I'll Be Gone in the Dark

by Michelle McNamara

  The girl added to the ever-growing catalog of fleeting details glimpsed in the dark through a loosened blindfold. Black, square-toed shoes. A small flashlight, small enough that it disappeared into his left hand. Military fatigue pants. While she was tied up, he kept scrambling up the west side of the embankment and looking out at something, the girl said. Back and forth. Fidgety like. Shelby climbed the embankment. They were, as always, minutes or hours behind him. You could plant your feet in the man’s footprints, but without knowing what drew him to that spot, yours was the chump’s view, dumbly scanning the horizon for a hint. Overgrowth of tangled brush. Fences. Backyards. Too much. Not enough. Square one.

  The leather hood the girl described extended beneath the EAR’s shirt and had slits for eyes and mouth; that sounded to Shelby like the kind of hoods arc welders wear underneath their helmets. He hit up welding equipment companies for customer names. Nothing panned out. Meanwhile, the phones rang at the Sheriff’s Department with people spilling names. The detectives tried to eyeball everybody. Guys were eliminated if they had big feet, a sunken chest, a potbelly, a beard, a wandering left eye, a limp, custom arch supports, or a sister-in-law who confided that she skinny-dipped once with her husband’s younger brother and he had a big penis.

  The EAR attacked another teenage girl, this one in Fair Oaks, on December 18. There were two more victims in January. RAPIST STRIKES AGAIN, 14TH TIME IN 15 MONTHS read the headline in the January 24 edition of the Sacramento Bee. A quote by an anonymous sheriff’s detective conveyed the brittle weariness setting in: “‘It was exactly the same as all the rest.’”

  * * *

  ON THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 2, 1977, A THIRTY-YEAR-OLD woman in Carmichael lay bound, blindfolded, and gagged on her bed. After listening for a long time and hearing nothing, she worked the gag out of her mouth and called out for her seven-year-old daughter, whom she sensed was in the room. “Are you okay?” she asked. Her daughter shushed her. “Momma, be quiet.” Somebody pushed down on the woman’s bed abruptly and let go, as if to tell her he was still there. For several minutes she lay with her eyes wide open against her orange-and-white terry-cloth blindfold, listening to him breathing somewhere close by.

  Hypnotists elicited details about suspicious sightings. Detectives looked for a black-and-white motorcycle with fiberglass saddlebags. A black, possibly ex–California Highway Patrol car with a loud exhaust. A white van with no side windows. A biker named Don with muttonchops and a large mustache. A woman called about an employee at a local grocery store. The man’s penis, she said knowingly, “is very rough like it’s been used to death.”

  Desperate for fingerprint evidence, the detectives tried a method called iodine–silver plate transfer for lifting latent prints from human skin; Carol Daly was tasked with blowing a fine powder through a tube over the victims’ naked bodies. Nothing. There were small victories. In February, a woman in Carmichael struggled with the EAR for his gun. He beat her over the head. When Shelby and Daly examined the victim’s head wound they noticed a spot of blood on her hair about two inches from the injury. Daly snipped the bloodied hair and had it sent to the crime lab for typing. The victim’s blood was type B. This spot, determined to be the EAR’s, was A positive.

  * * *

  [EDITOR’S NOTE: The section that follows was pieced together from Michelle’s notes.]

  IT WAS AROUND TEN THIRTY ON THE NIGHT OF FEBRUARY 16, 1977. The Moore* family was settled into their home on Ripon Court in the Sacramento neighborhood of College-Glen. Eighteen-year-old Douglas cut himself some cake in the kitchen while his fifteen-year-old sister Priscilla watched TV in the living room. Suddenly, an unexpected noise capsized the ordinariness of their weekday evening—a crash that came from the backyard. It was the family’s electric smoker. Someone had just hopped the fence and knocked into it.

  Mavis Moore turned on the patio light and peered through the drapes just in time to glimpse a figure running through the backyard. Douglas impulsively began pursuit, and his father, Dale, grabbed a flashlight and followed him through the side door.

  Dale found himself trailing behind as he watched his son chase the blond-haired man who had been prowling their backyard— across Ripon Court and into the space between two neighboring residences, where the prowler disappeared over the fence. Douglas followed, and as he reached the crest of the fence, a loud pop sounded. Dale watched as his son fell backward onto the grass.

  “I’ve been shot,” Douglas cried out as his father attended to him. Another shot followed, without consequence. Dale moved Douglas out of the line of fire.

  An ambulance arrived and rushed Douglas to the hospital. The bullet had entered his stomach and left multiple holes in his intestines, bladder, and rectum.

  AS THE POLICE WENT DOOR TO DOOR CONDUCTING A NEIGHBORHOOD canvass, their notebooks began to fill up with details eerily similar to the descriptions detectives would hear when canvassing after an EAR attack: neighbors heard sounds in their yards as though their fences had just been scaled; one neighbor heard someone walking on her roof; fence slats were discovered kicked out and side gates were found open. A rolling tide of barking dogs seemed to indicate the direction of a phantom prowler. Residents in the general area reported prowler incidents and burglaries in the weeks leading up to the Moore shooting.

  And all witness reports, including Doug Moore’s, yielded a familiar set of descriptors: a white male between twenty-five and thirty years old, five nine to five ten, with heavy legs and sandy blond neck-length hair, wearing a watch cap, a windbreaker, Levi’s cords, and tennis shoes.

  Among the clues collected was the usual outlier, an intriguing potential lead that may have had no relationship at all with the incident culminating in Doug Moore’s shooting—and even if it did, it seemed to offer little in the way of concrete information: A custodian leaving his shift at the nearby Thomas Jefferson School crossed paths with a pair of loiterers in front of a building on campus. One of them asked him the time as he passed, while the other appeared to be concealing something—possibly a transistor radio—beneath his coat.

  Both subjects appeared to be eighteen or nineteen years old and around five nine. One was apparently a Mexican male with dark shoulder-length hair, wearing a blue windbreaker and Levi’s, while the other was a white male in an identical outfit.

  The custodian had worked at the school for seven years and was well acquainted with the regulars who’d hang around campus after hours. He had never seen either subject before.

  * * *

  THE EAR HIT AGAIN IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF MARCH 8, in Arden-Arcade. The Sacramento Bee ran an article (“Rape May Be Linked to Series”) about the attack. The reporter noted that “the victim was separated from her husband and had a small child, who was staying elsewhere Monday night. The east area rapist has never attacked while there was a man in the house, although occasionally there have been children.” If there was ever a question about whether the EAR was reading his press, it was put to rest after the article was published. His next victim was a teenage girl, but after that he targeted heterosexual couples, eleven in a row, and from then on, couples remained the main focus of his attacks.

  On March 18, the Sheriff’s Department received three phone calls between four fifteen and five p.m. “I’m the EAR,” a male said, laughed, and hung up. The second call was a repeat of the first. Then the third: “I’m the East Area Rapist. I have my next victim stalked and you guys can’t catch me.”

  That night in Rancho Cordova a sixteen-year-old girl returning home from her part-time job at Kentucky Fried Chicken dropped her take-out bag on her kitchen counter and picked up the phone to dial a friend. Her parents were out of town and she intended to stay at the friend’s house. The call had rung one and a half times when a man in a green ski mask emerged from her parents’ bedroom, a hatchet raised above his head.

  This time the victim had a somewhat better look at the EAR’s face, as he wore a ski mask with the center cut out. Acting on a hunch that the E
AR was a young Rancho Cordova local, Shelby and Daly brought over a stack of neighborhood yearbooks and watched as the victim flipped through them. She stopped on a page in the 1974 Folsom High School yearbook. She handed the book to Shelby, pointing at a boy’s picture. “That looks most like him.” They ran down the kid’s history. Instability, check. Weirdness, yes. He was working at a gas station on Auburn Boulevard. They hid the victim in the back of an unmarked car and had her peer at him from three feet away as he filled the gas tank. She couldn’t make a positive identification.

  * * *

  THE HOUSES HAD DIFFERENT LAYOUTS. SOME OF THE VICTIMS were young teenagers who clutched couch pillows to their stomachs and, pain-faced and confused, shook their heads when they were asked if they knew what a “climax” was. Others were in their midthirties, had recently divorced their second husbands, and were enrolled in beauty school classes and active in singles clubs. But for the detectives called out of bed in the early morning hours, the scenes record-skipped with a numbing sameness. Cut shoelaces on a shag carpet. Deep red indentations around wrists. Pry marks on window frames. Kitchen cabinets left open. Beer cans and cracker boxes scattered on backyard patios. There was the sound of some sort of bag, paper rustling or a zipper opening, as he stole engraved jewelry, driver’s licenses, photos, coins, occasionally money, though theft was clearly not his driving motive, as he bypassed other valuables, and often what he stole, like a cherished wedding ring ripped violently from a swollen finger, was found dumped somewhere close by.

  On April 2, he added a twist to his method, one he would continue to use. The first couple he targeted awoke to a bright, square-lensed flashlight shining in their eyes. He gruffly whispered that he had a gun (“a .45 with fourteen shots”) and threw a length of twine at the woman, ordering her to tie up her boyfriend. When the male was bound, the EAR placed a cup and saucer on his back. “I hear the cup rattle or bedsprings make any noise, I’ll shoot everybody in the house,” he whispered. To the woman he remarked at one point, “I was in the army and I fucked a lot while I was there.”

  That the EAR may have a military connection was frequently discussed. There were five military installations within an hour’s drive of Sacramento; Mather Air Force Base, adjacent to Rancho Cordova, had roughly eight thousand personnel alone. There was his penchant for army green and the occasional report of black lace-up military-style boots. Several who encountered him, including those with military backgrounds, felt his authoritative posture and unyielding demeanor were reminiscent of someone with a background in the armed forces. “The dishes trick,” as his unusual alarm system came to be known, struck some as a technique right out of jungle warfare.

  There was also the galling fact that he was outmaneuvering them. He remained free. The Sheriff’s Department borrowed treetop cameras from the State Department of Forestry normally used to catch arsonists. They depleted their overtime budget sending undercover patrols to roam the neighborhoods the EAR frequented. They borrowed military nightscopes and movement detectors used in Vietnam. Yet he was still out there blending in, a man whose ordinariness was his mask.

  The Sheriff’s Department brought in an army colonel trained in Special Forces techniques to help them understand the EAR’s tactics. “The major point in training is that of patience,” the colonel told them. “The specially trained person can and will sit in one position for hours if necessary and will not move.” The EAR’s sensitivity to noise—he often turned off air-conditioning and heating units to hear better—was a skill honed in Special Forces personnel. Ditto knives, knots, and planning multiple escape routes. “He can and will make use of any point of concealment,” the colonel said. Look for him “in the place most unlikely for a human being to be, i.e., the bottom portion of an outhouse, the middle of blackberry bushes.” The colonel reiterated: remember the patience. He believes he’s got more stamina than anyone else, and that searchers will give up when he will not.

  Shelby wondered if they hadn’t caught him for another reason. He noticed that they would station undercover patrols in a neighborhood he was known to frequent, but that night the EAR would attack somewhere else. He seemed more aware of police procedure than the average citizen. He always wore gloves and parked outside the standard police perimeter. “Freeze!” he shouted once at a woman as she tried to scramble away from him. Shelby wasn’t the only one to bring it up. The thought crossed other minds in the Sheriff’s Department too. Was he one of them?

  One night Shelby followed up on a prowler tip. The woman who called in the tip seemed surprised when Shelby knocked on the front door and announced himself. For the last several minutes she thought an officer was already there, she told him; she could swear she heard the sound of a police radio just outside her house.

  “He will let the searchers walk within an inch of him and will not move,” the colonel had warned.

  By the end of April, the victim count was seventeen. The EAR was averaging two victims a month. If you were paying attention, and most people were, it was bad.

  Then came May.

  * * *

  THE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT ACCEPTED AN OFFER FROM A PSYCHIC who said she could identify the EAR. She chanted and ate raw hamburger. They looked into having the EAR’s “biorhythm chart” done but were told it wouldn’t work without his birth date. Around midnight on May 2, a little over two weeks since the last attack, a thirty-year-old woman on La Riviera Drive heard a thump outside, the same sound her young sons made when they jumped the fence from the levee into the yard. She went to the window, but didn’t see anything. The abrupt glare of a flashlight, the first hint of danger, startled her and her husband, a major in the air force, around three a.m.

  Two days later, a man in a beige ski mask and dark blue jacket, resembling a US Navy jacket, lunged out of the darkness at a young woman and her male co-worker as they walked to her car parked in his driveway in Orangevale. Both cases had the familiar smell. The hang-up phone calls beforehand. The dishes trick. The unsettling pairing, in one instance, of brutal rape followed by a break to eat Ritz crackers in the kitchen. Both couples told the detectives the EAR seemed like someone straining to appear tough, a bad actor who took gulping breaths in an attempt to seem angry and unhinged. The woman in Orangevale said he entered the bathroom for several minutes; it sounded to her that he was hyperventilating in there.

  EAST AREA RAPIST ATTACKS 20TH VICTIM IN ORANGEVALE read the headline in the next day’s Bee.

  Pressure was building at the Sheriff’s Department. Normally hands-off bosses became agitatedly hands-on. It was only May and their overtime budget was nearly depleted for the year. They were elbow-deep in dead-end calls about ex-boyfriends and Public Works employees checking street lighting. Slouching and leisurely sipping from Styrofoam cups of coffee disappeared from daily briefings, replaced by pacing and restless legs. Detectives stared at maps and tried to predict his next attack. They had a feeling he would hit next in the area around Sunrise Mall, in Citrus Heights; reports of prowling and break-ins were emanating from there.

  Around twelve forty-five a.m. on May 13, a family on Merlindale Drive, not far from Sunrise Mall, heard someone on their roof. Dogs in adjacent yards began barking. A neighbor called the family around one a.m. to say they heard someone crawling on their roof too. Squad cars arrived within minutes; the roof creeper was gone.

  The next night, a block over, a young waitress and her husband, a restaurant manager, were the next victims.

  Disbelief set in. A roughly ten-mile corridor following the American River east into unincorporated Sacramento County was under siege. No one required context anymore. There was no “Have you heard?” You had heard. “There’s this guy” was replaced by “He.” Teachers at Sacramento State gave up teaching and entire class sessions were devoted to discussions about the EAR, any student with new information pumped for details.

  People’s relationship with nature changed. Winter’s drizzle and dense tule fog, the weather of dread, had given way to a lovely warmt
h, to vistas of freshly scrubbed green studded with red and pink camellia petals. But Sacramento’s prized abundance of trees, all those Oregon ash and blue oaks flanking the river, were recast in their eyes, a once verdant canopy now a hunting blind. An urge to prune took over. East siders hacked off tree limbs and uprooted shrubs around their houses. Reinforcing sliding glass windows with dowel rods wasn’t enough. That might keep him out, but they wanted more; they wanted to strip him completely of the ability to hide.

  By May 16, a surge of newly installed floodlights lit up the east side like a Christmas tree. In one house tambourines were tied to every door and window. Hammers went under pillows. Nearly three thousand guns were sold in Sacramento County between January and May. Many people refused to sleep between one and four a.m. Some couples slept in shifts, one of them always stationed on the living room couch, a rifle pointed at the window.

  Only a madman would strike again.

  MAY 17 WAS THE DAY EVERYONE HELD THEIR BREATH AND WAITED to see who would die. They’d awakened that morning to news that the EAR had struck for the fourth time that month, the twenty-first attack attributed to him in less than a year; the latest victims, a couple in the Del Dayo neighborhood, told police he threatened to kill two people that night. In a single twenty-four-hour period, between May 17 and May 18, the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department received 6,169 calls, almost all of them about the East Area Rapist.

  The officers responded to the call at 3:55 a.m. on May 17. The thirty-one-year-old male victim was outside his house in light blue pajamas, a length of white shoelace dangling from his left wrist. He spoke angrily in a mix of English and Italian. “What’s the hurry,” he said to the officers. “He’s gone. Just come on in!” When Shelby pulled up to the scene, he recognized the man immediately. Back in November, when he and Daly had led a packed town-hall discussion on the EAR, the man had stood up and criticized the investigation. He and Shelby had exchanged heated words. The incident had taken place six months ago, and maybe it was a coincidence, but the connection contributed to the impression that the EAR was brazen enough to attend events dedicated to his own capture, that he blended in, observed, remembered, and excelled at a certain kind of malevolent patience.