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The Black Box

The Black Box

Titel: The Black Box
Autoren: Michael Connelly
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positioning of facts that brought a certain understanding and helped explain what had happened and why. But with Anneke Jespersen, there was no black box. Just a pair of musty cardboard boxes retrieved from archives that gave Bosch little direction or hope. The boxes included the victim’s clothing and bulletproof vest, her passport, and other personal items, as well as a backpack and the photographic equipment retrieved from her hotel room after the riots. There was also the single 9mm shell casing found at the crime scene, and the thin investigative file put together by the Riot Crimes Task Force. The so-called murder book.
    The murder book was largely a record of inactivity on the case on the part of the RCTF. The task force had operated for a year and had had hundreds of crimes, including dozens ofmurders, to investigate. It was almost as overwhelmed as investigators like Bosch had been during the actual riots.
    The RCTF had put up billboards in South L.A. that advertised a telephone tip line and rewards for information leading to arrests and convictions for riot-related crimes. Different billboards carried different photos of suspects or crime scenes or victims. Three of them carried a photo of Anneke Jespersen and asked for any information on her movements and murder.
    The unit largely worked off what came in from the billboards and other public outreach programs and pursued cases where there was solid information. But nothing of value ever came in on Jespersen and so nothing ever came of the investigation. The case was a dead end. Even the one piece of evidence from the crime scene—the bullet casing—wasn’t of value without a gun to match it to.
    In his survey of the archived records and case effects, Bosch found that the most noteworthy information gathered from the first investigation was about the victim. Jespersen was thirty-two years old and from Denmark, not Germany as Bosch had thought for twenty years. She worked for a Copenhagen newspaper called Berlingske Tidende , where she was a photojournalist in the truest sense of the word. She wrote stories and shot film. She had been a war correspondent who documented the world’s skirmishes with both words and pictures.
    She had arrived in Los Angeles the morning after the riots had started. And she was dead by the next morning. In the following weeks, the Los Angeles Times ran short profiles of all those killed during the violence. The story on Jespersen quoted her editor and her brother back in Copenhagen anddepicted the journalist as a risk taker who was always quick to volunteer for assignments in the world’s danger zones. In the four years prior to her death, she had covered conflicts in Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Senegal, and El Salvador.
    The unrest in Los Angeles was hardly on the level of war or some of the other armed conflicts she had photographed and reported on, but according to the Times , she happened to be traveling across the United States on vacation when rioting in the City of Angels broke out. She promptly called the photo desk at the BT , as the newspaper in Copenhagen was more commonly known, and left a message with her editor saying that she was heading to L.A. from San Francisco. But she was dead before she had filed any photos or a story with the newspaper. Her editor had never spoken to her after getting the message.
    After the RCTF was disbanded, the unsolved Jespersen case was assigned to the homicide squad at 77th Street Division, the geographical policing area where the murder occurred. Given to new detectives with their own backup of open cases, the investigation was shelved. The notations in the investigative chronology were few and far between and largely just a record of the outside interest in the case. The LAPD wasn’t working the case with anything approaching fervor, but her family and those who knew Jespersen in the international journalism community did not give up hope. The chronology included records of their frequent inquiries about the case. These marked the record right up until the case files and effects were sent to archives. After that, those who inquired about Anneke Jespersen were most likely ignored, as was the case they were calling about.
    Curiously, the victim’s personal belongings were never returned to her family. The archive boxes contained the backpack and property that was turned over to the police several days after the murder, when the manager of the Travelodge on Santa Monica Boulevard
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