“Bill hugged us one minute and cursed my rapist the next,” Jane recalled.
The emotional roller coaster never stopped for Bill or Jane.
Bill began to question himself, as any man might. Men are designed to protect—to stand in front of women and children and guard them from evil and the dangers life can throw at them. Bill felt helpless and defeated. He wasn’t home and his wife was raped and his son tied up and scarred for life. Could he come back from this? Could any of them come back?
“Who the hell is that SOB?” Bill would scream inside the house to no one in particular. “How did he know what time I left for work? I’ll kill that bastard! If I ever get my hands on him . . . I’ll kill him, Jane.”
Jane was scared. This was not like Bill. Their lives were now so vastly different from those days before the rape.
My husband was compassionate toward us one minute, and then full of rage and fear the next. His type A personality and fighter-pilot spirit were, in a sense, a detriment, as he always wanted to be in control. In this situation he did not have the opportunity. His first protective thought was to call an alarm company—which he did. But that’s all he could do. The rapist was still at large and the police were on a desperate search.
There were no leads. There was plenty of description about his MO and his way of thinking, but there was no genuine lead taking law enforcement toward one particular pool of suspects. The one piece of evidence he had left behind at just about every crime scene was DNA—his sperm. Authorities had it. At this time, however, “DNA” and “catching killers” were not yet part of the same sentence. Still, law enforcement had his DNA and could connect each case by that alone.
Yet, none of it helped solve the crimes.
CHAPTER 11
BRITTLE EMOTIONS AND A NEW THREAT
Fearing he might return, Jane, her son, and her husband snuggled close together in bed every night, as if waiting for him. Helicopters with spotlights, being proactive, still hovered over neighborhoods, hoping to locate the rapist at night during the process of him committing a crime. And yet the EAR looked at it all as a mere challenge.
“Sleepless nights were common for both Bill and me,” Jane said. “Taking care of our security needs was not difficult for him. Dealing with my erratic emotions was his challenge. How do you deal with your wife who has just been raped? He had no training or experience in that arena. Sometimes I felt as though he just wanted me to ‘get over it.’ Perhaps counseling would have been appropriate for both of us at that time. We had only been married five years when the rape occurred. Because of stress and poor communication of our individual needs, we separated for about three months before we then reconciled.”
Jane kept asking herself: Do I know him? Do I interact with my rapist every day and not know it?
It seemed like maybe she did, Jane would feel one day; and the next, she’d tell herself, no way.
“I didn’t know whether he saw me at the grocery store or whether he saw me at the college or whether he saw me at the officers’ club,” Jane explained. “I had no idea. I really didn’t. The only clue again he gave me was that comment about the officers’ club, so immediately I thought, uh, you know, this guy has gotta be in the military or have some connection with the military.”
Jane thought that things were getting somewhat back on track as she put some time between her and the rape. The daily thoughts were waning and not quite as common. The fear was not so much on full volume anymore, but cranked down to about a “five.” The notion that he would return was in the far corners of her mind. It had been several months by now. Things seemed quiet.
The EAR had not slowed down, however, despite how Jane was feeling. He attacked a seventeen-year-old girl inside her home when she returned one night to pick up some clothes. There was no one else inside the house. She walked in and bang! There he was, wearing his ski mask, dressed in all black, waiting for her inside her own home. He had entered the house, obviously, before she had and seemed to know she was going to return at some point that night. This attack had been the sixth such rape within a relatively small section of town—like a square mile. He had focused on one section of a neighborhood and systematically, over the course of a few months, raped six victims inside their homes. With this latest victim he had gotten in through a garage door he shimmied open.
Each description gave the same details: He was between twenty-five and thirty-five years of age, white, short (about five-eight), clean-shaven face, with dark, neatly cut hair (from what each victim could see with the mask he wore). All of the attacks occurred between 10:30 P.M. and 7:00 A.M. The age range of victims didn’t seem to bother him. Victims had been as young as sixteen and up into their forties.
During what was his nineteenth attack, by shining a flashlight in a couple’s faces, he had awoken them as they slept in bed. He held a gun on them. He tied them up after placing a blanket over their heads. In this latest one, he “pried open a sliding glass door.” The couple had two young children, both of whom he did not wake up. In fact, the kids slept through the entire time he raped the woman in front of her husband. Then he ransacked the house. In total, he was there for two hours. He took a tiny bit of money from the couple, but not all they had on hand.
On and on, the rapes continued.
Then, with his twenty-third victim, he made a startling statement—one he surely wanted to get out to the public. During this particular home invasion he again snuck in through a door he pried open quietly. The windows in the home had been locked. After forcing the woman (by putting a gun to her head) to tie up her husband, he took her to a different part of the home—a new MO he began to explore—and raped her. In yet another room was the couple’s children, who again did not wake up. But here, in this attack, there was another male, a friend of the family, sleeping in a guest room, who also didn’t wake up. It appeared the EAR was becoming bolder. He liked the idea of attacking couples with children, but he had now made it clear that it didn’t matter if there were three adults in the home—two of them males.
When he was finished raping this particular woman, he told her, “If there is no press coverage of this, I will kill my next victim.”
Then he took the husband and got him alone. He told the husband: “If there is any press coverage of this, I will kill my next victim.”
With that news hitting the media, police got together and, using the information gleaned from his now twenty-three attacks, developed a composite sketch.
Suddenly, for a guy who had gone to great lengths to hide his identity, there he was on the nightly news: a feather-haired, rather plain-looking white man. How an artist could have drawn a depiction of what was a masked man was anybody’s guess.
CHAPTER 12
CALM BEFORE THE STORM
Just when Jane thought she was getting a handle on her life and, as she put it later, “getting over the hump of dealing with daily thoughts of the EAR,” an incident occurred, bringing all that paralyzing fear and terror back into the forefront of her life once again. It was at this moment when Jane realized her life would never be as it was before she was raped.
It was a sunny afternoon in California. Bill was away on temporary duty for an air force assignment. Jane and her son were home alone for the weekend.
I had pretty much gotten over the fear of being left alone, especially with all the security devices we had in place. The weather was nice. I thought I’d sunbathe in the backyard while my son took a nap.
Jane put on a two-piece bathing suit and stretched out on her stomach atop a patio recliner in the middle of her backyard. Like many women, Jane untied the top, brassiere section of her bathing suit, so her back could get equal amounts of sun and she would not wind up with a tan line.
Suddenly I felt something hit my back, like a small pebble, but I ignored the feeling initially. Maybe the wind had blown something on me or maybe a large bug had landed, I thought. Soon after, a few more small objects struck me, at which time I knew something strange
was going on.
Thinking now that the sky wasn’t raining pebbles, Jane jumped up while holding her bikini top to her chest and ran into the house, terrified. It felt to her like someone was out there watching her, tossing pebbles over the fence, hoping she’d jump up and expose herself.
She locked the doors and called police. Something seemingly so innocent as a pebble or falling debris from a nearby tree had startled Jane to the point where she believed the EAR had returned.
My first thought, of course, was that the East Area Rapist was back and trying to get my attention. The police arrived in fewer than ten minutes, but it felt like hours. They knew I had been one of the EAR’s first victims. So when they arrived and I told them what happened, they raced out the back door and jumped over the fence in search of a suspect.
Was someone hurling small rocks or pebbles at me in hopes that I would stand up without my top and he’d get a thrill while seeing my breasts? How degrading! How humiliating!
My adrenaline must have been pumping because I also jumped the six-foot fence, hoping to see the EAR’s capture—this while cutting my left palm. It bled quite a bit and probably needed a stitch or two, but I refused treatment. I was afraid that returning to an emergency room would open old wounds, so to speak, especially after this frightening episode.
Jane didn’t have to repeat her leap back over the fence, because police escorted her home. At first it seemed to be nothing but perhaps falling debris and an anxiety-fueled rape victim a bit on edge.
“When I returned home, I immediately woke up my son and drove to a friend’s house, where we spent the rest of the evening,” Jane explained.
As it turned out, Jane wasn’t crazy, after all, or terrified for no reason. Those feelings of things falling on her weren’t from her active imagination—it was all real.
The police had searched the orchard area behind our home for a suspect and finally came across an elderly man who lived in a trailer. He confessed. I don’t think he was ever charged with a crime.
After the incident, I was afraid all over again, and mad at the same time. How dare this creep terrorize me? Didn’t he know that I was a victim of the EAR and didn’t need any more turmoil or fear added in my life right now? Of course, he didn’t know my situation. If he had, he probably wouldn’t have thrown the pebbles. The whole fiasco didn’t sit very well with my husband. Just when he thought I was well on my way to recovery, I was an emotional wreck all over again.
CHAPTER 13
THE INVISIBLE MAN
He did not kill his next victim, as the EAR had promised his previous victims with that bizarre set of backward warnings. But he did, however, change things up a bit. The EAR decided to hit the south side of Sacramento City. With victim number twenty-four, he struck “for the first time,” the Sacramento Bee reported, “outside of the east residential area.” Whereas all of his previous attacks had been north of Folsom Boulevard and east of Howe Avenue, the Bee noted, the masked serial rapist struck in a region near Sky Parkway, in the south side of the county. He had never done this before. He was beginning to branch out. He was expanding his comfort zone. He was stepping outside an area he had plundered and pillaged for what was nineteen straight months. Now, though, an entire new community had reason to fear this man who was causing complete havoc in the Sacramento area of California.
No one could stop him.
No one could catch him in the act.
No one could give a solid description of his facial features.
It was as if he was invisible.
Once again, the EAR had entered a home through a sliding glass door after prying it open with a screwdriver or crowbar. He had again chosen a woman sound asleep next to her husband. He again forced the woman to tie up her man before he took her into another section of the home and brutally raped her. The couple had a child, who again had not awoken.
It was getting to the point where people felt like fish in a barrel. It was as if there were a sniper roaming the county, picking off his victims at random, and nobody knew when or where he would strike next. Men would stay up all night, gun in hand, guarding their homes. Women were terrified to close their eyes. Although the EAR had not hurt children, experts warned that he was evolving; his behavior certainly proved as much. There could come a time when he began to hurt children. Nothing seemed impossible when dealing with the EAR.
Some time would pass without a rape and the community would feel as though maybe he stopped, or moved, or wound up in prison.
Law enforcement knew, though, a guy like this, with the wherewithal and fortitude of a slithering snake in a cornfield feeding on helpless mice at will, could (and would) never stop on his own accord. It just wasn’t part of his DNA.
“There’s no way he can,” Larry Crompton explained. “As an example, one rapist [I studied], who was also from Southern California, had raped [dozens] and he was caught and ultimately sent to prison for sixteen years. Then he got out and immediately raped another woman! You see, once it’s in their head, that’s it. It’s not a sex act, not when you are a serial rapist. A serial rapist you are not going to ever change.”
CHAPTER 14
HELLO?
Jane was home, alone. That’s when the calls generally came. She’d be going about her normal course of being a mother and wife, maybe not thinking about anything other than the moment, and the phone would ring.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
“Hello? Hello?”
Silence.
The only reason I would answer the phone is because it had been tapped by the police and maybe they’d be able to trace the whereabouts of the caller. No luck.
When I answered, I was always worried that the rapist might be on the other end, threatening me again in that deep, muffled, clenched-teeth voice.
“Shut up or I’ll kill you.”
Jane could never forget the tone, the texture, or the exact sound of his voice.
But no one was ever on the other end of the line. It was not a hang-up call, so to speak, but there was nothing but silence and then a dead line.
Was it him? If so, what was he trying to prove in calling his victims after he raped them?
As it turned out, the EAR started calling his victims. Investigators couldn’t tell if it was the rapist who had called Jane, but they suspected it might be. Because in one other instance he called a victim, for whom cops had, same as Jane and several other victims, placed a tap on her phone. She picked up, and there was this terribly disturbed individual on the other end. Nothing but heavy breathing . . . in and out. These deep, slow, long breaths. Then his voice, in a near whisper, but clear as glass: “Gonna kill you. . . . Gonna kill you. . . . Gonna kill you. . . .” He emphasized the word “kill.” This was the message: You were dead. Then he followed with “bitch . . . bitch . . . whore.” He’d drag out each syllable, so it came out slow and eerie. He’d made sure his words were understandable. He had already raped this particular woman, but he was now terrorizing her all over again, in an entirely new way.
The first eight rapes he committed in the Rancho Cordova/Citrus Heights/Del Dayo neighborhoods of California happened with a “news blackout” in place—Jane Carson-Sandler’s case being one of those. Law enforcement did not want the crimes reported. They had hoped to catch this psychopath and be done with him. Within these eight rapes, so it seemed, there had been no systematic or coordinated effort on his part to create a pattern, besides the region of the rapes and the times he struck. The rapes took place on Mondays, Saturdays, a Sunday, a Friday, and a Tuesday. He’d strike when he felt like it, mostly in the middle of the night. One teenage girl had actually escaped from him before he could rape her. You look at an Excel chart of these crimes and it boggles the mind: the sheer energy and amount of planning that must have gone into each crime. The idea that he could not be stopped when everyone was out there searching for him is baffling. And just when you think he’d gone and outdid himself, he’d up the ante, like moving from single women
(or women home alone) to couples sleeping in bed. Then he made sure there were others in the home, whom he would not wake up. Then the threatening calls after the rapes.
There was even one time when a town meeting had been held. It was covered by the local papers after the news blackout had been lifted. The room was packed. People were frustrated and angry. One man stood up and taunted the rapist, making a plea for him to come and try to enter his house and rape his wife.
And you know what? The EAR did exactly that.
He was mocking the police. He was saying no matter what he did, or how he did it, no one was going to catch him. It was a game to the EAR—one he was clearly winning.
But now they had him on tape, talking, and profiling experts realized something distinctive about the voice.
“The one call that we had taped,” Larry Crompton explained, “he called the lady . . . a bitch, and the way that he talked was through clenched teeth. But he also stuttered a little bit.”
He’d tried to disguise his voice by whispering, but he couldn’t hide that slight stutter. So law enforcement took that tape to his other victims so each could listen to it to see if they were actually dealing with the EAR. After all, the caller to that one woman could have been some twisted pervert out in the community following the story and wanting to get involved.
But victim after victim said it was him on that tape. There was no mistaking that creepy voice; they’d heard it inside their bedrooms as he threatened each one with death. How could they ever forget an experience like that?
Other calls came in, where people reported getting calls from a man who claimed to be masturbating while talking, but Crompton and his team did not believe it was the EAR.
She Survived: Jane Page 4