When he went back to MP Hill, Mansfield picked up Kenzi’s statements. For the next two months, he rarely put them down. He read them over and over. He took them with him to the Kum Sung Motel and to Nickleby’s bar. He kept them by his side when he interviewed new witnesses. He made charts based on them. He read parts of them aloud to Lee. After eight weeks, he convened a meeting with the Korean police and announced a shocking new prime suspect: Kenzi Snider.
Mansfield’s conclusion must have stunned the Korean detectives. Kenzi Snider? The sweet, blond teenager who had provided the most useful information in the early days of the investigation? The one who burst into tears when she talked about Jamie? The one who called her mother “mommy” on the phone?
Sure, she had been testy during some of their interviews, but none of them had blamed her. She didn’t like being told she knew more than she was telling, and anyone would get irritated with inept translators.
Are you sure? they asked.
With Lee at his side translating, Mansfield told them he based his conclusion on Kenzi’s own words. She gave investigators at least five statements about St. Patrick’s Day night. He said he combed through them and found they contradicted one another, other witnesses and the evidence. Just hear me out, he told them.
Two months earlier, when Mansfield began scrutinizing Kenzi’s statements, one part of her account immediately struck him as odd and possibly suspicious: her description of going back to check on Jamie in Room 103 before turning in for the night.
She told the Koreans and the Americans that Jamie was quite drunk and having trouble walking. When they returned to the motel, Jamie wanted to shower to sober up, so Kenzi had helped her undress and turn on the water. In a statement to the Korean National Police the day of the murder, she said:
I asked Jamie if she was ok, and she said yes. I left the room and went back to my room. When I got inside my room, Jeroen was sleeping on the outside of the bed away from the wall. I got into bed and after a minute or two, I decided to check on Jamie. I went to her room, knocked on the door and asked her if she was ok and she replied “yes.” I didn’t check the door and I went back to my room.
To Mansfield, the account was nonsensical from the start and got more unbelievable the closer he looked. Kenzi was worried enough about Jamie’s welfare that she got back up out of bed after a couple minutes to check on her. But when she got to the door to Room 103, she didn’t go in or even stick her head inside to verify that she was okay? It was a lot of effort to go through not to even lay eyes on Jamie, he thought.
Mansfield picked up Jeroen Kuilman’s statement. The Korean police had questioned him very briefly since he had not met any of the soldiers in Nickleby’s, nor heard anything unusual from his bed in Room 104, directly next to Jamie’s room. But one thing in his short statement immediately grabbed Mansfield’s attention. He told the police that he woke up only one time, when Kenzi opened the door to Room 104 and crawled over him into bed. It was around 3:30 A.M., he told the detectives.
Kenzi was a large woman, and the bed was small for two people, Mansfield thought. Even if she were trying not to wake him, it would have been difficult, maybe impossible. It was a cold night, and there were covers to arrange and rearrange. She had to lift the blankets, throw herself over Jeroen, and replace the blankets. If she had done that three times in the space of a few minutes, why did he remember only one time?
Mansfield decided to test her statement with what he would later call a “nonscientific test.” He grabbed another CID agent and drove off base to the Kum Sung. He told Pak and Sin he wanted to see Room 103. You can, they told him, but only if you rent it. Fine, he said, and plunked down a few won notes.
Mansfield went into the bathroom, closed the door and started the shower. The second agent closed the outside door to Room 103 and stood in the hall.
In his report, Mansfield wrote, his colleague “made the statement ‘Are you OK!’ and SA Mansfield responded with ‘Yes.’ It was the opinion of both agents that it was very difficult to hear what was being said by each other. Further, each agent was listening for a statement and response, and Penich would not have been expecting Kenzi to return and ask if she was OK.”
Back on MP Hill, Mansfield was convinced Kenzi was lying about that part of her story and began scouring her account for other contradictions. He looked closely at her description of Jamie undressing in the bathroom. Kenzi maintained Jamie was unsteady on her feet, so she had helped her disrobe.
“I took off her shirt in her room and took off her blue jean pants in the bathroom. I remember that I threw her blue jeans in the floor of the bathroom,” she told the Koreans.
She said that when she left Room 103, Jamie was standing outside the shower in her bra and panties.
In a book of crime scene photos, Mansfield found what he considered absolute proof Kenzi was lying: a photo of Jamie’s clothes in a pile on the bathroom floor. The picture clearly showed that Jamie’s panties were inside her jeans and the jeans were on top of her bra. She took her shirt off, then her bra and then stepped out of her jeans and panties in one motion, he thought. She was never standing in just her underwear. Another lie from Kenzi, the agent thought. He began to wonder what exactly had happened in Room 103 after the bar.
He focused on her statements about Vincent, one of the mysteries of the case. She said he waved to her on the street as she helped Jamie back to the motel. CID agents had grilled Vincent about this encounter for hours, but he insisted that he did not see her outside the bar. The streets were crowded and I was drunk, he told the officers, I may not have seen her if she walked by, but I am positive I never waved to her.
Mansfield wondered if Kenzi was trying to incriminate Vincent. In the first interviews, she described how he had hit on her in a booth and invited her to come home with him in exchange for a free trip to a tropical island.
“I told him no, but he was insistent. Finally, I told him I had to go,” she said in her initial statement.
Vincent admitted that he had invited her to come away with him to Jeju Island and that she had turned him down, but he described it as less confrontational. Just another Saturday night in Itaewon, and another girl to hit on, he recalled.
Kenzi had described Vincent in more alarming terms two months after the murder in an interview with Stars and Stripes.
“He was very strong and forward and very fast, and I didn’t feel right with him,” she said of Vincent. In an FBI interview that summer, she described him as “sexually aggressive.”
“He asked her to sleep with him that night. She turned him down, and the conversation bothered her, so she climbed over the table to get out of the booth…Vince seemed a little annoyed at the declination,” the interviewing agent wrote.
Vincent told investigators that account wasn’t true. The bar was crowded, but he wasn’t holding her captive in the booth.
Mansfield also considered a statement she made to Korean police a few days after the murder about another suspect, Nick Baer. Kenzi noted that Baer was manning the pitchers of green beer at Nickleby’s and said she thought Jamie’s inebriation might stem from something he put in the drink.
In the statement, awkwardly rendered by a translator, Kenzi said, “Nicolas offered us a lot of drinks in the Nickleby’s Club and further Jamie could not get up in her room. It was because I guess Nicolas added something to her drink. I wish you interview Nicolas more deliberately.”
Lab tests had shown Jamie was free of drugs, date-rape and otherwise. Was Kenzi deliberately trying to place blame elsewhere?
Lastly, there was the issue of time. Nearly everyone investigators interviewed that night, including Kenzi, said she was drunk and did not have a great sense of time. Initially, Kenzi said she and Jamie had left the bar sometime between 2 A.M. and 3:30 A.M. She later told authorities that after talking to the other exchange students and reflecting further, she thought she and Jamie had departed about 3:15 A.M.
As Mansfield saw it, that was problematic. Kenzi said she and Jamie had left the bar about the time the hashers had moved on to the nightclub. The hashers were very intoxicated and leaving in groups, but they put the time they left for Stompers between 12:30 A.M. and 2 A.M.
Mansfield went back to Itaewon and reinterviewed the bar owner, a German expat. The American girls left about 1:30 A.M., the man said. Can you be sure? Mansfield asked. The man acknowledged that it was a busy night and he wasn’t keeping tabs on people.
Is it possible that she left at 3:15 A.M.? Mansfield asked.
Absolutely not, the owner said. He said that by that time, the hashers were gone and the bar was empty except for a dozen people. The American girls were not among them, he said.
So if they really left at 2 A.M., Mansfield wondered, and Jeroen felt her crawl into bed at 3:30 A.M., what was going on in between? And why is Kenzi lying about it?
Mansfield ticked off the list of contradictions to the Korean investigators at a meeting in December 2001. Lee translated, and the Koreans seemed open to his findings. He told the detectives that he wanted to talk to the men who had been at the Kum Sung crime scene the morning of the murder. He wanted to know if they noticed anything that pointed to Kenzi.
The detectives set up a television to watch a brief video of the crime scene. As the camera panned over the bathroom, Mansfield pointed out Jamie’s bra underneath her jeans and underwear.
The camera swept over to bathtub and lingered on a plastic shopping bag resting on the bottom of the tub.
“I wanted to know what the plastic bag was doing there, because Miss Snider had stated that Miss Penich had taken a shower,” Mansfield later recalled.
“They said there was no shower. And I was puzzled and I said, ‘Well, what do you mean? There must have been a shower.’ They said, ‘No, there was no shower. There was no water,’” he said.
The tub was dry and so was the bathroom floor. Mansfield pressed them about crime scene photos that showed Jamie’s hair was damp and a report that stated her jeans were wet. Her hair was soaked with blood, not water, and the jeans were damp in only one spot, the Koreans explained. Mansfield was dumbfounded. Perhaps the water had simply evaporated.
He returned to the Kum Sung and once again rented Room 103 for a “nonscientific test.”
“I put a measurable amount of water, small amount. I took the [shower head], sprayed the ledge of the bathtub, the ledge of the floor,” he recalled.
He returned six and a half hours later—about the time between the murder and the processing of the crime scene.
“About half the water was still there,” he said.
She lied about this too, he thought. It was time to confront Kenzi Snider.