When the Penichs saw Jamie off to Korea in March, Patty pulled out a pen and paper in the airport and asked for a return itinerary. Jamie was twenty-one, but she was still the little girl who told her mom to go home on the first day of kindergarten, and she was consumed with leaving, not with coming back. She humored her mother, however, and read off the flight number, arrival time and date of her return: June 11, 2001.
It was on that sad date that the Penichs went to Pittsburgh for a meeting that would change the course of the investigation. They drove into downtown, to the hundred-year-old gothic building that houses the city morgue and the offices of the Allegheny County coroner. The man who occupied that office was no nameless civil servant, but Cyril Wecht. Wecht was one of the elite group of national forensic celebrities, men like Henry Lee and Michael Baden who rose to fame because of the public’s fascination with solving crimes using science.
From O. J. Simpson to JonBenet Ramsey to Laci Peterson, Wecht seemed connected to every high-profile crime in the country. If he wasn’t a prosecution expert, he was a defense consultant or at the very least, a commentator on cable shows. On those programs, he was inevitably identified as “renowned forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht.”
Shortly after Jamie’s death, Wecht had contacted the family to offer his help. With their growing disillusionment at the pace of the investigation, the Penichs were ready to accept his offer. In his enormous office, Wecht listened as the couple recounted what they knew. They handed him the few documents they had: an English translation of the Korean pathologist’s report and a sealed packet of autopsy photos.
Wecht looked at the materials and then shook his head. In his opinion, so much more should have been done at the autopsy. He told them that if the murder had occurred in America, it almost certainly would’ve been solved through forensics.
The most important thing that Wecht did, however, occurred after the Penichs had left for the long drive back to Derry. He picked up his phone and called the office of Pennsylvania’s senior senator, Arlen Specter. The men knew each other. Both had studied the Kennedy assassination—Specter as a junior counsel to the Warren Commission in 1963 and Wecht as a member of the pathology panel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s. Although they had clashed on the “single-bullet theory” of the president’s death, Wecht felt the senator would be eager to help.
In his fourth Senate term, Specter was a powerful figure in Congress and a popular politician in the Keystone State. As a senior Republican senator, Specter had close ties to the White House, but was not afraid to break with his party on issues such as abortion. His committee assignments reflected his status: He served on Appropriations, Judiciary and Veterans Affairs.
Wecht’s phone call reached the senator’s office at an opportune time. Specter was preparing to go to Seoul later that summer as part of weeklong visit by a bipartisan congressional delegation.
In August, Specter and a delegation led by Senator Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, visited China and Taiwan.
After high-level talks with the Chinese president and Taiwanese leaders, the senators flew to Seoul to meet with then-president Kim Dae-jung. The meeting at the Blue House, the president’s residence, was critical for the Korean government.
Kim was eager for the Bush Administration to enter into direct negotiations with North Korea, but the Americans wanted North Korea to end its long-range missile program. The North Koreans, in turn, wanted the United States to scrap its missile defense plans. Further isolation of North Korea from the international community was a terrifying prospect for the south. The border was just ninety miles from Seoul, and a missile attack by North Korea would kill millions of South Koreans in a matter of minutes. The more the United States engaged the dictatorship, the greater the chances for stability, they believed.
When the talks concluded, Specter asked for a moment alone with Kim. He told the Korean president that one of his young constituents had been killed in Seoul and that it seemed nothing was being done to solve the murder.
“Although he was not familiar with the case, he agreed to inquire about its status and work with the Korean police force and the American embassy staff on facilitating its swift resolution,” Specter recalled a month later when he detailed his trip in the Congressional Record.
The mention of a grisly murder in a cheap motel must have been jarring in the Blue House with its pristine mountainside location and graceful, templelike architecture. The august residence was just a subway ride from Itaewon, but worlds away from a place like the Kum Sung Motel.
Kim must certainly have been embarrassed by Specter’s comments. The talks with North Korea were vital to him, and one of the men who might persuade President Bush on his stance toward the Korean peninsula was now telling him that a young American girl had been brutalized here.
It is not clear what steps Kim took after meeting with Specter, but soon the Korean police, the embassy, the FBI and the army knew about his concerns. An FBI agent later described the subsequent pressure to make an arrest as “intense.”
The army had stepped back from the case that spring, but a few weeks after Specter’s visit, they assigned a new CID agent to lead the investigation.
At thirty-three, Mark Mansfield was one of the older CID agents on MP Hill. He was also one of the least experienced. At the time he was assigned to reinvestigate Jamie Penich’s murder, he had been an agent for just ten months, four of which were spent in training.
To an outsider, the selection of a greenhorn for a politically sensitive case may have seemed odd. The case was the most challenging and complex Mansfield had ever worked, let alone the only murder. His supervisors apparently saw in him more important attributes than investigative know-how.
One was likely his age. Many of the CID agents involved in the Penich case were as young as the soldier suspects and exchange students who were the key witnesses. Investigators in the CID hold a title outside of the rank system—“special agent”—so they can confront and interrogate more senior soldiers who would otherwise outrank them. But while differences in rank could be concealed, differences in age were more difficult to hide.
Mansfield carried a distinct air of maturity. He had served a decade in the marine corps before joining the army and spent two years as a military policeman before transferring to the CID. Detective work may have been new to him, but the armed forces and its personnel were old hat.
Mansfield’s personality also worked in his favor. A native of Temple, Georgia, a town west of Atlanta with a population of two thousand, tinier even than Derry, he was friendly, charming and spoke in a warm Southern drawl that put people at ease and camouflaged his agile mind. He was openly devout and talked about his wife back in Atlanta and their three daughters, whom she was home schooling. With his good ol’ boy demeanor, Mansfield seemed like sort of a Dixie Columbo, a smart policeman whose bumbling ways lured criminals into underestimating him.
Mansfield also had the respect of other investigators in the army and in the Korean police. He was regarded as the straightest of arrows. He didn’t take shortcuts or shirk work. He didn’t boast. He never swore or told crude jokes. His coworkers ribbed him about being a Boy Scout. He always shrugged it off with a smile. “My integrity is all I have,” he would say.
Mansfield had the advantage of knowing the case without being steeped in the bad leads and dead ends. He had worked on the team of investigators questioning the students and tracking down soldiers in the days after the murder. He had talked briefly to Kenzi to get descriptions of Vincent and Harlan and had helped question Vincent.
But three days into the investigation, he had to leave Seoul for noncommissioned officers’ school in the States. He did not return until late June, long after the soldiers were cleared.
Two months later, after the Senate delegation had left Seoul, Mansfield’s supervisor assigned him to lead the investigation. He knew it was politically charged, and years later, he can still recall a moment where he realized that two important leaders had talked about a murder case that was now sitting in boxes in his small office.
Still, he insists, “there were never any discussions where I was told ‘You better solve this case because Sen. Specter asked the Korean president about it.’”
The pressure he felt came from himself, he recalls. He knew he did not have much experience, and the case had already frustrated investigators with much more detective work under their belts.
“I was intimidated,” he said.
He bucked himself up and threw himself into reviewing the case file. The process took him nearly two months. He pored over the witness interviews, the autopsy reports and lab tests, the crime scene photos, the polygraph examinations, and the hypnotist’s conclusions. He read the reports that army investigators before him had written. He saw how they had pieced all the evidence together and arrived at a sensible hypothesis—an amorous soldier, a spurned advance and an eruption of rage—only to have every possible suspect turn into a dead end.
After six weeks of combing through the case file, Mansfield sat down at his computer and typed out an e-mail to a person he believed knew things about the murder that were not in the case file: Anneloes Beverwijk.
From the first hour after the murder, there were questions about Jamie’s Dutch roommate. Many investigators simply did not believe it was possible for someone to sleep through such a brutal murder, and Anneloes knew well that the American and Korean detectives harbored these doubts. The repeated suggestions that she knew more than she was saying angered her, and ultimately they led her to stop cooperating with authorities. Her parents, who had come to Korea after the murder to support her, and officials from the Dutch consulate persuaded her to cut off communication with the investigators after a week.
After she returned to Holland, reporters from Stars and Stripes and Korean television continued calling her for interviews. One question was always the same: How could you have slept through it?
What Anneloes did not know that fall was that Mansfield had taken steps to verify her story. He had arranged for detectives to interview the Korean woman whom Anneloes had roomed with during her brief stay at Keimyung. The Korean student confirmed that Anneloes was a remarkably deep sleeper. She wouldn’t hear her phone even if it was on her pillow and she would sleep through her alarm every day, the young woman said.
Still Mansfield felt that she must know something more. She admitted waking up at two other points during the night—first when someone opened the door to her room and second when someone touched her shoulder. Perhaps there was some small detail she might not have mentioned. Perhaps she would be willing to undergo hypnosis?
Knowing that she was tired of having her story challenged, Mansfield approached her gingerly. In an e-mail written on September 26, he introduced himself and wrote, “I realize after reviewing your statements how much you have already tried to help in this investigation. I appreciate all the time you already gave, and I realize how difficult this whole thing must be for you.
“I am not contacting you to re-question you concerning all the dates and times you already provided,” he wrote.
He asked if she would be willing to talk to him over the phone.
“Rest assured my only concern here is bringing the individual(s) who did this to Jamie into custody. All information, however slight, is so very important in this case,” he wrote.
That fall, Anneloes was studying in the United States, but she immediately returned his e-mail.
“Mr. Mansfield, I am of course always prepared to help in the case, but I am really not sure how, since I did not really see anything,” she wrote. She told him, however, that she would be happy to answer his questions. Just e-mail me, she wrote.
But Mansfield did not write to her that day or that week. Something had caught his eye and taken the investigation in a very different direction.