The East Area Rapist stalked individuals, but it was clear after reading the police reports that he stalked neighborhoods too, often by traversing Sacramento’s underground maze of canals and
drainage ditches. He preferred single-story houses, usually second from the corner, near a greenbelt area—an open field, a park. Before an attack, there’d be evidence of prowling and illegal entries in the homes around the victim’s. Small, inexpensive, sometimes personal items would go missing. Incidents of hang-up phone calls rose sharply in the four- or five-block radius just before an attack. He was doing reconnaissance. He was studying people, learning when they were home. His method appeared to be to pick a neighborhood, target a half-dozen possible victims, and maybe even prioritize them. He maximized options and laid groundwork; that way, when mission night arrived, his urge never went unfulfilled.
That means that women exist who, because of change of schedule, or luck, were never victims, but like the Creature’s shapely object of obsession treading in the lagoon, they felt something terrifying brush against them.
The neighbors, in the scant five or six lines allotted them in the canvass reports, offer evocative haikus of a certain time and place. When questioned, they’re on their way back from the disco club, or a double feature of Earthquake and Airport ’77 at the drive-in, or the Jack LaLanne gym. They report missing two size 5 women’s jackets, one brown suede, the other leather. A girl saw a suspicious man with a “Wolfman Jack” look. Door-to-door solicitors—sprinklers, Fuller Brush, personal photography, painters—were a near-constant presence back then. In one neighborhood, everyone seemed to be heading for work at five a.m. These people took special notice of newer model, “shiny” cars. In other neighborhoods, mostly north of the American River, the only person home to answer the officer’s questions might be the live-in babysitter. These neighbors were suspicious of “dirty” cars, cars with side dents that were “a heap” or “in bad shape.”
In April 1977, a boy hoisted his younger sister onto his shoulders. From her higher vantage point, she suddenly saw a prowler in her neighbor’s yard, a white man in dark clothing crouching
in the bushes. When the prowler realized he’d been spotted, he took off running and hurdled several fences. A month later, that neighbor, a young waitress, woke her husband at four a.m. “I hear something. I hear something,” she said. A flashlight lit up their bedroom doorway. She later told police that she believed the EAR when he threatened to kill her, and she lay there, bound in the dark, wondering what it would feel like to have a bullet go through her.
* * *
READING THROUGH THE SACRAMENTO REPORTS, YOU CAN TRACK public awareness that there’s a serial rapist at large. It’s zero to dim in the first dozen or so attacks; then the media runs with the story, and chatter and paranoia build. By a year into the attacks, victims recount being awakened by flashlight and thinking, Oh shit! It’s him. They behaved in certain ways, they told investigators, based on gossip they’d heard about the East Area Rapist, cowering, for instance, because they’d been told he liked his victims terrified. It’s around a year in that the source of neighbors’ inaction is no longer unawareness or inertia but a fortress mentality. They see something, and they lock their doors, turn off the lights, and retreat to their bedroom, hoping he doesn’t come for them. “I was afraid,” one woman admitted. Then why not call the police? My imagination burbled with what-ifs.
They weren’t thinking of their neighbors, but he was. Part of the thrill of the game for him, I believe, was a kind of connect-the-dots puzzle he played with people. He stole two packs of Winston cigarettes from the first victim, for instance, and left them outside the fourth victim’s house. Junk jewelry stolen from a neighbor two weeks earlier was left at the fifth victim’s house. Victim twenty-one lived within shouting distance of a water treatment plant; a worker there who lived eight miles away became the next
victim. Pills or bullets stolen from a victim would later be found in a neighbor’s yard. Some victims shared surnames or jobs.
It was a power play, a signal of ubiquity. I am both nowhere and everywhere. You may not think you have something in common with your neighbor, but you do: me. I’m the barely spotted presence, the dark-haired, blond-haired, stocky, slight, seen from the back, glimpsed in half-light thread that will continue to connect you even as you fail to look out for each other.
I left Sacramento in a bad mood. I hadn’t slept well. The hungover wedding party crowded the front door of the hotel as I tried to make my way out. At the airport, I walked past a giant red rabbit sculpture I somehow had been too preoccupied to notice when I flew in. I don’t know how I missed it before. The fifty-six-foot-long, ten-thousand-pound aluminum rabbit is suspended by cables and appears to be diving toward the baggage claim area. I searched the term “Sac airport rabbit” on my iPhone while waiting to board my plane. An Associated Press article said that artist Lawrence Argent had been commissioned to create an iconic piece for the new terminal, which was unveiled in October 2011.
“I wanted to play around with the idea that something has come from the outside and leapt into the building,” Argent said.
The Cuff-Links Coda
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The following section is an excerpt from an early draft of Michelle’s article “In the Footsteps of a Killer.”]
THE DAY AFTER I PLACED THE ORDER FOR THE CUFF LINKS, I CALLED the Kid. I told him I was having the cuff links shipped overnight to me.
“To a P.O. box?” the Kid asked. Well no, I admitted. A ludicrous scenario flashed through my mind: EAR-ONS reselling the cuff links to the store where he happened to work inputting customer addresses; he’d no doubt be suspicious of someone who paid forty dollars for next-day delivery of his eight-dollar cuff links.
The best thing to do, I knew, was to turn over the cuff links to EAR-ONS investigators. The risk was that they’d be angry I’d taken this kind of unauthorized initiative. Coincidentally, I had recently scheduled my very first interview with Larry Pool in Orange County. I decided that if I felt the interview was going well, I’d explain the story and hand over the tiny gold cuff links in their square Ziploc bag.
The problem was, of all the investigators, the prospect of meeting with Pool was the most intimidating to me. He’d been described as inaccessible and a little remote. I knew he’d been working on the case for the last fourteen years. He’d been instrumental, along with
victim Keith Harrington’s attorney brother, Bruce, in the passage of Proposition 69—the DNA Fingerprint, Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act, which in 2004 established an all-felon DNA database in California. The California Department of Justice now has the largest working DNA data bank in the country.
Pool and Harrington felt that by expanding the DNA database they’d surely net EAR-ONS. The disappointment when that didn’t happen, it was suggested to me, was sharp. I had imagined Larry Pool as a steely, impassive cop locked away in a dimly lit room, the walls plastered with EAR-ONS composites.
A pleasant but somewhat formal man in wire-rim glasses and a red checkered shirt greeted me in the lobby of the Orange County Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory. We sat in a conference room. He was duty officer for the computer lab that day, and when the occasional colleague poked their head in and said something, Pool would respond with a clipped “Copy that.”
I found him a thoughtful, measured speaker, the kind of person whose stoic exterior masks how generous they’re being with their insights. When I met with Larry Crompton, it was clear that the retired detective took his failure to solve the case personally. It kept him up at night, Crompton confessed, and he always asked himself, “What did I miss?”
Pool didn’t present the same sort of anguish. At first I took this as cockiness. Later I realized it was hope. He’s not nearly done yet.
We were wrapping up our conversation. I pegged him as someone who prioritizes procedure and decided he wouldn’t like the cuff-links story. But at the very end, I caved; I don’t know why
. I began speaking way too fast and rustling around in my backpack. Pool listened but his face revealed nothing. I nudged the cuff links across the conference table at him. He took the bag and examined it very carefully.
“For me?” he asked, stone-faced.
“Yes,” I said.
He allowed the slightest hint of a smile.
“I think I love you,” he said.
* * *
BY THE TIME I RETURNED HOME TO LOS ANGELES, POOL HAD tracked down the victims and sent them a high-resolution image of the cuff links by e-mail. The cuff links had originally belonged to a deceased family member, and the victims had had them in their possession only a short while before they were stolen. They looked like the cuff links, but the victims were cautious about merely “wanting them to be them.” They got in touch with another family member who was more familiar with the jewelry. A couple of days later, Pool called me with the news: not the same cuff links.
I was disappointed; Pool seemed unfazed. “I don’t get excited like I used to,” he’d told me earlier. A decade ago, when the shock of the DNA match between the EAR and the ONS was still fresh, he had every investigative resource at his disposal. An Orange County Sheriff’s Department helicopter once flew to Santa Barbara just to pick up a suspect’s DNA swab. The suspect was under active surveillance at the time. Pool traveled to Baltimore to exhume a body. This was before 9/11, and he recalls that parts of the suspect were packed in his carry-on.
Eventually cold-case funding dried up. Investigators got reassigned. And Pool got less emotionally invested in every new development. Even the composite of EAR-ONS that hangs above Pool’s desk is deliberate and matter-of-fact—it shows the suspect in a ski mask.
“Is it of any value?” Pool said. “No. But we know he looked like that.”
He showed me the stack of mail he continues to get with tips from the public, including one piece of paper with a photocopy of
a man’s driver’s license photo and the words “This is EAR ONS.” (The man is far too young to be a viable suspect.)
Eight thousand suspects have been examined over the years, Pool estimates; several hundred have had their DNA run. They conducted a DNA test on one suspect in a southern state twice when they weren’t satisfied with the quality of retrieval the first time. When Pool comes across an especially intriguing suspect, his curt response is always the same.
“Gotta eliminate him.”
Despite his reserve, Pool has reason to be optimistic about the case; in fact, everyone who’s weathered the ups and downs of the EAR-ONS mystery agrees that the pendulum is currently swinging in an upward direction.
Los Angeles, 2012
I WAS IN A PANIC. WE WERE HOSTING, AS WE HAD FOR YEARS, ABOUT a dozen adults and four kids under the age of ten, and the second draft of my seven-thousand-word story was due Tuesday. A few days before, I’d sent out SOS e-mails, brief and frank pleas for help that I hoped would be understood. “Dinner rolls. Butter.” Thanksgiving always makes me nostalgic for the Midwest. But the day was sunny and unusually brisk, the kind of California autumn afternoon when, if you concentrate on your friend’s gray cardigan and the forkful of pumpkin pie in your mouth and the snippet of NFL commentary running in the background, you can forget the bougainvillea and the wet swimsuits drying over the backyard chairs; you can imagine that you live somewhere where the seasons actually change. I wasn’t myself though. Impatience roiled. I made a bigger deal than I needed to that Patton bought an undersize turkey. When we went around the table and said what we were thankful for, I forgot the holiday for a moment and shut my eyes, thinking about a wish. After dinner the kids piled together on the couch and watched The Wizard of Oz. I stayed out of the room. Little kids have big emotions, and mine needed reining in.
That Saturday Patton took Alice for the day, and I hunkered down in my office on the second floor to revise and write. About four o’clock in the afternoon, the front doorbell rang. We get a lot of deliveries, and I had in fact already answered the door a couple of times that day and signed for packages. I was irritated at yet
another interruption. Normally I’d ignore it and let them leave the package at the door. Usually, just to be sure, I walk over to our bedroom window and peek out, and yes, there’s the back of the Fed Ex deliveryman, our front gate closing behind him.
I’m not sure what made me get up this time, but I walked a few steps down our curving staircase and called out, “Who is it?” No one replied. I went to our bedroom window and peeked out. A slim, young African American kid in a pink shirt and tie was walking away from our house. I had the strong sense he was a teenager; maybe I saw him in profile for a moment. I guessed he was selling magazine subscriptions door to door, and let the drape fall. I went back to work and didn’t think more about it.
About forty-five minutes later, I got up and grabbed my car keys. I’d made plans to meet Patton and Alice for an early dinner at one of our favorite restaurants in the neighborhood. I made sure the doors were locked and headed out to my car parked on the street. When I was about halfway down our walk I saw out of the corner of my eye the figure of a young man off to my left, walking very slowly with his back to me in front of my next-door neighbor’s house.
I’m not sure I would have noted him if his body language hadn’t been so unusual. He froze completely when I came bounding out of the house. He was a young African American kid, not the same kid who’d rung our door, but similarly dressed in a pastel blue shirt and tie. He kept his body still and craned his neck ever so slightly in my direction. I hesitated. I thought again about teenagers selling magazine subscriptions, and wondered if he was gauging me as a possible customer. But I knew it was weirder than that. His body language was so off. I got into my car and drove away, and as I did I picked up my phone to call the police. I pressed 9 and 1. But what was I going to say? Suspicious young black kid? That felt racist and like an overreaction. I canceled the call. They weren’t doing anything overtly criminal. Still, I
hit the brakes and yanked the wheel to the left, making a quick U-turn back to our house. It couldn’t have been more than forty-five seconds, but neither kid was on the street. Dusk was making it harder to see. I figured they’d rung someone’s bell, begun the magazine pitch, and been invited in. I headed to the restaurant.
The following night, I was upstairs when I heard the doorbell ring and Patton greet someone at the front door. “Michelle!” he called. I came down. Our next-door neighbor, Tony, was standing there.
Tony was the first neighbor we’d met when we’d bought our house two and a half years earlier. We hadn’t moved in yet, and I was at the house with our contractor, talking about renovations, when an attractive man in his forties peeked in at the front door and introduced himself. My memory is that he was gregarious and a little self-effacing. The previous owner had been a recluse, and Tony had never seen the inside of the house. He was curious. I told him go ahead, walk around. I thought from his outgoing demeanor that we’d end up being friends, the way you imagine things when you’re picturing your life in a new space. He told me he was recently divorced, and his teenage daughter was going to live with him and attend the local all-girls Catholic high school. He was renting the house next door.
But our relationship, while always friendly, never blossomed into a real friendship. We waved and made occasional small talk. When we first moved in, Patton and I talked about how we should have a get-together in our backyard and meet all the neighbors. Our intentions were good. We kept talking about it but then getting waylaid. The house was always being worked on, or one of us was traveling. But when Alice’s ball flew over the fence into their yard, Tony and his daughter always graciously returned it. When I found a motherless baby pigeon on the curb in front of their house and fashioned a nest from a wicker basket and leaves and fastened it to a tree branch, Tony came out and smiled at me.
“You’re a good person,” he said. I liked him. But our interactions were relegated to comings and goings, to moments between do
g walking and toddler wrangling.
My second-floor office faces their house; a distance of only about fifteen feet separates us. I’ve become accustomed to the rhythms of their lives. In the late afternoons I hear their front door slam, and Tony’s daughter, who has a beautiful voice, begins to sing. I always mean to tell her what a beautiful voice she has. I always forget.
Tony was at our front door because he wanted to tell us that they’d been robbed yesterday.
“I think I know what happened,” I said, and motioned for him to sit down on our living room couch. I explained the doorbell and no answer, and what I saw. He nodded; the elderly couple that lived on the other side of Tony had seen the same kids hauling bags out of Tony’s house. They got in through the kitchen window and completely ransacked the place. The cops told him it’s a common ruse used by teams of petty thieves on holiday weekends. Ring and see if anyone’s home; if no one answers, break in.
“It’s just iPads and computers,” Tony said. “But I keep thinking, what if my daughter had been home alone? What might have happened then?”
At the word “daughter” his voice quavered. His eyes welled. So did mine.
“You don’t have to explain,” I said. “It’s such a violation.” I reached out and put my hand on his.
I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer Page 18