Two days after Jamie’s body arrived, her twenty-three-year-old sister, Jennell, sat down on her computer and typed out an e-mail to Kenzi Snider.
“All I want to know is if she was having a good time in Seoul? Did she get to see any of the sights. I just want to make sure that Jamie was happy those last few days before this tragedy,” Jennell wrote on March 27. She added, “I know this must be as hard for all of you as it is for me and my family.”
The following afternoon, cars carrying Jamie’s classmates, coworkers and university administrators left the Pitt campus for the viewing in Derry. Annagene Yucas was in one of the vehicles. She and a colleague had visited the grief counselor for a last-minute bolstering before departing for Derry.
“I knew I wanted to be there, but I just didn’t know how I could face them or what I could possibly say,” Dr. Yucas recalled.
The counselor told her that there was nothing she could say to comfort the Penichs. All you can do is go and show with your presence that their daughter’s life meant something to you, the woman told them.
Dr. Yucas felt too shaky to drive, and so she stared out the window of the car. The majestic university buildings of Forbes Avenue gave way to the interstate, then a highway with traffic lights and finally the twisty road that led down through the hills.
It must have struck those making the fifty-mile trip just how far Jamie had come to succeed in the academic world of Pitt.
“Jamie was really a trailblazer out of Derry. She was doing extraordinary things that nobody in her family had ever done. She was a small town girl, but she was going global,” Dr. Yucas said.
At the Quinlisk Funeral Home, the line of people waiting to pay their respects to the Penichs stretched out the door and down Chestnut Street. It seemed like all of Derry was there. The funeral director, a family friend, had handled hundreds of deaths, but as he helped them make the arrangements, Patty saw tears in his eyes. She and Brian sat near the coffin they had picked out. People filed by with hugs and kind words, but everything seemed a blur.
At one point, the priest from St. Martin’s leaned over to them. Normally we’d stop now and say the rosary, but there’s no way everyone can fit inside, he told them. We’ll just say extra prayers tomorrow.
The next morning, a procession of cars stretching two miles left the funeral home and wound its way out of town and up a hill to the bluff where St. Martin’s church sits overlooking the valley. Irish farmers built it 145 years ago with brick made in Derry. It is a modest structure with just twenty-eight narrow wooden pews and a simple altar. The only thing fancy about St. Martin’s is a small mural in the middle of the pressed tin ceiling, which shows Martin of Tours, a Roman soldier, giving half his cloak to a beggar.
By the time the Mass began, every seat in the church and the choir loft was filled. People clustered in the foyer and spilled out the front steps.
Jason Young, Jamie’s junior year boyfriend, stood across the street watching people arrive. He remembered Jamie crossing herself each time they drove by the church, and he thought about the long conversation in which he convinced her to go to Belgium. He decided not to go in.
“I thought it would be too tough to see them lay her down,” he remembered.
Dr. Yucas leaned on the arm of a colleague. When she had returned to Pitt the night before, she had gone back to the grief counselor. The woman could only reiterate what she had said a dozen times before: The family just wants to know that Jamie’s life meant something.
Looking back, the Penichs cannot remember much of the service.
“I know I was there, but I couldn’t tell you what was said or very much about it,” Patty said.
The priest tried to say some comforting things to Brian and Patty. They were sitting with their daughters in the front row of the church near the altar rail where they had been married. Above them on the right side of the altar was a large statue. From the back of the church, the statue was easily identifiable as St. Joseph with his staff in one hand and the infant Jesus in the other. But it was only from the front, where the family sat, that one could see the Christ child was himself holding something. In his small outstretched hand was a blue globe, one last map of the world for Jamie.
After the funeral, there was a lunch in the parish hall. One by one, Pitt students gingerly approached the Penichs and introduced themselves.
Brian and Patty “were numb. They didn’t know who was talking to them. At one point, I remember thinking they had the deer-in-the-headlights look. They don’t even know what has hit them,” Jamie’s swim coach, Jeff Kelly, remembered.
Later in the afternoon, close relatives and friends returned to the Penichs’ house to sit with the family. There were so many sympathy cards to open. Eventually they would fill two shoe boxes. In the middle of the quiet conversations, the phone rang.
It was Kenzi Snider.
She and Brian spoke briefly. That day, he was just focused on making it from one minute to the next, and her words of condolence barely registered. She said something about Jamie enjoying the sights in Seoul and being very happy before she died. He thanked her and hung up.
When Jennell Penich checked her e-mail, she had a similar message from Kenzi.
“It’s great to know Jamie was having a good time her last days in Seoul,” she replied.
The day of the funeral, Kenzi boarded a plane in Korea for the United States. Of the students who decided to leave early, Kenzi was among the last to go. It had turned out to be a more difficult choice for her than the others.
There was the financial issue. Here was a semester of school paid for with scholarships and student loans, and with only three weeks of classes, she wasn’t any closer to her goal of an education degree. For some students that might not have mattered, but Kenzi had no relationship with her father, and her mother was just scraping by as a teacher in an international school in Thailand. Money was no small issue.
She was also aware of being the first student from Marshall University to participate in an exchange program in Korea. She did not want to let down her school, she said later.
Perhaps most fundamentally, there was the matter of where to go if she left Korea. While other students headed back to their hometowns and childhood bedrooms to await the next semester at college, Kenzi didn’t have that option. With her father’s careers in the air force and State Department, Kenzi’s childhood was spent in temporary housing in five countries and three states.
“There was nothing waiting for her in the U.S.,” her roommate from the Kum Sung, Jeroen Kuilman, recalled.
But at the same time, the idea of staying after Jamie’s death seemed unimaginable.
“Jamie wasn’t there anymore. If I hadn’t seen her body, I could pretend it away, but I had seen her body, and you can’t pretend that away,” Kenzi said later.
Before Anneloes, Jamie’s Dutch roommate from the motel, and Jeroen departed, they told Kenzi she was always welcome to visit them in Holland.
The students had known one another only a brief time, but the experience of Jamie’s death seemed to bond them. In an e-mail to Kuilman ten days after the murder, Kenzi wrote, “I have finally decided what I am going to do…I am going to be going back to the States.”
She told Kuilman that she would go to Minnesota, where her parents had grown up and where her three grown brothers lived. She would then come to Holland, she wrote, for “however long I can.”
She added, “I think by that time, I am going to be needing the support from you guys (whether you like it or not heheh).”
The lights in the CID offices on MP Hill burned all night. The army agents had a pool of strong military suspects and a detailed statement from each man. It was only a matter of punching holes in the killer’s story. They spent every day looking for ways they could verify or debunk their accounts.
Some were obvious. Josh Harlan, the Montana hasher whom Jamie had kissed on the dance floor, had as his alibi a one-night stand. Agents tracked the young woman to the casino where she worked. She was not happy to see them, but she confirmed Harlan’s story. He was with me from Nickleby’s until the next afternoon, she told them.
The alibi of Vincent, the military intelligence officer who came on to Kenzi in a booth, relied heavily on another soldier, Javier Martinez. Vincent claimed he and Martinez were together from the time they left Nickleby’s for Stompers until they fell asleep watching TV in a base hotel. When they located Martinez a short time later on the same northern base, he echoed Vincent’s story. They were never separated for more than a couple of minutes, he said.
The agents remained suspicious. They knew from Kenzi that Vincent was sexually aggressive in the bar and that he also saw her and Jamie as they made their way back to the motel. Maybe he and Martinez had followed the young women. The fact they were together also made them promising suspects. Kati Peltomaa, the student in Room 102, said she heard the apparent assailant talking to someone else in the hall and more than one set of footsteps leaving the scene.
But Vincent and Martinez denied ever going to the motel. They produced the names of more than ten people who could vouch for them at the pub and Stompers. Video from the nightclub, Stompers, showed them there for at least some of the night, and security cameras at the base hotel confirmed their account of arriving at the hotel at dawn.
The pair also didn’t match the motel manager’s description of the man with bloody khaki pants. Both were wearing jeans, and Vincent was five inches too tall and much too muscular to fit the description of the fleeing man.
There was also the matter of the boots. Investigators believed the killer wore size 91?2 hiking boots. Vincent could not fit his foot into anything smaller than a size 13.
Officially, the Korean National Police remained the lead agency investigating Jamie’s murder. In practice, the CID agents handled the most promising leads. Their command of English made them the sensible choice to deal with the exchange students, the soldier suspects and other expats connected to the case.
Still, the Koreans aggressively worked the perimeter of the case. They might not know much about the mating habits of young Americans, but they knew how to navigate the criminal underbelly of Itaewon.
They questioned the African peddlers who resided in the Kum Sung. None of the men seemed to remember Jamie, though, and one Nigerian told the detectives his countrymen were not capable of such a crime.
Nigerians, he said, “argue, but they do not kill persons. Especially, they do not kill female persons because they think much of female persons.”
Five days after the murder, a Korean detective phoned MP Hill. We found a hooker from the Kum Sung and you’re going to want to hear what she has to say, the investigator told the CID agent.
Miss Yi was a Korean woman in her twenties with heavy bangs, a broad face and a passable knowledge of English. In interviews with authorities, she never admitted that she was a prostitute. When pressed for an occupation, she said she was an unemployed dropout from a college that trained workers for the tourism industry. But when she described her own activities St. Patrick’s Day night, the authorities had little doubt about her occupation.
She had gone out alone at midnight in Itaewon in three-inch heels and ended up in Stompers, throwing back whiskey and Cokes with a couple soldiers. Eventually she and a civilian army employee, an engineer from a base outside Seoul, went back to the room he had rented at the Kum Sung Motel.
In an interview with the Korean detectives on March 23, 2001, she said she had noticed two things when she walked into the shabby motel. The clock on the wall said 4:20 A.M., and the motel manager, Sin, was standing in the lobby. Apparently believing the couple wanted to rent a room, he shouted at them that the motel was booked full, but her date pulled out a key for Room 213 and dangled it in front of him.
Yi said she and the civilian army employee brushed past the manager and toward the stairs that led to the second floor. As they rounded the corner, she noticed the door to Room 103 was slightly ajar, and a man was loitering outside it.
“I can’t remember his face exactly,” she told the police. “He was neither black, nor white. He didn’t look like a Korean man either. He looked like a South Asian man.”
She said that as she passed he took about two small, hesitant steps that made her think he was pacing outside Room 103.
“His height seemed to be five-seven or five-nine and [he was] slim built. He was wearing dark pants, bright colored long sleeve shirt, and his hair style was ‘white collar style,’” she said, referring to a cut that was short on the sides and back and a little longer in the front.
She began climbing the stairs when she heard the motel owner yelling at the man. She couldn’t make out Sin’s words, but she turned and looked back down the stairs.
“The owner said something to him and [the man] grabbed the Room 103 door handle as if he was about to go in the room. I didn’t see if he actually went into the room or not,” she said.
She and her date repaired to Room 213, had sex and passed out. She never heard any sounds of an assault.
Yi told detectives that she wasn’t sure if she would recognize the man if she saw him again. The hall was dark and she was drunk.
When the army agents heard the account, they were excited. The time was within five minutes of when Kati Peltomaa, in the room next door, heard the sounds of an assault.
Was the man in the hall waiting for an accomplice to kill Jamie? the investigators wondered.
The CID agents arranged to interview Yi late one night at the police station around the corner from the Kum Sung. They showed her photographs of the suspects and asked if any resembled the man in the hall.
Yi pointed to a photo of Nick Baer, the soldier who had danced with Kenzi and who said he only vaguely remembered Jamie.
“She stated she could not say Baer was the individual who she saw in the Kum Sung Motel. Yi related Baer most closely resembled the individual she saw,” a CID investigator noted.
The Korean police told the Americans they were in the process of arranging for Yi to undergo hypnosis by a scientist at NISI. Perhaps she would remember more then, they said.
Back on MP Hill, the army investigators were zeroing in on Baer and another hasher, Mick Kolinski. Neither man had a firm alibi. Kolinski, the second man to kiss Jamie on the dance floor, said he was very intoxicated and stumbling around Itaewon at the time of the murder. Baer, who had danced with Kenzi, said he was wandering through the crowd at Stompers chatting with people whose names he either did not know or could not remember.
Now Yi was saying that Baer looked like the man loitering outside Room 103. He had olive skin and cropped hair like the man and was wearing khaki pants the night of the murder.
Kolinski did not have a dark complexion, but he did have the right shoe size. The hiking boots he handed over to the CID officers were size 91?2.
The CID agents reviewed the videotapes from Stompers again and focused on the times that Kolinski and Baer appeared. The video was more Girls Gone Wild than security tape. The shots were randomly angled and jumpy. Scantily clad women jiggled up to the camera. Shirtless men danced on tables. The camera seemed to be passed from friend to friend, and often the frame was filled with people mugging for the camera. It was impossible to determine times or locations.
In one shot, Baer danced on a barrel with a young Caucasian woman. Two weeks after the murder, they identified her as Natalie Langley, one of the leaders of the hashers. A preschool teacher from New Zealand, Natalie was celebrating her twentieth birthday the night of the murder.
She told the CID agents she had danced with all the hashers that night, including Nick. The agents pressed her for specific times, but she shook her head.
“It was over a four to five hour period, so you lose track of people,” she recalled. She said the investigators wanted to know if either man or any of their hash friends had a bad temper.
It was laughable to Natalie. Stompers could be a scary place for single women. Prostitutes trolled the club for customers, and that led to a lot of drunken men to grope whatever they saw.
“The hash guys always stayed around the women in the group to protect them from that. No matter how late we would stay out, one of them would always be nearby in case anything happened,” she said. “It was like a family.”
Agents also interviewed Baer’s co-workers, including his best friend, another hasher who was partying in Itaewon that night. The soldier told investigators he had gone home with a woman he met at Stompers around 3 A.M. He said when he talked to Baer the next day, he seemed his normal “mellow and goofy” self. The soldier said Baer bragged about doing “body shots” of tequila off the breasts of a woman who read weather reports on the army’s news channel. When it turned out she was married, he moved on, the friend said. He said Baer told him he stayed at Stompers until 8 A.M. because “the party just kept going.”
As they had promised the army investigators, the Korean police took Yi to NISI for the hypnosis that they hoped might jog her memory. Hypnosis is rarely used as an investigative technique in the United States but it is fairly common in Korea. Before the exam started, the technician asked the police if Yi had been shown any photos of possible suspects. Yes, they told him, the American army agents showed her four different lineups and she picked out one man.
That is unfortunate, the hypnotist told them. There’s a chance she will describe the man in the photo and not the one in the hall.
He proceeded with the process anyhow. Under hypnosis, Yi gave police a more detailed description of the man in the hall. He was not Korean, African or Caucasian, but “mixed race.”
“His face looked flat and he did not have much flesh and his cheeks were wide. He appeared to be nervous and awkward by the way he carried himself. His cheekbones were not high and he had thin facial features and did not wear glasses. The ridge of his nose was not high, and the end of the nose appeared to be dull,” she said.
She put his height between five-nine and five-eleven, two inches taller than before, and changed her description of his shirt, saying it was not bright-colored as she had previously remembered, but either gray or sky blue with horizontal stripes around the chest.
Perhaps the most striking change in her hypnotized account was the gender of the motel manager. It was not the man, Sin, but his wife, Chong-Sun Pak, that she had seen in the lobby and heard yelling at the man in the hall.
For the Korean police, both of Yi’s accounts raised questions about the statement they had taken from Sin the day Jamie was murdered. The motel owner never mentioned yelling at a man loitering in the hall, and he had assured officers that his wife knew nothing about the crime.
The Koreans confronted Sin at the Kum Sung, and after hedging for a few minutes, he made a stunning admission. He never saw a man with bloody pants. The night Jamie was murdered, he was out with friends gambling. It was his wife, Pak, who had been on duty and had seen the man rush from the motel.
He tried to explain why he had lied.
“My wife has a feeble mind and she is not mentally stable when she gets a shock,” Sin told detectives. They were furious. They had worked the case in the belief that Sin was their most important eyewitness.
They took Pak to the Yongsan Police Station and began questioning her. She conceded she let her husband lie for her, but said it wasn’t her idea.
“I just followed him,” she said.
She told the angry officers, however, that her husband’s account of the man with the bloody pants was not far off. At 3:30 that morning, she got out of her bed behind the window and walked into the hall. She was upset that her husband was not yet home and decided to wait for him in the lobby. As she walked toward the lobby, she heard a noise and saw a white man exiting Room 103.
He was wearing khaki pants, and as he moved past her she noticed there was blood on both legs. The right leg was soaked from the ankle to the knee and the left had blood spots “as big as a button,” Pak said.
“I didn’t talk to him, but I murmured to myself ‘blood on his pants,’” she said.
She told the police that she got a good look at the man, and he was not one of her paying guests.
“He was a Caucasian man, round face,” she told them. “I cannot recall his hair style but he was about 170 to 175 centimeters [five-eight to five-ten] in height, relatively short for a foreigner, a little bit chubby [in] build, wearing no glasses.”
She said he was wearing a light jacket with a “checkered pattern shirt” and brown hiking boots. Pak said the man made a right turn out of the motel, the direction of the subway and Hooker Hill.
“I could recognize him [if] I saw him again,” she told the police.
The Korean detectives questioned her about Yi’s account of the man in the hall. Why were you yelling at this man? they asked.
Pak shook her head. I never saw such a man, let alone yelled at him, she said.
Yi saw you when she came into the hotel, they told her.
“No, she is not true. I believe she is not telling the truth,” she replied.
The detectives quizzed her about others who had come into the Kum Sung that night, including Anneloes, Jeroen, Kenzi and Jamie.
She said she had not noticed any of them.
“All the rooms were occupied by customers [so] I didn’t pay much attention to the people coming and going that night,” she said.
Not even Anneloes? they asked. She claims she asked you for water.
No, she said, that never happened.
The Korean police were clearly frustrated with Pak and her husband. In one interview with her, they accused her of knowing who the man with the bloody pants was.
“You are not telling the truth because you do not want those people to be punished, and you are afraid of being punished because you have not been truthful on the case,” the detective charged.
“That is not true,” Pak retorted.
Convinced Pak was covering for someone, the detectives briefly focused on one of her grown children, a son who lived elsewhere in Itaewon. They asked her if her son frequented prostitutes or participated in anti-American protests or was gay. No, she told them. She said he didn’t have keys to the rooms and had no reason to be in the motel.