She turned the podcast back up.
“It seems like we’ll never figure out whether this was a coincidence or a serial killer,” Tim was saying. “Unless, and no one wants to hope for this, their bodies are found.”
Madison went to the dresser in her bedroom and threw on some yoga pants, then got on the floor and started doing three hundred crunches.
As she crunched, she tried to put herself in the place of the girls leaving the Gaslamp when the bars closed: You’ve been drinking, maybe you’re even drunk. How do you end up missing? What could have happened? Madison didn’t want to be on the PR team for the Gaslamp District: “Come out for a night of fun … maybe you’ll make it home, maybe you won’t!”
And anyway, Gaslamp was a bit of a misnomer: while the area was built in the Victorian area, it had never had gas lamps. When Alonzo Horton began development in the 1860s, it was actually called New Town to distinguish it from Old Town, the original Spanish colonial settlement of San Diego, built in the 1700s and still in existence. Horton wanted a more centralized San Diego closer to the water, and he had succeeded: the Gaslamp District was now part of downtown San Diego, mere blocks from city hall and the courthouses—and the water. The area had fallen into a long period of decay but was renewed in the 1980s and became what it was today: a vibrant area of nightlife and shopping frequented by locals and tourists alike. During the renewal period the locals had begun calling it the Gaslamp District, and the name stuck. Madison thought the official name was the Gaslamp Quarter, but once locals got a name lodged in their heads, it was hard to change it. You could park near the sixteen-block radius of red-brick buildings and walk from restaurant to bar to shop. Better yet, take a rideshare service, walk around all night, and then get home safely. Well, getting home safely was how it was supposed to work.
The first victim, Samantha Erickson, had last been seen four years before, on security video at Hank’s Dive, at 1:30 AM; the camera was positioned over the bar, mostly to watch the cash register and make sure the bartender wasn’t stealing money. In the video, which Madison had watched online when she first heard about the case, the bartender could be seen cutting Samantha off because she was so drunk. He even used the universal hand-across-the-throat sign. Samantha stumbled backward, right into the side of another guy, spilling his drink on his shirt. He could be seen exclaiming and yelling at her, and she stumbled out of the frame while he was gesturing wildly at her. She was never seen again. Her VW Jetta was found the next day parked a few blocks away; it was locked and appeared undisturbed.
Madison turned over and began a two-minute plank.
There was no video outside the bar or on the streets nearby. Hank’s used to have security video outside, but after a Hank’s bouncer assaulted a guy ten years earlier and their own security video helped to convict him—and get the victim a multimillion- dollar settlement from Hank’s—their security video “wasn’t working” anytime video was sought, which was quite often, considering the number of assaults that occurred at Hank’s. The bar specialized in huge drinks, beer guzzlers and shots, and generally consuming as much liquor as possible and still staying upright. The waiters and bar staff all practiced that form of serving entertainment where they were intentionally rude to the customers and everyone was supposed to laugh. Madison had gone in one time and was out within ten minutes. She considered it a frat-boy bar, and she saw a fight start even in the short time she was there. Excess alcohol being served at Hank’s meant bar brawls there on a nightly basis.
Two years later Elissa Alvarez didn’t make it home after a night at Bourbon Baby in the Gaslamp District. Her friends said she’d gotten into a fight on the phone with her boyfriend and was upset and wanted to go home. She wasn’t that drunk; she was more distraught, or else they wouldn’t have let her drive. She walked out of the bar to go home and was never seen again. The next day her car was found a few blocks away in a parking lot, undisturbed.
The similarities between the two incidents were striking. Was there someone driving around downtown San Diego at night looking for women walking alone? Madison kept thinking of a rideshare driver preying on drunken women who decided as they walked to their cars that they were too drunk to drive. She had read about a more recent case where a woman alleged she was picked up by a rideshare and driven from New York into New Jersey, raped by several men, and then driven home and dropped off. It was so traumatic she blocked it out. When she saw the next morning—after waking in inexplicably horrible pain—that the cost of the ride the night before was over a hundred dollars for what should have been a fifteen-minute ride home from the bar, she looked at the map of her ride and couldn’t understand how she’d been taken to another state. She sent a screenshot of the map to her friend and texted WTF? This was my ride last night. It was only in discussing it with a friend the next day that the memories came flooding back, and she started sobbing and went to police. The woman was now suing the rideshare for their response to her alleged attack, and for the culture that allowed a driver like that onto their workforce. Madison thought it was interesting that the victim in the case was not suing for money. She was suing for, as the woman put it, “a seat at the table”—to work on global changes so that this horrible crime didn’t happen to another woman.
There were plenty of other crimes alleged against rideshare companies, and Madison couldn’t help but wonder if the Gaslamp mystery would turn out to be the case of a criminal rideshare driver, or even a fake rideshare driver—someone pretending to work for a rideshare company who really wasn’t—preying on women out at night alone. Madison felt like the apparent safety of the now ubiquitous rideshare was just that—an apparency. In fact, Madison felt it was more like a predator’s dream, like taking candy from a baby: drunk women stumbling around getting into a car with a strange man—and not just willingly. They paid to get into the car with a strange man.
Every time Madison had another thought regarding what might have happened to the girls in the Gaslamp, like the rideshare angle, she would tweet about it. Sometimes another Twitter user responded, and once in a while one of the podcast’s hosts, Tim or Lance, tweeted back. Twitter had created a nice community of armchair detectives and real detectives, who normally worked alone, and allowed them to share ideas and enthusiasm that kept cold cases alive. She just used the hashtag #GaslampMystery, and all the other sleuths saw it and joined the conversation.
On the one hand, Madison felt like she should probably work on finding friends in real life instead of engaging with strangers on the internet. But on the other hand, strangers on the internet could be turned off with a switch; you had to talk to real people even when you didn’t feel like it.
She sat on the ground to stretch out her hamstrings.
“Even though we can’t respond to everyone, we do appreciate all of your tweets with suggestions and clues and ideas,” Tim said on the podcast. “We definitely forward anything that might be important to law enforcement. Not to mention that your idea might give someone else an idea that leads to a resolution. And who knows, maybe the person or persons responsible is paying attention and realizes we’re getting closer. That could cause them to make a mistake.”
“A slipup that gets them caught,” Lance added. “You never know. That’s why we bring as much attention to these cases as we can. So keep those tweets coming! And now on to the case of Maura Murray, University of Massachusetts student missing since February 9, 2004.”