All jewelry was taken from either our bedroom chest drawer or the top of dresser. Other items are appropriately indicated.
I do hope this will be all that will be needed as we are desperately trying to get our lives back to normal. I’m sure we both can appreciate each other’s positions.
Good luck in the piecing together!
The tone was reasonable, direct, and resilient. Upbeat even. I found it extraordinary. Some people, I thought when I read it, can endure horrible, traumatic things and move on. A few pages later in the file, there’s another short note, handwritten by a sheriff’s deputy. This family no longer lives in Contra Costa County, the note says. They’ve moved to a city hundreds of miles away.
Good luck in the piecing together!
I’d read the exclamation point as optimism. But what it meant was good-bye.
WE HEAD EAST. THE SECOND ATTACK IN CONCORD OCCURRED A week after the first and is located less than a half mile away. Holes slows for a stop sign. He points to the street perpendicular to us, again consulting his mental map of October 1978. “Right in this area there’s new construction going on. So people, construction workers, delivery trucks, are coming down this road”—he indicates the one we’re on—“or that road, in order to get to the construction location.”
Of the two primary thoroughfares someone could take to the construction site in October 1978, Holes says, one route passes the first attack location, and the other passes the second. I remember that Holes said he believed the EAR came to the area for work.
“Building? Construction?” I ask.
“That’s the avenue I’m pursuing,” he says.
I notice that he says “the” and not “an.”
“Do you know who the developer of that construction site was?”
He doesn’t answer, but his expression says he does.
We pull up to the second Concord crime scene, another single-story, L-shaped home, this one cream with green trim. A giant oak dominates the small front yard. Nothing about the neighborhood suggests that people with a great deal of weekday leisure time live here. No one ambles by with a dog. No one is speed walking with an iPod. Few cars pass.
In this case, the EAR hinted at a possibility, one that flickers intriguingly throughout the series a handful of times. It was Friday the thirteenth, four thirty a.m. The EAR’s psychosexual script that he forced upon his victims with his flashlight and clenched-teeth threats was by now, his thirty-ninth attack, so well established that, reading the police reports, one can be forgiven for missing the clue, the key change of a single word: “I” to “we.”
“All we want is food and money, and then we’ll get the hell out of here,” he ranted at the disoriented couple. “I just want food and money for my girlfriend and me.”
Once the couple was restrained and compliant, he began his frenetic ransacking, slamming kitchen cupboards, rummaging through drawers. The female victim was led to the family room. He laid her on the floor.
“You want to live?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said.
He blindfolded her with a bathroom towel.
“This had better be the best fuck I’ve ever had, or I’m going to kill you.”
She told investigators she kept flashing on In Cold Blood, on the story of a family annihilated in the middle of the night by fickle killers.
However, what followed, while terrifying for the victim, seemed oddly juvenile and of little interest to her attacker. He quickly and perfunctorily ran his hands over her thighs; she could feel that he was wearing thick leather gloves. He made her masturbate him for a minute, then penetrated her and was done in thirty seconds. He jumped up and began ransacking again. It seemed that the raiding of the house stimulated him more than actual sex.
A door opened and she felt a draft; he was in their attached garage. A trash bag rustled. He seemed to be going back and forth from the house to the garage. She heard him say something, but not to her.
“Here, put this in the car,” he whispered.
There was no reply; she heard no footsteps. A vehicle never started up. She never knew how or when he left, just that at some point he did.
It wasn’t the only time the EAR suggested he had an accomplice. The first victim heard what she thought were two separate
voices in her living room whispering heated, overlapping threats. “Shut up,” followed quickly by, “I told you to shut up.”
Another victim heard a car horn honk four times outside, and then someone began ringing the doorbell. There was knocking at the front window. She heard muffled voices, possibly a woman’s. She couldn’t tell if the EAR’s voice was among them. He left, and the voices went away, but the victim, who was bound and face down on her living room floor, couldn’t tell if the events occurred at the same time, or were related at all.
“My buddy is out in the car waiting,” he said once.
Was it a lie, a bolstering tactic when he psychologically felt the need for backup? An attempt to misdirect the police? Most of the investigators believe it was a bluff. Holes isn’t so sure.
“Does he have someone who’s assisting him at times? In the sexual assaults, no, but on the burglary side? Who knows? It happens enough throughout the series, that you go, ‘Maybe.’ Maybe we have to consider that possibility.”
Holes concedes that much of what the EAR said was deflection and misdirection. He ranted about living in his van or at a camp by the river, but he rarely emitted the kind of body odor a transient would. He invented connections to his victims. “I knew when I saw you at the junior prom I had to have you,” he whispered to a blindfolded teenager, but she’d heard tape being pulled from her bedroom wall—her junior prom picture coming down. “I’ve seen you at the lake,” he said to a woman with a ski boat in her driveway.
Some of the lies—about killing people in Bakersfield, about being kicked out of the military—probably played into a tough-guy image he nurtured of himself. The fake connections to victims were possibly part of his fantasy or an attempt to unsettle them with opaque familiarity. Holes and I speculate about his other behavior, like the gasping breaths. They were described as huge, gulping intakes of air, bordering on hyperventilation. A
criminal profiler who examined the case in the seventies felt that the breathing was a scare tactic, a way to make his victims think he was a lunatic capable of anything. Holes says a fellow investigator who has asthma wondered if it was legitimately respiratory distress; adrenaline can trigger an attack.
The EAR is a card face down on a table. Our speculation is a cul-de-sac. Round and round we go.
“San Ramon?” asks Holes.
SAN RAMON
We head for 680, which will take us seventeen miles south to the next attack, the third that month. October 1978. Carter was president. Grease had been the huge summer movie, and John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John’s “Summer Nights” was still a radio mainstay, though the Who’s “Who Are You” was climbing the charts. The fresh-scrubbed face of thirteen-year-old Brooke Shields stared blankly from the cover of Seventeen. The Yankees beat the Dodgers in the World Series. Sid Vicious’s girlfriend Nancy Spungen bled to death from a stab wound on a bathroom floor at the Chelsea Hotel. John Paul II was the new pope. Three days before the San Ramon attack, the movie Halloween was released.
“What about the crying? Do you think that was real?” I ask Holes.
Nearly a dozen victims reported that he cried. He sobbed, they said. He stumbled and seemed lost. He whimpered in a high-pitched voice like a child. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he wept. “Mommy, please help me. I don’t want to do this, Mommy.”
“I do,” says Holes. “Women have good insight into men’s behaviors. There are times when the victims say his anger is a put-on, he’s acting, but other times, when he’s in a corner sobbing
uncontrollably, it feels real to them. He’s conflicted. The crying is always after the sexual attack. That’s when he’s sobbing.”
There’s an exception among the
victims who believed the tears were real. The Stockton woman, the one whose husband struggled to come to terms with their attack, didn’t buy the crying, Holes tells me.
“She heard those sounds. But she wouldn’t attribute them to crying,” says Holes.
“What did she think it was?” I ask.
“High-pitched hysteria,” Holes says. “Like laughter.”
For years no one seems to have noticed that the 911 emergency number didn’t work in unincorporated San Ramon, even though the phone company charged residents for the service. A woman who lived at the end of a quiet court discovered the discrepancy. The discordant squawk her receiver emitted indicating a failed call was a jolt she didn’t need after two hours of sexual violence at the hands of a stranger. The woman, using the pseudonym Kathy, is quoted in an Oakland Tribune article that ran on December 10, 1978, six weeks after her attack. When Kathy awoke the night of her rape, her eyes frantically sought to adjust to the darkness. She could make out only one thing in the pitch-black: a disembodied wild gaze, his “‘little eyes, just staring.’”
“‘I just really hate that guy,’” Kathy says matter-of-factly of her unidentified rapist. She explains she’s also angry with the phone company for not providing emergency service when they said they did. Of this outrage, Kathy tells the reporter, she can exact some quantifiable justice: she has the 911 charge deducted from her bill now, a savings of twenty-eight cents a month.
Help came after Kathy dialed the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office directly.
In the wake of the two rapes in Concord the Sheriff’s Office had issued an alert to its deputies. Sacramento’s warning had
proved prescient: The EAR was pressing his ski mask against their windows now. Everyone needed to be vigilant. A strike force began identifying neighborhoods where the EAR might hit. License numbers of vehicles parked next to open areas, or otherwise deemed suspicious, were quietly recorded.
Bug-eyed attentive wasn’t the San Ramon beat’s usual mode. From 1970 to 1980, the city more than quadrupled its population, but it was, and still is, ringed by rolling grasslands studded with oak trees, vast swaths of undeveloped country that suggest space and impose quiet. Police radios lulled with extended silences. Patrol headlights swept over the same detached garages, the same darkened windows on ranch homes occupied by young families. Suspicious figures rarely peeled off from San Ramon’s unvarying suburban silhouette; the fence lines were unbroken, the shrubs never shook. Deputies were trained for action but accustomed to stillness.
That changed on October 28 just after five a.m., when dispatch delivered to the graveyard shift a blast of static followed by scant but alarming details. Home-invasion rape and robbery. Montclair Place. A one-man unit was the first to respond to the scene. The victims, Kathy and her husband, David,* calmly met the deputy at the front door. After confirming that the couple didn’t need immediate medical care, the deputy’s interest was absorbed by the odd scene behind them. The house was almost completely empty. Drawers of the few pieces of furniture were haphazardly pulled open and bare. Closet doors stood open, revealing hanging rods and nothing else. Had they been completely cleaned out by the intruder? No, Kathy and David explained, they were in the process of moving out.
He’d come for them during their last few hours in the house.
There was the real estate factor again. And the canny timing that suggested inside knowledge. Kathy and David had a three-year-old son; they pointed out to investigators that the EAR never opened or even approached their son’s bedroom door. Other victims with small children noticed the same thing. How he zeroed in on victims and gained knowledge about their lives and the layouts of their homes was a question of endless speculation.
Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, called the preattack time he spent casing for victims “patrolling.” Banality was his camouflage. He’d back his truck into a 7-Eleven on Pacific Highway South, the gritty stretch around the Seattle-Tacoma airport known for prostitution. Sometimes he’d pop the hood. He was a slight man with a putty-colored face who was preoccupied with engine trouble. His presence never registered. The washed-out gray landscape absorbed him seamlessly. Only a close, patient observer could have picked up on the detail that signaled something was wrong: time didn’t concern the man. His pupils flicked like a pendulum, fixing on everything but his engine, a quick-change of hungry considerations tracking as forcefully as a planchette on a Ouija board.
Clank. It was a sound so routine it was lost in the urban noise, in the whoosh of wet tires in light rain and door chimes at the convenience store. It’s the scariest sound no one heard—Ridgway closing his hood. Patrolling was over; a new phase had begun.
Initially I felt that the EAR, like Ridgway, must have hidden in plain sight. He seemed to possess information that could only have been gleaned from careful, prolonged observation. But he clearly wasn’t an obvious lurker: despite thousands of pages of police reports, including victim statements and neighborhood interviews, no consistent physical description of a suspect emerges. Over the course of fifty rapes, a face should start to cohere, I thought, at the very least an agreed-upon hair color. But none
did. Therein lay the puzzle. Chance wins eventually. Luck is unreliable. How did he survey so long without being surveyed?
My mind kept circling back to the image of a man in a uniform, a telephone lineman or a postal worker, an everyday worker bee straight out of Richard Scarry’s Busytown, the kind of person whose presence signals that everything is running smoothly. No one fastened on him. He was in a state of constant dissolve. What people bounced past, what they missed in the blur of beige was the devouring force in his angry eyes.
A retired investigator who worked the Irvine homicides tried to dissuade me from my image of a master reconnoiterer. The attacks didn’t require a lot of preplanning or inside information in his opinion. He and his partner conducted an experiment one night when they were working the case. They dressed in all black, laced up soft-soled shoes, and prowled the Irvine neighborhoods, following the paths they believed the killer took. They crept along cinder-block walls, peeped over backyard fences, and concealed themselves against tree trunks in the dark.
Rectangles of light drew them closer. Rear windows offered access into dozens of strangers’ lives. Sometimes there was only a sliver through a curtain, enough to see the blank face of a woman rinsing and rerinsing a single glass at her kitchen sink. Mostly it was quiet, but occasionally there was a shower of laughter from a TV. A teenager’s shoulders inched to her ears as her boyfriend lifted her skirt.
The investigator shook his head at the memory.
“You’d be amazed at what you can see,” he told me.
In fact, I asked every investigator I talked to about prowling and got the same response, a succession of head shakes and expressions that all said it’s the easiest thing in the world to do.
A compulsive prowler is a quick study of body language, the way a woman home alone might glance out her living room’s rear window before turning out the light, or how a teenager moves
more quietly when her parents are asleep. After a while, it’s pattern recognition. Operation time is cut down considerably.
I ask Holes how methodical he thought the EAR was in selecting victims.
“I think there’s evidence of both ways. There are times I think he’s done a fair amount of surveillance. He sees somebody. Focuses on them. Follows them. And there are times he’s attacking them the first time he sees them.”
No one knows how long he was watching Kathy, but they have a good idea from where. The house backed up on a Christmas tree farm. The criminalist noted “zigzag jogging type” shoe impressions on the board fence in the backyard.
Holes turns right and points out where the tree farm used to be behind the house. We go a block or two more and he takes another right, to the 7400 block of Sedgefield Avenue.
“The next day there’s a vehicle parked here on the side. There’s blood inside.”
The car was a Ford Galaxie 500. It had been reported stolen.
“Somebody obviously bleeding, probably with a bloody nose. Then you see the trail of blood as they take off. Evidence from that is long gone, but I’ve speculated that if you’ve got somebody escaping through a Christmas tree farm in the middle of the night, what’s the likelihood he ran into a tree? And then got into this car that he stole and abandoned? I had a case where somebody was escaping a shooting and ran into a telephone pole. Left a blood trail just like that.”
The trail of blood traveled east and over the curb. Some tissues were crumpled up in the gutter. The blood drops grew smaller and disappeared. Like every trail in the case, this one eventually led to a series of blank walls. Nothing ever led to a front door. Every object found in a search could or could not be his and always lacked firm, traceable information. It was a case whose wheels spun endlessly in possibility.
“Everything is a half clue,” says Holes.
“What about construction at the time in San Ramon?” I ask.
Holes tells me that Kathy provided them with helpful information.
“She was able to recount multiple active construction sites for new subdivisions going on around her neighborhood at the time of her attack.”
It takes me a moment to realize that he means he talked to Kathy personally.
“You talked to her?”
He knows why I’m shocked.
In his book about the case, Sudden Terror, Larry Crompton disparages Kathy. He describes her demeanor during the police interview as almost seeming as if she’s reliving “the ultimate turn-on.” He discloses unflattering details about her life after the attack. He says he feels sorry for her husband and son. I like Crompton but thought he was wrong here. Seriously wrong. He even rates her looks against other victims—favorably, but it’s still wrong. His treatment of Kathy is at best wildly tone-deaf and at worst victim blaming. His portrayal assumes that there’s only one way to respond to a violent sexual attack. It lacks compassion and understanding. For example, he describes derisively how she told police that she asked for a glass of water first when the EAR demanded that she fellate him, without considering that for a terrified victim a plea for water could be a stalling tactic. And the pseudonym Crompton chose for her, “Sunny,” while probably not deliberately malicious, seemed a particularly cruel choice in light of how he depicted her.
I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer Page 20