The ONS’s last known victim (to date!) was teenager Janelle Lisa Cruz, who was raped and murdered on May 4, 1986, almost five years after the Sanchez/ Domingo murders. Janelle lived with her parents one mile from Manuela Witthuhn.
Ten murder victims—four of the women raped—over a period of seven years. Then it all abruptly and conclusively ended. The ONS disappeared and never, as far as law enforcement could tell, struck again.
CHAPTER 19
TRAGEDY AND DESTINY
It was the summer of 1967, Newark, New Jersey. Not one of this city’s most crowning years, for certain. The year 1965 had given the country the Watts Riots in California. Racial tension was as taut as a hair throughout most major cities. According to some estimates, there were over 125 cities across the United States experiencing riots between 1965 and 1967.
Mind-boggling.
Jane graduated in 1967, just as the Newark riots began. Now a nurse on the front lines of the riots, Jane later recalled those moments as though reliving the violence, riot aftermath, and all of its horror once again:
Twenty-six people were killed, fifteen hundred wounded, sixteen hundred arrested. Many of the wounded came through our emergency room doors. Total chaos broke out and students were called to help with the injured. I worked directly inside the ER. The blood and trauma and drama didn’t bother me—and, believe me, there was enough of it to make you think you were locked inside some Hollywood movie. I can remember ducking as shots were being fired through the windows.
Postgraduation I stayed in Newark for three additional months and worked in the emergency room while waiting to take my nursing board examination in Trenton. It was after that I felt a desperate need for a change of scenery.
So I talked a girlfriend into moving down to sunny Miami Beach, Florida.
Included in the death toll in Newark was a ten-year-old boy. After all was said and done, the city itself faced a bill for $10 million. For Jane, the move down South was not only a welcome transition in life, but also a way to escape all the darkness of Newark and what had happened. After just a few months of Southern living, it seemed the life she had led back in the North was another time, another place entirely. She was ready for everything Florida had to offer: the sun, the sand, the sin.
One of the hospitals in Miami, Mount Sinai, offered free apartment living if you worked for them. My mother had already transferred to the VA Hospital in Gainesville, Florida, so we wouldn’t be too far away from each other. But after just a few years living the good life in sunny Florida, I got antsy—and extremely tired of taking care of the “rich folk,” who didn’t appreciate my nursing abilities. Many wanted to be waited on hand and foot and didn’t have any desire to help themselves.
Harkening back to my Newark days and the needy and appreciative folks I cared for there, I wasn’t too sympathetic to the rich, who expected that whatever they wanted would be given to them.
I needed to travel and see the world, but didn’t have the time or the money.
So Jane did the next best thing: She joined the military.
The years 1968 through 1969 might not have been the best moment to become a member of the military, some would perhaps note, since the Vietnam War was going on.
“But I wanted to be part of the action,” Jane said.
It was the living conditions of field soldiers that scared Jane into tweaking her career decision, however.
“After talking to the army recruiter and being told I would live in a tent, I quickly changed course and spoke to the air force recruiter. He . . . promised me a nice assignment in California. Ecstatic, I raised my hand and took the officer’s oath the next day, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. Three months later, I was on my way to officer basic training school at Sheppard AFB, in Wichita Falls, Texas, and would soon be off to my first assignment at Travis AFB in Northern California.”
Call it fate or the way the cards unfolded, all of these decisions that would soon change the course of Jane’s life were, she said many years later, how it was supposed to happen. And later, when she looked back on it all, she would say it was neither fate nor destiny: It was God’s plan, the absolute way her life was supposed to unravel. Everything that happened, in fact: the divorce, the miscarriage, the rape, and all those dark days after the rape she was soon to experience were “God’s plan for me.”
CHAPTER 20
BLOODSHED ENDS, THE SEARCH BEGINS
After all of the killing and rape suddenly stopped, Detective Larry Pool, today a retired investigator from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, took a look at all of it. Pool is one of those relentless cops who will not give up until a case he gets involved with is either solved or at the least able to move forward. It’s in his blood—same as with Larry Crompton—that this case, no matter where it took them or how many man-hours and years they spent on it, would be eventually solved.
Pool went back and looked doggedly at the entire case: the rapes, the murders, the break-ins, the burglaries, anything he could find connected to the ONS/ EAR. The ONS did not always use a gun, Pool noted; he killed once with a fire log he found outside the home. And in one case, specifically teenager Janelle Lisa Cruz, he waited until a male she was with left the house before he went in, raped, and murdered. This was not like him. He had killed several males before this, and also had detained scores of males during the EAR cases. Why did he allow this boy to live?
“Janelle Cruz,” Pool summarized, “came home in the evening and she had a friend over, a male friend, and they were in her room. Her family was away on vacation and Janelle was reading her friend some of the poetry she had written.”
While doing this, Janelle and her friend heard a noise outside her bedroom window.
“They perceived it to be a cat,” Pool added. “So we think she attributes the noise to a cat. They both hear another noise a few moments later and they get up to inspect, but [they] believe it came from the area of the washer/dryer. They then attribute that to the noise of the washer/dryer.”
Pool said they have no idea why he would allow this particular boy to live. Did he know him? Would the boy recognize him? Did he not want to murder a child?
These are questions without answers.
Pool expressed how the ONS sometimes struck. It could just be a simple bump in the night really. One of those noises we all hear: a tree limb brushing up against a window, a car driving by, the wind, a dog barking, some kids in the neighborhood yelling.
The sounds of life.
It was a story Pool had read in reports of those who had lived to tell it.
“The story that he, Janelle’s boyfriend, tells is consistent with the stories that the victims tell us throughout the East Area [Rapist] series of rapes,” Pool was quick to note. “They hear a noise. They dismiss it to the cat. They dismiss it to the dog. They dismiss it to the heating or the cooling of the house in the course of the day—it was getting cooler so the house is contracting or expanding, dependent upon the weather. And so they’d dismiss those sounds to any number of things.”
But, of course, it wasn’t. In fifty reported rapes and ten known murders connected to the same suspect by DNA and fingerprints, it was the ONS—the most notorious serial killer/serial rapist that the state of California, maybe the entire country, has ever known. Larry Pool would agree with that assessment.
And so the question remained—and stuck in the back of Jane Carson-Sandler’s mind as she went through life: Would the EAR/ONS ever be caught? Would Jane, and many other victims of this merciless sociopath, be able to sleep better at night, knowing that this psychopath was in jail, behind bars, where he belonged?
It was a waiting game now. During all of those years following his crimes, the evidence had withstood the test of time, and there were now the many technological and DNA breakthroughs that the EAR/ONS had never suspected would come.
CHAPTER 21
WEDDING BELLS
It was a warm evening. Maybe even inviting, as they say. The sun was s
etting. Jane was inside her car, driving. The sky was magical. Those colors we see only on postcards and in rainbows.
“I thought life couldn’t get any better,” Jane said later.
There she was heading across the Oakland Bay Bridge, thinking how beautiful, how wonderful, how amazing it all was. Not to mention how her life, just a short while before, had been a whirlwind of the Newark riots, a move south to butt heads with the elite of Miami, then joining the military and realizing she was on her way toward a career that could take her anywhere in the world.
Jane was headed for Travis Air Force Base, in Fairfield, California, north of Oakland. Her mother had been transferred to the Veterans Administration hospital in Palo Alto, California, just by happenstance.
“So the umbilical cord would remain tied,” Jane said with a laugh. “I didn’t mind. She was my best friend and would always be close by for loving support.”
It didn’t take long before Jane realized she was really happy about where she saw herself in the future. The military environment suited Jane’s character well. She adhered to and embraced it.
“I loved the military!”
Jane wound up working with injured troops from Vietnam that arrived via C-141 aircraft and, during the course of that work, felt needed and appreciated. Her work had merit. Her life had worth.
I saw it all and I cared for them all, not only physically but emotionally. They were my age. Some had no arms, no legs. Some were paralyzed . . . blind. Some had large wounds, infections, and head injuries.
But after a year of that, I was transferred to another unit as I became too emotionally involved with men and women I consider heroes. Thank God I didn’t join the army, I soon realized, as I would have seen the horrors of war up close and personal, right there on the battlefield.
It was that transfer that put Jane in a position to meet Bill, her fighter-pilot future husband, at the officers’ club one Saturday night.
“I had met a lot of men, but Bill was special. He was handsome, smart, a graduate of the Air Force Academy, and a pilot.”
After a brief courtship Jane and Bill were married at the base chapel in a beautiful military ceremony, including the crossing of the sabers as they walked out of the chapel as husband and wife for the first time.
It’s important to note here how Jane’s religious life played out throughout these years, considering what would happen with the rape and the personal terror she went through afterward, and where and how she came out of it. Jane’s mother was usually working different nursing shifts throughout Jane’s childhood. Her mom was unavailable, Jane said, to take her to the local Presbyterian church services on Sundays. Jane’s grandmother, Nannie, would step up and always drag—Jane’s word—her along.
I was not crazy about going, but was a pretty obedient kid, so never argued. . . . Once I became a teenager, church attendance for me became scarce, although I did enjoy going to youth-group meetings on Sunday nights.
I got married in the Presbyterian Church to my first husband. Joining the church and taking religious classes were a prerequisite, so I complied. Afterward, I rarely attended services, however. I was in nursing school and going to church was low on my priority list. I believed in God, but never had a spiritual connection with Him.
In 1971, when I was married for the second time, at the base chapel to Bill, it was the only taste of church I got then. I did not attend services, but occasionally sent the children Bill and I would have together to Sunday school when we were stationed in Germany.
Jane and Bill moved around a lot after getting married. After leaving Travis Air Force Base, their next assignment was Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. When Jane got pregnant, she said, the air force did not “take kindly to pregnant women at that time,” so she was forced off active duty.
“I was working in the pediatric unit when I learned of my pregnancy, caring for Negritos, who had every disease imaginable,” Jane explained. “Maybe God was protecting my unborn child and me from a terrible fate. I was sent home in March of 1973, the same time the Vietnam prisoners of war had returned. I was part of the planning team for their hospital stay, but wasn’t allowed back in the hospital when they arrived.”
This was disappointing to Jane, because she wasn’t able to care for them.
Upon her return to the States, Jane lived in San Antonio with her mother-in-law, until Bill returned that summer and their son was born. They spent the next year in Ohio and then headed to Sacramento for Bill’s next assignment at McClellan Air Force Base.
We bought our first home, that small ranch in Citrus Heights, and were excited about this new chapter in our lives. Fortunately, I had not resigned my air force commission, so I was able to transfer to the air force reserves and get a slot back at Travis as a flight nurse with the 65th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron.
I kept busy, being a mother and wife. But then, well, then on October 5, 1976, my life changed forever when that man wearing a ski mask came into our home and raped me in front of my child.
CHAPTER 22
ONS ON HIATUS?
As Larry Pool focused his attention on the ONS, he relied on technology to help him potentially discover new things about this elusive, intelligent, seemingly untouchable serial killer. There was one factor that Pool made sure of regarding himself living in the same area that the ONS had used as his personal space to wield his sick and twisted acts of perversion and murder: Larry Pool and his family were not ever going to be ONS victims.
“People are inclined to dismiss creaks and sounds to things that are harmless. . . . When you know this case inside out, when you dig into it and you see what happened, time and time again, it affects the way you perceive things. At least it has for me. So I’m a very light sleeper. I’m also a heavily armed sleeper. I keep my house safe.”
As Pool looked at the case, he said, the key pieces of the puzzle that authorities have right now are “first and foremost, the DNA. Also the latent fingerprints that were left behind potentially by the offender. We continue to run those through the automated fingerprint indexing system. We continue to compare suspects that don’t have fingerprints in the system or DNA in the system to those latent fingerprints.”
What this means is that if an offender is ever arrested in Texas, for example, and his DNA and/or fingerprints are put into the automated national system (the FBI’s CODIS: Combined DNA Index System), law enforcement could wind up with a hit for the EAR and ONS crimes. What’s more, Pool noted with a touch of both excitement and optimism in his voice, “DNA advances outside of what we do within law enforcement are considerable. There is ancestral information that could be determined through DNA.” In other words, science is right now looking at the possibility of narrowing down the ONS’s ancestry through his DNA. There has always been speculation that the ONS is European and that he was here for that time he offended but had moved back to his homeland after his last crime. That scenario answers the question as to why the murders/rapes stopped so suddenly. It was unlike the ONS to stop. Nothing scared this guy. Nothing deterred this guy. So the theory has always been that he died, wound up in prison, or moved.
Larry Crompton, who retired and wrote a book about his involvement in the EAR case titled Sudden Terror, thinks “the ONS/EAR was perhaps paralyzed in an accident, or some sort of health reason prevented him from continuing his reign of absolute terror.
“If he has stopped doing what he was doing, [being crippled in an accident] would have to be one of the reasons,” Crompton theorized. “I’ve had a couple of calls from people who read my book and then said, ‘I think I know who it is.’ A couple of them were crippled at the time. And one of them passed away just shortly after the murders stopped. But it was that reason that they felt he was a rapist, but he’s a cripple and he can’t do it now. Unfortunately, however, we eliminated those suspects.”
The other Larry—Larry Pool, that is—has made the DNA end of this case into his focus.
“Of course, we’re utilizing
the DNA as best we can right now,” Pool said of the ancestral DNA analysis, “in an effort to determine the ancestry, the origin of the offender. And by amplifying the DNA profile we have the ability to potential identify a family [he] descended from. So law enforcement is working on that currently. Utilizing that kind of technology might give us a family name and an area where we can focus.”
What’s more, if there was ever a doubt that those fifty rapes in the north were unrelated to the murders in the south, DNA analysis later wiped that doubt away: The latest analysis proved that all of the crimes are related and have been committed by one, single attacker.
Scary as that sounds, it’s actually the best outcome imaginable. Because if not, it would mean there were other attackers out there with the same MO and intelligence as the ONS. And California, or any other state for that matter, doesn’t need two Original Night Stalkers prowling the countryside.
There was additional evidence equally important to those involved with investigating the ONS/EAR case.
“When he was first hitting houses, he would have shoelaces, usually white shoelaces he brought with him,” Larry Crompton said later. “Then it got to the point when he would be taking the shoelaces out of the shoes of the people and that again, once the men were involved, he had more people to tie up. When he was hitting in Sacramento, and then when he was hitting in the north, we went through knots . . . and I felt that he was tying them up just to tie them tight—and the diamond knot never came up until later, and I didn’t know anything about it until I got involved with what was going on with the murders.”
She Survived: Jane Page 6