Not long after Juri’s body was found, her brother Kazu Kibuishi, a graphic-novel author and illustrator, posted a message on his Twitter feed. “My sister was murdered & we need help finding the suspect,” he wrote. “Please contact the detectives if you have any info.”
In an effort to make sense of the case, investigators were probing the red Samsung phone that Juri had left in Sam’s apartment, examining the log of recorded messages, along with the texts.
“Can you come over tonight at midnight alone?” began a text from Sam’s cell phone. “Going out for a bit. Very upset. Need to talk.”
“Yeah,” Juri answered. “About what?”
“Please don’t tell anyone. Please.”
“I won’t, Sam. I don’t talk to anyone from the Camden’s anymore because I am so busy talking to Mark,” she said, referring to her online boyfriend.
“Please, no sex. I need to talk to someone.”
The request seemed preposterous to Juri. “LOL, you, Sam, we are like brother and sis. No sex.”
“Jesus, I really just want to talk. I can’t talk about it. I need someone I trust.”
“You can trust me. I promise. I am not going to say anything. I promise. Pinkie promise.”
“I’m hurting w some bad fam crap. I can’t be alone. No sex. Please. I am begging as a brother.”
“Yeah, that’s fine. Sam, I am here for you like family.”
“Thank you. Be here at midnight. I will be back around then.”
“Okay. I can’t spend the night though.”
“That’s cool. You are saving my life.” This was followed by another text from Sam’s phone: “Okay. Thank you so much again. I feel I have no one I can share this with. You sure you won’t let me down?”
“I never let my friends down when they need me there.… No problem.”
“Thank you. You are an angel.”
Later, Juri received another text from Sam’s phone in an anxious tone: “Where are you? Just about back. Can you come by? I don’t want to be up late.”
“Yeah, I will leave now. I am in Long Beach at my brother’s.”
“Getting off the freeway. Feel like talking a bit. Don’t want to make it a late night.”
Juri was asked how soon she thought she’d be able to arrive at Sam’s apartment.
“30 mins.”
“Cool.… Please don’t bring anyone. I really don’t want anyone else to know what’s going on.”
The next message from Juri: “Hey, buddy, I am here. I am walking to your place.”
It was cold outside, and the texts revealed that Juri was also communicating with her brother Taka. She’d visited with him and his fiancée at a Thai restaurant near his Long Beach home earlier in the evening. Then, the group continued to Taka’s residence. Along the way, Taka had handed Juri the tiara that she’d be wearing at his wedding. True to form, she gleefully put it on.
When the texts from Sam’s phone began coming in, Juri told her brother about the odd messages. “Sam’s like a big brother,” she explained as she rose to leave for Sam’s apartment. “You’d like him.”
Once she entered Sam’s floor, shortly after midnight, she wrote, she heard an unsettling sound from the other side of a door. “Huh-oh,” Juri messaged her sibling. “Sam is crying. It’s not good.”
* * *
On the surface, it appeared that Sam had lured Juri to her death. Because of his military background and his youthful encounter with the justice system, police were warned that the veteran could be “armed and dangerous.” But Det. Sgt. Ed Everett knew not to take anything at face value.
Like the others assigned to the case, Everett had grown up in Orange County, specifically in the bedroom community of Orange, where he attended El Modena High School before taking classes at Fullerton College and opening a bicycle shop. The hours were long and, from Ed’s standpoint, the rewards limited. When he met a group of police officers, he found himself drawn to their line of work.
“I knew there was always going to be job security,” he said, “and I looked forward to putting bad guys in jail.”
In California, many officers “self-sponsor” their police training. Everett went to a police academy at Rio Hondo College in Whittier, paid for his own equipment and uniform—he was prohibited from sewing any patches from actual departments to the fabric—and applied to agencies all over the region. In 1995, the town of Tustin hired him as a reserve, or part-time, officer.
“Once you start training, you’re taught to be more vigilant, more aware of your surroundings,” he said. “You learn to scan the streets sidewalk to sidewalk, and just look for signs of trouble.”
His first true police experience occurred when someone called the station and reported a robbery at a sporting-goods store. Everett rushed to the location, heart pumping. By the time he arrived, the suspects had fled. But as he surveyed the scene he felt a mixture of excitement and satisfaction.
“This is it,” he told himself. “You’re a police officer now.”
A few months later,in an unrelated incident, he pulled up at a home and saw a body squirming in the driveway. He soon learned that the wound was self-inflicted. The victim was a parolee who’d violated the terms of his probation by acquiring a tattoo associated with one of the Hispanic gangs in neighboring Santa Ana. Distressed about being sent back to prison, the man shoved a flare gun into his mouth and fired. “He was just laying there, screaming, with a burned tongue and smoke coming out of his mouth,” Everett said. “We conducted a small investigation. We recovered the flare gun. We spoke to the parole officer. We weren’t able to get a statement from the victim because he couldn’t speak.”
The incident provided a lesson on the human condition. The awful episode could have been avoided if the person simply followed the rules of his parole and refrained from getting the tattoo. But it was an impulse that he couldn’t control, and Everett would see dozens, if not hundreds, of others find trouble because of similar circumstances.
“Someone’s told not to do something, and they continue to do it,” he said. “You have a court order to not contact someone, but you call someone you shouldn’t call. Gang members are ordered to stay away from other gang members, but they don’t. It’s mind-boggling that someone would lose their liberties over a simple commonsense thing.”
After a year in Tustin, Everett learned about a full-time job in Costa Mesa and was hired. Compared to other departments in the area, Costa Mesa seemed to be one of the better ones. “We were one of the first agencies with computers in the car,” he said. “We had a helicopter program. It was a good agency.”
While not nearly as busy as nearby municipalities like Anaheim or Long Beach, Costa Mesa was an active city for police officers. Consumers from all over the area poured into South Coast Plaza, a luxury shopping center whose sales of $1.5 billion annually rated it as one of the highest-grossing malls in the United States. Others stopped by the bars and restaurants while coming or going from Newport Beach. “We do have a large transient population,” Everett said. “I’m still trying to figure out what the draw is to Costa Mesa.”
Costa Mesa police work independently in one-man cars, and—after going through additional instruction at the Orange County Sheriff’s Regional Training Academy—Everett was dispatched into every corner of the city.
In 1997, he responded to a report of a woman not breathing in her second-floor apartment. When he arrived at the home of Sunny Sudweeks, a twenty-six-year-old photography student at Orange Coast College, it was clear that she’d been strangled in her bedroom. Investigators would discover that she’d also been raped. Sunny lived with her boyfriend and another roommate. Each had alibis; they were taxi drivers and didn’t discover the body until they’d completed their shifts. Sunny’s mother theorized that the attacker had watched her from afar and deliberately struck when she was alone.
Everett helped set up a perimeter around the building and spoke to some of the neighbors. When he’d run into detectives working on the case, he’d ask about progress. But as of this writing, the murder of Sunny Sudweeks remains unsolved.
The dead ends frustrated Everett, even though he’d played a minor role in the case. Although he was expected to maintain a level of detached professionalism, he was still a human being and would find himself wrestling with his emotions throughout his career—particularly after meeting families like the Herrs and Kibuishis.
After three years at the Costa Mesa Police Department, Everett was asked to work investigations. At first, he hesitated; he was relatively new to the department and still believed that he had a lot to learn. But his supervisor explained that the opportunity might not arise again, and Everett decided to take advantage of it.
As in other departments, Costa Mesa divided its detectives into units for Crimes Against Property (thefts, burglaries, credit card scams, identity fraud) and Crimes Against Persons (homicide, rape, domestic violence, armed robberies, and other violent felonies). After six months in the Crimes Against Property section, he filled an opening in the Crimes Against Persons division.
Within an eight-year period, Everett investigated twenty-three murders. By the time Juri was killed, Everett had been a detective sergeant for three years. Because of the scrawl on Juri’s back, the motive appeared to be emotional. Detectives suspected some type of love triangle and were baffled over Sam’s absence.
“They kept asking me if Sam owned a gun and things like that,” Steve Herr said. “And I kept vehemently denying that Sam did this.”
Yet even Steve realized that, under the present circumstances, there was no way that any investigator could dismiss Sam as a suspect. When police questioned Raquel, she offered her own theories. “I knew something was wrong,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I thought maybe he was being held hostage, but was still alive.”
* * *
Meanwhile, the other people who loved Sam were experiencing their own tortured emotions. Leah Sussman couldn’t conceive how a dead body would end up in her younger cousin’s apartment. And she wondered where Sam had gone. But she knew that he was 100 percent innocent. “I understood how much he respected women, how he protected them,” Leah said. “If he was capable of any sort of violence, it would never be against a woman. And then, to see the media showing his face and naming him as the suspect was very, very upsetting.”
Like Raquel, Leah wondered whether Sam had been kidnapped at gunpoint by the people who killed Juri. Otherwise, he would have found a way to send a message to his family. “Some people thought, ‘Well, he’s a young guy with a life of his own. He’s not going to call his parents right away,’” Leah said. “But they didn’t understand that Steve and Sammy were best friends. When we didn’t hear from Sammy, I started to get really scared that the worst had happened. And I was worried about my aunt and uncle. This was their only child. I didn’t know if they could even survive this.”
Miles Foltz had seen Sam in life-and-death situations in Afghanistan, as well as alcohol-fueled altercations in the military, and believed that he understood his fellow veteran’s triggers. “First of all, I knew how much Sam liked Julie and would never hurt her,” Miles said. “Yes, he did have a temper, but he was a guy who’d use his fists. And the only reason he would ever hurt somebody is if they were threatening him and he had to defend himself. He didn’t start fights, and he wouldn’t pick on someone weaker than him, especially a really great girl who he treated like a sister. The whole thing didn’t make sense.”
The situation was so confusing that Miles wondered whether the person responsible for Sam’s disappearance might target Steve and Raquel next. Anxious to protect his friend’s parents, Miles volunteered to sleep on their couch, his gun at his side, to protect them.
Sam’s classmate and fellow veteran Ruben Menacho learned about Juri’s death before it was ever reported in the media. He’d been eating at a LongHorn Steakhouse with his wife when Sam’s neighbor Jake Swett phoned. What followed was a bizarre tale about walking up to Sam’s apartment, finding Steve inside, and being questioned by the police about a murder there.
“We have to go,” Ruben told his wife, signaling the waiter for the check.
As the two drove toward the Camden Martinique apartments, Ruben repeated the fragmented information he had but couldn’t come up with a coherent supposition of what might have occurred. Outside Sam’s building, Ruben saw a large police presence and Steve and Jake with detectives. Stepping forward, Ruben told police that he was willing to assist them in any way possible.
He was instructed to drive to the Costa Mesa Police Department and provide a timeline of his recent communications with Sam. Ruben knew that detectives were investigating Sam, and repeatedly told them that his friend was not a murderer. “There are a lot of people who go in and out of that apartment,” Ruben emphasized.
Perhaps Sam had walked in on the murder, Ruben thought, seen the weapons, and fled. Maybe he’d gotten himself involved in something that he hadn’t confided to Ruben. “I was actually expecting a phone call from him from Mexico,” Ruben said. “‘I’m here. This happened. Come and get me.’”
Theresa Glowicki was still in the Army, deployed in Altimur, Afghanistan, when someone in her platoon told her that Sam had gone missing in California. On the base, she went over the Army MWR—for Morale, Welfare, and Recreation—tent, found a desktop computer soldiers used to communicate with loved ones back home, and Googled her friend’s name. Immediately a photo came up with a caption describing Sam as the number one suspect in Juri’s murder.
Incredulous, Theresa dialed Sam’s cell phone, but no one answered. Then, she realized that she had the number for Sam’s fiancée, Katharina, in Germany. Katharina picked up but was as confused as everybody else. “I couldn’t get ahold of anyone with any answers,” Katharina said.
Independent of the detectives, Steve decided to search for his own answers. In the event of an emergency Sam had given his father access to financial information and passwords, and on Monday, May 24—three days after Juri was killed—Steve began monitoring his son’s banking activities. Someone was withdrawing money from Sam’s account. Given the fact that so many people were currently looking for Sam, Steve concluded that his son would have been spotted by now had he been the one coming and going from the bank or ATM.
Steve also noticed that Sam’s credit card had been used at a place called Ecco’s Pizza in Long Beach. On Monday evening, Steve first drove to a Chase Manhattan Bank where some money had been withdrawn, then sat down at Ecco’s and watched the clientele closely. If someone drove up in Sam’s car, Steve intended to latch himself on to the person until police could arrive.
On the television, the Orlando Magic and Boston Celtics were competing in the NBA play-offs, and Steve noticed many of the customers raptly watching and studied each face in case he came across the person later. Over at the bar, he spotted one man pacing back and forth, agitated, speaking animatedly into a cell phone. Maybe the guy had money on the game or was having a fight with his wife. For all Steve knew, the man’s car was in the shop and the mechanic had quoted an exorbitant price. After making a mental note of the patron’s face, Steve stared out the window into the parking lot. None of the cars even resembled Sammy’s.
Looking down at his phone, Steve checked to see if any of Sam’s associates were calling him back. Since Saturday, he’d been contacting Sam’s friends, questioning them about other acquaintances who might have seen Sammy or heard rumors about his whereabouts. Whenever he heard a new name, Steve immediately asked for the person’s number.
Eventually, Steve was directed to a fellow resident of 2855 Pinecreek Drive, who’d been spending a good deal of time with Sam and their other associates. Dave Barnhart—the roommate of Jake Swett, the man Steve encountered shortly after finding Juri—said that, on the day he was last seen, Sam was with an actor who lived in the complex. From what Dave remembered, Sam and the man planned to travel to a theater at any Army post and set up backdrops for a play.
On Tuesday morning, Steve called and spoke to the actor, Daniel Patrick Wozniak.
As with the police later on, Dan seemed only too happy to help.