Excerpt
The Carpool Detectives
Marissa was so bored.She was sitting in a college classroom, enrolled in a continuing education course promising an introduction to television journalism. The coursework she thought would be compelling involved viewing unedited B-roll footage to be inserted into news reports: filler, such as a police officer unspooling yellow caution tape around an accident scene or a bored public official giving a canned press briefing or bib-wearing walkers participating in a charity 5K. She had signed up for night school to study investigative journalism, determined to follow her passion a decade after leaving a career in forensic accounting to become a full-time parent. She thought she would be learning how to tell exciting and impactful stories, not compose boilerplate local interest pieces.
What she did not expect was that she would view a piece of film that would alter the trajectory of her life.
The soundless footage showed a red Skyhook helicopter hovering low inside a deep canyon. From massive straps hanging from the bottom of the helicopter, a wrecked SUV dangled slowly, corpse-like, beneath the rotorcraft, high above the hilly forest.
Marissa sat up in her seat. Something about the footage captivated her.
The helicopter set the vehicle gently down on the roadside, its long straps slackening and then, released, collapsing to the gravel around the SUV. Sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrol officers surrounded the vehicle, which had been damaged almost beyond recognition. The location of the retrieval was not identified, but it was familiar to Marissa.
California State Route 2 ran from the Pacific coast in Santa Monica—near where she lived now—east and north through the San Gabriel Valley and up into the rugged mountains of the Angeles National Forest. Marissa used to hike in that area on summer day camp excursions when she was young—running barefoot with friends, catching frogs, a world away from the tension and dysfunction of her home.
What followed chilled her.
To demonstrate how dry footage was incorporated into the finished product, the instructor played the actual news segment as it had aired in August 2006. “Accident Investigated as Double Homicide.” The costly helicopter retrieval had been performed after the vehicle had lain at the bottom of a ravine for more than a year.
The report raised so many questions in Marissa’s mind. Why wait so long to bring it up? How could a one-car accident be a double homicide? And—had this crime ever been solved?
For the first time in that class, she was paying attention. The segment included a still image of a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department “Information Wanted” poster showing driver’s license photographs of a man and a woman, Joel and Angela Watkins, an older married couple who looked so ordinary, so everyday, so
anyone—Marissa could not get the image of the two victims out of her mind. She had recently renewed her driver’s license, and it had not occurred to her that the resulting image could, in the event of a crime, be the image that forever defined her. She thought of the two victims running errands that forgettable day, putting up with the inconvenience of going to the Registry of Motor Vehicles, another chore in another day of comings and goings—until it all stopped. Stopped forever.
The couple were close to Marissa’s parents’ ages, and something about their expressions seemed familiar to her, looking so normal, and yet at the same time she detected tension in their faces—similar to the tension she’d known in her own parents.
Who would want to murder this older couple, and why?
This was in early 2020. Marissa had found herself at one of life’s crossroads.
For more than a decade, motherhood had defined her life. Marissa always wanted to be a mother, and she and Brian had married young, at twenty-five, planning to start a family almost right away. But just thirteen weeks into her first pregnancy, after hearing the fetal heartbeat and watching the little bean move on the ultrasound, she suffered a devastating loss. She woke up covered in blood and miscarried shortly after. Six months later, she suffered another miscarriage. She was distraught. Of all her plans, hopes, and dreams in life, becoming a parent was one thing she had simply taken for granted.
Ultimately, she picked herself up and they tried again, this time seeking the help of a reproductive endocrinologist. She did everything she was supposed to—ate wholesome organic foods, got regular exercise—while avoiding everything she was supposed to—coffee, alcohol, deli meats, unpasteurized cheese. So when her daughter was born and placed in her arms, healthy and wailing, her joy was beyond what she’d ever known. Halfway through her maternity leave, Marissa knew there was no chance she would go back to work. Two years later, her second daughter arrived, and the family she once feared might not materialize now felt complete.
She loved being a mom. Marissa’s childhood had been tumultuous at times, such that much of her approach to parenting was an attempt to compensate for what she felt had been lacking in her own upbringing, devoting herself to giving her girls everything she could. Brian worked in advertising for a major movie studio, and for most of their thirties he worked long hours in order to establish himself professionally. Marissa’s career in forensic accounting had never felt like her identity, while being a full-time mother did. It was the most fulfilling and rewarding job in the world—until it wasn’t.
Now, her girls were eleven and nine, the ages when children first show signs of becoming their own selves. The oldest was a typical first child, a perfectionist, somewhat anxious, endearingly empathetic. The youngest was shy, but also brave, exactly as Marissa had been as a child. She and the girls were particularly close, and she was proud of that. Marissa still felt needed, and with adolescence on the horizon, she understood that as a mother she had a long, long way to go. But she was no longer their entire world. The days of swinging her kids around or playing tag were fading. Her daughters were blossoming and no longer required one hundred percent of Marissa’s focus and energy. Being on the cusp of forty had something to do with it as well.
With both girls now in school for much of the day, Marissa began considering the second half of her life. She threw herself into school-focused volunteer work, ultimately becoming president of the parent association and overseeing the class fundraisers. While this work was important and challenging in its own way, it did nothing to fill the void she was feeling.
She shared her thinking with Brian, telling him that there was a course of study at a local university through which she could earn a certificate in investigative journalism. This was out of the blue, and it seemed to Brian like a lot for her to bite off all at once.“Okay,” he said. “I guess let’s look into it.”
“Oh, no need,” Marissa told him cheerily. “I already enrolled.”
She was still thinking about the footage of the wrecked car dangling from the helicopter as she arrived home that night after class. She lived in a Spanish-style house in a quiet but densely settled neighborhood, a dozen or so blocks from the Pacific coast. Tall palm trees lined the wide sidewalks outside single-family homes separated by hedges or short fences, not far from one of the Westside’s main thoroughfares for stopping and dining. She checked in with Brian, got the girls to bed, then brought her laptop to her favorite spot on the living room sofa and began googling. Fifteen-year-old news stories came up in the results, and she began reading them in roughly chronological order.
The initial stories focused on the lack of information related to their vanishing. “No trace,” “family members have not heard,” “no indication of foul play in the disappearance.” A son, Andrew Watkins, was quoted as saying, “We have no idea what could have happened.” The Watkins children, all adults, had last heard from their parents by telephone over the weekend, and the father, Joel, had last been seen at his office in Pasadena that Saturday. The son was also quoted as saying that they enjoyed taking weekend drives and there was concern they might have met with an accident.
Two weeks later, the story was still being updated. There were no further developments as to Joel and Angela Watkins’s fates, but, as one article’s subheadline stated, “Questions Surround Missing Elderly Couple.” The family business, Wattkins LED, an importer of commercial lighting equipment, had been closed overnight, and the company’s telephone line was disconnected. A Sheriff’s Department spokesman said that the disappearance was “an active investigation and we are looking into anything and everything.”
The details became even stranger over time. Not only had Wattkins LED closed down for good, but the company’s bank had filed a lawsuit claiming fraudulent financial activity and was seeking to recover significant losses. After issuing conflicting statements regarding the business’s closing, family members had ceased communicating with the press altogether.
