Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy past examples of the reporting craft.
Detective work is sexy … in the movies. In real life, it is usually a painstaking process that depends on dogged perseverance, mind-numbing attention to detail and a little luck.
Mark Bowden, who is best known for his book about a U.S. military raid in Mogadishu, “Black Hawk Down,” brings this high-stakes drudgery to life in a 2010 Vanity Fair article with a noirish headline, “The Case of the Vanishing Blonde.”
The story opens in 2005 when a 21-year-old blond woman was found raped, beaten and left for dead near the Everglades. The woman, who was from the Ukraine and worked for a cruise ship line, had been staying at the Airport Regency Hotel in Miami for several weeks as she recovered from an injury. The distraught victim’s story was far from coherent and her immediate request for a lawyer seemed suspicious. Bowden writes:
She described her attackers as two or three white men who spoke with accents that she heard as “Hispanic,” but she wasn’t certain. She remembered one of the men pushing a pillow into her face, and being forced to drink something strong, alcoholic. She had fragments of memories like bits of a bad dream—of being held up or carried, of being thrown over a man’s shoulder as he moved down a flight of stairs, of being roughly violated in the backseat of a car, of pleading for her life. Powerful, cruel moments, but there was nothing solid, nothing that made a decent lead. When her lawyer soon after filed a lawsuit against the hotel, alleging negligence, going after potentially deep corporate pockets, the detectives thought something was fishy. This was not your typical rape victim. What if she was part of some sophisticated con?
The central mystery was a doozy: How did the woman, who was seen entering the hotel at 3:41 a.m., wind up in the woods eight miles away without any of the hotel’s surveillance cameras capturing her leaving the premises? The star of Bowden’s article, a private detective hired by the hotel named Ken Brennan, would eventually find the answer by piecing together unlikely clues. Initially, the videotape was his only lead and he studied it carefully, eliminating the dozens of people seen coming and going from the hotel as a potential suspect. He concluded that the woman’s claims regarding her assailant(s) were wrong – it was not a group of men, but one, and he wasn’t white but black. It was probably the black man who got on the elevator with the woman that morning. Bowden writes:
The same man emerges from the elevator into the lobby less than two hours later, at 5:28 A.M., pulling a suitcase with wheels. The camera over the front door records him rolling the suitcase out toward the parking lot at a casual stroll. He returns less than an hour later, shortly before dawn, without the bag. He gets back on the elevator and heads upstairs. Why would a man haul his luggage out of an airport hotel early in the morning, when he was not checking out, and then return to his room within the hour without it? 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. … [Brennan] scrutinized the video still more closely, watching it again and again. The man steps off the elevator rolling the bag behind him. As he does, the wheels catch momentarily in the space between the elevator floor and the ground floor, just for a split second. It was hardly noticeable if you weren’t looking for it. The man has to give the bag a tug to get it unstuck. And that clinched it. That tiny tug. The bag had to have been heavy to get stuck [because the woman’s body was inside]. Brennan was now convinced. This is the guy.
And that was just one of many attention-to-detail feats Brennan pulled off to solve the case – a key to identifying the rapist was noticing a tiny label on a shirt worn by another man who was talking to the suspect. Turns out the shirts had been given away in the food court at a boat show held in Miami at the same time. This led Brennan to the company that ran the food court. Workers there vaguely recalled the man, who no longer worked for them, but not his name. They thought he might have worked for a minor league baseball team in New Orleans. And Brennan was off on a new lead.
It is a tribute to Bowden’s writing that he makes this hardscrabble work almost seem sexy.
