were having with the case.

“Sexually motivated crimes committed by strangers are difficult to solve,” Jenkins said. “There’s no association with the victims, and they are solved at much lower rates. We’re really left at the mercy of tips.”

Jenkins recalled a similar case from September 3, 1977, regarding the abduction, rape, and slaying of six-year-old Lisa Bonham, who had been kidnapped from Reno’s Idlewild Park, located a short distance southwest from downtown. She had been taken by a convicted child molester, who had been paroled from prison in 1976 for previously molesting two young girls. The similarities between the Lisa Bonham case and that of Brianna Denison were obvious: Both involved an innocent young person—girls in each case—who had been kidnapped and killed by a serial predator. In both instances, the perpetrators were not immediately caught, and there was DNA evidence involved in each case. In the Bonham case, however, DNA had not been developed to the point where it could be useful to detectives at the time of the girl’s murder. Instead, Jenkins had to wait more than twenty years to solve the case.

In recapping Lisa’s case, Jenkins explained that Lisa’s family had been vacationing in Reno, visiting relatives, after a long driving trip that had taken them to Mississippi and Georgia, where they had visited other relatives. Lisa and her brother had been playing at the park, where there were amusement rides at the time, when they ran out of money. Lisa left her brother and ran three blocks to her uncle’s house to get another dollar from her mother, who was busy preparing their motor home for the family’s departure.

“In that three-block distance, she disappeared,” said Jenkins, who had joined the Reno Police Department a year earlier. He said that the case stunned Reno residents, like Brianna’s case had.

After Lisa failed to return to her uncle’s house, her family and Reno police mounted a massive search effort, much like Brianna’s family had done. They went over virtually every inch of the park where she had been playing. The first clue of foul play was received the next day when a couple, who had been out picking up aluminum cans, called police. Upon hearing of Lisa’s disappearance, they reported that they had found a little girl’s short-sleeved shirt, red-and-white-checkered shorts, white socks, and red sandals in a trash can at a rest area outside Reno, in Toiyabe National Forest. The little girl’s brokenhearted parents identified the clothing as belonging to Lisa. Fearing the worst, everyone then geared up to begin looking for a body.

“Reno was an even smaller community back then, and that crime really rocked the community. There were thousands of volunteers that participated in the search for Lisa,” Jenkins said.

Approximately two months later, two teenage boys hiking northwest of Reno, near Verdi, Nevada, found a human jawbone and reported it to the police. Investigators searched the area and found the rest of the remains, which were eventually identified as Lisa’s.

Despite a massive effort by Jenkins and the Reno Police Department, the case soon went dormant and remained so until 1993. Jenkins was reviewing the department’s unsolved murders at that time when it suddenly dawned on him that advances in forensic science and DNA technology might be able to shed new light on Lisa’s case, specifically on the identity of her killer. At the time of Lisa’s disappearance, forensic technology had been more useful in eliminating potential suspects as opposed to identifying them.

“It was never sufficient to identify a specific individual,” Jenkins said of 1977 forensic technology.

Jenkins sent Lisa’s clothing to the crime lab, where a DNA sample was taken from semen stains on her shirt and sock. Analysts first began checking the DNA sample against a list of possible suspects, and then against lists of known sex offenders from Nevada, Northern California, and the Pacific Northwest. In each instance, there were no hits, and it took until May 2000 before a match was found, in part because of backlogs in processing DNA in the crime lab.

“It just takes time to process all the samples,” said Renee Romero, who was DNA technology leader at the Washoe County Crime Lab at that time. “I don’t think there’s a state that doesn’t have a backlog.”

Back at that time, the backlog was created, in part, by efforts of DNA testing laboratories to keep pace with advancing scientific technology, Romero said.

When the hit in Lisa’s case occurred, which still would have to wait for confirmation, it had led Jenkins to child molester Stephen Robert Smith, fifty-seven, who had been working all those years as a card dealer at a Reno casino. As Jenkins waited for the DNA confirmation he needed in order to make the arrest, officers closely watched Smith’s comings and goings. While waiting, Jenkins showed Smith’s photo to Lisa’s parents, who did not know him—he was a stranger to them and to their family.

Smith was arrested at his Sparks, Nevada, home and charged with Lisa’s murder. Jenkins subsequently learned that Smith had been convicted in 1969 of abducting and sexually molesting two young girls in Sparks, a Reno suburb, after being arrested in Reno for the attempted abduction and molestation of another young girl. He had been sentenced to two life prison terms with the possibility of parole. Unfortunately, he had indeed made parole seven years later. He had never been seen as a suspect in Lisa’s murder, and might not have ever been identified as her killer if his parole officer had not convinced him to provide a DNA sample to authorities in 1997.

“It’s the oldest DNA hit we’ve ever had at this agency,” Jenkins said. “And I’m led to believe that it may be the oldest in the country [in 2000] .”

“It was very covert,” Jenkins said later as he recalled being notified of the DNA hit in 2000 by the commander of the Washoe County Crime Lab. “He said to call him back from a landline. Right away, I knew this wasn’t a garden-variety thing. He said, ‘You’re not going to believe it. We got a match.’”

“It was euphoria,” Lisa’s mother, Doris Bonham, said about receiving Jenkins’s phone call to tell her that Lisa’s killer had been found. She made her comments to a reporter for the
Reno Gazette-Journal
by telephone from her home in California. “Finally we had the answer we’ve been waiting for. I was imagining the people in the crime lab as windows were popping up on their computers saying they had a match. That must have been very exciting.

“Anger wasn’t my first emotion,” she added, speaking of the emotions that she had experienced when she had learned that her daughter had been murdered. “It was the realization I would never see her again and that our lives would be turned even more upside down.”

On October 3, 2000, Stephen Robert Smith pleaded guilty to Lisa’s murder after agreeing to accept a punishment of life in prison without parole, which would have allowed him to avoid a sentencing hearing in which many, if not all, of the details of his crimes would be presented.

Jenkins learned from Smith that he had taken Lisa to the little-used Dog Valley Campground, located near Verdi, Nevada, near the Northern Sierra Nevada Mountain Range in the Toiyabe National Forest, where he attempted to smother her to death. Lisa, however, managed to get loose from her restraints, after which Smith “twisted her neck” until she remained still. Washoe County DA Richard Gammick later said that Smith had “made a deal with the Devil,” and called Smith a “hard-core pedophile.”

Smith’s guilty plea in open court had been the first time that Lisa’s mother had seen her daughter’s killer, enabling her to finally put a face to the demon that had taunted her for more than twenty-three years. Bonham, who did not believe in closure, said that the details she heard about the crime were painful, but it had been nothing that she had not already imagined. She said that she had awakened at two-thirty every morning since her daughter’s murder and wondered whether Lisa’s death had been quick, or whether Lisa had suffered for a long time.

“It’s never gone,” she said. “It’s always lingering back there somewhere.... It’s still very hard every time I hear about one of these awful cases, because you just relive that day. You get that anxious feeling again that won’t go away.”

Doris Bonham said that she had always remained confident that her daughter’s killer would eventually be found and brought to justice, especially after she had read an article about DNA technology and the crime lab. Doris felt that DNA would provide the answer. She believed that sooner or later, it would provide the answer in Brianna’s case as well.