Mark Mansfield loved order. He had joined the marine reserves immediately after high school graduation. He went in looking for college money, but he stayed in the corps because of the discipline. Every man doing his part. The entire organization running smoothly. He liked things to add up just so. His college degree, from a state school near his hometown, was in finance, and when he went on active duty with the marines, he worked as an administrative clerk, making sure records were kept exactly right.
After ten years in the corps, he left active duty. He was twenty-eight, with three young daughters, and the money was better in the civilian world. He got a job at a family-owned building materials store. He worked hard, as usual, and got promoted several times, eventually becoming a store manager at Lowe’s, the national home improvement chain.
His supervisors loved him, and for the most part, his employees respected him. But Mansfield hated it. There were no standards as in the corps. Sometimes his workers showed up, sometimes they didn’t. The goals, if you could call them that, were not lofty and fixed as in the service, but constantly changing and profit-driven. Sometimes he had to make ten cents on each two-by-four. Other times it was eight cents. The weather and traffic and the price of gas all affected sales. How could one man control who bought these things?
“I hated managing so many people and the lack of control. It’s a tough job, and you can’t really get your arms around the whole thing,” he said. He found himself constantly comparing the work to what he had done in the corps.
“The military is something you can get your arms around. There are rules. There are ways of doing things. There is a standard,” he said.
Within three years, he was back in the military, this time the army. When he reenlisted, he told them he didn’t want to be an administrator anymore. He wanted to be in law enforcement, specifically a CID agent. For a man who craved order, it might have seemed strange to choose a career dealing exclusively with people and situations that were disordered. But Mansfield saw a CID agent’s work as setting straight what was crooked. He wasn’t interested in kicking down doors or roughing up people. He was interested in what he called “the entire process of discovering how or why something occurred and seeing justice served if possible.”
In early October, Mansfield was scouring the catalog of evidence from Room 103 when he noticed something. Among the contents of Jamie’s purse was a nametag bearing the name of Michael Greco, another American exchange student studying at Keimyung.
Greco, a nineteen-year-old anthropology major from the University of Rhode Island, had been invited on the trip to Seoul, but investigators were under the impression he had remained behind for a meeting with his host family. If that was true, though, why did Jamie have his nametag? Greco sounded like an Italian name. Maybe he was the young man with olive skin Yi saw in the hall or the dark-haired male Pak saw with blood on his pants.
Tracking Greco down was easy. He was still at Keimyung. He had been the only American to remain after Jamie’s murder, and he had stayed on that fall for a second semester. Mansfield arranged to go to Daegu with the Korean detectives and an FBI agent named Seung Lee. Lee, a Korean American stationed at the U.S. embassy, would act as a translator between the groups.
The Korean investigators decided to bring Pak, the motel manager’s wife, with them. If Greco was the killer, they reasoned, she would recognize him. In the United States, police lineups are regulated by strict policies designed to make sure the results are admissible in court. Generally, witnesses are required to select the suspect from among several people behind a one-way mirror or from an array of photos.
In Korea, however, witnesses are often brought face-to-face with a single suspect. The witness stares at the person in police custody for a few moments and then tells police whether they have the right suspect.
According to Mansfield’s report, Greco got a Korean-style lineup in a conference room at the university on October 5, 2001. After looking the student over, Pak told the police “she was 99 percent sure Greco was the individual she saw outside Room 103…who had been wearing the blood stained trousers,” Mansfield wrote.
His report indicates the identification had an electrifying effect on the team. They spent hours questioning Greco afterward and found some of his behavior suspicious.
“Greco was extremely nervous at the beginning of the interview. He had accepted a cigarette from [Special Agent] Lee, but it did not appear that Greco was a smoker,” Mansfield wrote.
Greco insisted he was two hundred miles away from Seoul in Daegu the night of the murder. According to their report, Korean detectives spread out across Daegu in search of witnesses to poke holes in Greco’s alibi. Meanwhile, Mansfield arranged for Greco to take a lie detector test. The results indicated Greco was being “deceptive,” according to the polygrapher’s report. Mansfield turned back to Anneloes with questions about Greco’s personality and his relationship with Jamie.
“Did you ever find Mike to have a temper or get angry and do you know if he had any interest in Jamie?” he wrote.
“I know he had to stay back in Daegu to meet with his host family, but that meeting was early in the day on Saturday. I was just wondering if he wanted to come up to Seoul after the meeting, and maybe [exchange student Elvira Makhmoutova] called him,” he wrote.
The questions unnerved Anneloes. “I have never seen Mike having a temper or getting angry, and I don’t think he had any special interest in Jamie. I have no clue why you are asking me these questions,” she replied.
Mansfield’s report suggests that within a few days, the investigators had come to agree with the Dutch girl. The Koreans had located many alibi witnesses who saw Greco in Daegu, and they couldn’t make the train schedule work with the murder timeline. His roommate, Park, said he and Greco had eaten dinner with Park’s family that night and passed a lie detector test to that effect. Park’s parents and other witnesses also backed his story.
Park told them he never saw Greco display any real interest in Jamie. “If Mike saw a pretty female, he used to say that the female was sexy and he wanted to sleep [with her]. However, he never made such a comment about Jamie,” Park said. “Jamie appeared to be scholastic,” he added.
Ultimately, investigators concluded Greco failed the lie detector test because he had talked extensively with the other exchange students about the details of the case. He had nothing to do with the murder, they decided.
The Daegu experience severely shook investigators’ faith in Pak. Did she know what the killer looked like? Or were all young Caucasian men the same in her eyes? Had she simply seen Greco with the officers and said whatever she thought they wanted to hear?
Frustrated, and now apparently faced with doubts about an important eyewitness, Mansfield searched for a new approach.
“I was starting over,” he later testified.
In his office on MP Hill, Mansfield stared at the case file. Its thousands of pages seemed an enormous collection of wrong turns, bad leads and unproven theories. The only way to solve this, he thought, is to go back to the first day and forget everything that came after. He tabbed through the file to the first folder, the statements of the exchange students.
“I decided I would go back to the beginning with the students and kind of scrub the reports, all the statements, and see if there’s something I’m missing as far as soldier interaction, anything that I had missed,” he later explained.
He was spreading the papers out on his desk in thin piles—Jeroen here, Anneloes there, Kenzi there—when he noticed a dark mark on the rear of one of the pages. He flipped it over and saw a heavy black boot print. He turned it back over. It was a page from the first statement Kenzi had given the Korean National Police the morning of the murder.
He picked up the phone and called Lee, the only FBI agent in Seoul.
“I think I’ve got something. Can you come here?” he asked.
Later, when everything was over, Lee would tell people he had been nothing more than a glorified translator. As a legal attaché at the embassy, he was a diplomat, not an investigator.
“I had no business being involved in this case,” he would say with a smile.
The truth, however, was that more than any army agent, Lee was Mansfield’s right hand in the reinvestigation of the case. After Specter visited Korea, the U.S. ambassador called Lee into his office. He had a stack of letters from the Penichs, and now a senator was breathing down his neck.
This Penich case, he said. Is there anything you can do to help?
Lee shrugged. He had never worked on a murder investigation, but he wanted to be accommodating.
I speak Korean, if that might help, he said.
It seemed a simple thing, but in short order, Lee’s language skills made him instrumental in the investigation. When Mansfield interviewed Americans, like Greco, Lee was there to translate for the Korean National Police. When the Koreans interviewed natives, Lee was there to translate for Mansfield.
Straddling the two worlds was familiar to Lee. He had lived in rural southern Korea until he was sixteen and his mother, who was the town nurse and midwife, decided prospects for Lee and her other two children were better in the United States.
She settled them outside Washington, D.C., where she got a job as a nurse’s aide. Lee found himself in a large American high school in the mid-1970s. He knew only a few words of English, and the ways of American teenagers were even more mysterious.
He taught himself English by listening to old Beatles records and working side-by-side with native speakers at after school jobs. At the University of Maryland, he pursued a degree in accounting and worked nights at a liquor store. He struck up a friendship with a regular customer, an FBI agent. The man persuaded him to apply to the bureau.
“I didn’t know what the FBI was, but I thought it sounded neat,” he recalled.
After a brief stint as an accountant, Lee was hired in 1984. He spent the next fifteen years in counterintelligence. He worked on teams trying to catch traitors and spies sent by other countries.
“It sounds exciting, but it was mostly mundane. The things we do to investigate—they are very organized, based on empirical evidence. You would be bored,” he said.
In July 2000, Lee’s assignment changed when the bureau decided to open its first office in Korea. Lee was the obvious choice. It was an exciting move for him and his wife, a Korean American, and two preteen daughters. The Korean press celebrated his arrival. A native son in the FBI!
The principal of his middle school in Korea asked him to speak to the students. He remembered the school as a primitive place in a poor rural region. When he arrived, he was stunned. The Third World of his memories was gone. The students were healthy, and they wore Nikes and listened to Walkmans.
“It had changed. A lot,” he remembered.
Lee settled into the relatively humdrum life of an FBI legal attaché. He was the sole employee of his office, so he answered the phones, filed the paperwork, filled out his own expense forms and even emptied the trash. The work was routine. He did background checks on prospective employees and lent a hand in the occasional cyber-crime investigation that had a Korean connection.
The Penich murder was far and away the most interesting thing to cross his desk, and the more he learned about the case, the more he was drawn to it. One of the biggest reasons was Mark Mansfield.
Lee had known a lot of good investigators in twenty years at the bureau, but he liked no one better than Mansfield. Mansfield was smart and hardworking, but had no ego. He never cut corners or snapped at colleagues. He looked everyone in the eye and gave him respect.
The two cut an odd pair. Mansfield was six feet tall and trim with a crushing handshake, a big smile and an abundance of Southern charm. Lee was shorter and starting to get the paunch of a man who spent his days at a desk. He wore sport coats and slacks that didn’t always match. He was soft-spoken and reserved.
The pair complemented each other well. Lee knew Korean society, Mansfield knew the army.
When Lee arrived at MP Hill, Mansfield showed him the print. The paper was a copy of one of the stilted interviews Kenzi had done with the Korean police interpreter. The Koreans had made a Xerox of it for the army case file. The boot print showed the treads of a heavy boot like the one that killed Jamie.
“Is it possible they took a boot print from Kenzi and this is it?” Mansfield asked Lee.
Let’s go ask the Koreans, Lee said.
The two drove to the Yongsan Police Station. In the detective bureau, Mansfield excitedly placed the paper down in front of his Korean counterparts.
The Korean detectives stared at it and then burst into laughter.
You think this is the smoking gun, they said, shaking their heads. This isn’t her print at all.
They explained that immediately after the murder, they bought boots of all styles and treads and slathered their soles with ink. They then pressed the shoes onto sheets of copy paper. The ones that didn’t match, they had sent to the copy room for recycling, and by chance, the recycled paper was used to copy Kenzi’s report.
Some big break, the Koreans jeered. Lee thought that if he were in Mansfield’s place he would’ve told the Koreans to shut up and stop being nasty, that he was just doing his job and they should be more understanding. Instead Mansfield just thanked them politely for straightening him out and smiled. The detectives could still hear the Koreans laughing as they left the stationhouse. They drove back to MP Hill in silence.
On the surface, it was another dead end. But something about it kept nagging at Mansfield. On the way to the police station, he had thought about Kenzi. Could she have somehow been involved? The Korean police were right about the inky boot print, but maybe he was right about Kenzi.
Later, Lee would think that the result of the dead end had been worth all the humiliation at the police department.
“What it did was get our minds on Kenzi once and for all,” Lee recalled.