It took several months before the police realised that they were dealing with a serial killer.
All across the country baristas were turning up dead. It appeared that a number of similar cases were being reported where a café worker had finished for the night and at some point had been bludgeoned to death either in the car park when they had gone to their car or at some point on their way home. They had all suffered from the same method of despatch, a single blow to the back of the head. Local police in each district made enquiries at each café, to get a list of customers that had been there on the day. The task force that had been set up to catch the killer received nearly twenty such reports and began searching through them to find a repeat sighting. In the main, they rarely had the customers’ names, but they did have descriptions.
One description stood out as a repeating person. Combining the list of descriptions, they came up with a man in his mid-twenties, short, Caucasian with light brown hair, stubble on his face and wearing wire-framed glasses. From this, a composite was drawn up by a police sketch artist. Copies were posted online and café owners’ were advised to be on the lookout. It was at this point that the detective in charge of the task force had an unmarked envelope left in his mail box at home. Inside, he found a single sheet with a short message. It read: ‘All is well, now. I have found a barista who can make a decent cup of coffee.’ The message was made up with words that had been cut out of magazines and pasted. He immediately put it into a plastic bag and took it in the following day.
The forensic people found nothing to help identify the sender. There were a number of discussions about it within the task force, with some finding it rather funny, and many of them suggesting it was a hoax, perpetrated by somebody that had nothing better to do but cause trouble.
Although officially the case was never closed, no more victims ever came to light.