WEST McCRAY:
He was homeless until he was nearly twenty-four.
ELLIS JACOBS:
I didn’t have it as bad as some people. I couch-surfed a lot. I had a lot of good friends. But I was having problems getting my feet under me.
WEST McCRAY:
And then he met Keith.
But Ellis knew him as Darren.
ELLIS JACOBS:
What happened was, I got into this game online, when I was at a pal’s house. An MMO. Massive Multiplayer Online game. You can talk to people while you’re playing, and that’s how I met Darren. There was nothing sinister about it, we just struck up a friendship and he told me he knew what it was like, drifting from place to place. He wanted to help.
WEST McCRAY:
Just like that? You barely knew each other and he was offering you help?
ELLIS JACOBS:
I’m condensing it down for you. A lot. We had over a thousand hours in that game. It’s a lot of time to get to know someone, or at least feel like you have.
WEST McCRAY:
What did he tell you about himself?
ELLIS JACOBS:
Well, it’s just like I said—he said he was a drifter, that he was estranged from his family most of his life too. His dad used to beat him …
Now I wonder if any of it was true, but I don’t know. He got me my job at the Bluebird when I needed it the most. He never gave me any reason to think he was … bad. I mean, he was good to me.
He saved Joe’s life, for God’s sake.
Joe talked about Darren like he was a brother, like he was one of those guys that’ll do anything for you if you ask, but can never quite figure out how to get his own life together, you know?
WEST McCRAY:
Tell me about meeting Sadie.
ELLIS JACOBS:
I was working that whole night. I hadn’t heard a word about her when I changed off with Joe. She came into the office late, and her face was all busted up. She didn’t look good. First person she asked for was Darren.
WEST McCRAY:
But he wasn’t there that weekend.
ELLIS JACOBS:
Nope, but he hadn’t been around a long time before that either. Longest stretch we’d gone without seeing him. We still haven’t seen him.
WEST McCRAY:
Did Darren ever keep his whereabouts hidden from you?
ELLIS JACOBS:
Not from Joe, not from me. But we understood … you know, it was understood not to bug him about wherever he ended up, or share it with anyone who asked. That’s what Joe told me, anyway.
WEST McCRAY:
What happened with Sadie?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She said she was a family friend. She asked a lot of questions about him. The thing that stood out to me at the time was she was real persistent. I offered to leave a message for him, she refused. She asked if she could leave something for him in his room, I said no. She asked if I knew where he was and I wouldn’t tell her that either. After that, she gave up. Least, I thought she did.
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]:
That broken window in the bathroom?
Sadie.
WEST McCRAY [TO ELLIS]:
And you didn’t hear the window break?
ELLIS JACOBS:
If I’m shut up in here, and the TV’s on … I didn’t hear it.
WEST McCRAY:
What made you decide to check the room?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She put it in my head. She was acting so fucking weird about it … I couldn’t shake it. So an hour or so later, I guess it was, I got up to look. My gut just told me to. From the front of the motel, it didn’t look like anything was going on, but I went right up to the window and I looked in. The curtains were drawn, but I could make out what I thought was some kind of … something moving around.
I opened the door, and there she was.
WEST McCRAY:
Tell me everything you remember.
ELLIS JACOBS:
It was … a lot to take in. The place was trashed. She’d done it. She was bleedin’ bad from her arm—
WEST McCRAY:
Bleeding?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She broke the bathroom window, and she didn’t get through it clean. It tore up her arm.
WEST McCRAY:
You never told Joe about that window. You didn’t tell Joe about any of this until he told you about talking to me.
ELLIS JACOBS:
Yeah, that’s right.
See, Darren’s room is off-limits and I figured I’d lose my job if Joe got wind. I got like, no rules working there except that one and it’s the easiest rule in the world not to break so … I just left it. I didn’t know how long it was gonna be before Joe had the sale and I needed that money ’til it wasn’t there anymore. Soon as the Bluebird got bought, he let me go and I just … they’re gonna tear the place down. It seemed pointless to me to bring it up.
WEST McCRAY:
Okay, so let’s keep going from the point where she broke the window and cut her arm and you found her.
ELLIS JACOBS:
She cut it up enough it needed stitches. She didn’t get any, but it looked deep enough to warrant ’em and that’s when I realized how bad she must’ve wanted in his room. So I get in there, and I see her and she sees me and she pulls out a switchblade and she puts it to my throat and she asks me—she asks me … Jesus, this is hard to say out loud.
WEST McCRAY:
What did she ask you, Ellis?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She asked me if I was like him.
WEST McCRAY:
Like Darren?
ELLIS JACOBS:
Yeah.
WEST McCRAY:
What did she mean by that?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She wanted to know if I … if I … how she put it was … God, it’s ugly.
She asked me if I fuck little girls.
WEST McCRAY:
Those were her words?
ELLIS JACOBS:
Her exact words. She had a knife against my throat and she asked me if I was … like Darren, and that’s what she meant when she asked. And of all the things she could’ve said, I wasn’t—that wasn’t anything close to what I was expecting.
WEST McCRAY:
What did you do?
ELLIS JACOBS:
I told her I didn’t know … I didn’t know about Darren. I told her how I met him online in a game and all that. She was … Okay, so when my parents kicked me out, I had to rely on other people seeing through me, you know what I mean?
WEST McCRAY:
Explain it to me.
ELLIS JACOBS:
Well, like when I was too proud or I was too angry … I was always putting on a front to keep people from giving me what I needed. I’d hurt them. Not—not physically, but I’d just put my pain on them because I didn’t know how to ask for help. So I always try to remember that, about other people. I always try to see past them and give them help, if I think I can.
WEST McCRAY:
So you decided to help her?
ELLIS JACOBS:
A little. I mean—it was more that I was shitting myself and I had a knife at my throat and I really thought I was gonna die, man. She was crazed. She just had this … wild look in her eyes … and that was all I had to work with, so I worked with it.
WEST McCRAY:
You talked her down.
ELLIS JACOBS:
I guess so.
WEST McCRAY:
How did you do that, exactly?
ELLIS JACOBS:
I said she was hurt and I could help her and she could tell me about Darren, because I didn’t know. I could kinda see that she … she was tired, man. She just looked like she was done. So I had that on my side. I think that was part of why she lowered the knife … but also, I guess—okay, so in the moment, I believed I was going to die. I truly believed that she was going to kill me. But after she left … I don’t know
. Hindsight’s twenty/twenty. But after, I don’t think she would’ve gone through with it. Still cried like a damn baby when she let me go, though.
WEST McCRAY:
Walk me through what happened next.
ELLIS JACOBS:
We went back to the main office and I fixed up her arm, and she told me about—she told me about Darren.
WEST McCRAY:
By all accounts, Darren had been a very good friend to you. I know you offered to hear her out as an act of self-preservation but was that all there was to it? Did you believe her?
ELLIS JACOBS:
I mean, when someone comes at you with a knife and they’re not trying to shake you down for money or something like that, and the first words out of their mouth are askin’ if you mess with little kids … there’s got to be something to that, right? And even though I … I swear I never knew the Darren she was talking about, she found this—she found this stuff in his room.
WEST McCRAY:
What kind of stuff?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She’d found a bunch of fake IDs and they were all—they were all Darren, the pictures on the IDs, but they all had different names. And none of them were Darren’s name.
WEST McCRAY:
Do you remember any of them?
ELLIS JACOBS:
Just Keith, like you said. She said she knew him as Keith. And then the other things she had from his room were, uh … they were tags.
WEST McCRAY:
Tags?
ELLIS JACOBS:
Tags like … they were cut out of shirts … and they had names—girl names—he’d written girls’ names on them. When I asked her what that meant … she said they were his trophies … his trophies from kids.
Sadie was one of the names.
WEST McCRAY:
Okay.
ELLIS JACOBS:
She didn’t say she was Sadie, though, and I didn’t even really think about it until you told me her name and then I remembered.
WEST McCRAY:
Okay, what happened after that?
ELLIS JACOBS:
Are you all right?
WEST McCRAY:
Yeah, just—what …
What happened after that?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She said Darren “did something” to her little sister, and he hurt kids, and that was the reason she was looking for him.
WEST McCRAY:
What did she mean by that?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She never said. I told her she should just call the police, get them to take care of it, if he was so bad … we fought about that.
WEST McCRAY:
She didn’t want to?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She didn’t want to. She made it out like she wanted to be sure he was there first, then she’d call the cops … but she had to be there because after everything he’d put her through, she needed to see it happen.
WEST McCRAY:
What did you do?
ELLIS JACOBS:
I bandaged up her arm … I mean, I bandaged it up as best as I could, which wasn’t very good, and then I sent her on her way.
WEST McCRAY:
You sent her to him.
You knew where he was.
ELLIS JACOBS:
Yeah.
WEST McCRAY:
Please tell me you called the police as soon as she left.
ELLIS JACOBS:
I didn’t.
WEST McCRAY:
Why wouldn’t you call them? Why talk to me and not the police?
ELLIS JACOBS:
Because I was—because I don’t know! Because if I sent them to Darren, and she was wrong, I betrayed a guy who was good to me! I can’t walk back from that! But if she was going there to call ’em herself, and if he really was guilty, then it was all going to work out anyway. I didn’t—I don’t know, man! It didn’t feel real, you know what I mean? I just wanted to forget about it. And then when Joe told me you were looking for a missing girl named Sadie, and I remembered that tag …
I don’t know.
WEST McCRAY:
My God, Ellis.
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]:
Farfield, Colorado is five days from Langford. When I’m done talking to Ellis, I prepare to drive there, but I’m stopped by the thought of Sadie, relentlessly moving from one place to the next, grief-stricken, guilty, exhausted and hurt. It’s hard to think of someone so vulnerable and alone.
It’s hard to think of her, so vulnerable and so alone.
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:
I don’t think I can do this.
DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]:
Yes, you can.
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:
When Keith was in their lives, Mattie was about the same age as my—as my daughter. And Sadie was only eleven. He preyed on them and they’re just—they’re just kids, you know?
Who does that to a kid?
DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]:
You slept any?
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:
Yeah.
DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]:
Liar.
WEST McCRAY:
When I arrive in Farfield, it’s seven in the morning. Ellis told me the last place he knew Keith to be, the same address he gave Sadie, and when I pull up in front of that house, I don’t wait for nine o’clock before I knock on its front door.
[FOOTSTEPS, SOUNDS OF KNOCKING]
[SOUND OF DOOR OPENING]
FEMALE VOICE:
Can I help you?
WEST McCRAY:
Hi, there. I’m West McCray. I’m a journalist with WNRK and I’m looking for a missing girl. I have reason to believe she was in this area, at your house, actually, and I would really appreciate if you could give me your time and let me ask you a few questions about that.
FEMALE VOICE:
I don’t know anything about a missing girl.
WEST McCRAY:
It would’ve been a few months ago—
FEMALE VOICE:
Uh, look, I just got off work and I’m very tired and it’s very early … but maybe you could—
WEST McCRAY:
Wait, I just need—just a—do you know this man?
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]:
I show her the picture of Keith. Darren.
FEMALE VOICE:
Oh my God.
WEST McCRAY:
So you do know him? Is he here now? Was he?
FEMALE VOICE:
No. Yes—I mean … he was. But—
WEST McCRAY:
Where is he now?
FEMALE VOICE:
Well, he’s—
He’s dead.
LITTLE GIRL:
Mom?
THE GIRLS
EPISODE 8
[THE GIRLS THEME]
ANNOUNCER:
The Girls is brought to you by Macmillan Publishers.
WEST McCRAY:
It’s been a year since I turned up on Amanda’s doorstep and she told me Keith was dead. The next words out of my mouth were, “I think we should call the police.” In the time since, I’ve been collecting the pieces of everything that’s left, trying to put them together in a way I can understand. Amanda agrees to meet me to go over what happened that day. She’s a white, thirty-year-old mother of one. She has asked me not to use her last name.
AMANDA:
I don’t know where to start.
WEST McCRAY:
How did you meet him?
AMANDA:
He came to the place I worked at the time.
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]:
Amanda no longer lives in Farfield. She lives in a new town, a different state. She’s trying to put her relationship with Christopher—the name Keith was going by at the time—behind her. It hasn’t been easy. She is haunted by everything that happened then. She’s finding it hard to cope.
WEST McCRAY:
You worked at a bar.
AMANDA:
Yes. He showed up on
e night, and then another. He was nice, attentive. He didn’t drink, he just ate there. He kept coming back. There was something about him—I felt like I could talk to him, and I felt whatever I said, he understood. I’m a single mom and it’s difficult to find people—I found it difficult to find people willing to listen.
WEST McCRAY:
You have a daughter.
AMANDA:
[PAUSE] Yes.
WEST McCRAY:
How old was she at that time?
AMANDA:
She’d just turned ten.
WEST McCRAY:
How long did you know him, before he moved in?
AMANDA:
About a month and a half. He was there for every one of my shifts, and every one of my breaks. My days off. I was—I thought I was in love with him. I remember thinking that was ridiculous, to feel that way, but at the same time, why couldn’t one good thing happen to me?
If I had known that bringing him home … if I had known what I was bringing home … my daughter never said a word to me. She never told me something was wrong. You’d think, as her mother, I would’ve known. You think that I—
WEST McCRAY:
He targeted single mothers of young girls, women who were alone and had to look after more than their fair share. He preyed on them as much as their children. You can’t blame yourself.
AMANDA:
I know that, but knowing it and …
Knowing it and believing it, those are two different things. [PAUSE] He didn’t have a job. Any other time, that’d be a red flag for me. But he was so nice and so good with my girl that I thought having someone around more often, someone who, at the time, she seemed to like—I thought that would be good for her.