I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

by Michelle McNamara

  Sacramento, 1976–1977

  IN THE SEVENTIES, KIDS WHO DIDN’T LIVE HERE CALLED IT RANCHO Cambodia. The American River bisects the east side of Sacramento County, and Rancho Cordova, on the south bank, is cut off from the leafier, more genteel suburbs on the other side of the river. The area began as a Mexican land grant of five thousand acres for farming. In 1848, after James W. Marshall, thirty-five miles upriver, glimpsed glittering metal flakes in a water-wheel drain and declared “I have found it,” the gold dredges descended on Rancho Cordova, leaving huge piles of river rock behind. For a while, it was a vineyard. Mather Air Force Base opened in 1918. But it was the Cold War that really changed Rancho Cordova. In 1953 Aerojet, the rocket and missile-propulsion manufacturer, opened its headquarters here, and with it came a boom in residential housing for its employees, the town’s twisty roads (Zinfandel Drive, Riesling Way) suddenly paved and neatly divided into modest single-story tract houses. Everyone’s family seemed associated with the military or Aerojet.

  A rougher element lurked. A man who grew up on La Gloria Way in the midseventies remembers the day the ice cream man who worked around Cordova Meadows Elementary School disappeared. Turns out the guy with the long hair, big beard, and mirrored aviator glasses who had been selling the kids Popsicles was selling LSD and cocaine to a different set of clientele, and he was hauled away by the cops. Stories of growing up in Sacramento

  in the seventies are often bait-and-switches like this, a tangle of sweet and scary, small-town postcards with foreboding on the back.

  On hot summer days, we waded in the American River, a woman recalls; then another memory, this one of running along the trails by the river and coming upon a homeless camp in the dense brush. Parts of the river were said to be haunted. A group of teenage girls hung out at Land Park and watched shirtless boys wax their cars; they went to Days on the Green in Oakland, that era’s Lollapalooza, to see the Eagles or Peter Frampton or Jethro Tull. They drove up to the Sutterville Road levee and drank beer. They were on the levee drinking the night of April 14, 1978, when a convoy of squad cars, sirens blaring, flew past them on the road below. The convoy was endless. “Never saw anything like it before, or since,” one of the teenagers, now a fifty-two-year-old woman, said. The East Area Rapist, or EAR—the man I would come to call the Golden State Killer—had struck again.

  From Folsom I took a left onto Paseo Drive, into the heart of residential Rancho Cordova. This place meant something to him. He attacked here first and kept coming back. By November 1976, there were nine attacks in Sacramento County attributed to the East Area Rapist in six months; four of those took place in Rancho Cordova. In March 1979, when he hadn’t attacked in a year and it seemed he’d left for good, he came back to Rancho Cordova one last time. Was it home? Some of the investigators, especially the ones who worked the case in the beginning, think so.

  I pulled up to the site of his first attack, a simple L-shaped single-story house, about a thousand square feet, with a cleanly shorn tree stump in the center of the yard. It was here that the first call came in, at five a.m. on June 18, 1976, from a twenty-three-year-old woman who was speaking into the receiver as best she could from where she lay on the floor, her hands tied behind her

  back so tightly that she’d lost circulation. Sheila* had backed up to the phone on her father’s nightstand, knocked it to the ground, and searched with her fingers for 0. She was calling to report a home-invasion rape.

  She wanted them to understand that the mask was strange. It was white and made of a coarse, knitlike material, with eyeholes and a seam down the middle, but it fit very tight against his face. When Sheila opened her eyes and saw him in her bedroom doorway, she thought she was dreaming. Who wears a ski mask in Sacramento in June? She blinked and absorbed more of the image. He was about five nine, moderately muscular, wearing a navy blue, short-sleeved T-shirt and gray canvas gloves. Another detail, so unnatural it must have strayed in from her subconscious—a pair of pale legs with dark hair. The parts flew together and formed a whole. The man wasn’t wearing pants. He was erect. His chest rose and fell, exhalations of the real.

  He leaped onto Sheila’s bed and pressed the blade of a four-inch knife against her right temple. She pulled the covers over her head to will him away. He yanked them off. “If you make one move or sound, I’ll stick this knife in you,” he whispered.

  He tied her wrists behind her back with cord he brought with him, then tied them again with a red-and-white fabric belt he found in Sheila’s closet. He stuffed one of her white nylon slips into her mouth as a gag. Already hints existed of the behavior that would become so recognizable. He put baby oil on his penis before he raped her. He rummaged and ransacked; she could hear the little knocker handles on the side tables in the living room clattering as he opened drawers. He spoke in a low guttural whisper, with a clenched jaw. A one-inch cut near her right eyebrow bled from where he’d pressed the knife, ordering her not to make a sound.

  Common sense, and any cop, will tell you that the no-pants rapist is an unsophisticated teenage peeper who just graduated from misdemeanor to crudely conceived felony. The punk doing the no-pants dance suffers from poor impulse control and will be arrested swiftly. His lingering stare has no doubt afforded him creep status in the neighborhood. The cops will kick him awake at his agitated mother’s house in no time. But this no-pants punk wasn’t caught.

  There exists something that I think of as the paradox of the smart rapist. Roy Hazelwood, a former FBI profiler who specializes in sexual predators, talks about it in the book The Evil That Men Do, co-written by Stephen G. Michaud: “‘Most people have no trouble connecting intelligence with a complex robbery. But rape-torture is a depraved act, which they cannot remotely relate to. They therefore resist crediting such offenders with intelligence. This is true even of police officers.’”

  A closer look at Sheila’s rapist’s methods reveals a calculating mind at work. He was careful to never remove his gloves. Sheila received hang-up phone calls in the weeks leading up to the attack, as if someone were monitoring her schedule. In April she had the feeling she was being followed. She kept seeing a dark, medium-size American-made car. But it was curious—though she felt sure it was the same car, she could never quite make out the driver.

  The night of the attack, a birdbath had been moved to a spot under the telephone line in the backyard, evidently to stand on. But the line was only partially cut, the clumsy hesitation mark of a trainee, like the bent nail of an apprentice carpenter.

  Four months later, Richard Shelby was standing on a curb on Shadowbrook Way in Citrus Heights.

  Based on the rules of the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department, Shelby should not have been on this or any other case. He shouldn’t have even been in uniform. Shelby knew the rules—to work for

  the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department in 1966 you had to have all ten digits in their entirety—but he had passed the written exam and physical, and thought he’d try his luck. Luck had been good to him; even the fact that he was missing a good portion of his left ring finger was lucky. He should have been cut in half by the hunter’s errant shotgun blast. The doctors told him he came very close to losing the whole hand.

  When the screener spotted Shelby’s finger, he halted the interview. Shelby was curtly dismissed. He wouldn’t be joining the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department after all. The rejection smarted. All his life, Shelby had heard his family speak reverently of an uncle who was a sheriff in Oklahoma. Maybe it was a sign. He wanted to work in a less populated county anyway. Yolo, or Placer. The Central Valley’s open spaces were the landscape of his youth. Summers he’d worked outside on the ranches and farms of east Merced County. Skinny-dipped in the canals. Hunted rabbit and quail in the lower foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The SSD’s “failure to pass” letter arrived a week later. Then, the next day, another letter arrived. This one told him where and when to report for work.

  Shelby called for an explanation. Vietnam was becoming big news. In Febr
uary 1965, the monthly draft was three thousand; the number had increased to thirty-three thousand by October. Protests began throughout the country, turning incrementally more raucous. Available young men were growing scarce. The SSD saw Shelby as a new and relatively rare phenomenon. He had joined the air force more than a decade before, thirteen days after his seventeenth birthday, and completed duty. He had a college degree in criminal justice. He was married. And despite what he was lacking fingerwise, he could outtype the sheriff’s secretary. They changed the rules about finger length. Shelby reported for work August 1, 1966. He stayed twenty-seven years.

  The SSD was far from a slick place back then. Everyone

  competed for the one squad car that had a gooseneck lamp and clipboard affixed to the dash. The armory still had tommy guns from the 1920s. The sirens were located right on top of the cars; the cops who drove them wear hearing aids now. Specialized divisions like the one for sex crimes didn’t exist. You were the expert with hands-on experience if you picked up the phone and were called to a rape scene once. That’s why Shelby found himself on the morning of October 5, 1976, on the curb at Shadow-brook Way.

  A bloodhound following a scent trail had brought him to the spot. The trail began at a child’s bedroom window, continued over a fence and through a field of weeds, stopping at the curb. Shelby knocked on the nearest door and looked across the field toward the victim’s house, a distance of about two hundred feet. He wished away his unease.

  An hour and a half earlier, shortly after six thirty a.m., Jane Carson had been cuddling in bed with her three-year-old son when she heard a light switch go on and off, and then someone running down the hallway. Her husband had left for work moments before. “Jack, is that you? Did you forget something?”

  A man in a greenish-brown ski mask came through the door.

  “Shut up, I want your money, I won’t hurt you,” he said.

  Shelby found the precision timing interesting. The man entered the house through the son’s bedroom window just moments after Jane’s husband left. They’d been the victims of an unusual burglary two weeks before, in which the thief took ten or so of their rings and left behind some neighbors’ stolen jewelry. The thief had also entered and exited through the son’s window. Same guy, Shelby thought. A methodical and patient one.

  Jane’s rape would end up being the fifth assault attributed to the East Area Rapist, but it was the first one worked by Shelby and Carol Daly, two detectives who would become inextricably linked to the series. A female detective with experience in sex

  crimes, Daly was a natural fit to conduct the victim interviews. Her people skills would eventually rocket her all the way to the job of undersheriff. Shelby, however, had a knack for pissing people off. He would call on colleagues to handle suspect interrogations, as his tended to devolve into chaos. He was always butting heads with “the fourth floor,” the top brass. His problems stemmed less from arrogance than plainspokenness. He lacked finesse. A childhood spent roaming a flat landscape empty of people could keep one from developing certain communication skills. “The ability to be tactful has always eluded me,” he says.

  There were three more attacks in quick succession that October. At first many of his colleagues thought an unidentified serial offender known as the Early Bird Rapist was responsible, but Shelby knew they were up against a smarter and weirder man than the Early Bird. These were the days before criminal profiling, before terms like “signature” or “ritual behavior” became commonplace. Back then, investigators might say “the presence,” “the personality,” or “the smell of it.” What they meant was the precise and peculiar arrangement of details, as distinct as an odor—the experience of crime-scene déjà vu. There was the consistent physical description, of course. He was white, in his late teens or twenties, about five nine, with a medium, athletic build. Always in some sort of mask. Forced, angry whisper. Clenched jaw. When he got upset, his voice rose to a higher pitch. Small penis. There was the odd deportment—his voice was often hurried but his manner was not. He would open a drawer and stand looking at it for several minutes in silence. Reports of prowlers seen in the neighborhood around the time of an attack often included the detail that the prowler, once alerted that he’d been seen, left the area in a leisurely manner. “Totally unhurried,” one witness said.

  His psychosexual needs were specific. He bound his victims’ hands behind their backs, often tying and retying several times,

  sometimes with different material. He ordered them to masturbate him with their bound hands. He never fondled them. When he started attacking couples, he’d take the female into the living room and drape a towel over the TV; lighting seemed important. He got off on sexual questioning. “What am I doing?” he’d ask a blindfolded victim as he masturbated with hand lotion found in the house. “Is this like the captain’s?” he asked Jane; her husband was a captain in the air force. He told her to “shut up” at least fifty times, Jane said, but when he was raping her, he had other demands, snapping at her like a director to his actress. “Put some emotion in that,” he ordered her, “or I’ll use my knife.”

  He was brazen. Twice he entered homes, pressing on undeterred when he knew victims had spotted him and were frantically dialing the police. Children didn’t bother him. He never hurt them physically, but he would tie up the older ones and put them in another room. He put Jane’s toddler son on the bedroom floor during her attack. The boy fell asleep. When he awoke, he peered over the bed. The EAR had left. His mother lay bound in strips of torn towels and was gagged with a washcloth. He mistook the ligatures for bandages.

  “Is the doctor gone?” he whispered.

  * * *

  SHELBY WAS FAMILIAR WITH THE BRUTE WAYS OF SKI-MASKED PERVERTS, but he was unsettled by this one’s commitment to reconnaissance. That was unusual. The hang-up phone calls. Pre-prowling. Burglaries. The EAR knew how to turn off outside lights even when they were on a timer. He knew where a hard-to-find garage opener was located. Interviews Shelby conducted suggested that the suspect hadn’t cased out just Jane but her neighbors too, noting where he could park his vehicle, what time the neighbors took out their garbage and left for work.

  Carol Daly, Shelby’s colleague that day, would be quoted a year later in the Sacramento Bee saying about the case, “The typical rapist does not have such elaborate schemes.” That was the thought going through Shelby’s mind as he stood on the curb with the bloodhound, looking across the field toward Jane’s house. Another detail troubled him. The offender had poked Jane’s left shoulder with his paring knife. Jane felt he didn’t intend to injure her, that the wound was an accident. Shelby wasn’t so sure. He guessed the guy was suppressing an urge to inflict more pain; until he was caught, the urge would grow.

  It did. The suspect began clicking scissors next to blindfolded victims’ ears, threatening to cut off toes, one for each time they moved. He stabbed the bed next to where they lay. Psychological torment stoked him. “You don’t know me, do you?” he whispered to one victim, using her name. “It was too long ago for you, isn’t it? It’s been a long time. But I know you.” He would always let them believe he’d left their house, then, just as their bodies would slacken, their numb fingers inching for their ligatures, he’d shock them with a sudden noise or movement.

  After Jane Carson’s attack in October, rumors flew around the community about a serial rapist at large, but the Sheriff’s Department asked the local press to not publicize the crimes, fearing that the spotlight might drive the suspect away from the east side, where they hoped to contain and catch him. Shelby, Daly, and their colleagues in the detective unit went about quietly chasing leads. They checked with parole and probation officers. They looked at deliverymen, milkmen, janitors, and carpet layers. They left their business cards on neighborhood doors and followed up on tips that came in, usually about young men who stared too hard or stayed out too late or were, as one tipster said about his younger brother, “fruity.” They blindfolded Jane and played tape recordin
gs of two suspects’ voices for her. She lay on her bed; her arms shook. “Not him,” she said. They canvassed pawnshops for the stolen items, and

  visited House of Eight, a porn shop on Del Paso Boulevard, inquiring about customers into bondage. They followed up on a tip about a man who was paying the DMV for women’s registration information, then following them in his car. They questioned him outside his house, where they noted that he stood in the gutter, too distracted to notice the stream of water swirling around his nice leather dress shoes. He wasn’t the EAR, but they got the DMV to stop allowing the practice of purchasing private information. They noted blushing, blinking, arm crossing, and repeating questions in a clear grab for time. None of it led to the EAR.

  Meanwhile, gossip in the community mutated in the vacuum of official word. The police weren’t telling the public about the rapes, the rumors went, because the details were too horrible to repeat. He was mutilating women’s breasts. The rumors weren’t true, but the press blackout meant that no one publicly refuted them. Tension peaked on October 18, when the EAR attacked twice in twenty-four hours. One of the victims, a thirty-two-year-old housewife and mother of two, lived on Kipling Drive in Carmichael, one of the more affluent neighborhoods on the east side. Some speculated that the EAR, fed up with his lack of press, was pushing into the nicer neighborhoods to ensure publicity. It worked. Five hundred people attended a town-hall meeting on crime prevention at Del Dayo Elementary School on November 3. Shelby and Daly took turns at the microphone awkwardly trying to answer heated and panicky questions about the EAR.