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  67. 3:46 a.m.

I pour myself a large glass of milk and join my dad at the table.

It is 3:06 a.m.

“Okay, you got five minutes, old man.”

My dad smiles, then begins.

::::

Jennifer Nubers was reported missing by her father on January 11th, 1985. A day later, her body was found in a park. She was just sixteen years old.

A sophomore at Theodore Roosevelt High School in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC, Jennifer was last seen departing the school grounds Wednesday, January 10th, by Megan Nubers, her best friend and cousin.

Jennifer’s parents had recently divorced, and she and her little brother split time between both the mother and father. Their respective homes were less than three miles apart and it was understood that both children would stay Sunday through Wednesday at their mother’s, then Thursday through Saturday at their father’s.

When Jennifer didn’t come home to her mother’s that evening, the mother simply assumed she went to stay at her father’s, which she was prone to do. The mother never picked up the phone. Never checked to make sure her daughter was there safe and sound.

It wouldn’t be for another full twenty-four hours until the father would call to report Jennifer missing.

It didn’t take long for the DC detectives to uncover a motive for Jennifer’s murder. According to her cousin, Megan, for the past year, Jennifer had been engaged in something extremely dangerous, something Megan had begged, pleaded with her to stop doing on multiple occasions.

It started off innocently enough. Jennifer, a lover of photography, was walking downtown DC — one of her favorite places to photograph — taking snapshots of a fountain outside an office building, when she noticed a man and a woman.

Having caught her own mother in an affair with another man, Jennifer knew the telltale signs of a clandestine encounter.

She followed the couple to a motel a half mile away and snapped a dozen pictures of the two walking to and from the motel room. Two days later, she staked out the office complex, patiently waiting for the gentleman to leave the building. When he did, Jennifer skipped up to him and said, “Nice wedding ring.”

He nodded absently and said, “Thanks, I guess.”

“I couldn’t help notice the woman you were with two days ago didn’t have a wedding ring on.”

“Which woman?”

“This woman,” she said, slipping him a manila envelope.

After glancing at the pictures, he took a deep breath, and asked, “What do you want?”

“Two hundred dollars.”

It was such a reasonable sum that the man hardly hesitated before walking to a nearby ATM and pulling out the money.

“How do I know you won’t come back asking for more money?” the man demanded before payment.

“I won’t,” she said simply, leaving the man to watch her as she skipped away.

Jennifer’s blackmailing hobby quickly turned into a blossoming enterprise.