Before 1985, the snuff film was something of an urban legend. Everybody knew somebody who knew somebody whose cousin claimed to have seen a sex video that included an actual murder, but nobody claimed to have seen one personally until the FBI’s Organized Crime division raided a warehouse in Paramus, New Jersey, in June of that year, and found a carton of identical video-cassettes labeled Principals of Accounting, Tape 3.
Even then, the videos might have gone unnoticed if Special Agent William C. Izzo hadn’t been the spelling bee champion of P.S. 139 in Queens in his youth. He not only knew the difference between principals and principles, he still remembered the mnemonic: the princiPAL is the student’s PAL.
At first viewing, Izzo thought he’d uncovered some run-of-the-mill amateur porn: roly-poly, middle-aged woman having sex with a buff, dark-haired white guy wearing a white Lone Ranger mask. But in the last fifteen minutes of the half-hour video, the victim was throttled unconscious, then revived, throttled, revived, and ultimately strangled to death.
Watching it even once wasn’t easy-poor Izzo had to view it repeatedly, first with his ASAC (Assistant Special Agent In Charge), then with the SAC, then with the AD (Assistant Director). And after the spin-off investigation had been green-lighted with Izzo as CA (Case Agent), he watched it over and over, frame by frame, with a technician, searching for clues to the identity and/or location of the videographers.
The big break in the investigation, however, was provided not by Izzo, but by a rookie agent sifting through the warehouse garbage on a barge moored off Perth Amboy. In early August, the rook discovered a stained and crumpled bill of lading for a carton of educational videocassettes shipped from a post office box in Marshall City, California.
When efforts to identify the box’s leaseholder failed, Izzo proposed a potentially man-hour-eating stakeout. Figuring he’d need at least four agents to do the job right, he asked for eight and got one. Special Agent E. L. Pender from the Liaison Support Unit, who’d been working on a similar case in nearby Calaveras County, was dispatched to assist Izzo.
Pender had already been in California for nearly three weeks, helping the locals identify victims of the serial murderers Charles Mapes and Leonard Nguyen. Day after day, he studied the women in Mapes and Nguyen’s videotaped torture-murders in an effort to match their descriptions and likenesses with those of missing women from all over the western United States. And night after night he drank himself into a near stupor in an effort to shut off the goddamn VCR in his head long enough to fall asleep.
The only good thing about the Mapes-Nguyen investigation, at least as far as Pender was concerned, was that it was over. Mapes was dead, Nguyen had fled, and one way or another, all the victims who could be identified, had been, leaving only a few charred bone fragments to be buried anonymously.
And now that Unsub was (a) dead, and (b) an unsub no longer, having been identified through fingerprint records as an ex-con named Luke Sweet-last known address, a trailer in the Sierra foothills-Pender was hoping that the Marshall County investigation was all but wrapped up as well. He was looking forward to getting home, putting in a little R amp; R.
“Going to eat some crab cakes, play a little golf, maybe get laid if the missus is in the mood,” he told Izzo, as their Bu-car, a dark blue Crown Vic on loan from the Sacramento field office, hitched on to the tail end of a law enforcement convoy consisting of basically every vehicle in Marshall County with a dome light and a siren.
“You’re married?” said Izzo. “We’ve been working together, what, almost a week-I had no idea you were married.”
Pender shrugged. “Yeah, well, you may have put your finger on part of the problem there.”