Whatever their concerns about Pak, authorities behaved as though they believed she had seen the killer. They assembled a half-dozen soldier lineups and even brought her to a base for a face-to-face meeting with Martinez, who along with his friend Vincent had all but been exonerated. She said none of the soldiers she saw was the man in the hall.
Investigators also used Pak’s description to develop a composite sketch of Jamie’s killer. They posted it around Itaewon and at the entrances to the base.
The wanted poster described a male with “a well rounded, clean face shape,” wearing “a fine check” shirt, beige pants and brown shoes, perhaps Timberland. Inexplicably, the poster listed the suspect as about five-six to five-eight, shorter than Pak’s description.
The sketch accompanying it showed a young Caucasian man with a crew cut. On a Saturday night in Itaewon, the sketch fit about three of every four men on the street.
Shortly after the poster went up, the CID got a tip about a private serving at an airbase just outside Seoul. The tipster said the private, a helicopter crew chief, was behaving very oddly the Monday after the murder. The soldier was telling people he had amnesia and did not know where he had been for the past forty-eight hours. The private, the tipster said, resembled the man on the wanted poster.
CID agents went to the base and interviewed the private’s commanding officer, who confirmed parts of the story. He said he was concerned enough about the soldier to have him committed to a psychiatric ward on the Yongsan base. Not only had the private blacked out, but he was heard muttering about sabotaging helicopters. The officer said that ten days after he checked the private into the hospital, doctors there shipped him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., for more psychiatric treatment. From there, the officer had lost track of the man.
Investigators were intrigued until they began reviewing the man’s hospital records. The tipster was wrong. The private’s mental breakdown wasn’t the Monday after the murder, but ten days later. Agents talked to the private’s roommate who told them that the soldier rarely left the barracks for leave and had only been to Itaewon once, a day trip months before. He wouldn’t know how to find a club or a motel, the man said. He had mental problems, the roommate told them, but more than anything, he was trying to get out of the Army.
The dead end led the army agents to come back to Kolinski and Baer. One had the right shoe size; the other had the right face. But over and over, the soldiers denied ever setting foot inside the Kum Sung, let alone killing Jamie.
In an interview with the military newspaper Stars and Stripes later, a soldier who spoke under the condition of anonymity, but whose story and assignment clearly identify him as Baer, said that he told the investigators it was ridiculous to think he had murdered Jamie, a girl to whom he spoke “maybe three words.”
He was interested in Anneloes, “the real cute one,” not Jamie, he said.
Even as they hammered away at Kolinski and Baer, army investigators knew they had a nearly insurmountable problem in pinning the crime on either man. NISI scientists had gone over Kolinski’s jeans and Baer’s khakis with a magnifying glass. They had swabbed every crevice of Kolinski’s hiking boots and Baer’s Skechers. There was simply no blood.
Snapshots the hashers took in Nickleby’s and interviews with people who crossed paths with the men left no doubt they had the right clothes. The investigators looked at the gory photos of Room 103. Blood was splattered on the walls and the floor. At the very least, the killer’s boots would have been soaked with blood.
In perhaps the final blow to their case against the pair, Baer agreed to take a polygraph. He passed.
On April 27, 2001, a warm spring day about a month after Jamie’s funeral, the University of Pittsburgh held a memorial service for her at Heinz Chapel. The Penichs drove in from Derry. In choosing the speakers, Dr. Yucas kept in mind the grief counselor’s advice that what parents of a dead child need most is assurance the child will not be forgotten.
The university chancellor spoke first and called Jamie “bright, healthy, happy and hardworking” and “a person of vision.”
“She will continue to be in our thoughts and memories and our prayers,” he said.
Her academic adviser, Dr. Keith Brown, told those gathered that he was “still in the anger stage of her needless death.
“Jamie was precisely the kind of student every professor wants to see. She was using the college experience to its fullest, not just passing through,” he said, adding, “She will be greatly missed.”
The director of the day care center where Jamie worked announced they were creating a memorial garden decorated with stepping stones for the children.
“The stepping stones of Jamie’s life ended rather abruptly, but I believe her spirit lives on,” the director said.
Jeff Gretz spoke near the end of the service. As he looked out on the pews, he must have remembered that Jamie had wanted to marry him in that chapel.
“I do not know what Jamie is doing in the afterlife. I do know what she would not want to be doing. She doesn’t want to be sitting on a cloud playing a harp. She wants to be doing stuff,” he said.
He mentioned the goal she had told him about when they first met.
“Maybe she didn’t change the world, but she changed the worlds of everyone who knew her,” he said, his voice catching in his throat.
Dr. Yucas told the gathering that in tribute to Jamie, the university was planting a purple beech tree on the lawn outside the chapel. After the ceremony, Brown approached the Penichs to offer his condolences. The college world was an unfamiliar one to Patty, but she knew enough from Jamie to realize the professor’s comments about her daughter were something special.
“You have so many students and so many classes. Why would you remember Jamie?” Patty asked.
“She just stood out,” Brown replied.
Patty nodded.
To her family, it seemed like Patty’s will had died along with Jamie. She had always been a great and enthusiastic cook, who delighted in whipping up elaborate holiday meals for dozens of relatives, but since March 18, she hadn’t so much as turned on a burner.
“It was like ‘Why bother?’” she recalls.
She closed the door to Jamie’s room, leaving everything inside exactly as it had been the day her daughter left for Korea. She gathered up all the family snapshots and packed them away. It was too difficult to look at the pictures of Jamie beaming in front of the Christmas tree or grinning with all her cousins around the Thanksgiving table. The smiles just seemed so crazy. Couldn’t any of them have seen what was coming?
But late that spring as the ridges around Derry turned from gray to pale yellow and green, Brian and their daughters began to detect a slight thaw in Patty. She wasn’t ready to talk about Jamie or what they all had lost, but she did want to know about the investigation.
Early on, there had been plenty of information about the search for Jamie’s killer. The arrest of a soldier seemed just around the corner. The embassy called the Penichs frequently, and officials at the Korean National Police gave interviews to the Pittsburgh newspapers documenting the case’s progress, but as April turned to May, the articles stopped and the phone calls from Korea became less and less frequent.
The Penichs began to sense the investigation was faltering. Sometimes their calls were not returned for days, and when they were, the family was told there was no news.
In Derry, they would have driven over to the state police barracks and demanded answers, but from the other side of the globe, there did not seem to be much they could do. They could not communicate with the Korean detectives, and the army did not give out information.
Television had once been a refuge from thinking about Jamie’s murder, but as their frustration grew, it became an inspiration. Every true crime show or police drama contained hope for solving difficult cases. They began taking notes.
Did they check for bite marks? Did the coroner scrape under her fingernails? Did they look for fingerprints in closets in case someone was hiding there?
“We were trying to be our own little detective agency from over here,” Patty said.
She began contacting the Korean police, the army investigators and the embassy. By her nature, Patty is shy. She is a small-town woman who married her high school sweetheart and lives a thirty-second walk from her mother. But the dearth of answers about Jamie’s death made her suddenly brave.
“I’ll call anyone now. I’ll ask anything,” she told friends.
She sent e-mail after e-mail and placed dozens of international calls. She had lists of specific questions. She wanted to know about forensic tests and interviews, and she even proposed a few leads of her own. Did the investigators know, for example, that Jamie had just received $1,000 in stipend money, money that was not sent back with the rest of her belongings? If one person did not have answers for Patty, she would call someone else. She would wait on hold, and if they disconnected her, she would call right back.
In mid-April, Jeff Gretz received a strange call from a consular officer at the U.S. embassy in Seoul. The man wanted to know Gretz’s full name and date of birth. When he asked why, the man told him they were going to run his name through immigration to make sure he had not been in Korea at the time of the murder.
Go ahead, Gretz said, but to him and the Penichs, the call seemed an indication that investigators were far from finding the real killer.
One of the few official correspondences the Penichs received from Korea that April confirmed that. It was a letter from Woon-ha Hwang, a superintendent in the Korean National Police:
I would like to express my sincere condolences on your daughter being victimized in a country so far away from home. I understand that she was a beautiful and energetic young lady who was curious to learn different cultures and customs. [The Korean National Police] has been doing our utmost to find the perpetrator. We knew that finding the murderer would be the only way to comfort the grieving family and friends of Jamie, as well as the spirit of Jamie herself, but unfortunately, we have not been successful to date. One thing we want to reassure you is that we are still continuing the investigation and that we will not give up or get discouraged easily.
Hwang noted the assistance of the army investigators and then added, “In my business, we have a saying: ‘There is no perfect murder.’ We are determined to find the person who did this.”
Attached to the letter from Hwang was a two-page document entitled “A Summary of the Investigation so far.” It had been translated from Korean and contained many misspellings and grammatical errors, but for the Penichs it was a trove of previously unknown information.
The Penichs flipped to the second page, titled, “A Future Plan.” Beneath the hopeful headline, however, there were just a few lines:
The substance and brevity of the plan was astounding. So they were starting over from the beginning, looking for new suspects who had had a month to dispose of evidence and come up with alibis? And a wanted poster and some sort of Korean-style Crime Stoppers? Weren’t these things that should have been done on the first day?
Patty’s heart sank.
“They’ve botched this up real good,” she thought.
Six weeks after the murder, army investigators made a round of visits to the five soldier suspects. If the GIs were expecting more questions or lineups, they were surprised. The agents handed each of them a bulky evidence bag. Inside, each man found the shirt, pants and footwear investigators had seized for forensic testing.
The agents offered little explanation.
“I don’t remember if they ever told me I wasn’t a suspect anymore,” Mick Kolinski recalled. “I don’t remember any part of closure.”
On May 1, however, an army press officer told the Stars and Stripes that all military suspects had been cleared.
“There’s no longer any U.S. Forces Korea personnel listed as suspects,” the official told the military paper. “Everyone that has been identified as having anything to do or in the proximity to [Jamie] has been eliminated as a suspect that we are aware of.”
The official indicated that without any GI suspects, the investigation would go back to being a local operation, with the CID assisting when the Koreans specifically requested it.
Since the beginning, Stripes was the paper of record in the Penich case. The Pittsburgh newspapers reported on the murder early on, but getting information out of Korea was difficult. Stripes had a bureau in Seoul, a staff of both Korean and American reporters and a strong interest in accusations of wrongdoing against soldiers. The daily paper is technically a U.S. government publication, but its editors are independent, and the content is not subject to military censorship or control.
Patty came to depend on the Stripes website for information about her daughter’s case. That May, the paper wrote articles about the exoneration of the soldiers and the status of the investigation. Often the stories bolstered the Penichs’ sense that the case was mishandled. The paper detailed problems at the crime scene, including police officers placing multiple pieces of evidence in one bag and the officers’ inability to lift even a single fingerprint from Room 103.
Stripes reporter Jeremy Kirk also wrote that in some cases, CID agents had waited a week before seizing clothes of men who had been in the bar with Jamie and Kenzi. He raised questions about the wanted poster that Superintendent Hwang had touted to the Penichs. The poster didn’t go up on base until a month after the murder, one soldier who had briefly visited Nickleby’s told Kirk. By then, memories were fading.
Perhaps no information was more jarring for the family than the Stripes coverage of the semen test results. The paper reported that the police samples came back positive for the presence of semen. Much later, American investigators would deem the findings meaningless because they were done with an old-fashioned test that often mistakes routine infections for the presence of semen.
But in the stories Patty read, the lab director at NISI said that semen was found on Jamie’s genitals and on two pairs of underpants: one belonging to Anneloes and the other belonging to Jamie.
“We cannot definitely say she was not raped,” he told the paper. He cautioned, however, that the tests showed only trace amounts of semen, normally an indication that sexual intercourse occurred a day or two prior. The amount was so small that DNA testing was not even possible, he said.
Anneloes, however, protested the finding to the paper, saying that she had never had sex while she was in Korea and as far as she knew, Jamie had not either.
Complicating matters, the police superintendent said his reading of the results was that they were negative for the presence of semen.
The discussion upset the Penichs and reinforced their belief that their daughter’s case was not in competent hands.
“We are about at the end of our rope,” Patty told the paper.
In the midst of the family’s growing frustration, Jeff Gretz reached out to Kenzi Snider. She was the last person known to have seen Jamie alive, and she knew the soldiers that he and the Penichs believed were the most likely culprits.
According to Gretz, army investigators contacted by the family said they didn’t even know how to get in contact with Kenzi because she had returned to the United States. To prove that this was ridiculous, Gretz did a quick search for Kenzi on the Internet and immediately found an e-mail address.
Was this the Kenzi Snider who did study abroad in Daegu with Jamie Penich? he wrote.
Immediately he got a reply. Yes, Kenzi wrote. How do you know Jamie?
“I was her fiancé,” he wrote back. “EX-fiancé technically, but…that’s a WHOLE other story.”
He told her that the police tried to get her e-mail address and phone number from the Penichs, but “no one was going to give anything away until they checked with you. I won’t say anything either.”
He continued:
While I have a million questions at the same time, I don’t know what to ask.
I’ve heard she was really fond of you and I hope you don’t but I can understand if you feel some guilt kicking in with all of this. Please don’t!! Anyway, if it would be cool, I would love to talk to you on the phone. A little more personal. (Granted we don’t know each other at ALL!) but that’s up to you…I mean…here you are getting a strange email from a complete stranger…but I’ll give you my number. I’d be MORE than happy to call you to save you in toll charges, but if you don’t feel comfortable with that…that is okay with me.
He gave her his number and signed off the e-mail:
Please take care,
Love,
Jeff Gretz
Kenzi called Gretz that night, and the conversation was lengthy and wide-ranging. The two discussed suspects and Jamie’s behavior in the hours leading up to her death. The family was gravely concerned about the semen test results. In their discussion, Kenzi assured Gretz that to her knowledge, Jamie was not seeing anyone in Daegu and did not have sex during her time in Seoul.
The next afternoon, Gretz wrote, “You answered so many questions that were nagging at our minds for the past 2 months…things that we thought we’d NEVER know.”
He wrote that he had phoned the Penichs when he got off with Kenzi and the information he had passed along to the normally stoic couple had changed them completely.
“Not only did Patty just start gushing with all these emotions (happy, anger, sad) that she had been holding in for the past two months, but Brian even TALKEDJ. That is a big step for him (hee hee),” Gretz wrote.
He told her that she could pass his e-mail address on to Anneloes, but added, “I really don’t have any questions for her per se…since most of what we wanted to know YOU were around for.”
Gretz encouraged Kenzi to go online and read the Stripes stories. At the urging of the Penichs, he also told her she should consider contacting the FBI in Pittsburgh. The special agent in charge there was acting as a liaison between the family and the investigators in Korea. He included in the e-mail a copy of the wanted poster hanging around Itaewon.
“They probably didn’t bother to show it to one of the key witnesses (YOU!!),” he wrote.
In the weeks that followed, Patty Penich also e-mailed Kenzi to thank her for her help.
“Jeff mentioned that you clarified what we had been suspecting about Jamie having no sex. I am glad you are helping us. Please keep us informed of any new developments,” she wrote.