The Mourning Mail (final release candidate #7)

Chapter 10

I called Marci as soon as I'd returned home from interviewing Jess Nessbaum. I wanted to share with her what I'd learned and found. Investigators hadn't turned up any connection to a "David Barnwell," or any Barnwell for that matter. But Marci promised to pass the information along to the detectives working Coach Cantor's murder.

Marci was grateful for the clue about the porch light and the first visitor's limp. Investigators had already interviewed Coach's tenants and looked into the real estate angle, though it hadn't produced any leads. We agreed to keep each other in the loop.

Still, at least for the moment, I didn't have anything further to pursue on my own that wouldn't entangle me in the department's ongoing investigation.

Absent anything I could do to help with Coach's homicide, I returned to Dad's graveside letters. As I considered Bubba's dilemma over other people moving a dead body while he was stealing from the home, I also understood Dad's concerns about the possible commission of a homicide. His original simple intention to identify the author and return the letters might not cut it.

Dad's attempts to turn the letters over to the police and not being taken seriously must have been humiliating. It could have been worse. The police could have accepted the letters to humor Dad, then sat on their hands and done nothing. Doing nothing was the San Diego Police Department's standard operating procedure for anything out-of-the-ordinary. A side effect of writing an in-depth article about the department's many problems was that I learned too much. I'd never trust them again like an ordinary citizen might if they were ignorant of those issues.

Sadly, the problem of quality policing is national in scope. Several years after my piece on the San Diego department, the FBI reported that the national homicide clearance rate had dropped to fifty-four percent. If a murder happens anywhere in the U.S. today, it's basically a coin flip as to whether anyone will ever be punished for it. In San Diego, the clearance rate is only forty-two percent. The Atlantic published an article entitled "Six Reasons the Murder Clearance Rate Is at an All-Time Low". The piece's subtitle stated the issue succinctly: "For the past 60 years, U.S. detectives have gotten worse at one of the most basic jobs of law enforcement."

But San Diego games the system to keep from reporting even worse rate and clearance numbers. Unfortunately, a significant number of missing person cases prove to be homicides. But San Diego's missing persons clearance rate is only thirty-five percent, helping keep their reported murder rate artificially low. That goal explains why Dad's reports went uninvestigated.

Part of the blame goes to the unholy alliance with the Navy base. Most of the missing are sex workers. Thorough investigations would at least embarrass, and probably incarcerate, some of its sailors. Or worse, officers. So, the missing go ignored. Even with those undiscovered murders, San Diego still adds sixty-five unsolved murders every year to the more than one thousand cold cases in their files.

But as things worked out, circumstances had rendered giving Dad's letters to the police moot anyway. Because of the gap between Dad's audio recording and my hearing it, it was now eight months later, and any benefit to immediate surrender had vanished. I still didn't know who originally wrote the letters or anything about who he'd written them to. I couldn't even be sure if the events described in the correspondence happened, or could have happened.

Still, I thought there might be a story here—if that story had taken a criminal turn, I'd agree with Dad that the police should be involved.

I'd need more facts than I had in hand for law enforcement to take the story, these letters, and the situation seriously. Finding the writer was still the first part of the task, but I also had to learn more about the circumstances he described. One challenge I faced was that I might not have all of Bubba's descriptions if he'd added more in a later letter. We buried Dad eight months ago. The last time he'd have been well enough, even attended by a nurse, to go to Mom's gravesite was two weeks before that. I was missing around nine months' worth of letters if the pattern had continued. Hopefully, the caretaker at the memorial gardens kept collecting them in Dad's stead.