Los couldn’t have taken a shot. Not that he doesn’t occasionally reconstruct the events of that night, the lost seconds restarting his car, the U-turn, the figure on the bike about fifty yards away, merging with the right edge of his lights, how the headlights acted as a kind of command. Bike dropped. Man running. Had Los the power to foresee what the man would become, he would have taken aim with his .38 special and brought him down right there.
Everyone agreed that October 1, 1979, was the precipice, the night a would-be killer crossed over.
The mystery prowler would ultimately target a northeast neighborhood around the intersection of Cathedral Oaks and Patterson, within a two-mile-square radius. All three Santa Barbara attacks would be adjacent to San Jose Creek, a stream that begins in the laurel-covered mountains and meanders down through east Goleta before emptying into the Pacific. The creek’s suburban stretch is a Huckleberry Finn dream of moss-covered rocks and rope swings and delinquents’ cigarette butts shrouded by a canopy of trees. Looking at the crime locations on a Goleta map, Pool was struck by the way the killer hewed to the creek like an umbilical cord.
The Goleta attacks were noteworthy for another reason. Control was this offender’s chosen language. It was in the bindings. The blitz attacks. He might be a forgettable loser in the daytime, but he ruled in the houses he sneaked into, a static mask imposing horror. He sometimes left milk and bread out in the kitchen, the psychopath communicating confident leisure.
Yet this master criminal always lost control in Goleta. Three times he hit there; three times he was thwarted. He was never able to sexually assault the female victims; in the first attack she got away, and in the second and third, the males resisted and were shot to death. He was probably concerned that the gunshots would attract police, so he quickly killed the female victims and fled.
Tracking back the killer’s predatory development was like watching a horror movie in reverse, but rewinding was important. “A criminal is more vulnerable in his history than his future,” writes David Canter, a leading British crime psychologist, in his book Criminal Shadows. Canter believes the key to solving a series of crimes is to find out what happened before the first crime rather than establishing where the offender went after the most recent one. “Before he committed the crime he may not have known himself that he would do it,” writes Canter, “so he may not have been so careful before as afterwards.”
That he was careful later there was no doubt. He was a watcher. Calculating. Take, for example, Ventura. He hit multiple times in Santa Barbara and Orange Counties, but only once in Ventura. Why? Joe Alsip’s arrest for the Smith murders was huge news. Why risk committing another double homicide in Ventura, raising doubts about Alsip’s guilt, when the sucker was about to take the fall for you?
* * *
THE FACT THAT THE THREE HOME INVASIONS OCCURRED IN GOLETA, Santa Barbara’s more recently developed and less genteel neighbor to the west, didn’t stop the Sheriff’s Office from trying to keep the crimes under wraps. Like most longtime institutions, the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office had developed an organizational culture, and its reputation was for insularity and secretiveness. Hair on the back of a detective’s neck might be raised by what he saw at a crime scene, but his job required that he remain poker-faced to the public. That’s certainly the impression Sheriff’s Detective O. B. Thomas was trying to convey on the afternoon of Friday, July 31, 1981, when he began canvassing the neighborhood around 449 Toltec Way, five days after he was the first officer to arrive in response to an emergency call there. Canvassing consists of knocking on neighbors’ doors and asking them about any unusual or suspicious sightings or incidents. There was no need to panic the public. Thomas asked the questions but revealed little about what had happened. You wouldn’t know from his face what he’d seen.
Linda lived just a block from Toltec Way. When Detective Thomas knocked on her door and took out his notepad, he triggered a memory. She remembered the wounded dog, her flooded lawn, and the curious absence of any sharp objects in either her or her neighbor’s backyard that could have cut the animal. She told Detective Thomas the story. He asked her if she could remember the date of the incident. Linda thought back, and then consulted her diary. September 24, 1979, she said.
The date’s significance was clear to them immediately. That was a week before the first attack. Detectives knew very little about the suspect they sought other than what a witness who glimpsed him fleeing in the dark told them: he was an adult white male. They didn’t know what drew him to this sleepy pocket of tract homes, but they knew some things. He carried a knife— he’d dropped one running from the first scene. He was a night prowler; they’d followed his shoe impressions as he crept from house to house searching for victims. And he liked the creek. Maybe he used the undergrowth and canopy of trees to move about undetected. Maybe he had history there, had played as a kid among the moss-covered rocks and rope swings. Whatever the reason, shoe prints and precut ligatures he’d dropped signaled his presence there. And all three houses he invaded shared one characteristic: they were close to the creek.
From where they stood, Linda and Detective Thomas could see the tangle of trees and the low white wooden fence that paralleled the creek. There was the footbridge that Kimo had emerged from that night, his radar alerted to something moving in the dark that shouldn’t be. It was becoming clear what had probably happened next. The dog peeled off between the houses to nose around, and the prowler, startled and no doubt annoyed, gutted him to keep him away. Maybe he got Kimo’s blood on him and used Linda’s hose to wash it off. There were often signs of his presence in a neighborhood before he struck, small, disquieting details only understood in retrospect.
Years later, after the invention of Google Earth, cold-case investigators created a digital map and time line detailing the suspect’s violent trail across California. Bright yellow pushpin icons along San Jose Creek represent the locations where he hit in northeast Goleta. The neighborhood hasn’t changed much in thirty-five years. Zoom in further and there’s the backyard where his presence was first signaled by a dog’s yelp in the night. The depth of his shoe impressions shows that he often remained in one position for long periods of time, pressed against a wall or crouching in a garden. It’s easy to imagine him standing in the dark backyard as Kimo whimpers out front, as his owner knocks on doors, and then a car rumbles up to take them away. Quiet settles over the night again. He creeps between the houses, turns on the hose to wash the splatter from his shoes, and sneaks away, rivulets of watery blood disappearing into the grass behind him.
Contra Costa, 1997
“WHAT’S EAR?” PAUL HOLES ASKED.
John Murdock was taken aback for a moment. He hadn’t heard the acronym in years.
“Why?” Murdock asked.
They were sitting across the aisle from each other on a flight to a California Association of Criminalists conference. It was 1997. Murdock had recently retired as the chief of the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s crime lab. His specialty was firearms and tool marks. Holes, in his late twenties, had landed a job as a deputy sheriff criminalist soon after graduating from UC-Davis with a major in biochemistry. He started in forensic toxicology but soon realized that his passion was CSI. Then his curiosity outgrew the microscope. He began going around with the investigators; he was a cold-case investigator trapped in a crime lab. He enjoyed wandering the Property Room, pulling out boxes of old unsolved cases. What he found there were stories. Statements. Photographs. Incomplete thoughts scribbled in the margins by a distracted investigator. Ambiguities don’t exist in the lab. Old case files teem with them. The puzzles beckoned.
“Paul, that’s not your job,” more than one fellow criminalist scolded him. He didn’t care. He possessed the handsome Eagle Scout’s talent for remaining convivial while doing exactly what he wanted. What he wanted, he realized, was to be an investigator. He was angling to make the move to that division when the chance arose.
Despite their age diff
erence, Murdock and Holes recognized that they had something in common: they excelled at science, but it was stories that pulled them in. Every day after he finished his lab work, Holes would sit down with old case files, appalled and fascinated by the dark off-roads of human behavior. Cold cases stayed with him. He had the scientist’s intolerance for uncertainty. After devouring boxes of old unsolved cases, he noticed a pattern; the same person always signed the most meticulous crime-scene reports: John Murdock.
“I saw EAR marked in big red letters on some folders set aside in a filing cabinet,” Holes explained to Murdock. Holes hadn’t delved into the files yet, but he could tell that they had been set aside in a special, almost hallowed way.
“EAR stands for East Area Rapist,” Murdock said. The name was clearly cataloged in his head, its significance not dimmed by time.
“I don’t know that one,” Holes said.
For the rest of the flight, thirty thousand feet up in the air, Murdock told Holes the story.
He was a hot prowler. He barely registered with the cops at first. In mid-June 1976, he appeared in a young woman’s bedroom in east Sacramento doing “the no-pants dance,” wearing a T-shirt and nothing else. Knife in hand. Whispered threats. Ransacking. He raped her. It was rough, but Sacramento in 1976 had an abundance of predatory creeps. Ski mask and gloves suggested some intelligence, but no-pants dancers are usually rumdum teenagers whose mothers turn them in by the scruff of the neck.
That never happened. More rapes did. Twenty-two in eleven months. His methods were distinct and unwavering. An initial just-a-robber ruse to secure compliance. Females as gagged objects, moved to his specifications. Their hands and feet tied and retied, often with shoelaces. Sexual assault that curiously avoided breasts and kissing. Ransacking as stimulation. Gleefully raising the stakes as east Sacramento entered full-blown panic. Taking on sleeping couples. Stacking dishes on the bound man’s back, threatening to kill his wife or girlfriend if he heard the dishes fall. The East Area Rapist was the bogeyman in the bedroom, the stranger who knew too much—layouts of homes, number of children, work schedules. The ski mask and raspy, faked voice suggested an alter ego, but from whom was he altering?
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department hit walls. Hit walls hard. The same young white males were stopped repeatedly. The right one wasn’t. Or maybe he was. That was the problem. All EAR Task Force investigators had their own mental impression of the suspect’s face, but none were the same. He was a blond stoner in an army jacket. A Mormon on a bike. A slick, olive-skinned Realtor.
Carol Daly was the lead female investigator on the task force. By the twenty-second rape, after another three a.m. trip to the hospital with a distraught victim, she surprised herself with a dark thought. I love my husband. I hate men.
What kept investigator Richard Shelby up at night were the repeated credible reports called in of a suspicious prowler who, once spotted, walked away “at a leisurely pace.”
The creep of a bitch was an ambler.
The community began to glimpse fear in the sheriff’s deputies’ eyes. The EAR was stalking their heads. All their heads. Sundown produced collective dread. It seemed impossible that he’d never be caught. The law of chance would get him eventually, but who wanted to be the schmuck waiting around for that?
Then, as mysteriously as he’d appeared in east Sacramento, he was gone, after a two-year reign of terror, from 1976 to 1978.
“Wow,” said Holes. “What happened then?”
Murdock remembered that Holes was a ten-year-old at the time, unaware of the mass paralysis the case caused, its twists, false hopes, and dead ends. His connection to the case came only from spotting files labeled EAR in red.
“He resurfaced in the East Bay,” Murdock said. “He came to us.”
Holes began asking older friends and colleagues about the EAR and was surprised at how pervasive the case had been. Everyone had a story. His undersheriff remembered the helicopters whirling overhead, the roving spotlights darting through the quiet subdivisions. A UC-Davis professor said his first date with his wife had been taking part in one of the nightly rape patrols. One of his co-workers quietly confided in Holes that his sister was one of the victims.
Between October 1978 and July 1979, after which he vanished from Northern California, there were eleven EAR cases in the greater East Bay area, including two in San Jose and one in Fremont. Trying to make headway twenty years later was daunting. Local police departments handled some of the cases. All of the agencies, including Sacramento County, had destroyed their evidence. It was routine Property Room procedure. The cases were past the statute of limitations. Fortunately CCCSO (Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office), where Holes worked, had kept its evidence. The set-aside red EAR files weren’t a fluke; demoralized CCCSO deputies back in the day assured that it would stay that way. It was the opposite of hanging a police commendation plaque. The EAR was their failure. If the human brain was, as experts allege, the best computer in the world, the old guard wanted their conspicuous EAR files to lure one of those young, inquiring computers in, fast and deep. Sometimes the tough cases were just a relay race.
“We always catch the dumb ones,” cops like to say. They could tick off ninety-nine out of a hundred boxes with these kinds of arrests. That one unchecked box though. It could vex you into early death.
* * *
IN JULY 1997, HOLES BEGAN PULLING THE EAR RAPE KITS FROM Property and seeing what evidence might be coaxed from them. The CCCSO crime lab wasn’t as advanced as other California labs. Their DNA program was relatively new. Still, it looked as though three kits would yield material for a rudimentary profile. Holes figured that, even though the EAR’s m.o. was distinctive and there was little doubt the Northern California attacks were connected, if he could conclude with scientific certainty that one man was responsible for CCCSO’s three EAR-suspected cases, that could resurrect the investigation. They could dig up old suspects and swab them.
The DNA-amplification process took a while, but when the results developed, they confirmed the match. The same man, as predicted, was responsible for the three Contra Costa County cases. Holes now had a basic DNA profile of the EAR that would grow more advanced when the lab acquired better equipment. He began delving into the case files themselves, something he’d put aside while he concentrated on the science. He picked up on the EAR’s patterns. Choosing neighborhoods to prowl for information gathering. Phoning victims. Tactically preparing.
Holes compiled a list of old suspect names and then tracked down retired detective Larry Crompton. Crompton had been a member of the CCCSO’s EAR Task Force at the height of the series. Holes could tell from the number of times Crompton’s name appeared in the reports that he was the de facto leader. He’d either been a worker bee or taken the cases to heart.
Calling up retired detectives about an old case is a mixed bag. Some are flattered. A lot are mildly annoyed. They’re in line at the pharmacy waiting for their heart medication. They’re installing garboard drain plugs on their fishing boats. Your polite enthusiasm represents lost minutes of their day.
Crompton answered Holes’s call as if he’d just been talking about the EAR that moment, had possibly been talking about the EAR for years, and this unexpected, welcome call was a natural continuation of an ongoing conversation in the Crompton household.
Crompton was born in Nova Scotia and looks like the kind of tall, lean, honest-faced rancher John Wayne would have trusted in one of his Westerns. He’s got a slightly odd, breathless way of speaking; never hesitant, just brief, confident declarations that could use a little more air.
Holes wanted to know if Crompton remembered any old suspects who stood out and should be reexamined. He did, and unenthusiastically fed Holes some names. Crompton’s real wish, it turned out, was for Holes to follow up on an old hunch of his that the bosses had prevented him from pursuing at the time.
Jurisdictional cooperation is spotty at best now but was downright dismal back in the late
1970s. Police Teletype and the gossip mill were the only ways cops heard about cases in other agencies. The EAR disappeared from the East Bay in the summer of 1979. Crompton’s bosses nearly danced with relief. Crompton was panicked. He could tell the guy was escalating, that he was requiring more terror in his victims’ eyes to get off; his threats about killing his victims, previously stilted in manner, were more severe but also looser, like someone shedding his inhibitions. Crompton worried. Inhibition shedding was not what the EAR needed.
In early 1980, Crompton got a call from Jim Bevins, a Sacramento Sheriff’s investigator he’d become close to through their work on the EAR Task Force. Bevins was trying to step away from the case. Its hold over him broke up his marriage. But he wanted to tell Crompton that he was hearing rumors that Santa Barbara had a couple of cases, one a homicide, that felt like the EAR. Crompton called down there.
They stonewalled. “Nothing like that here,” he was told.
Several months later at a statewide training conference, Crompton was seated by chance next to a Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s investigator. Small talk ensued. Crompton played dumb. Pretended he wanted to talk shop.
“What about that double homicide not too long ago?” he asked.
He never let his face reveal the chill he felt as he listened to the details.
“I’m telling you, Paul,” Crompton said. “Call down south. Start with Santa Barbara. I heard there was something like five bodies down there.”
“I will,” Holes promised.
“I know it’s him,” Crompton said, and hung up.
TWENTY YEARS LATER, HOLES CALLED SANTA BARBARA AND GOT shut down too. The Sheriff’s Department denied having any cases that resembled what he was talking about. But near the end of the conversation, the detective on the other end either recalled something or had a change of heart about obfuscating.
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