The knots the ONS/EAR used to tie up his victims, specifically that diamond knot Crompton mentioned, became a big issue. Diamond knots are used mainly by sailors, ranchers, and those familiar with knot tying. It is not a knot one can tie hastily if one does not know exactly what he is doing, in other words. Because he used a diamond knot, some speculated, it not only said a lot about the guy, but perhaps he was sending a message by using the knot. So the question became: Was he actually toying with law enforcement and saying something with this diamond knot?
“I don’t know,” Crompton said reservedly, “but I think that if he did tie a diamond knot, it would have to be after the people were secured. His whole thing was to secure them so that they could not attack him, and he’s not going to take time to tie any kind of a knot other than one he could get tight as possible.”
As an additional caveat, warning people not to focus too much on these knots, Crompton concluded, “And understand that when there was a man involved, well, he would have the woman tie the man up and then he would retie the man later.”
And then we come to the poem. Yes, poetry.
There was a time during his late-1970s crime spree when the EAR, meddling with law enforcement, sent in a poem about himself. It was a rather interesting, albeit verbose and adolescent, sonnet that told profilers a lot about who the guy was and what he had been planning all along. (Interestingly, some people did not believe this came from the EAR. They felt it was someone pretending to be him.)
CHAPTER 23
FAITH IN THE FACE OF FEAR
Jane’s faith would become unbreakable. Getting there, however, was another story. As trite and clichéd as it might sound, she would walk through the valley of darkness after the rape before literally getting on her knees and pleading with God, whom she believed in, to help her.
The first postrape trauma occurred in the garage lobby at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC, one night. Jane and a female friend, whose husband worked with Bill, were out and about, “dressed to the T’s with furs and expensive jewelry,” heading to a yearly party. It was bitterly cold that night, Jane recalled. There was a storm in town, so it was rainy and windy and raw.
As they made their way from their car to the elevators inside a parking garage, Jane noticed a man, an African American, circling several cars about forty feet away from where they stood.
“I thought he looked suspicious, but didn’t pay too much attention to him as I was in a hurry to get to the dinner I would be attending with my husband, who had already arrived at the hotel and was waiting upstairs.”
There was no security guard in the booth inside the lower garage level. Jane and her friend were now alone in the hall, adjacent to the parking lot, waiting for the elevator to take them upstairs. Jane had forgotten about the man she saw.
As Jane and her friend talked, a masked man, yielding a large knife, ran through the entrance door and approached them.
“Money . . . give me all of your money,” he said.
Right away, Jane went back to that morning inside her bedroom when the EAR stood by her bedside with that knife, grazing her skin, drawing blood. She was in that moment all over again. It couldn’t be. Here she was again facing an attacker wearing a ski mask, brandishing a knife. Did Jane have the word “victim” written on her forehead? How had she become such a vulnerable target again?
“The knife looked similar to the one the EAR was carrying,” Jane said later. “I couldn’t believe this was happening.”
But, to her surprise, the first emotion she felt wasn’t fear. “It was anger. How can this be happening? Is he kidding? Am I really being held up and threatened—again?”
Was someone playing a terrible joke on her? Jane wondered.
No such luck. It was the real thing.
“Due to my disgust, I told him I didn’t have any money, while at the same time I twisted my diamond around to face my palm.”
I’ll be damned if you’re going to get anything from me! Jane thought as she stood there with this masked man, wielding a knife, facing her.
Her friend was shivering in fear and handed him some money from her wallet.
He walked up to Jane. Then he placed the blade of the knife in front of her.
“Do you want me to cut up your face?” the attacker said.
Jane could tell he meant business.
She fumbled around in her wallet and “threw seven dollars at him.”
This pissed the guy off. Now he believed Jane was messing with him.
Then, out of nowhere, a woman heading to the parking lot walked down the stairs and out of the door, right where they were standing—which startled the masked man into taking off.
I believe now that she was an angel that God had sent to protect us. Thinking back on that night, I took a great risk by not complying with his wishes. I was so mad this had happened to me. How could this happen again?
Jane said she later thought about God that night, but it wasn’t pleasant. She felt duped—as though He had let her down.
“He knows I’ve been raped and now He allows another attack?”
It made no sense to her. She had never been some sort of churchgoing, Bible-thumping religious zealot, dedicating her life to God. But as Jane grew older, she was beginning to contemplate a deeper relationship with God, suffice it to say after what she had been through with the rape.
I guess I believed that I would never suffer or face fear again after the trauma I had experienced. However, today I know that throughout our lives we all have our share of sunrises and sunsets, hills and valleys, ups and downs. But if we hold on to our faith and trust God, He will hold us in His arms and never forsake us. We just have to be faithful and attentive.
That outlook belonged to Jane in 2014. It took her some time and plenty more trauma to get there, however—because the next battle would be a very personal one: addiction.
CHAPTER 24
THE POET
It was February 1978, when the EAR allegedly sent a poem about himself to the editor of the Sacramento Bee, a second copy to the Sacramento mayor’s office, and yet a third copy to a local Sacramento television station. He used legal-size onionskin paper. After testing, forensic examiners found one latent palm print on one of the envelopes (as if he wanted it left there). According to one law enforcement source involved later on, there was a piece of information in the poem only the family of one of the EAR’s victims could have known. It was information that had never been made public. And that alone, that investigator claimed, was of great concern at the time because it meant to them that the poem had been sent by the EAR. It was not an imposter or some kids playing around. This was a direct message from this serial sociopath saying: Catch me if you can.
The poem, titled “Excitement’s Crave” by the EAR, reads as follows:
All those mortal’s surviving birth
Upon facing maturity,
Take inventory of their worth
To prevailing society.
Choosing values becomes a task;
Oneself must seek satisfaction.
The selected route will unmask
Character when plans take action.
Accepting some work to perform
At fixed pay, but promise for more,
Is a recognized social norm,
As is decorum, seeking lore.
Achieving while others lifting
Should be cause for deserving fame.
Leisure tempts excitement seeking,
What’s right and expected seems tame.
“Jessie James” has been seen by all,
And “Son of Sam” has an author.
Others now feel temptations call.
Sacramento should make an offer.
To make a movie of my life
That will pay for my planned exile.
Just now I’d like to add the wife
Of a Mafia lord to my file.
Your East Area Rapist
And deserving pest
See you
in the press or on T.V.
Now, I publish the EAR’s poem in this book at the risk of copyright infringement. After all, I did not get permission from the EAR to publish his poem. Yet, in all honesty, I’d love for him to come forward and make a claim in court against me that it is, in fact, his work!
For Crompton and other law enforcement sources, the poem displayed the EAR/ONS’s extreme hubris and narcissism. It proved that he was looking to take off once he completed whatever sadistic plot he had planned next. And he knew, thirty or forty years after he committed his first crime, well, people would still be talking about him—as we are today and will continue to for many years hence.
We could argue the psychology of this poem endlessly. We could pick it apart bit by bit (which it has been) and break it down into profiling points, examining the ONS’s mind. For me, however, the poem screams of a background in Russian literature of some sort—a guy who is familiar with Russian literature and cannot hide his deep-seated Russian roots. It’s the phrases and word choices he uses that lead me in this direction as I did a complete study of this poem. If there’s one thing about language I can clearly count on and believe without reservation, it’s that we, as human beings, no matter how hard we try, cannot hide the influence language has had on us throughout our lives. It’s there in everything we write and everything we say. It’s not a fingerprint, necessarily; but the words we choose to put together into sentences—again, even if we are trying to hide our identity, as was the case here—say something about who we are.
This poem also outlines perfectly his desire to be in the media and public spotlight and to maintain what all serial killers crave: power and control. But more than that, it says the ONS believes he is smarter than law enforcement and always will be.
And, as of this writing, he has been smarter—because the EAR/ONS has never been caught.
CHAPTER 25
DOWNWARD SPIRAL
Jane Carson-Sandler was now having issues with Bill. They had never been able to go back to the way things had been before the rape. Jane was suffering emotionally. She liked to put up a front that she was “doing fine” and “everything was all right,” but inside Jane Carson-Sandler was hurting bad.
One could argue that within Jane’s DNA, the alcohol gene festered like a virus waiting to attack her emotional immune system. Jane’s father drank a lot and might be considered an alcoholic by today’s standards. What Jane never realized, however, was that once she picked up a drink and started running, there was no turning back. To paraphrase Charles Jackson, a novelist and admitted alcoholic, if Jane continued to dabble with drinking, then at one point she’d discover one drink was going to be too many and one hundred was never going to be enough. And it seemed that as time went on and her life became defined, in a sense, by what had happened to her back in Sacramento in the early 1970s, Jane could not escape from that past of growing up around a father who drank.
Jane and Bill divorced in 1993, after giving it a run. Jane remarried a year later and moved to the South in 2000 with her new husband, Warren. It was there, Jane explained, that yet “another life-threatening event occurred.”
I began having serious bowel issues and thought I might have colon cancer. I was working as a hospice nurse at the time. So with all the new education I was getting about cancer, I thought for sure I had been afflicted. Trying to get a colonoscopy scheduled at the local military hospital was almost impossible. Because my symptoms didn’t seem life-threatening, a sigmoidoscopy was authorized. Understanding the limitations of the sigmoid not seeing the whole bowel, I demanded to see a gastroenterologist. He again brushed off my request.
“Listen to me,” Jane pleaded with the doctor. “I’m a nurse and I know there’s something seriously wrong with my body.”
The doctor was shocked by Jane’s outburst and behavior.
“Look, I can be a drama queen when I want to be,” Jane recalled.
Her plea worked. Her doctor scheduled a colonoscopy procedure to take place two days later.
Coming out of the fog of anesthesia, Jane believed she heard the doctor, who was standing in the room waiting for her to come back, saying, “I’m so sorry. . . . I’m so sorry.”
Jane thought: Sorry for what? What the hell did you find?
With quite an embarrassed tone, Jane remembered, her doctor said, “I found a very large polyp I couldn’t remove. I don’t know if it’s cancerous.”
Her worst fear was realized.
Jane’s doctor apologized for not believing her. “I’ll listen more carefully to my patients from now on,” he added.
It was a week later when Jane found herself in Walter Reed Hospital having abdominal surgery to have the polyp removed.
It turned out to be benign. But within two weeks of recovering from that surgery, Jane was back in the hospital with an intestinal obstruction.
“My abdomen blew up like a balloon,” she said. “I couldn’t pass any stool or gas, and another surgery was on the horizon.”
It was a nightmare. What started out as a seemingly routine procedure, in search of what Jane was beginning to think had been paranoid delusions of having cancer, soon turned into a life-threatening battle to remove a blockage.
Nothing the doctors ordered would relieve the obstruction. My day to return to surgery and a probable colostomy was a Sunday. As the sun was just starting to shine through my hospital room window on a cold, windy day, my surgeon appeared in his coat and tie. He had just returned from church.
He explained that he had contacted the gastroenterologist to see if a rectal tube could be used to relieve the obstruction. The possibility of injury because of the previous surgery was the reason this approach had not been tried earlier.
I asked the surgeon to pray for me. He said the most beautiful prayer. As they wheeled me to X-ray to attempt this procedure, I felt at peace, even before I was given sedation.
The question remained, however: Would it work? Or would Jane wind up with a colostomy bag hanging from the side of her stomach for the rest of her life?
CHAPTER 26
THE LIGHT
That tubular procedure worked. The obstruction was removed without any injury to Jane’s intestine. She was at home a week later. And it hit her: She felt that God had had something to do with her recovery and healing. It was that darn prayer, the impression the doctor had made on her by coming from church.
For years Jane felt grateful to her doctor for that prayer. God was speaking to Jane, she believed. He was there, hovering around her life, giving her these subtle signs to come and join Him. She wasn’t yet ready to dive headfirst and start attending church services or kneeling in her bedroom every night, saying words breathlessly, praying to a God she believed in, but still had issues with.
Still, a light had been injected into Jane’s being, she later explained, that she couldn’t dim, no matter how hard she tried to ignore it.
It was 2006, and that son who had endured the rape with his mother was now a soldier stationed in Iraq, serving as a company commander in what Jane described as “a very dangerous area, where men were being wounded and killed on a daily basis.”
The fear Jane felt as a mother was immense. She sat around waiting for that knock at the door. She expected it. The anxiety was something she had not felt for years as her life had gone on autopilot for so long now, with Warren by her side. In the back of Jane’s mind, however, had always been the acknowledgment that the ONS had never been caught. The man who raped her and brutalized so many others, committing all those murders, was still out in the world walking around. This, coupled with her son in Iraq, became too much for Jane.
Frankly, I don’t know how I survived that year. My daughter-in-law would call every other day in tears to tell me of another soldier wounded or killed from their unit. I was afraid to answer the door, the phone—and the stress was overwhelming.
Jane began to attend church services that year on a regular basis. She came home one day from a service, and the phone
rang.
It was her daughter-in-law. She was crying.
“What is it?” Jane said, almost afraid to ask. It was as if she knew. Here it was: the worst thing that can happen to a parent, the call that no one wants to get.
“Two of his buddies were killed on patrol, one day after the other,” Jane’s daughter-in-law explained.
Jane’s son was alive. He’d made it. For that day, anyway.
Would he be next? Jane kept asking herself.
That light inside of Jane burned and her desire to seek solace from her pain in God was beckoning Jane to give in to it completely. Yet, something else was going on now, and Jane kept it hidden from everyone.
Her drinking—it was slowly growing out of control, without Jane ever realizing what was happening or where her life was headed.
CHAPTER 27
FIRST TASTE
Jane’s first taste of alcohol, like many, came when she was a teenager. Jane was just thirteen years old (and, incidentally, her parents had been divorced by then for some years). She was sleeping over at her best friend’s house. (How familiar a story it is. . . .) Her friend’s parents were out for the evening. So, left to their own devices, Jane and her friend made the choice to check out the family liquor cabinet.
I don’t know why we started out our sampling with liqueurs, but we did. They were sweet and tasted pretty good. Feeling no pain, we decided to eat some strawberry ice cream before bed and spent the next six hours vomiting.
She Survived: Jane Page 7