12 - Another One Gone
The Twitter Crush #12
THE MARCUS CONLON EXPERIENCE
Episode #847 - Jackson Reed
Published March 15, 2018
[CONTINUING FROM 2:51:09]
MARCUS: So now you know Charlie isn’t the first.
JACKSON: Yup.
MARCUS: After finding that transcript on Charlie's computer, where was your head at?
JACKSON: [long exhale] Fucked. My head was completely fucked. I'm sitting there analyzing my friend’s laptop, judging the hell out of him too, and then I see he found another missing person I'd never heard of. All roads lead back to my biggest client.
MARCUS: So you didn’t know Zack was missing?
JACKSON: I’d never heard of the guy. Zacked Out was a mid-size channel in the anti-MLM space. Kinda big in the gay community. But we were in different corners of Twitter, you know? I was in the female empowerment bubble. He was exposing pyramid schemes and calling out fake gurus. Some of my clients were assholes, but not the specific kind of assholes he called out. Our paths never crossed.
MARCUS: Until you found out he'd been missing since November 2016.
JACKSON: Four months before Charlie vanished. Before the book even came out. Same pattern. Active online presence, digging into Irina's background, then nothing. Just gone.
MARCUS: That must have changed everything.
JACKSON: Fuck yeah it did. You have to understand, this woman wasn't just a client. She was my meal ticket. Her book was climbing the charts. Even if she was my one and only client, I was set for life based on her alone. And now I'm finding out she might be... what? A killer?
MARCUS: Did you consider going to the police?
JACKSON: With what? "Hey, two podcasters looked into my client's background and now they're missing?” I had no evidence. Just a bad feeling and some timestamps. Plus I had slept with her.
I couldn’t handle it like I would for any other client. What was I gonna do, call her up? "Hey Irina, quick question—do you happen to know why people investigating you keep disappearing?" I’d get called a creep and that would be the end of my career.
MARCUS: [Smiles] Well, yeah…
JACKSON: Yeah, yeah, let’s not put the cart in front of the horse. I felt crazy. At the time. Maybe I was being paranoid. Maybe Charlie had just burned out and left. Maybe Zack was one of those crazy twinks and he’d gotten himself mixed up with a hard partier. People disappear all the time, right?
MARCUS: But you didn't believe that.
JACKSON: My gut didn't believe it. But my gut had also told me Irina was just another influencer who couldn’t write her own books. So what the fuck did I know?
I'd start to DM her then delete it.
I was in way over my head. My experience as an MP was mostly paperwork and dealing with drunk Marines punching each other outside bars in Jacksonville.
MARCUS: Come on, you were an officer—
JACKSON: Yeah, which meant I supervised the real investigators. I signed off on their reports. My actual casework? Barracks suicides. Domestics in base housing. Sometimes I'd liaise with local PD when one of my Marines got arrested for a DUI or bar fight.
I'd never done forensics beyond basic crime scene preservation. Never gathered intelligence beyond reading incident reports. Sure as hell never done surveillance unless you count sitting in a parking lot waiting to catch Marines sneaking back after curfew.
MARCUS: That's when you realized you needed help.
JACKSON: I needed someone who actually knew how to investigate. I could write up an incident report. But tracking down a potential serial killer who might be my client? That wasn't in the field manual.
MARCUS: Which is why you reached out to me.
JACKSON: [laughs] Your listeners might forget you’re still a licensed PI, but I didn’t. You'd done real investigative work. Deep background, following paper trails, that whole series on defense contractors. Plus you were a Marine too. I figured you'd either help me or tell me I was losing my mind.
[pause]
I really hoped you'd tell me I was losing my mind.
Not my usual genre of fiction, but I’m enjoying the ride.
Cannot wait for the next drop!