On October 17, 2003, six months after Kenzi Snider’s acquittal, the appellate court announced that its review of the case was complete and the three-judge panel was ready to issue a verdict.
Accompanied by her mother, Kenzi took an hour subway ride to the Seoul High Court’s sprawling campus south of the Han River. The overcast, humid day seemed to reflect her mental state. As she trudged up the steep hill toward the modern, imposing court building, she looked down at her mauve sweater and realized that she might be wearing a prison uniform by nightfall.
A Korean law firm run by an American had agreed to handle Kenzi’s appeal for free, and its attorneys assured her that the appellate verdict should be the same as that of the lower court. Despite a request from the judges for more evidence, the prosecutors had not added anything to the case file. They brushed off reporters’ calls about the case, and the consensus around the courthouse seemed to be that they regarded the matter as an American mess dumped into the laps of Koreans.
It was the first time Kenzi had walked in the front door of a Korean courthouse. On her other trips, guards brought her in a back door, cuffed and wrapped in ropes. As she walked to the courtroom, she noticed how different the Korean system was from the U.S. system.
Security, an obsession of U.S. courts, is nonexistent, perhaps because personal handguns are banned in Korea. Lawyers, witnesses and employees enter and exit the buildings unimpeded. There are no metal detectors. Bags, briefcases and boxes are not screened.
Hallways in American courthouses are frequently loud and crowded, seeming to double as recovery rooms, cafeterias and day cares. In Korea, they are clean, silent and empty, save for clerks who walked swiftly and silently between offices carrying stacks of folders. Relatives of the victims and defendants rarely come to court.
The courtroom where Kenzi’s case was to be decided was almost comically ornate. Crimson and midnight velvet trimmed the walls and the chairs. An enormous crystal chandelier bathed the room in a soft yellow light that seemed more appropriate for a dinner party than a legal proceeding. The judges wore dramatic purple and black.
It was sentencing day, and guards escorted prisoners from a rear holding cell into the court. Four months had passed since Kenzi first saw the color-coded uniforms and the heavy ropes. As the lead judge pronounced each sentence, the prisoner stared at the floor, then bowed to the judges and was led out.
Finally, her name was called. She rose and walked into the well, her lawyer on one side and an interpreter on the other. The lead judge, Justice Jun Bong-jin, delivered the decision: The confession was inadmissible. Beyond that, he said, the evidence suggested that someone else had killed Jamie Penich. In a soft-spoken, steady voice, the judge ticked off a list of evidence pointing toward a male perpetrator. Among them: the man with the bloody pants seen by the motel manager’s wife, the angry American male voice a fellow student had heard, and the lack of blood on Kenzi’s clothes and shoes.
“It is very reasonable the person who committed this crime might be a third person, not Miss Snider,” he said.
When he finished, Kenzi bowed slightly and returned to the gallery, where she collapsed in her mother’s arms, crying. She allowed herself a few minutes of relief before reminding herself and her mother that she still had one more hurdle. There was no doubt prosecutors would appeal to the Supreme Court.
“I’m saving my emotions for the very end, when it will all be over. Until then, it’s like, ‘Don’t get too excited,’” she told a few reporters who were on hand for the verdict.
An hour later, an embassy official called the Penichs. The family had braced for the decision.
“Of course, we’re upset, but we were expecting it,” Patty said. She was trying to sound resigned, but anger simmered under her words.
“The way their system is set up is just terrible. She’s going to get off, and they’re just going through the motions,” she said.
Shortly after the verdict, Heath Bozonie packed up her things and flew to Minnesota, leaving Kenzi on her own. The wedding of her middle son, Durham, was set for the end of December, and she was needed to make the bridesmaids’ dresses.
Kenzi was eager to follow. Her lawyers petitioned the prosecutors for her to return to Minnesota for the wedding. After all the formality of the Korean courts, it was a very casual agreement. The prosecutors, exhausted from a politically charged American case that they seemed not to want, asked her if she would return if the Supreme Court found her guilty. She promised she would.
Okay, you can go, they told her. The lead prosecutor handed back her passport and a Post-it with his cell phone number in case there was a problem at the airport. When she asked for something more official, a consular officer at the U.S. embassy e-mailed a two-paragraph letter to her Hotmail account.
On Christmas Day 2003, almost a year to the date that she’d arrived in handcuffs, Kenzi flew to Minnesota. She made it in time for her brother’s wedding. For the Penichs, her return had a special cruelty. Jamie’s older sister, Jennell, also was getting married, but Jamie wouldn’t be there.
Later that year, both Kenzi and the Penichs cooperated with a piece on the case on the ABC newsmagazine Prime Time Live. In the piece, the Penichs made it clear that they believed Kenzi had killed their daughter and gotten away with murder.
Shortly after the program aired, the Penichs got a call from a woman with an accent. She said she was Portuguese and had seen the show.
“All I can tell you is check the bear, check the bear,” she told Brian Penich. He was confused, and the woman hung up before he could get any more information.
Was she referring to one of the soldier suspects, Nick Baer? the family wondered. Baer’s name was never mentioned in the piece, or in any story ever published.
At the kitchen table, Jennell and Amanda told Patty to just forget about it. Just let it go, mom, they said. Patty felt she should tell someone. With Mansfield gone, she passed the information to the CID agent who had replaced him in Seoul. She said she and Brian still were certain that Kenzi had killed their daughter, but they suspected Baer was somehow involved.
The agent seemed hesitant.
Technically, he said, the case was closed when Kenzi was arrested.
“He said that he’d have to check with his superiors before he could contact Nick Baer,” she recalled. “I got the feeling he was humoring me.”
While they spoke, the agent told Patty that in their office on MP Hill, they kept a photo of Jamie to remind them that perseverance in an investigation paid off. From Patty’s perspective, there was not much of a payoff. The woman who confessed to killing her daughter was free and the man she believed an accomplice had never served a day in jail. But as the months and years passed, she was grateful if anyone outside their family remembered Jamie at all.
“I thanked him for that,” she recalled.
A year passed and then another, and Kenzi Snider’s guilt remained an open issue before the Supreme Court of Korea. It was very unusual for the justices to take so long to rule, but few in Seoul’s legal circles could blame them for foot dragging. This case is a headache, those familiar with the court’s workings said. An American case, botched by Americans, what good will come out of ruling either way? If they acquit her, the Americans will be angry. But how can they convict her under our law?
Since Kenzi’s first trial, the law governing confessions had become even more of a problem for prosecutors. In the wake of the accused hit man’s death at the hands of prosecutors, the courts in Korea raised the bar for confessions. In most cases, it was no longer enough for a prosecutor to hear an incriminating statement from a suspect. If the suspect denied the confession to a judge, it was as if it never happened. The long-shot argument the prosecutors had put forth—that the FBI and army agents were the equivalent of prosecutors—was moot. Acquittal seemed the only real possibility, but the justices were silent.
In Seoul, Jamie Penich’s name is most often met with quizzical looks. Even reporters, police officials and prosecutors, the individuals that one would expect to recall such a tragic murder of a young woman, seem to strain to place the name. Once in a while, someone remembers.
Oh yes, the person will say. The lesbian. Or no, she wasn’t a lesbian, but the girl who killed her was. I forget. Wasn’t someone a lesbian? Whatever happened with that case?
The short memories of Koreans does not surprise Dr. Kim. She left her administrative position shortly after Jamie’s murder and is back teaching students about minorities in Korean society and the effect of mass media on the culture.
She struggles to explain why Jamie’s case had little resonance for Koreans. It comes down to the Korean concept of inside and outside, she said. We are a very insular, homogeneous people and we tend to divide everything into what is us and what is not us, she explains. It’s like a house. When you are outside, you wear your shoes and you show a hard demeanor, but when you are inside, you take off your shoes and relax. A murder involving Americans in Itaewon, that is outside the house, she says.
“Maybe if she was here longer and she had gotten to know people, then maybe it would be different. But she was only here for two weeks,” she says.
Itaewon remains a party zone, but there are fewer Americans. The U.S. military is in the process of moving out of the Yongsan Garrison to a new base south of the city. By 2008, the Americans will be gone and Korea will take over the sprawling base in the middle of the crowded city.
On weekends, soldiers still come to Hooker Hill, but they can no longer stay out all night. Just after the September 11 attacks, the military instituted a curfew. The base commanders also barred soldiers from visiting a long list of bars that encourage prostitution. On weekend nights, military policemen patrol the alleys of Itaewon enforcing the new rules.
Nickleby’s has been redecorated as a Mexican cantina. The soldiers who partied there in 2001 are long gone. Their replacements, many of whom were in junior high school when Jamie died, have not heard of the murder.
“Wow, that’s wild,” they say when told about the case.
The men first considered suspects have moved on. Josh Harlan, the dental technician who kissed Jamie on the dance floor, left the army and returned to Montana, where he serves in the National Guard. Discussing the case five years later, he struggles to remember Jamie’s first name. He says he has separated the long night he spent under CID interrogation from the rest of his time in Seoul.
“For me, Korea was great. I would do almost all of it over again,” he says.
Michael Kolinski, the infantry captain who also kissed Jamie on the dance floor, finished his second year-long tour in Iraq in 2005. The war has faded many of his memories of Korea, but he says he still remembers drinking too much, running the hash and the CID officers who were so convinced he had killed a young woman he could barely recall.
“I didn’t even know her last name,” he says. “They had to tell me.”
Vincent, the captain who hit on Kenzi in the bar booth, also served in Iraq, commanding a military intelligence unit protecting the Green Zone in Baghdad. He is married now, and he and his wife run a toy drive through their church for Iraqi children. In an e-mail from Baghdad, he writes that he does not have much information to offer.
“Kenzi was just a girl that I hit on. Nothing more, nothing less. In my single days, I hit on lots of girls. I honestly do not remember her personality. If all this had not happened, I would have said, ‘fun,’ but I really don’t remember much about her,” he writes.
He says that when he found out about her arrest, “I was happy that the real killer had been found. A really crazy story had taken an unexpected turn.”
He has lost touch with his friend Javier Martinez, who left the army and is living in California. Of the main suspects approached about the case, only Nick Baer declines to talk. He is a sergeant stationed at an army hospital in Virginia. He sent a letter to the hospital spokeswoman saying he didn’t wish to discuss Jamie Penich.
Lee says he isn’t surprised.
“I think his experience with the CID was more traumatic than any other suspect that came in,” Lee says. “He was the most scrutinized.”
Lee works at FBI headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown D.C. He inspects field offices for the bureau, a step in the promotion ladder, he explains. It is not exciting, and he does not expect anything in his career could ever match the thrill of the Penich case.
“I’m still amazed even today that Kenzi confessed,” he says.
“That particular day in West Virginia is the most memorable moment in my twenty-year bureau career. It was an amazing experience I went through, and I appreciate it. I feel I witnessed something special. If you read the confession, it’s like poetry. I’m just sorry she didn’t have the maturity to see this all the way through,” he says.
Lee bristles when asked about evidence that might indicate a male killer.
“The motel owner and Miss Yi and what the other student heard, we’d be sitting here trying to figure that out still today if Kenzi hadn’t confessed. But she did, so it’s meaningless,” he says.
He adds, “The outcome of this case would seem to say something about the truth, but it actually doesn’t say anything.”
Mark Mansfield left the army in December 2003 and took a job as a civilian investigator for the CID office in Vicksburg, Mississippi. After Hurricane Katrina, much of his work related to detecting fraud in contracts given out by the Army Corps of Engineers. He moved his family to Mississippi, but he spends most of his time on the road traveling between construction projects. He has approached the assignment with the same zeal he brought to the Penich case. He works nights and weekends and worries that his family, which now includes a fourth child, a son, does not see him enough.
Reached on his cell phone on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, he says that he wants to talk about his investigation, but that it is emotionally difficult.
“This thing is so close to my heart,” he says.
His supervisors at CID headquarters insist all questions for Mansfield be submitted in writing. After months of negotiations, Mansfield’s answers arrive by e-mail. He writes that he is proud of his investigation despite the result and feels sorry that some believe he was responding to political pressure when he targeted Kenzi.
“The fact that I felt no pressure from Mr. Specter’s inquiry can be believed or not believed, but it is true. My career did not hinge on the case being solved or not,” he writes.
He brushes off suggestions that he tried to coerce a confession from Michael Greco or Kenzi to close the case.
“To infer as much means that we didn’t care about the truth in this investigation, and I personally spent too much of my life and energy on this investigation to merely settle for a fabricated confession and close the file,” he writes.
He says he thinks of the case often and what he might have done differently. He wishes they had done more to try to find the boots that Kenzi wore the night of the murder. The boots could have been the smoking gun, he suggests.
“For the clothes she was wearing that evening to have been so readily available to her, I don’t like the way the boots have just vanished,” he writes.
As part of Jamie’s memorial service, the University of Pittsburgh planted a purple beech tree in the yard of Heinz Chapel. The university was supposed to mark the tree with a plaque, but five years later, it has yet to be erected, and the lack of marker makes it difficult to locate the tree. Officials from the public affairs office make several phone calls and a couple of field trips to the yard. Eventually, they identify a tree that seems to be Jamie’s beech. It is the right size, neither a sapling nor old wood, a sort of adolescent of trees. It stands near a sidewalk. On weekdays, students trudge by it on their way to class. On weekends, wedding parties sweep by it on their way up the chapel stairs.
Just down Fifth Avenue is the study-abroad office. It is a bright, busy place. Large windows bathe undergraduates in sunlight as they read colorful pamphlets about exchange programs in Paris and Tokyo and Sydney. The students seem uniformly gleeful.
For a time after the murder, Jamie’s picture hung in the reading room. As time went by, however, fewer people knew Jamie or her story. Eventually, the photo came down. In her office down the hall, Angi Yucas remembers how she and a colleague used to send the Penichs flowers on the anniversary of Jamie’s death. After a couple of years, they wondered if it was more upsetting than helpful and stopped. Dr. Yucas keeps a file on Jamie in the cabinet by her desk, but she rarely looks at it. Paging through the folder remains a draining experience. Her eyes well with tears when she thinks about that raw spring. Since then, she has dealt with some date rapes and terrorism fears, but nothing compares to Brian Penich’s cracking voice asking her to “just bring her home.” She is glad she went to the viewing and the funeral. She remembers the words of the grief counselor.
“Nothing we can do can really take away the pain. All you can do is try to assure the parents that their child will be remembered,” she echoes.
Jamie’s fiancé, Jeff Gretz, still lives in Pittsburgh, but he is often on tour as a drummer in a metal band named Zao. Twice he agrees to talk about Jamie, only to cancel. Her parents no longer have contact with him.
“He’s doing his thing and that’s fine,” Patty Penich says.
Mia Scott Shea, Jamie’s roommate and best friend, married and moved to Sacramento. For a week after Jamie’s death, she stayed with the Penichs, but as the months stretched on, she found her contact with them more and more difficult. There was nothing that she could say or do to ease their pain, and she wondered if the developments in her life—graduation, marriage—served only as unpleasant reminders of the life Jamie would never have.
“I think about Jamie every day,” she says before asking how the Penichs are doing.
“Tell them that I think about them too,” she adds.
In Derry, change is slow and subtle. A new priest. One less business in town. Another row in the cemetery. A decade has passed since Jamie left the high school on Chestnut Street, and the teenagers who hurtle through the halls each day may not recognize her name. The teachers, the keepers of all institutional knowledge, remember Jamie, though. Sometimes, it’s seeing Patty or Brian in town that makes them think of her. Other times, it’s the echo of her personality in a current student. They see a quiet, self-assured young woman who casts her eyes not on the hills around town, but over them. It is these kids, the Jamies, that delight and terrify them.
“I think that with the children that we love, when they want to experience life, all we can do is pray that in that ride of experience, life doesn’t get taken from them,” Jamie’s English teacher, Linda Warner, says. “Unfortunately, that is what happened to Jamie.”
Some of Jamie’s classmates eventually left Derry to find work or to marry, but many of them eventually returned. There is just something in Derry, they say. No place else feels like home. One who left and returned is Jamie’s high school boyfriend, Jason Young.
Married with two children, he inspects nuclear tubing at the Westinghouse plant in nearby Blairsville. Whenever he drives past St. Martin’s, he thinks of Jamie in his passenger seat, crossing herself. He notes the spot across the street where he stood when they carried her casket into the church. He sometimes sees her parents in town, but he finds himself avoiding them. Other than a whispered “sorry” at the viewing, he has not spoken to Patty or Brian. The conversation he had with Jamie just before she left for her senior year abroad haunts him. She was going to chicken out and stay in Derry, but he would not let her.
“It’s stupid, I guess, but I just feel guilty. Like I could’ve talked her out of going to Belgium and then maybe she never would’ve gone to Korea,” he says.
When people ask how many children they have, Brian and Patty always say three. They talk about Jamie in the present tense. Jamie likes her grandmother’s spaghetti. Jamie loves tennis. Jamie wants to see the world. Patty tells people that she keeps sane by pretending that Jamie is just away at school, gone on some wild international trip.
“Jamie’s at school, Jamie’s traveling,” she says, flinging her hand out toward the picture window in her living room.
She smiles, but there is a distinct bitterness in it. The truth is that every moment of every day the Penichs are aware their daughter is dead. They have learned to walk around the hole in their lives rather than flinging themselves into it as they did for the first few months, but it is still there, gaping.
Brian, the more emotional of the two, has difficulty even saying his daughter’s name to a stranger. Patty can seem hardened, but her grief is raw and just beneath the surface. She still carries Jamie’s flight itinerary in her wallet. They were standing in the Pittsburgh airport and Jamie just wanted to get on the plane and go, but Patty made her write down on this little scrap of paper the flight number, the time and the date: June 11, 2001. It is like the deed to a house destroyed by a flood, proof that she had something once and it was ripped away from her lawlessly.
“I’ll probably never take it out,” she says.
The Penichs’ mourning breaks into chapters. There was their initial, all-consuming sadness when Patty couldn’t get out of bed and they didn’t open their mouths except to sob. Then there was the investigation, the desperate search for answers that gave them a sense of purpose and therefore hope. There was the rage they felt toward Kenzi after the confession. That gave way to bitter disappointment when she was acquitted.
In the years since then, they have learned to manage that heartbreak. They eventually gathered the strength to pack up Jamie’s room. She impressed them to the end. They shook their heads at the anthropology books that filled her shelves.
“How did she read this stuff?” they asked each other.
They found they could still experience moments of great joy. Jennell got married. Amanda graduated from high school. Brian turned fifty, and Patty threw him a big party at the firehouse. They survived more heartbreak when Jennell miscarried her first child.
Throughout all the developments, they kept Jamie in their thoughts and conversations. But during a busy winter week a few years after her murder, a handful of days passed without the mention of her name. Jennell, rushing through the grocery checkout, handed the clerk a club card. The store employee paused.
“Are you Jamie Penich?” she asked.
Jennell was taken aback.
“Why are you asking me that?” she said.
The clerk pointed out that the card belonged to “Jamie L. Penich.” Jennell had no idea how her sister’s card had gotten in her wallet, but the family took it as a message.
“It was like Jamie saying to all of us, ‘Don’t forget about me. Please don’t forget about me,’” she said.
St. Martin’s cemetery spreads down a long, gentle hill behind the church. The small American flags that mark the graves of veterans seem to wave from every third stone. As the graveyard slopes down from the parking lot, the old, cracked headstones of nineteenth-century farmers give way to the modest family plots of coal miners of the 1950s and 1960s and eventually to the newer graves of factory workers and truckers. At least twenty-nine members of the Penichs’ extended family are buried there.
Jamie’s grave is in the most recent section, a flat field at the bottom of the hill. It was once a woods where Patty and her best friend played as children. Jamie’s grave stands out from twenty-five feet. It is covered in roses and stuffed animals. The largest decoration is a carved wooden angel. She has brown hair and is lying on her stomach reading a thick book.
The headstone is black and flush with the ground:
PENICH
Jamie Lynn
Sept. 19, 1979
March 17, 2001
If tears could build a stairway
and memories were a lane,
we’d walk right up to heaven
and bring you back again
Separating Jamie’s family name and her first name, there is an engraving unique in St. Martin’s cemetery. It is a map of the world. The Penichs might have selected something more traditional, praying hands, perhaps, or a simple cross or the lamb that is a favorite on the graves of children. But tradition never defined Jamie. Even if her family did not always understand Jamie’s dreams, and even if her dreams took her away from them, they knew that it was those plans for the future that made Jamie who she was. It seemed right to acknowledge that on her headstone.
She wanted so desperately to get out of Derry and see the world. For a brief time, she lived her dream, and then she had to come home. She is buried in a field that overlooks her hometown, surrounded by people who lived their entire lives in it. When Jennell’s son died, the family comforted themselves with thoughts of Jamie caring for him. They buried the baby in Jamie’s plot, on top of her casket.
When her parents die, her father will be buried on her left, and her mother on her right. “That way she will be with us forever,” Patty explains.
Of all the places Jamie traveled and all the places she wanted to see, her mother says she feels certain her daughter’s spirit is in Derry.
“She’s here. She’s in the house. It’s peaceful here,” Patty says.
Shortly after Kenzi’s arrest, the Penichs filed preliminary paperwork for a civil suit against her. They see little point in pursuing it.
“To file a civil suit is to go after money. If Kenzi Snider has no money, there’s no use,” Patty says. “So we have to wait until Kenzi Snider makes something of herself.”
When she mentions the woman she believes killed her daughter, it is always by first and last name, as if she is a concept rather than an actual person. Mostly though, she tries not to talk about her at all.
“I could probably find 20 ways to do away with Kenzi Snider and not think twice, but I feel nothing for her,” she says.