Chase Darkness with Me Quotes

“The biggest problem with true crime has always been its imbalance of villains to heroes. True crime is full of supervillains: Manson, Bundy, Gacy. But the superheroes are rarely acknowledged.”
― Billy Jensen, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders

“Whenever people ask me why I only write about unsolved murders, I always say the same thing: because I hate the guy who got away with it. But after Michelle died, it was different. Now I hate the perpetrator for taking over the lives of the living just as much as taking the lives of the dead. The victim’s families. The investigators. The volunteers. they all gave up giant chunks of their own lives to search for an answer that someone selfishly kept hidden away.

People die before getting the answer.”
― Billy Jensen, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders

“Things only became real when I would tell him,” he said. “And much of the work I was doing was for him, to make him proud, to make him happy. My dad was kind of like the cashier window at the casino. Things that would happen were just chips, but when I told my dad, it would turn into money. And that went away.”
― Billy Jensen, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders

“The killers were still out there, not only escaping justice for the stories I told but free to kill again, believing they had the right to take someone else’s life.”
― Billy Jensen, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders

“If you get killed in America, there is a 38 percent chance your killer won’t be caught.”
― Billy Jensen, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders

“The thought makes my teeth gnash and my lip snarl and my jaw fill with a scream. A scream that always has the same chorus. What they took away, seemingly so easily, was a person. "This was a person!"

A person who could watch a sunset and feel the wind against their cheek. Smell fresh-cut grass or listen to a Bowie song. A person who could scrape up enough money to buy themselves a hot-fudge sundae.

A person who could still close their eyes and dream.

That's what the media refuses to understand. No matter how down and out someone may seem, no matter how many drugs they took or arrests they had or rock bottoms they hit-they could have still done all those things. Those things that make us human.

And one day, someone came along and took all those things away. Every single one of them. And left them with darkness.”
― Billy Jensen, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders

“True crime satisfies the same urge as watching blackhead-popping videos: there is a foreign element in an otherwise perfect environment, and it must be removed. Then everything resets to normal.”
― Billy Jensen, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders

“In October 2004, seven Milwaukee police officers sadistically beat Frank Jude Jr. outside an off-duty police party. The Journal Sentinel newspaper in Milwaukee investigated the crime and published photos of Jude taken right after the beating. The officers were convicted, and some reforms were put in place. But the city saw an unexpected side effect. Calls to 911 dropped dramatically—twenty-two thousand less than the previous year. You know what did rise? The number of homicides—eighty-seven in the six months after the photos were published, a seven-year high. That information comes from a 2016 study done by Matthew Desmond, an associate social sciences professor at Harvard University and New York Times bestselling author of Evicted. He told the Journal Sentinel that a case like Jude’s “tears the fabric apart so deeply and delegitimizes the criminal justice system in the eyes of the African-American community that they stop relying on it in significant numbers.” With shootings of unarmed civilians being captured on cell phones and shared on the internet, the distrust of the police is not relegated to that local community. The stories of the high-profile wrongful death cases of Tamir Rice in Cleveland or Eric Brown in New York spread fast across the country. We were in a worse place than we were twenty years earlier, when the vicious police officer beating of Rodney King went unpunished and Los Angeles went up in flames. It meant more and more crimes would go unsolved because the police were just not trusted. Why risk your life telling an organization about a crime when you think that members of that organization are out to get you? And how can that ever change?”
― Billy Jensen, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders

“There is no reason that with all our tools, the United States solves only 61.5 percent of all homicides every year. Japan clears 95 percent. Germany between 88 and 94 percent. England and Wales clear 85 percent. Canada clears 75 percent.”
― Billy Jensen, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders

“The world didn’t need another story about the Zodiac Killer or Jack the Ripper. The murders in the shadows add up to a hell of a lot more than the murders in the spotlight. The shadows are where I need to tread, because that’s where the problem lay. The blood of the forgotten was just as red as the “famous” victims.”
― Billy Jensen, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders

“Everyone has someone who thinks of them as their starshine.”
― Billy Jensen, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders

“I smile every time I see it.”
― Billy Jensen, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders

“but let’s just say proper spelling and grammar are kryptonite to racists.”
― Billy Jensen, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders

“The killers were still out there, not only escaping justice fir the stories I told but free to kill again, believing they had the right to take someone else’s life.”
― Billy Jensen, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders