She Survived: Jane

by M. William Phelps

  Still, regardless of the calls and all of the taunting, along with putting himself out there, law enforcement was no closer to nabbing the EAR than they were when it had all started.

  CHAPTER 15

  GOING BACK

  To understand where Jane Carson-Sandler’s life was headed after she had been victimized by the EAR, one has to step back for a moment and take a look at Jane’s life before she met Bill and before she was raped.

  Jane was thirty when she was raped. Moving to California was something she did for work. She was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1946 and had spent her childhood in a small town called Dunellen, a middle-class working community of tough and proud New Jerseyans.

  My mother was a psychiatric unit nurse at Lyons Veterans Hospital, in Lyons, New Jersey. My father was one of the few electricians in town. My only other sibling, a brother, Bill, is four years older than I. I have happy memories of my early years through grammar school. Evenings would be spent chasing fireflies and playing hide-and-seek with the neighborhood kids. The Good Humor truck would come around on Friday nights, and my mother would play the piano for the neighbors as we all stood around and sang. My brother would show off his Lionel trains in the basement, and my father would entertain friends with cartoon movie strips.

  My brother was always planning and plotting some sort of good-natured prank. Because my dad was an electrician, my brother often tinkered with the trade. As a joke one time, for example, he wired the piano seat with a buzzer that startled my grandmother’s friends when they sat down.

  Jane and her mother were close. As Jane began to deal with the aftermath of being attacked, she leaned on her mother for support.

  (Photo courtesy of Roger Sandler)

  Jane’s introduction to religion and attending church services came from her grandmother, who volunteered at the local church and would often take Jane with her to help prepare food for special occasions. Jane said she was the “only child invited to help in the kitchen,” so it made her feel “pretty special.”

  Life was good. Jane felt loved and felt love inside her home. It seemed her family was invincible and would be together forever. She recalled a childhood memory of her father driving up to the house after work and she greeting him in the driveway.

  Yet, the happy, white-picket-fence bubble Jane lived in came to a screeching halt one afternoon. Her life, as she had known it, changed in an instant.

  Jane was home. She was just a child. She heard her mother and father arguing, hurling insults back and forth. The argument grew louder and louder.

  “Then I looked and saw my father with his hands around my mother’s neck—and she was screaming.”

  Jane’s world—that Bing Crosby image of a family standing around the piano singing and sharing fun stories—had now ended.

  Her father was choking her mother.

  CHAPTER 16

  BIGGER AND BOLDER

  Rapes nine through twenty-one took place on every day of the week. The only pattern to emerge from that new wave of attacks was that the EAR had continued to strike in the middle of the night or late evening, slightly changing his M.O. from early mornings. The one item many investigators agreed was that the released sketch and increased patrol in the Carmichael/ Citrus Heights areas pushed the EAR out of that region and forced him to expand his comfort zone to now include North Stockton and Eastern Avenue and other areas surrounding Citrus Heights and Carmichael. Apparently, he was finished with Carmichael and Citrus. So the added pressure and sketch had worked, and yet only to make him move. It certainly wasn’t enough to make him stop.

  The idea that one man with a ski mask could put such a scare into seven hundred thousand residents was something everyone living in the region was trying to grasp. “Hysterical” was a word many used to describe the feeling then. Everyone was staring at everyone, pointing fingers.

  “Is it you?”

  “How about you?”

  “What were you doing last night when he struck?”

  HE’S THE TALK OF THE TOWN, one headline in the Sacramento Union said next to a cartoonish drawing of a red ski mask with a blue stripe. THE RAPIST: BOLD, CRAZY, read another. COUPLE TERRORIZED, still another.

  Then something incredible happened—incredible because he got away once again. In between attack numbers twenty-eight and twenty-nine, the EAR was spotted near La Riviera Drive and Watt Avenue. He was wearing a ski mask while pedaling speedily on a child’s bicycle, which many believed he had stolen. There is a walking bridge on Watt Avenue passing over the American River, which leads down into a bike path underneath the bridge. It’s a fairly popular path attracting walkers and runners, bikers and people just out for a leisurely stroll. As sheriff’s deputies were traveling north on the freeway, heading over the bridge in search of a called-in sighting of the EAR, here was this guy, who many thought to be the EAR, pedaling away in the opposite direction, heading south along the bike path, where he soon disappeared into a crowd of people using the path. He had his ski mask pulled up, some reported, just above his eye line, exposing his face.

  No one could find him (or a trace) afterward. The attack he had planned was apparently aborted after he was spotted and the sighting called in.

  Yet it didn’t stop him—it only slowed him down.

  Six weeks later, he struck again, attacking and raping a teenage girl and her sister.

  If there was one thing about the EAR that law enforcement could be certain about, it was to never underestimate what he would do next, or how much he was willing to change up his routine and modify his comfort zones. If there is anything more dangerous than an active sociopath out wreaking havoc and fear within a community, it’s a relentless sociopath bent on one-upping cops and always staying ahead of the game. The EAR was the latter; he was willing to do whatever it took to keep on raping and terrorizing.

  In certain cases, in fact, he spit in the face of law enforcement, his prior victims, and the press. For example, right after it had been reported that he would only attack women alone at night in their homes, and that women with men at home were safe, he struck a couple’s home and continued striking couples. Whenever it was reported that he couldn’t do something, the EAR took on the challenge and went out and did it.

  A few specific traits stood out to Larry Crompton as he analyzed the EAR and thought about the type of desperate psychopath this man was, a man whose crimes were escalating and whose ego was being fed by the constant and consistent publicity surrounding his crimes. It was the EAR’s MO—it was unlike any other predator of his caliber. Rapists don’t generally go to such lengths, in other words, that the EAR was willing to go. Most rapists choose a victim, stalk the victim for a period of time (maybe just a few minutes when out trolling, or weeks, when developing an obsession about a certain female) and then strike in an alley, inside a home, in a dark parking garage or park, or along a walking path. With the EAR, it was clear that he stalked neighborhoods, not potential victims. This was significant. The neighborhood came first, the victim second.

  “I think he’d enter a neighborhood, walk around that neighborhood, and look at homes and look at people out in the yard, and it’s very easy for him to do,” Crompton explained. “He’d pick and choose which homes were potential targets.”

  Many believed the EAR would dress like John Q. Public, maybe have a dog with him at times and take a walk around a particular neighborhood as though he belonged there. This gave him the appearance of being just any other neighborhood community member out walking his dog. He probably even waved and said hello to community people he passed.

  “A lot of times he’d be on a bicycle or walking his dog, we think,” Crompton speculated.

  So he blended right into the community he would soon terrorize?

  “Oh, yes, definitely,” Crompton agreed.

  He might be that guy over there washing his car. That guy jogging. That man working on his house. That man cutting his lawn.

  That man with a family.

  “
Yes,” Crompton said. “He could certainly be all of that.”

  The main point that law enforcement was beginning to accept was that the EAR was not some one-eyed green monster or ogre you’d find mucking up a fairy tale, warts and all. To the contrary, this guy would not stand out in a crowd.

  That made him invisible.

  Crompton talked about how he once worked in Vice and Narcotics and by comparison, “I used to work undercover.. . . I could tell dopers when I saw them. I know ‘profiling’ is a dirty word, but as a police officer, you have to do it. I could tell if somebody in my neighborhood was a doper, and if he was looking for me because of cases that I worked, I would know that.”

  But this guy, the EAR, it was as though he was always one step ahead of any type of net put in place to catch him.

  “And, to be certain,” Crompton added, “he saw it all as a challenge.”

  Indeed, once the EAR figured out that the vise was tightening, he’d change his game around and wiggle out of that tight spot. And when a victim reached out one night and grabbed his ski mask, exposing his face just for a split second (and thus another police sketch was subsequently released, as would be several others over the course of the investigation), he decided that was it—he stopped.

  And yet, little did anyone know, although there was no word from him for several months—no sightings and no attacks—he was far from finished. What he had planned next was perhaps his swan song. And he would make damn sure that no one else would have the opportunity to grab his mask and see his face—or, rather, live to talk about it if they had.

  CHAPTER 17

  A DIFFERENT LIFE

  Jane’s grandmother was there that night her father put his hands around her mother’s throat and began to choke her. Thank goodness. Because Jane’s grandmother “butted in and threatened to call the police.”

  The incident, despite the police not becoming involved, was altogether earth-shattering, nonetheless. That family unit Jane had known and loved, and had such fond memories of, had dissolved like a dream in a movie.

  Before then, I never knew they had any problems. I did not know that my father . . . spent a great deal of time at the Lions Club or downtown at Otto’s Bar. I was too young to know that he had a drinking problem.

  Jane’s mother worked long, hard hours and rotating shifts. One of the things Jane admired about her was that the woman never complained about what she had to do to make ends meet.

  “She was like the Energizer Bunny,” Jane said.

  There was one summer when Jane and her brother were sent away to Camp Echo Hill in New Jersey for an entire month. That choking incident between her mother and father had happened; they all moved on; things seemed to be quiet, albeit not like they were before. Now Jane and Bill, her brother, were being shipped off to camp.

  What gives? Jane thought.

  Their father came up for a visit one weekend. He pulled the kids aside and said he needed to speak with them.

  “Your mother is in Reno, Nevada,” he explained. “She’s getting a divorce.”

  That was it. That’s how the man put it. Plain and simple. Just the facts. The onus, perhaps the point was being made, was on Jane’s mother. She’s getting a divorce. Not we’re getting a divorce. But she.

  Jane “nearly fell apart.” She was only eight years old, but smart enough to know that her “world had just turned upside down.”

  How could this be happening? Jane said to herself as time went on. Where is my father going to go? Who is going to take care of him? Why didn’t she tell us?

  The impact of divorce upon young kids—no matter which century, which language, or which custom or country—hurts in the same ways. The questions kids go through, the doubt, the questions they’re afraid to ask, are universal. It is as if self-esteem, right then, at the moment they find out about the divorce, begins to hiss out of them like a balloon losing air. They are never the same person again.

  After the divorce, Jane’s father lived in the family house with Jane’s brother, while she moved across town to live with her mother and grandmother. Not only did Jane’s parents split up, but she and her brother were now forced to separate.

  I didn’t see my father very often. When I would visit, I noticed he had the shades drawn and empty beer bottles all over the counters.

  Before my brother graduated from high school, he and my father moved to Phoenix, Arizona. My brother joined the air force, and my father married an emotionally unstable woman he met in a bar. They divorced not long after, but then remarried. I must say she took good care of him in his later years after she had stopped drinking. My father loved to entertain people. But he continued drinking the hard stuff, Jim Beam. One time, while dancing on the bar . . . he fell off and broke both of his ankles.

  Jane and her mother moved two additional times before Jane entered high school. They bought a two-bedroom home in an upscale neighborhood near Basking Ridge, New Jersey, where Jane wound up going to middle and high school. Jane started dating at thirteen— and that same boy later became her first husband, not long after she turned eighteen.

  Jane and her mother became “very close and shared a lot of laughs and good times,” Jane recalled fondly. Wherever Jane moved, her mother followed so they could be together.

  Once she was out of high school, Jane attended a three-year nursing program in Newark, located on the same grounds as the Martland Medical Center, where she eventually became a nurse. It was January 1966 when Jane and her school sweetheart were married—Jane was six weeks pregnant at the time.

  No one knew about the baby except my mother and his family. I don’t think any of us were very happy about the situation, but an abortion was out of the question. I wondered if I could remain in training to become a nurse for another eighteen months and care for a newborn at the same time.

  But God soon answered my question. I had a miscarriage on my wedding night at a hotel in Morristown. It was awful. Certainly no way to begin a marriage. I had such mixed emotions. In one sense I was heartbroken over the loss, but also relieved. I wasn’t sure I would have gotten married if I hadn’t been pregnant.

  God answered that question for Jane two years later when she and her husband divorced.

  CHAPTER 18

  DARKNESS SETTLES—THEN FIZZLES

  One thing can be said of all serial offenders: They might take time off, but sooner or later they always go back to the behavior that worked for them in the past. Nobody knows if the EAR went to jail, took a sabbatical out of the area (or country) on assignment for work, had been shipped to a different port (if he was in the military, as many would later speculate), or he just decided after that incident with the ski mask coming off his face that it was time to relax a bit, before making his next big move.

  But when he returned after a long break, he came back with a vengeance. His next crime took place in Goleta, Santa Barbara County, California, four hundred miles and a six-hour drive from Sacramento. It was like another world to him.

  It was December 30, 1979, a Sunday night, arguably about eighteen months after his last rape/attack in the north (arguably because there are other serial rapes that took place in between that some claim he could have committed, but no one can be certain because the evidence doesn’t exists to tie him to the crimes). Neighbors in the area heard several louds bangs and booms coming from a house in a rather secluded, suburban neighborhood. The sounds were so abnormal and loud, many believed fireworks were going off and didn’t think too much about it. The other side of this was that no one this far away from Sacramento ever expected the EAR to strike in their hometown; he was known to have committed all of his crimes thus far in the north. Nobody in the south had really heard of him.

  Those sounds of firecrackers going off, however, were actually gunshots. It was the EAR firing a shotgun at two new victims, forty-four-year-old Robert Offerman and thirty-five-year-old Debra Manning. What investigators later believed was that Offerman somehow managed to escape after being bound at the wris
ts by the EAR and went after him as he raped Manning. And when Offerman presented himself as a threat, the EAR killed him and then felt the need to kill Manning, sending a direct message that he was not going to take any type of resistance and was not playing around any longer.

  Regardless of how long it took to connect the case, the same sexual sadist known as the EAR was now a murderer who would soon become the Original Night Stalker, this on top of being one of the most prolific and intelligent rapists ever to work inside the boundary lines of California.

  Some law enforcement agencies had a difference of opinion with regard to the EAR/ONS being responsible for the Offerman/Manning murders as the investigation unfolded, but it would become absolutely clear through DNA testing later that it was, in fact, him.

  He would not stop there, however.

  That double murder must have jarred him, because he went quiet and simply burglarized homes in Santa Barbara for a time before he wound up in Ventura County in March 1980, where he raped Charlene Smith and murdered her and her husband, Lyman. Couples seemed to be his thing now; because after the Smith double murder, five months later he murdered Keith Harrington and raped and murdered Harrington’s wife, Patrice. He took six months off and switched back to his earlier behaviors, when, in February 1981, he raped and murdered Manuela Witthuhn.

  Five months after that, on July 26, 1981, he snuck into a house where thirty-five-year old Cheri Domingo and her twenty-seven-year old boyfriend, Gregory Sanchez, were house-sitting on the 400 block of Toltec Way, in Goleta. Both Cheri and Greg were bludgeoned to death, with Greg also being shot. It was obvious from the autopsy that Greg had gone after the ONS and was shot during the course of trying to save Cheri. The gunshot wound was not fatal. The ONS had overpowered Greg and beat him to death with a blunt object, same as Cheri. Both had been found in a bedroom. He seemed to make a complete circle with these last two murders because the Offerman/Manning murders, where it all started, had taken place just a few blocks away.