Years afterward, even talking about the horrible midnight call from Korea levels Brian and Patty Penich. Sitting in the living room of the small, meticulously kept home that he built, Brian stares down at the coffee table and recalls Dr. Kim’s words.
“‘Jamie’s dead. Jamie’s murdered. Jamie’s been strangled,’” he quotes softly. Tears slide down his face and, embarrassed, he attempts a half smile. A factory maintenance worker, he is a tall, athletic-looking man with enormous hands and few words.
“I think the woman was very upset herself. She didn’t really know what to say,” he says.
Sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, Patty says nothing, but she clenches her jaw and looks away from a graduation photograph of Jamie on the dining room table. It shows a young woman who is a mirror of her mother, petite with chestnut hair and bright, almost mischievous eyes.
The Penichs raised Jamie and her two sisters in Derry, a community of three thousand in a picturesque part of Pennsylvania coal country known as the Laurel Highlands. The town is about an hour and a half east of Pittsburgh, but it seems even more remote.
Derry sits at the bottom of a small valley surrounded by lavender ridges. Ninety-nine percent of the town is white, and one in ten residents has a college degree. The average household income is just below $30,000. It is too small for a Wal-Mart or a movie theater or even a McDonald’s. The downtown consists of the post office, a dollar store, a pharmacy and a small grocery catering mostly to seniors who don’t want to drive out to the supermarket on the highway.
For much of the twentieth century, Derry was a bustling place. Immigrants came from Italy and Eastern Europe to mine the Highlands for coal, and their children and grandchildren found work in local factories like Westinghouse and at the railroad wheelhouse in the center of town. But in the 1970s and 1980s, the steel industry collapsed. Westinghouse closed, the wheelhouse was torn down and jobs were difficult to find.
Some people saw a dying town and left for better opportunities, but a core group stayed, and the experience of terrible economic times seemed to intensify their feelings for Derry.
Maybe Derry didn’t have mansions or museums, but it had the mountains and the lake and nice people you had known your whole life.
“It’s still the most beautiful place in the world,” explained Karen Keirin, a high school music teacher who grew up in Derry. “The mines are gone, the mill closed, but it’s still beautiful.”
The shrinking of the town made an insular place even more close-knit. Jamie’s parents are typical of Derry. They grew up a mile apart and began dating in 1974 when Patty was in high school and Brian had just started a job at the factory where he still works. They were married when Patty graduated.
Jamie was born in 1979, a year after her sister Jennell and two years before her sister Amanda. The three were close, and one of the few photos of Jamie’s childhood the Penichs can bear to display shows the three little girls giggling and holding one another.
From an early age, however, Jamie was different. She loved new experiences the way other children loved their favorite blanket.
“This is a girl who walked into kindergarten the first day and said, ‘Go home, Mom,’” Patty recalled.
The nun who taught her parochial school class that year, Sister Nunziatina, was from an Italian missionary order, and she spoke to the children in Italian, French and broken English. They were captivated.
“They just loved her. She would dance and sing to them in three languages and they would follow her around like she was the Pied Piper,” Suzanne Markiewicz, the mother of a classmate, remembered.
Whether because of Sister Nunziatina or some other force, Jamie became obsessed with maps and traveling. She watched travel shows like other kids watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. She collected maps and globes. Each Christmas, she asked for a subscription to National Geographic, and she would sit quietly for hours poring over the map inserts: the topography of Russia, Africa by tribe, bird species on the Galapagos. It didn’t matter where or what so long as it was far from Derry.
“She had a wanderlust. She didn’t want to be just here. She wanted to see what was out there too,” said her mother.
For Brian and Patty, a homemaker, their daughter’s ambition was astonishing. They had lived their entire lives in a place where diversity meant some people were Catholics and others Presbyterians, and where a long trip was the drive to Pittsburgh. But their young daughter was talking about traveling around the world.
In Derry, the pinnacle of a young woman’s life is the high school prom. The actual dance is no different than that at any other school: big dresses, big hair and limousines. What sets Derry apart is the Grand March. On the afternoon of the dance, a thousand people pack the auditorium to see each couple strut across an elaborately decorated stage as their names are announced. Almost everyone in Derry seems to want to attend, and to comply with fire codes, the school makes special tickets.
“We add extra chairs, and we still have people standing,” Diane Mogle, the guidance counselor who runs the prom, said. “At least another 1,000 people would come if they could get tickets. I used to tell people we could fill Three Rivers Stadium if we knew the weather was going to be nice.”
For many students, that slow walk across the stage to the cheers of family and neighbors is the most treasured memory of their youth.
Jamie skipped her prom. And graduation too.
At Derry Area High School, Jamie had a large group of friends who hung in the middle ground between the popular kids and the geeks. Jamie wanted to try everything. Although she was just five feet, two inches tall and 110 pounds, she loved sports. She played tennis. She swam. She was on the debate team and helped out with the Special Olympics. She was on the tennis and swim teams, played saxophone in the marching band and participated in forensics and international cultures club.
She had grown into a quiet but confident teenager. She rarely raised her hand, but she always knew the answer. Everyone close to her well knew that she was not long for Derry.
“She was always very quiet, but somehow behind that there was a very clear desire of a young girl who was not going to be defined by a small town all her life,” her English teacher, Linda Warner, remembered.
In Derry, the teachers were often the most educated and cosmopolitan citizens. They frequently lectured their students to think outside the borders of what some jokingly termed “May-derry.”
“An idea dies in the world, and ten years later, it gets to Derry,” one teacher chided her students. But many of Jamie’s classmates could not fathom living anywhere else.
“Some of our kids, you just know, they are going to be here forever. Just by the way they act, who they run with, what they talk about, you can tell that they don’t see that there’s a great big world out there,” history teacher and swim coach Jeff Kelly, said.
Kelly remembered that on the bus back from swim meets, the “Derryites” would sit in the back, talking loudly about what was going on in high school and who had set a record and where they were going to hang out that weekend.
Jamie, he said, sat in the middle with the coaches.
“We’d talk about world events and politics and a lot of different things. It was just another sign that she thought of this as small potatoes, that she was looking for something so much greater,” he said.
During her junior year, she began dating a football player named Jason Young.
“I remember our first conversation on the phone was about some crisis that was going on in Russia, and she was really impressed that I knew about it,” he remembered.
On dates, they would often drive by St. Martin’s, the church where her parents were married and she was baptized. Even if she was in the middle of a sentence, she would stop and make the Sign of the Cross as the small red brick chapel flew by the window.
She talked to Young a lot about traveling and leaving Derry, something he found difficult to understand.
“Most of us, we never pictured ourselves gone from here, but she did,” he explained. She told him she was thinking about spending her senior year as a foreign exchange student. For months, he tried to talk her out of it, but for every point he raised, she countered with a reason that she should do it. She applied to a Rotary program and got a scholarship to Belgium.
She was to leave in August. Jamie and Young broke up around that time, but they remained friends. Shortly before she was to leave, she told him she was having second thoughts.
“She was worried about being away from her parents and her grandparents. It was like the sensible side was coming out. ‘I gotta stick around to go to the prom. I want my parents to see me march,’” Young remembered.
But he wouldn’t hear it.
“She had done such a great job of talking me into it that I thought the right thing to do was to talk her back into it. And I did. I told her she had to go,” he said.
Jamie left before school started in Derry, and she returned in June after graduation. During the year, she perfected her French and traveled throughout Europe. She got her nose pierced and the map tattoo on her back. She told her parents how she’d become lost in Venice. They were terrified, but she was laughing.
“She didn’t care. It was an adventure. Everything with her was an adventure,” Patty said.
A few years later, on her application for the Korean study-abroad program, she wrote about being a foreign exchange student.
“It is the best overall experience I have ever had doing anything,” she wrote.
The summer she got back, she and Young went rock climbing on the ridge above Derry. When they got to the top, they looked down at the town.
“I said how beautiful it was and how I hadn’t realized it before. Jamie was just like, ‘no it’s really not that nice around here at all. There are lots better places.’ She had seen the world,” he said.
The phone call with Dr. Kim was short. The Penichs had so many questions, but she knew little beside the one horrible fact: Jamie was dead.
“What should we do? Should we come there?” Brian asked. Patty, too upset to talk, was silent, but Brian’s voice was loud and beseeching.
Dr. Kim looked down at Jamie’s file in front of her. Derry, Pennsylvania. She knew some American geography from brief teaching stints in Hawaii and Utah. They are probably rural people, she thought.
She hesitated and asked, “Do you have a passport?”
“No,” Brian said with frustration tinged with panic. Why would they ever need passports? It was Jamie who liked to go away. “Where do I get one? How?” he asked.
Just wait where you are, she said. I am going to Seoul to find out more.
In Seoul, Dr. Kim found the exchange students at the Yongsan Police Station. Although officials from their various embassies had been summoned to the police station, the students seemed eager for help from someone they knew. Dr. Kim was surprised at how disheveled they looked with their dirty clothes, shower shoes and cowlicked hair. Since their belongings were locked behind police tape in the Kum Sung, she sent assistants out to buy clothes and toiletries.
The police were still interviewing Kenzi, but Dr. Kim gave the others a prepaid phone card, and one by one they called their parents from a pay phone in the corridor. She could not make out the words, but their crying echoed down the hall.
Dr. Kim arranged hotel rooms for the students, and eventually the police told Elvira, Jeroen, Kati and Tuomas that they could leave the station. There were still more questions for Anneloes and Kenzi, and Dr. Kim waited for them. Korean police investigators and army agents went in and out of the interview rooms.
At one point, Kenzi exited one of the rooms. She was angry about the questions and the interpreters. They were accusing her and Anneloes of having something to do with it, she told Dr. Kim. The Korean woman tried to be reassuring, but Kenzi snapped at her.
“Why is everyone else being allowed to make international calls for free and not me?” she asked.
Dr. Kim was taken aback by the young girl’s tone, but she handed the card to Kenzi, who took it and walked away to phone her mother. Of course, these questions would give anyone a short temper, Dr. Kim thought. They are only youngsters and they are probably being berated by these Korean officers.
She approached a Korean detective and told him she was concerned about how her students were being treated.
“They are strangers here, and we are like ambassadors. If they have some sort of traumatic experience in Korea, it is really not good,” she told him. She bowed slightly and clasped her hands together in the most supplicant pose she could think of. “Please, I’m begging you, be good to them.”
The detective shook his head.
“It’s not us. It’s the Americans. They are very tough,” he said.
As he spoke, a tall American in a uniform swept by them. Dr. Kim considered talking to him, but she was too intimidated.
She sat back down in the hall. Please let the killer be a non-Korean, she prayed silently.
Kenzi would later say she was relieved when American investigators arrived. The interpreters at the police station seemed to have only an elementary grasp of English. The students, who knew only a little Korean, caught them in mistranslations and noticed that the statements they typed up were awkwardly worded and rife with grammatical mistakes.
“I was under the intuition that some female was strike by a male” was how one interpreter rendered Kati’s statement that she heard a woman being assaulted by a man.
With the army investigators, there was no need for translators. The Americans were from the local office of the Criminal Investigation Command, a nine hundred-agent-strong unit that functions as the army’s detective bureau, investigating felonies with a connection to the service. The agents from the CID—the command is still identified by its old name, Criminal Investigation Division—were only assisting the Korean police in the investigation, but they quickly took the lead. Ten of the army’s forty-five agents in Korea were assigned to the Penich case.
That afternoon, some of the agents drove Anneloes and Kenzi from the police station to their headquarters at the sprawling Yongsan Garrison, a 630-acre base in the center of the city, for additional questioning. Neither woman objected. They both said they wanted to help find Jamie’s killer and would do anything to help the American agents. The CID and the military police shared a building on a rise on the north side of the base known as MP Hill.
As the Koreans had, the CID agents initially focused on Anneloes. The Kum Sung’s rooms were tiny, and by her own admission, the pretty Dutch student had been an arm’s length away from a very brutal murder. She had to know something, they reasoned.
Anneloes told them she woke up twice very briefly during the night. Once, someone had opened the door of Room 103. The second time, a hand was touching her shoulder. Neither alarmed her, she said, because she was expecting Jamie, and she immediately drifted back to sleep.
As far as the murder, she said, she knew nothing. The agents pressed her repeatedly on the point, but she insisted she was a very deep sleeper. The agents were skeptical. Their Korean colleagues who had questioned Anneloes shortly after the murder were convinced she was lying. Either the killer threatened you into silence or you yourself are the killer, one detective told her. They arranged for her to see a hypnotist, but after he consulted with Anneloes, the doctor told investigators she was not a good candidate. She was not in shock and did not seem to be blocking anything out. She simply was asleep when the relevant events occurred, he told them.
Frustrated with Anneloes, the army agents turned to Kenzi, the last person known to have seen Jamie alive. In a small office on MP Hill, the agents sat down across a table from the nineteen-year-old. She was plump and five-foot-seven, with long, strawberry blond hair, freckles and bright blue eyes. The freckles and the baby fat in her face made her look younger than her age, but when the army investigators began talking to her, they discovered a mature young woman.
The CID agents wanted a complete accounting of the contact between the young women and GIs at the bar, and Kenzi proved a gold mine. In contrast to Anneloes, who had become increasingly hostile in the face of the investigators’ suspicion, Kenzi seemed accommodating and respectful. She had grown up on a string of American bases and embassy compounds, and she was used to talking to military men. She also knew how to make the best of tough situations.
“Five different schools in six years and elected to student council in every one. That’s Kenzi,” her mother would often say.
It was that outgoing personality that had led to meeting the soldiers at Nickleby’s. In the ladies’ room just before midnight, she had struck up a conversation with an army wife. The woman was at the bar with the runners from the hash club. She introduced Kenzi to the hashers.
“I went and got Jamie and we started dancing. We were all dancing together,” she said.
Soon, Jamie was slow-dancing with a hasher named Josh—“a smaller guy, about five-eight with a military haircut, dirty blonde hair, had a big smile.”
Kenzi began dancing with Nick, another hasher. He was manning the pitcher of green beer and kept filling up the girls’ glasses, she said.
“He looked more Latino or Hawaiian, had darker hair and light olive skin, about five-ten, medium build,” she told them.
Kenzi said she turned her back to get the other exchange students, and when she returned, Jamie and Josh were making out on the dance floor. The European students were tired and bored and at 2 A.M., they left.
Jamie pulled Kenzi aside and told her that she’d given Josh her number at the university. Was it possible she told him where she was staying in Seoul? the investigators asked.
“I don’t know,” Kenzi told them. “It wasn’t something that she would do.”
Kenzi said that while dancing with Nick, she bumped into a tall, well-built soldier named Vincent. He was more muscular than the hashers and didn’t seem to know them. The two sat down in a booth away from the dance floor and began chatting. Kenzi said she mentioned she wanted to visit Jeju Island, a tropical resort off Korea’s southern coast. He said he was planning a trip there. “If you come home with me tonight,” she quoted him as saying, “I’ll cover all your expenses.”
“I told him no, but he was insistent. Finally, I told him I had to go, and then I went back on the dance floor,” she said.
About 3 A.M., Kenzi continued, Nick told them that the hashers were moving on to Stompers, a nightclub on Hooker Hill. He invited them along, but Jamie and Kenzi told him they had to be up early for sightseeing.
She said that although she hadn’t looked at her watch, she thought they left Nickleby’s about 3:15 A.M.
“Jamie had a lot to drink, and I was helping her walk,” she told them. Somehow, they got turned around and ended up near Hooker Hill. Kenzi said she realized where she was and turned down an alley toward the Kum Sung.
As they turned, she said, she saw Vincent and another man walking in the opposite direction. She and Vincent acknowledged each other with a wave, she said, and then the women headed for the hotel.
“I didn’t look back to see if he was following us, but I didn’t hear anything,” she told them.
She said that as they walked to the motel, Jamie began talking about taking a shower. She was convinced it would help her sober up. Kenzi said she helped Jamie to her room. Anneloes was asleep so the two women quietly went into the bathroom. Kenzi said she had turned on the water while Jamie undressed. She left as Jamie was getting into the shower.
She went to her room and climbed over Jeroen into bed. After two or three minutes, she decided to go check on Jamie.
“I went to her room, knocked on the door and asked her if she was okay and she replied, ‘yes,’” Kenzi told them. She said she hadn’t checked the door to see if it was locked, but that there was no one in the hall and no unusual sounds from inside the room. She returned to her bed and fell asleep.
She told the agents that she remembered some of the hashers had cameras in the bar and were taking pictures of her, Jamie and one another.
The CID agents were thrilled with the level of detail Kenzi had provided about the soldiers. While she sat in the small office, they began tracking down the GIs.