She’d waited years for the news.

But when the message arrived Aug. 26, 2022, Josephine Wentzel suddenly had to confront an agonizing possibility. She’d spent six years tracking the man authorities believed was responsible for killing her daughter, a search that spanned thousands of miles, international borders and dozens of possible sightings that, in the end, had produced little.

Wentzel declined to identify the message’s sender, but she said it supposedly contained a recent picture of Raymond McLeod, who at the time was one of the U.S. Marshals Service’s most wanted fugitives. Had he actually been found — or would this be another jolt of false hope?

She focused in on the image, she said, and “just freaked out like, oh, my gosh, it’s him. I didn’t even want to think it because someone might hear my thoughts and warn him to flee.”

McLeod, a 42-year-old former U.S. Marine, was apprehended in El Salvador days later and is awaiting trial in San Diego on a charge of first-degree murder in the June 2016 strangulation of Krystal Mitchell. He pleaded not guilty and is scheduled for a preliminary hearing in March. His attorneys either declined to comment or did not respond to a request for comment. In court filings, they said McLeod accidentally killed Mitchell during “rough, consensual sex gone wrong.”

Wentzel, a 67-year-old grandmother and former police detective had been preparing for life as an RV’ing snowbird when her daughter was killed. She has used the improbable platform she developed pursuing McLeod to write two books — “The Chase” and “The Capture” — and to help other grieving parents navigate the mix of frustration, despair and confusion left by an unsolved homicide.

Wentzel has assisted a nonprofit that helps law enforcement agencies with a series of cases in recent years, including the disappearance and alleged murder of Maya Millete, according to the Cold Case Foundation’s co-executive director. Through a nonprofit Wentzel established, Angels of Justice, she launched a campaign urging the White House to treat the country’s massive backlog of unsolved murders as a national emergency.

In a statement, a White House spokeswoman blamed former President Joe Biden for failing to enable law enforcement agencies to “truly fight crime” and said that President Donald Trump is “restoring integrity to our justice system.”

A spokesperson for the Marshals Service, which apprehended McLeod, declined to comment on questions about Wentzel’s role in finding him, but in a statement after McLeod’s capture the agency’s director said Wentzel had worked “diligently with law enforcement these past years to see this day of justice arrive.”

The San Diego County District Attorney’s Office has said she was “instrumental” in the search for McLeod.

“She goes for it,” said Pat Kuiper, who credits Wentzel with helping push investigators in Washington state to take another look at the nearly two-decade-old unsolved murder of her son. “She goes for it in such a way that people can’t really refuse her, because she’s so genuine and kind, but persistent, assertive.”

For Rachel Glass, whose daughter was found strangled along with her pregnant roommate in Arizona 15 years ago, Wentzel provided an empathetic ear and insight into an investigative process that Glass — a longtime nurse — knew nothing about.

“If there are things that go on and you think, what the hell is this, I’d call her and say, you won’t believe what’s happened now,” Glass recalled. “And she might tell me x, y and z about why it has to play out like that.”

Wentzel’s husband of nearly three decades, a retired post office maintenance engineer, attributes her latest chapter to the tenacity she’s always shown.

“That’s something I lack,” he said. “I can get easily discouraged and say, forget it. But my wife, she’s not gonna forget it.”

A deadly date in San Diego

For Wentzel, that chapter began soon after the death of her daughter. According to a statement of facts filed by the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, McLeod had gotten into a fight at a San Diego bar June 9, 2016, after he grabbed Mitchell by the throat and a man intervened, telling him to stop.

Mitchell was found dead the next day at the apartment where they were staying. According to the statement, a deputy medical examiner determined she had been strangled and later compared the severity of the injury to someone who’d been struck with a baseball bat or had their neck stomped on.

Mitchell, 30, had been visiting the city with McLeod from Phoenix, where the divorced mother of two worked as a property manager, Wentzel said. To her mother, Mitchell was the life of the party — and someone who turned heads whenever she walked into a room.

Mitchell met McLeod through work a few weeks before — he’d gone to her office to rent an apartment, her mother said — and they’d traveled to San Diego. Mitchell was impressed by how much McLeod seemed to care for his young son, Wentzel said, and she didn’t appear to know about his previous allegations of domestic violence.

One of those alleged incidents occurred not long before their trip, court records in California show. In Riverside County, he was charged that April with inflicting corporal injury on a spouse — an alleged crime that involved accusations that he strangled his wife, according to the statement of facts.

McLeod pleaded not guilty, the Riverside County records show, and in a filing his lawyers in Mitchell’s case have said that he has a “history of consensual sexual practices that included elements of the BDSM community such as bondage, whipping, slapping, choking and erotic asphyxiation, sometimes to unconsciousness.”

That earlier case was not adjudicated, however, and McLeod disappeared after Mitchell’s death. According to prosecutors, on June 10, he allegedly drove Mitchell’s car to San Diego International Airport, where he rented another car and headed to Mexico.

An international search

The San Diego Police Department identified McLeod as a person of interest in Mitchell’s death almost immediately. A warrant seeking his arrest in her murder was filed June 13.

But McLeod was nowhere to be found. Eventually, Wentzel recalled, the Marshals Service got involved and offered a reward. But she became frustrated with the government’s inability to quickly investigate leads in foreign countries, she said. U.S. embassies seemed less than enthusiastic about helping, she said, and she recalled a deputy marshal telling her that they couldn’t just “run in and get the guy.”

“It’s another country,” she recalled him saying. “We got to get approval.”

The Marshals Service declined to comment. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

So Wentzel began searching herself. Although she’d worked for several years as a police officer and detective in her native Guam decades ago, she said that experience didn’t begin to prepare her for the years of social media sleuthing that she was about to embark on.

One of her first steps was to pull together a “wanted” poster with pictures of McLeod, along with a brief description of the slaying and the reward amount — at the time $5,000, she said. She focused on Belize, a place she’d heard he might be, and circulated information among dozens of Facebook accounts — gyms and resorts, restaurants and a university, screenshots of the messages show.

After posting the information to a buy/sell group, Wentzel recalled, the responses started rolling in. Some were by phone. Others came via WhatsApp or Facebook.

“Madam I saw this man I am sure of it from his tattoos and his face,” one message read, according to a screenshot.

“If he is here he will b caught,” read another.

But then, he wasn’t. And the messages continued. There were tips that he was in Honduras, that he was in Guatemala. Some tipsters seemed to legitimately want to help, she said. Others seemed like scammers.

“One guy contacted me and said, OK, he’s here,” she recalled. “I know where he’s working at. I’ve got pictures. I’ve got all this. So, you know, I need you to send me $1,000.”

There were so many tips, said Mike Wentzel, that fielding them became a 24/7 job for his wife. At times, he considered asking her to dial things back, but never could.

“This is her child,” he said. “How can I tell her to stop?”

But there were times when the thought crossed her mind. Keeping hope alive during the pandemic, when that steady flow of tips dried up, was especially difficult, she said.

The final tip

As this slump in information dragged on, Wentzel said, local and federal officials announced that McLeod had been added to the Marshals’ list of its 15 most wanted fugitives. In the spring 2021 announcement, they also announced that the reward for information leading to McLeod’s arrest had grown to $50,000.

His last known location was in Guatemala in 2017, the officials said.

Wentzel said she believes it was a tip linked to that Central American country that ultimately led to McLeod’s capture. Five years after he was spotted in Guatemala, she said, a couple of tipsters told her they’d seen McLeod at a hotel just north of the country’s border with El Salvador.

Wentzel surveyed YouTube videos from the hotel to see if she could spot his face, she recalled, and she posted a “wanted” ad on Facebook that targeted accounts in the area. Wentzel said she set a 100-mile radius for the ad, meaning that everyone in that zone would see McLeod’s face.

Eventually, Wentzel said, she learned from the Marshals Service that someone saw one of her ads and shared a brochure with authorities that appeared to show McLeod. The brochure was from a Salvadoran English school not far from the Guatemalan hotel, she said.

It was this image that prompted Wentzel to conclude: “It’s him.”

Four days later, on Aug. 30, 2022, authorities announced that McLeod had been taken into custody in Sonsonate, El Salvador, where he’d been teaching English. He landed in San Diego the next day.

Wentzel wrestled with a tangle of emotion as McLeod’s arraignment approached. She thought about her daughter’s final moments and ticked through a litany of revenge fantasies, she recalled. But she didn’t want to stew in hatred and bitterness. So she tried to focus on her daughter’s children, whom she and her husband have raised, and on the other victims she’s sought to help.

“Murder does this to you — it makes you somebody you’re not, if you allow it,” she said. “I didn’t picture living my life out like this. I wanted to be a grandma and I just wanted to travel and have fun and live the rest of my life out with my family. But it made me something else.”

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said Wednesday that it may need a “few more weeks” to release all of its records on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein after suddenly discovering more than a million potentially relevant documents, further delaying compliance with last Friday’s congressionally mandated deadline.

The Christmas Eve announcement came hours after a dozen U.S. senators called on the Justice Department’s watchdog to examine its failure to meet the deadline. The group, 11 Democrats and a Republican, told Acting Inspector General Don Berthiaume in a letter that victims “deserve full disclosure” and the “peace of mind” of an independent audit.

The Justice Department said in a social media post that federal prosecutors in Manhattan and the FBI “have uncovered over a million more documents” that could be related to the Epstein case — a stunning 11th hour development after department officials suggested months ago that they had undertaken a comprehensive review that accounted for the vast universe of Epstein-related materials.

In March, Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News that a “truckload of evidence” had been produced after she ordered the FBI to “deliver the full and complete Epstein files to my office.” She issued the directive after saying she learned from an unidentified source that the FBI in New York was “in possession of thousands of pages of documents.”

In July, the FBI and Justice Department indicated in an unsigned memo that they had undertaken an “exhaustive review” and had determined that no additional evidence should be released — an extraordinary about face from the Trump administration, which for months had pledged maximum transparency. The memo did not raise the possibility that additional evidence existed that officials were unaware of or had not reviewed.

Wednesday’s post did not say when the Justice Department was informed of the newly uncovered files.

In a letter last week, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said Manhattan federal prosecutors already had more than 3.6 million records from sex trafficking investigations into Epstein and his longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell, though many were copies of material already turned over by the FBI.

The Justice Department said its lawyers are “working around the clock” to review the documents and remove victims names and other identifying information as required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law enacted last month that requires the government to open its files on Epstein and Maxwell.

“We will release the documents as soon as possible,” the department said. “Due to the mass volume of material, this process may take a few more weeks.”

The announcement came amid increasing scrutiny on the Justice Department’s staggered release of Epstein-related records, including from Epstein victims and members of Congress.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, of Kentucky, one of the chief authors of the law mandating the document release, posted Wednesday on X: “DOJ did break the law by making illegal redactions and by missing the deadline.” Another architect of the law, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said he and Massie will “continue to keep the pressure on” and noted that the Justice Department was releasing more documents after lawmakers threatened contempt.

“A Christmas Eve news dump of ‘a million more files’ only proves what we already know: Trump is engaged in a massive coverup,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said after the DOJ’s announcement. “The question Americans deserve answered is simple: WHAT are they hiding — and WHY?”

The White House on Wednesday defended the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein records.

“President Trump has assembled the greatest cabinet in American history, which includes Attorney General Bondi and her team — like Deputy Attorney General Blanche — who are doing a great job implementing the President’s agenda,” spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement.

After releasing an initial wave of records on Friday, the Justice Department posted more batches to its website over the weekend and on Tuesday. The Justice Department has not given any notice when more records might arrive.

Records that have been released, including photographs, interview transcripts, call logs, court records and other documents, were either already public or heavily blacked out, and many lacked necessary context. Records that hadn’t been seen before include transcripts of grand jury testimony from FBI agents who described interviews they had with several girls and young women who described being paid to perform sex acts for Epstein.

Other records made public in recent days include a note from a federal prosecutor from January 2020 that said Trump had flown on the financier’s private plane more often than had been previously known and emails between Maxwell and someone who signs off with the initial “A.” They contain other references that suggest the writer was Britain’s former Prince Andrew. In one, “A” writes: “How’s LA? Have you found me some new inappropriate friends?”

The senators’ call Wednesday for an inspector general audit comes days after Schumer introduced a resolution that, if passed, would direct the Senate to file or join lawsuits aimed at forcing the Justice Department to comply with the disclosure and deadline requirements. In a statement, he called the staggered, heavily redacted release “a blatant cover-up.”

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joined Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., in leading the call for an inspector general audit. Others signing the letter were Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota., Adam Schiff of California, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Cory Booker and Andy Kim, both of New Jersey, Gary Peters of Michigan, Chris Van Hollen, of Maryland, Mazie Hirono, of Hawaii, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

“Given the (Trump) Administration’s historic hostility to releasing the files, politicization of the Epstein case more broadly, and failure to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a neutral assessment of its compliance with the statutory disclosure requirements is essential,” the senators wrote. Full transparency, they said, “is essential in identifying members of our society who enabled and participated in Epstein’s crimes.”