Reporter Billy Jensen was on assignment for the New York Post in 2001 when he made a life-changing decision. Sent to interview the parents of a Long Island woman killed by a train after she and her friend drove around a closed railroad crossing, he told himself, “I’m done.”
It wasn’t that he didn’t like covering crime or tragic deaths — he actually loved the work. But he felt the weight of not being able to help victims. “I wanted to cover unsolved murders,” he thought.
And so began Jensen’s remarkable journey from promising street reporter — he also worked for The Village Voice, The New York Times and helped found the Long Island Press — to citizen detective.
Once he even tracked down a fugitive, finding the suspect in Mexico 24 hours after homicide detectives asked for his help.
“This is actually working!” he writes. “I was becoming the world’s first digital consulting detective.”
In 2013, Jensen finally made the leap from reporting on homicides to actually finding the culprits, when he met the sister of an East Village man, Brian Boothe, found dead in his apartment on Christmas Day, a knife wound in his neck. Cops suspected suicide.
The sister, convinced he’d been murdered, approached Jensen, and it turned out she was right, but the perpetrator remained a ghost. Reporting on a “killer I was sure would kill again,” Jensen recalls in the book, “I wrote the story and tried to catch him — or at least put pressure on the police to do so. I failed.”
Even so, the sister introduced him to Parents of Murdered Children, and Jensen bonded with heartbroken families and loved ones. “Letters started arriving, almost all of them ending with two words, ‘Please help,’ ” he writes.
So he left New York for Hollywood and became a senior producer on a TV show about cold cases, “Crime Watch Daily,” while developing his own technique for unmasking predators.
‘The intense nature of the subject and the stakes will take their toll on your relationships, your job and your faith in humanity’
In a random act of violence outside a Chicago 7-Eleven late one night in 2016, a shadowy thug in a hooded sweatshirt savagely punched bartender Marques Gaines in the face, knocking him out cold and into the street, where a car ran him over.
Cops were stumped. They had no idea who their man was.
But they had grainy surveillance footage of the crime, and that gave Jensen an idea. He created a Facebook page in the voice of the killer.
“This is the video where I punch a stranger,” he posted. “The man who died is in the blue shirt. He just went to the store for some chips . . . His family desperately wants answers.”
Jensen then boosted the post, plunking down $100 to geotarget the River North neighborhood where the slaying occurred. He did the same on Twitter, asking a popular sports blogger for a retweet as the killing happened in an area full of sports bars.
The blogger agreed and got a reply from a follower whose friend had been on that corner that night and shot his own video of the crime. “Get your fa—t ass up,” the puncher yells after coldcocking Gaines.
A second pal had snapped a face-forward photo of the killer, without his hoodie, showing “a black man with a scowl, a heavy brow and a widow’s peak.”
Jensen scoured mug-shot books, looking at more than 3,000 pictures, then got a likely match. The suspect, Marcus Moore, had a long rap sheet with two arrests near the murder scene. Jensen found him on Facebook. “It had to be him,” he writes.
It was. Cops located Moore in Minnesota and hauled him back to Illinois to face charges. “I felt like jumping up and down,” Jensen writes. “I felt like screaming.”
The adrenaline rush was short-lived. There are more than 200,000 unsolved homicides across the US — and in about 38 percent of all murders, the killer is never caught.
“Attempting to solve a crime will consume a good chunk of your time. The intense nature of the subject and the stakes will take their toll on your relationships, your job and your faith in humanity,” he writes.
Still, Jensen can’t stop. Though his crime solving work brings in money through a podcast, his book and consulting for media companies, the real payoff is catching a killer, which he describes as “like a drug.”
At one point, he juggled 30 cases and rang up tens of thousands of dollars in credit-card debt doing his job. But Jensen has now played a part in clearing 10 homicides, and he hopes others will join the cause.
“If you’re looking for a casual hobby, this ain’t it,” he writes. “But I truly believe that citizens like you can help solve the backlog of unsolved murders.”