Was it all just a bad dream? Was I really just raped? The guilt and doubt began as soon as what seemed like dozens of people stood around her, inside her neighbor’s home. Lights flashed outside. Cops had notebooks in their hands. Questions were coming at Jane from the left and right.
Oh, my God, you saved us. . . . We’re okay. . . . We’re alive! Jane thought, staring at her neighbor, grateful that she had come along when she did.
In answering a few of the officers’ questions, she was able to tell them that her rapist wore a ski mask, held a knife to her throat, and wore a black or brown leather jacket and black high-top sneakers. It wasn’t much of a description, yet enough to tell them—which they were not yet sharing with Jane—that she had just been raped by a serial rapist whom they knew all too well.
At the emergency room some point later, Jane said, she felt alone and scared. The female officer who had taken her there stayed about an hour and left. Jane sat, by herself, waiting to be examined. And that stigma and filthy feeling rape survivors often talk about began to encompass Jane and surround her like a ghost.
People looked at me as though I were some kind of freak. My hair was matted. My face was streaked with tears. Blood could be seen through my top garment, where the rapist had scraped my breast with his knife. I felt so alone.
After a few hours, I was taken to a room to be examined by a male doctor. I didn’t want him to touch me, but had no choice as the evidence needed to be collected. After the humiliating exam I had to have a painful shot of penicillin in case this creep had a venereal disease. I also had to take a version of the “morning after pill” to prevent pregnancy.
Something Jane would take into deep consideration many years later and use to help others in her position was that she did not have anyone to turn to after the examination. There was no counselor from the local Sacramento Rape Crisis Center there for her. There were no friends or family. No one from the hospital sat with her. She had never felt more alone. Her feelings and emotions went from one extreme to another: one moment grateful for being alive, the next feeling dirty and terrified that she and her son had been nearly killed.
“One minute I was crying hysterically and the next minute I was smiling, happy and overwhelmed with joy. . . . I hated all men now. . . .”
Returning home, Jane saw scores of law enforcement all over her house. This sacred family place, which was once her safe haven, her happily ever after, her comfort zone away from the world, was now a vicious crime scene.
The gulf between Jane and her husband started almost immediately. The horror plaguing Jane, however, wasn’t whether she and Bill would make it out of this. Rather, it was whether her rapist was out there, watching it all unfold, and was now planning on coming back to finish the job? He’d warned her. Jane took his warning seriously.
Cops stopped by, it seemed to Jane, every day for the first few weeks. One investigator in particular asked Jane question after question.
“Are you suspicious of anyone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you be more descriptive now of what the rapist was wearing? His height, weight, nationality, skin color, voice quality?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where did you go to college? Where have you hung out socially? Where do you shop? Have you had your car repaired recently? Where does your husband work mainly? Have any repairmen, painters, salespersons, stopped by your house? Have you seen any strangers in your neighborhood?”
Jane was overwhelmed by all the questions and detail that law enforcement needed.
Just after she was raped and the police responded, like many rape victims, Jane was in a state of shock, awe, denial, misunderstanding, and confusion. There were so many different emotions that she could hardly keep track of them all.
Then the mug shot books came, one after the other.
“Is this him?”
“Is that him?”
“Do you recognize anyone?”
“He wore a ski mask,” Jane kept telling them.
Still, Jane was asked to stop by the Sacramento Police Department to search the mug shot books periodically to see if she could identify anyone.
They tapped her phone in case he called.
Her life, even after the rape, had been totally disrupted and, like that bed sheet the rapist had used to tie Jane up, torn to pieces.
CHAPTER 8
A TOWN HELD HOSTAGE
Coming back from being raped is a slow, agonizing process of questioning everything about your life and yourself. If you have the slightest bit of a self-esteem issue, watch out. The aftermath of being raped will wreak havoc on your spirit. As the days and nights went on, Jane was beginning to feel like the victim she had become. It didn’t help that she soon learned a few things about her rapist, even though he had not yet been caught.
One of the items that police released early was that they believed the rapist to be a homosexual. However, Dr. Elizabeth Harrison, a consultant for the Sacramento Rape Crisis Center, came out in a newspaper interview and said this was absolutely “wrong.” Harrison reiterated that the rapist here had made it a “goal” to “hurt and degrade” the females he terrorized. He had lots of “difficulty relating” to females and was “probably an abused child in his family.” There was no way to tell from the available information if he was homosexual—and it really wouldn’t matter, anyway.
This guy was aggressive and violent, no doubt about it. He made a point to make sure the woman he assaulted felt fear, felt less than, felt so locked in his world that there was nothing she could ever do to stop the assault. He was in total control.
Jane certainly felt all those things. Back inside her home, trying to get back to a normal routine, she was terrified he would return to finish what he started and kill her and her son.
“Even though I hated my home and was afraid to stay there, we did not talk about moving. Our next military assignment was unknown at that time. We felt we were well protected by our new alarm system, which was installed the day after the rape.”
The EAR has been referred to as the most prolific serial rapist in California’s history and the worst sexual predator the country has ever seen. He has been called the Original Night Stalker (ONS)—not to be confused with the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez, who came later. He has been labeled a psychopath, someone in a homosexual crisis, a paranoid schizophrenic, a crafty and ingenious sociopath, a sexual deviant, and a sadist.
Jane heard all of this. She didn’t want to be known as the woman who survived the ordeal that was beyond comprehension. On top of that, there was so much misinformation going around. At a ladies’ function Jane attended one night, she walked over to get something to drink at the bar and heard some ladies talking about the EAR—none of them knowing, obviously, that Jane had been one of his victims.
“I hear he’s cutting off women’s nipples,” one lady said.
Jane wanted to scream: “That’s not true! He raped me. . . . I should know!”
Not telling many people what happened is common among survivors of rape. Jane felt she couldn’t muster enough nerve to speak up. She walked around too embarrassed and too ashamed to speak out and ask for help.
A police officer came to the house frequently and, besides asking me questions, would give me an update on the location of the preceding rapes and a few details from each case. He was trying to find out if there was any connection between our cases. Were there any similarities regarding where we shopped, dined, or hung out? I could not understand why they could not catch this pervert. Everyone in the Sacramento area was living in fear.
Reports of new attacks were aired daily on TV and in the newspapers. Hardware stores were sold out of dead bolts, and many folks went to sleep with firearms. Self-defense classes were packed and public meetings were held to try to calm the community. There was an EAR patrol and a group of volunteer CB operators that had formed a group of neighborhood watchers.
Still, it got to the point where people we
re afraid to go to sleep at night.
Jane was his fifth known victim. But now, as time passed, the newspaper headlines began to tell a new, altogether more frightening story: 11 ATTACKS. 12TH TIME IN 15 MONTHS. EAST AREA RAPIST CLAIMS 15TH VICTIM.
Anything we run from has power over us, like fear. My husband and I were now running from that fear. Would my rapist return? When? We didn’t get a good night’s sleep for months, in spite of having an expensive alarm system. Not only were the windows and doors wired, [but] a button alarm was placed beneath our headboard for quick access. Every night my husband, my son, and I snuggled together for comfort and safety.
Helicopters were hovering overhead with their light beams flashing through the neighborhoods in search of this guy. We, along with everyone else in the community, could hear them. We didn’t have a gun in the house, but had thought about getting a pistol and keeping it under the pillow. We were so afraid. The entire Sacramento community was traumatized.
Rape after rape occurred without this guy being seen by anybody else but his victims. He would attack in the middle of the night, sneaking inside a home stealthily without anyone knowing or hearing him. He seemed to enjoy the terror he caused more than anything else. Neighborhoods were set up to guard against him and he would slip in, rape, and slip out, using dirt roads, trails, riverbeds, bike paths, sidewalks, any means he chose to escape. He would always get away.
The description of him became as familiar as his MO: white, fair to light olive complexion, five-nine to five-eleven, 150 to 170 pounds, dark hair and dark eyes. No one had actually seen his face, because he always wore a ski mask. Some reported the possibility of a bull tattoo on his left or right forearm. He favored dark clothing. He liked tennis shoes or sneakers, like Converse high-tops. Sometimes, though, he wore military-style boots. He always had a gun or knife. And, rather interestingly, a pattern of him jimmying a window open days before the attack soon surfaced. Authorities thought he used a screwdriver or small crowbar. He generally spoke with clenched teeth—that raspy, angry whisper Jane described. He even switched up part of his M.O. (or evolved his process) by attacking at night when people were sound asleep.
If there was a male present, he would tie him up and make him watch the rape, or force him into another room and place dishes and pots and pans on his back as he lay facedown. He would tell him, “If I hear you move, I will kill your wife.” He enjoyed exposing his victims’ husbands to the shrieking and terrifying sounds of their wives being sexually assaulted. He demanded food and money. He always produced blood by poking his knife into the victim’s skin, just enough to draw blood without cutting the person too badly. The female’s wrists and ankles were bound, sometimes with their own shoelaces or clothing or sheets he tore up on the scene himself. At times he’d cover the eyes of any males in the home with a blindfold, using a towel from the home.
He liked to sodomize his victims and “make them,” said one report, give him oral sex. In many cases he would stick around and sexually assault the victim several times. He often referred to his victims as “bitch” or “motherfucker.” He’d ask several times where they kept their money and expensive jewelry, yet rarely took anything of value from the homes. He did, however, like to take food or beer from the fridge with him. He lubricated himself with lube he either brought with him or took from the victim’s home. Many said that he enjoyed masturbating and had issues maintaining an erection. His penis, most of his victims reported, was very small. Some called it “infant-size.” He liked to straddle each victim from behind, making her lubricate his penis and “rub it.” He’d spend as little as five minutes in a home, or up to four hours, which said he definitely stalked the homes he hit and knew the routines of his victims.
Talk about a monster. In Sacramento, the bogeyman was real and he was out there, somewhere, causing absolute panic as the late 1970s approached and the nation prepared to ring in a new decade, the fabulous ’80s. As this guy perfected his craft of home invading and rape, he was preparing to evolve into an entirely different sort of serial offender—one more brazen and, sadly, more deadly than anyone could have ever imagined possible.
CHAPTER 9
WHERE IS HE?
Of course, whenever cops cannot catch a serial offender and he is causing panic and fear throughout the community, the first finger is always pointed at a cop.
“Cops are different,” retired detective Larry Crompton said. They’re too familiar within the community. There’s not a chance, Crompton added, a cop could be responsible for the EAR crimes. “I don’t think that a cop would be able to do this. It just didn’t seem possible.”
Too high-profile a person, Crompton added as one reason why it was likely not a cop. Cops are out in the community. They interact with people. The fact that this guy was so brazen about his crimes, not to mention leaving DNA and fingerprints behind, led Crompton and others to believe that someone in law enforcement—specifically a detective or beat cop—would be smarter than that.
Crompton explained the MO investigators in these cases first focused on.
“What he would do is shine a flashlight onto their eyes, other times he would tap on the door frame with a flashlight. It was a knife he would be carrying and he would put a knife to their throat or their face and tell them to do exactly as I tell you or I’ll kill you. And most of his victims were so afraid they knew—or felt as if—they were going to die. They did exactly as he said.”
Law enforcement began telling the public to turn their televisions down and place something over the screen to keep the shine of it as low as possible in case somebody walked by and could see inside the house. This gave the appearance that there might not be anyone at home.
The guy was clearly thinking very methodically about what he was doing. What he liked more than anything else was the idea that his victims knew who he was when he entered the home. He was such a high-profile rapist that as soon as he walked into a home and shined the flashlight in a victim’s face, she knew who he was and what he wanted. He got off on the celebrity profile he had built, in other words. It fed his tremendous ego.
“Oh, yes, definitely,” Larry Crompton agreed. “But you’ve got to understand something about this perpetrator and this case.” And this became very important to the investigation: Crompton’s team of investigators in Southern California had not known what was happening in the north—those cases connected to Jane’s.
“We were in Contra Costa County,” Crompton added, referring to the late 1970s while this guy honed his craft and continued terrorizing neighborhoods and people. “The citizens in Contra Costa County did not know what they were going to have happen to them (as the seventies closed and the eighties began). The news media had not come down to our area. We, as cops, knew about it because Sacramento came down and told us. But other than that, there was nothing in any of the newspapers in our area. We knew nothing about the East Area Rapist [at that time].”
No one certainly knew that he was about to strike in the south very soon—and up his game substantially.
CHAPTER 10
MEMORIES
Something kept coming back to Jane. He had said something to her about how good she looked at the military/officers’ club. She recalled how he had made a point to say this—as if he needed her to know it. The way he said it was demeaning and sarcastic, as if he was trying to get her to believe that he had seen her out in public and she didn’t even know it.
At the same time, however, did this comment say something about who he was? Had Jane known him? Had he been to that club on the military base? Was he in the military? The first thing that came to mind for Jane was that he was at the club and had seen her and developed an obsession with her there.
“That’s what I thought. And that’s why the next time I went to that club, I, uh, gave [some people] the worst looks you could ever imagine, like ‘Maybe it’s you,’ you know? ‘Maybe it’s you that raped me, you SOB.’ But again, I was very paranoid.”
Life had to go on.
As much as the rape had frozen her daily routines and feelings about people, Jane had to crawl out from underneath and continue forward—if not for herself, then for her husband and son. All of this, despite the guy was still offending at random, anytime he chose. The thought Jane always held in the back of her mind was Will he return?
“I was attending classes during this tumultuous time so as to keep busy, trying to concentrate on schoolwork and not the rape.”
It was about three months after the rape when Jane reached out for help to the Sacramento Rape Crisis Center.
I was very depressed. I had been overeating, gaining weight, had stopped wearing makeup, and was isolating myself from others, except when at the university. The counseling I received was invaluable. I met other women who had been raped. Through sharing our stories I realized I was not alone. They, too, were experiencing feelings of shame and guilt. They, too, wanted the assurance their behavior was normal after surviving, sometimes, a brutal attack. I was comforted by knowing that our fears and reactions to our rapes were alike.
After she returned from the hospital that day of the rape, Jane’s husband seemed to be in a state of shock and disbelief. Bill’s world had just been turned upside down. There was no textbook—do this, do that—indicating how to act around a rape victim, or how to respond to questions, feelings, and emotions. It took Bill a while, but “slowly” he realized and “appreciated” that his wife and son had not been murdered—they were alive. And that, in and of itself, was something to celebrate. Something to be grateful for within all the madness that their lives had become.
Yet, the foundation—all that they had known together as a unit, as a family—began to crack as time went on and the EAR continued his reign.
She Survived: Jane Page 3