I'll Be Gone in the Dark

by Michelle McNamara

  The overall impression was of an unbalanced mind at work.

  “PUNISHMENT.”

  Holes was hooked.

  OUR WALK ON THE IRON HORSE REGIONAL TRAIL STOPS ABRUPTLY in front of an electrical pole. It’s the second pole north of an intersection a couple hundred yards in the distance, the spot where the bloodhounds lost the EAR’s scent and it’s believed he entered a vehicle.

  “The homework evidence was found in this area,” says Holes.

  He has practical reasons for believing that the pages belonged to the EAR. Tracking dogs aren’t infallible, but the fact that three independent bloodhounds indicated that he escaped south down the tracks is strong evidence; more important to Holes, the route, and where the scent trail ended, is consistent with the usual distance from the target that the EAR was known to park before making an approach. John Patty was a well-respected criminalist and heavily involved in the Contra Costa County cases; if Patty collected the evidence, he must have thought it might be important. The other two items found with the homework evidence are dead ends. The length of purple yarn is a mystery, and the fragment of paper with some typing on it is illegible. But spiral notebook paper isn’t as incongruous at a sexual crime scene as one might imagine. Serial sex offenders and killers frequently take notes as they prowl for victims, sometimes even developing their own code words. More than one witness who called in a suspicious person during the EAR attacks in Sacramento described a man holding a spiral notebook. And the EAR, despite his ability to elude authorities, did drop things occasionally; whether on purpose or not is unclear: a screwdriver, a bloody Band-Aid, a ballpoint pen.

  The ricochet between rage and self-pity in “Mad is the word” is another clue. Violent criminals like the EAR, that is to say, serial sex offenders who escalate to homicide, are not only rare but also so varied that generalizing about their backgrounds and behavior is unwise. But common themes do exist. The future nightmare maker begins as an adolescent daydreamer. His world is bisected; violent fantasies act as a muffler against a harsh, disappointing reality. Perceived threats to his self-esteem are disproportionately internalized. Grievances are collected. He rubs his fingers over old scars.

  Violent fantasy advances to mental rehearsal. He memorizes a script and refines methods. He’s the maltreated hero in the story. Staring up at him anguished-eyed is a rotating cast of terrified faces. His distorted belief system operates around a central, vampiric tenet: his feeling of inadequacy is vanquished when he exerts complete power over a victim, when his actions elicit in her an expression of helplessness; it’s a look he recognizes, and hates, in himself.

  The majority of violent fantasizers never act. What makes the ones who do cross over? Stress factors coalesce. An emotional match is lit. The daydreamer steps out of his trance and into a stranger’s house.

  The “Mad is the word” author exhibits the kind of disproportionate emotional response common to violent offenders. A sixth-grade teacher who punished him “built a state of hatred in my heart.” The author chooses self-pitying, melodramatic words to describe his experience. “Suffer.” “Not fair.” “Dreadful.” “Horrid.”

  We begin the walk back to the car. I consider what I know of Danville, which has a trajectory similar to that of many Northern California towns. Once upon a time, it was populated by Native Americans who camped out on Mount Diablo to the northeast, but in 1854 a white man flush with gold rush earnings swooped in and bought ten thousand acres. His name was Dan. Fruit and wheat farming hung in until the 1970s, when new residential construction boomed and people moved in, transforming the town into one of the coziest, wealthiest suburbs of the East Bay. Holes says aerial photos he consulted didn’t show a huge construction spike in the neighborhood during the period when the EAR was prowling its backyards. The victim’s house was built in the midsixties. Danville’s quaint history was a draw. The population doubled by 1980.

  The rap on Danville today is that it’s homogeneous and status conscious. It was recently ranked number one in America for highest per capita spending on clothing.

  “Do you think he grew up in an area like this?” I ask Holes.

  “Middle class? Yeah, I think it’s likely he’s not coming from an impoverished background,” he says.

  I raise the issue of the EAR’s unmatched DNA profile. I’m in wildly speculative territory, I know, but I’ve always thought it might indicate that he operates behind a front of respectability. I prod Holes for his opinion on the DNA.

  “It surprises me,” he says. “We’ve had DNA for over ten years on the national level, and we haven’t hit on the guy.”

  “Does it surprise you there’s no familial hit either? Doesn’t that suggest someone who comes from a more straitlaced family?”—an opinion thinly veiled as a question.

  “I think that could be, versus somebody that’s constantly committing criminal acts,” he says cautiously.

  Holes and I have now spent several hours together. He’s great company. Effortless. In fact, his manner is so easygoing and mild that it takes me longer than usual to recognize his conversational patterns. When he’s not on board with a particular idea, he’ll tell me with equanimity. But when he’s uncomfortable with a line of questioning, he sidesteps more obliquely, either by not really answering or by pointing out something of interest in the landscape.

  I sense a similar deflection from him on the topic of the EAR’s socioeconomic background. Holes is a criminalist, I remind myself. He’s a professional quantifier who works with scales and calipers. He’s not pedantic, but when presented with lazy inferences, he separates hard fact from mud. He corrects me when I allude to the EAR’s thick calves. The witness actually said heavy thighs. Later in the day, he’ll show me, via an impressive spreadsheet, how foolhardy it is to conclude anything about the EAR’s physicality from victim statements. Eye color and hair color are all over the place. Poor lighting and trauma obscure perceptions. Physical stature is the only constant, Holes points out. The EAR was around five nine. Six feet would be considered on the tall side for a suspect. But they’d still look into him, Holes adds.

  “You always want to err on the side of caution.”

  Ever the scientist.

  Prudence and scientific accuracy await me in the future. But at this point, as we prepare to leave Danville, I’m still in theory-riffing mode. I continue to rattle off other clues that the EAR might wear a mask of normalcy. Most of the murder victims were white-collar professionals who lived in upper-class neighborhoods. He must have presented as though he belonged there. He must have had some type of regular employment. He had ways and means.

  “We know he had a vehicle,” I say.

  Holes nods, his face shadowed. He seems to be turning something over in his mind, debating internally the wisdom of sharing a thought.

  “We know he had a vehicle,” he says. What he says next he says very slowly: “I think he may have had more than that.”

  I’m momentarily unable to imagine what that could be.

  Holes tells me: “I think he may have had a plane.”

  I stumble over the first and only word that comes to mind.

  “Really!?”

  He smiles an enigmatic smile. I’d misread him. He wasn’t disapproving of my speculative questions. He was considering when to add his own narrative line.

  “I’ll elaborate at lunch,” he promises.

  First, we need to make one last stop in Contra Costa County: Walnut Creek.

  WALNUT CREEK

  The Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Sidney Bazett house on Reservoir Road in Hillsborough, outside San Francisco, is located at the end of a winding, tree-cloaked driveway and not visible from the street. Its extraordinariness is murmured about but rarely seen. One afternoon in 1949 the owner’s mother-in-law, who was there alone, was surprised by a knock at the front door. The visitor was a middle-aged businessman in thick-lensed glasses. A half-dozen men in professional attire with serious expressions stood behind him. The man explained that
his name was Joseph Eichler. He and his family had rented the house for three years, from 1942 until 1945, when the present owners bought it. The Bazett house, with its redwood built-ins and glass walls, where daylight filtered in from so many directions and changed the mood of each room throughout the day, was a work of art that stirred Eichler. He’d never forgotten the house, he explained. In fact, living in it had changed his life. Now a merchant builder, he’d brought along his colleagues to show them the source of his inspiration. The group was invited inside. Crossing the threshold, Eichler, who got his start on Wall Street and was a notoriously tough businessman, began to cry.

  By the mid-1950s, Joseph Eichler was one of the Bay Area’s most successful developers of single-family homes in the California Modern style—post-and-beam construction, flat or low-sloping A-frame roofs, open floor plans, glass walls, atria. His ambition grew with his business. He wanted the rapidly expanding postwar middle class to enjoy clean geometric lines; he wanted to bring the Modernist aesthetic to the masses. Eichler began scouting central Contra Costa County for land to build a subdivision. He needed several hundred acres. More than that, he needed the right feeling. It should be an area on the cusp, unspoiled by urban sprawl but with budding infrastructure. In 1954 Eichler visited Walnut Creek. The town was essentially horse country. Ygnacio Valley Road, now a major thoroughfare, comprised two lanes occupied not infrequently by cows. But the area’s first shopping center had recently opened. There was a new hospital. Plans for a freeway were in the works.

  In a walnut orchard in the northeast part of town, across from Heather Farm Park, Eichler’s search came to an end. Mount Diablo shimmered in the distance. Here was the perfect place, he thought, for a community of creative professionals, progressive types who appreciated modern art and design, people who were tired of living in cookie-cutter houses where you could find your way around blindfolded. The subdivision of 563 houses, 375 Eichler homes, the rest standard tract, was completed in 1958. A brochure shows a beautiful woman in a flowing dress gazing out a wall of glass into her tidy backyard. The roof is post and beam; the chairs, Eames. Eichler named his new community Rancho San Miguel.

  The neighborhood had its detractors. Some thought the Eichler design, with its blank wall to the street and orientation toward the backyard, was antisocial. Waving from the front window at neighbors was no longer possible. Others thought the houses were ugly and resembled garages. Nevertheless, Eichlers, as people call them, have developed a devoted cult following, and Rancho San Miguel, with its parks and good schools, has remained a consistently coveted place to live. But the unusual homes, with rear glass walls, sliding doors, and high fences sealing off individual backyards, have also attracted another kind of following, not forward-thinking but darkly motivated, a fact that isn’t mentioned publicly but has been puzzled over privately for years.

  Holes and I pull up to the site of the first Walnut Creek EAR attack, an Eichler in Rancho San Miguel.

  “I call this the Bermuda Triangle of Contra Costa County,” says Holes. “We’ve had other serial killers attack in this same neighborhood. A missing girl. A known serial-killer attack. A housewife in 1966 that was strangled and her panties torn off. The two EAR attacks. And it’s like, why?”

  In the spring of 1979 a seventeen-year-old girl who lived in Rancho San Miguel in Walnut Creek began to receive a series of anonymous calls. What was especially unsettling was that the calls followed her to homes where she was babysitting. The parents would leave, the kids put to bed. A ring would knife through the quiet. “Hello?” The familiar blankness was always followed by a click, the only sign there was a human being with intent on the other line.

  The girl sat regularly for two families who lived in Eichlers across from each other on El Divisadero. In early May, a nightgown and telephone directory went missing from her own house; even so, she didn’t feel the hot breath of a threat moving in close. The thing about Eichlers is, they draw your attention to the outside. Walls of glass display occupants like rare museum objects. At night the play of light against dark means your view is limited to your reflection. The opaqueness fires the queasy imagination.

  In five months, the movie When a Stranger Calls would be released. Based on a well-known urban legend, the story involves a teenage babysitter who’s tormented by a series of increasingly sinister calls. “Have you checked the children?” an unidentified man asks. The off-white rotary phone sits menacingly in the living room like a time bomb. The drip of fear spikes at the end of the opening scene, when the detective trying to help the babysitter calls her back with an urgent message.

  “We’ve traced the call. It’s coming from inside the house.”

  Animal fear writ modern.

  When a Stranger Calls hadn’t come out yet on June 2, 1979. No anonymous calls came for the babysitter in Walnut Creek that Saturday night; there was no sense that a silent phone meant that an alternate approach was being considered and planned.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table when she heard footsteps or a man’s voice; she couldn’t remember which came first, only that he shot up suddenly, as if spring-loaded from the dark hallway and into her terrified heart.

  He said little and repeated what little he said. He communicated with jerky, unpredictable bursts of violence. He shoved her head down. He tied her wrists tightly with plastic cable ties. He bit her left nipple. Criminalists are required to take photographs of victims at the scene. No one looks happy, but everyone looks into the camera. Not the babysitter. Her gaze is averted, eyes anchored low. They seem unlikely to ever come up.

  A large open field and a school were across the street at the time. The house next door was empty and posted for lease. Dogs tracked the EAR’s scent around the corner, where he’d evidently gotten into a vehicle; he’d parked in front of a house where a pool was being built.

  Police patrolling the neighborhood after the rape stopped a drunk driver with a knife and sheath. They stopped a man with his pants down who said he was looking for his lost cat. In his car were photographs of unsuspecting women taken with a zoom lens. They were just two of the dark compulsives scuttling through the suburbs at night, like the waterways cemented over but still churning underneath Walnut Creek.

  Twenty-three days later, the EAR returned to Rancho San Miguel.

  Investigators who’ve worked the lead on serial cases say there are times when they feel that the offender is speaking to them, as if their private thoughts have been telegraphed and he’s responding. It’s a wordless dialogue familiar to obsessive competitors, an exchange of small gestures whose meaning only the two people locked in battle understand. In the first leg of the race between cop and at-large criminal, the investigator is the clock-watcher with the anxious, racing mind, and the offender is the string puller with the haunting smirk.

  The second Eichler was just a hundred feet from the first. The victim was a thirteen-year-old this time. Her father and sister were in the house, unaware of what was taking place. The tracking dogs yanked their handlers around a corner and stopped abruptly in a familiar place: the same spot as before, in front of the house where the pool was being built.

  The details of the crime coalesced to form a disembodied shiteating grin.

  “Has he ever gone back?” the thirteen-year-old asked the investigators interviewing her after the attack.

  “Never,” said the first investigator.

  “Never, ever, ever,” said the second.

  “The safest house in the area,” said the first.

  As if any house was ever going to feel safe again.

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD DOESN’T FIT EXACTLY WITH HOLES’S CONSTRUCTION angle. The Eichlers were all built in the 1950s. Rancho San Miguel didn’t have active development going on at the time, though there was some adjacent development. It’s two miles from the 680 freeway.

  “It’s a little off the beaten track,” says Holes, looking around. “Something is pulling him out to this outside neighborhood.”

  The drive thr
ough Contra Costa County is different for Holes than it is for me. I’m seeing the neighborhoods for the first time. Holes is driving through old murders. Every “Welcome to . . .” sign is accompanied by the memory of forensic evidence, of blurry-eyed afternoons spent in the lab hunched over a microscope. Walnut Creek particularly resonates for Holes, reminding him of the mystery of a missing girl.

  Elaine Davis was going to sew a brass button on her navy peacoat. Her mother left their home on Pioneer Avenue, in north Walnut Creek, to pick up Elaine’s father from work. It was ten thirty p.m. on December 1, 1969, a Monday night. When the Davises returned home, Elaine, a seventeen-year-old straight-A student with sandy blonde hair and a heart-shaped face, was gone. Her three-year-old sister was still asleep in her crib. The house appeared undisturbed. Elaine, who was nearsighted, had left her badly needed glasses behind. Items of Elaine’s began to surface. The button she intended to sew on her coat was found in a field behind her house. Her brown loafer with a gold buckle was picked up on Interstate 680 in Alamo. A housewife spotted a petite girl’s navy peacoat on a remote stretch of highway in the Santa Cruz Mountains, seventy-five miles away.

  Eighteen days after Elaine disappeared, a female body floated ashore at Lighthouse Point in Santa Cruz. A radiologist studied the bones and concluded that the woman was twenty-five to thirty years old. It wasn’t Elaine. The Jane Doe was buried in an unmarked grave. The Davis disappearance went cold.

  Thirty-one years later, a Walnut Creek police detective nearing retirement brought the case file to Holes, who reviewed it. Holes concluded that the radiologist was wrong and couldn’t have made an accurate determination of age. Holes joined other officials in an effort to exhume the Jane Doe’s body. Twenty-five feet deep on the side of a hill, shovels connected with a plastic body bag filled with bones.