I'll Be Gone in the Dark

by Michelle McNamara

  “At some point, I’ll have to walk away from all this and move on with my life,” the Kid wrote me in an e-mail. “The irony has been that, the more time and money I invest into this very impractical (and to most, inexplicable) endeavor, the more apt I am to continue doing so, so that I may perhaps identify this fucker and thus justify my investment.”

  Not everyone admires the board sleuths or their efforts. One agitator came on recently to rant about what he characterized as wannabe cops with a twisted, pathetic obsession. He accused them of being untrained meddlers with an unhealthy interest in rape and murder.

  “WALTER MITTY DETECTIVE,” he wrote.

  By then I was convinced one of the Mittys was probably going to solve this thing.

  East Sacramento, 2012

  THE THINGS THEY SEE: HEADLIGHTS IN AN EMPTY FIELD BEHIND their house where a car shouldn’t be. A man in a white shirt and dark pants climbing through a hole in a neighbor’s fence at three a.m. Jimmied doors. A flashlight beam in their bedroom window. A man emerging from a drainage ditch and sneaking into the backyard next door. Gates previously closed now open. A dark-haired man in a blue leisure suit standing under a tree across the street, staring at them. Mysterious footprints in the yard. A man bursting forth from the bushes and hopping on a bicycle. More flashlights in bedroom windows. The lower half of a man dressed in brown corduroys and tennis shoes running alongside the house and hiding behind a planter. A census worker at the front door wanting to know how many people live in the house in a year the census isn’t being taken. Their neighbor, a thirty-four-year-old man stumbling out of his house in his underwear, arms and legs bound, screaming for help at two in the morning.

  The things they hear: Dogs barking. Heavy footsteps on the lava rock path. Someone cutting through the window screen. A thump against the air conditioner. Tampering with the sliding glass door. Scratching at the side of the house. A call for help. A scuffle. Gunshots. A woman’s long scream.

  No one calls the police.

  The police canvasses net these after-the-fact observations. Occasionally, when the police stop by neighbors’ homes to ask questions, they’re shown a slashed screen or vandalized porch light. Reading through the police reports, I found the neighbors’ inaction peculiar at first. Eventually I became borderline obsessed. Some of the unreported suspicious behavior occurred at the height of the East Area Rapist panic in Sacramento.

  “He was prowling these neighborhoods constantly. Why didn’t more people call in?” I asked Richard Shelby. At first glance, Shelby is rough-looking, as a retired cop in his midseventies living out in the sticks of Placer County might be. (“We live so far out in the country we keep our gas in jerricans,” he told me). He’s tall and wary. He’s got a W. C. Fields nose and, of course, he’s missing half of his left ring finger, that injury that almost kept him off the force. But there’s a softness there, in his light blue shirt, in his extremely soft voice I could barely hear, and in the way, when the waitress at lunch told him they were out of lemonade, he didn’t scowl but smiled, softly, and murmured, “Iced tea, then.” Shelby, who had what he admits was a rocky career with the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department, came on the case early, in fall 1976, and was among the first to make the connection that they had a serial rapist on their hands.

  “Call in what?” Shelby asked. “It’s night. He’s dressed all in black. Creeping along the hedges. What’s to see?”

  “I mean what came out during the police canvasses. What the neighbors full-on admitted they saw and heard,” I said.

  A line jotted down during a police canvass of the area around Malaga Road and El Caprice in Rancho Cordova on September 1, 1976, after the third rape, particularly haunted me. “Several of the neighbors stated they heard the screaming, but did not look outside.”

  In January 1977, a man who lived just south of the American River and whose home had recently been burglarized glimpsed a young guy peeping into his next-door neighbor’s window. He coughed to let the peeper know he’d been spotted; the stranger ran. The gesture seemed almost polite. A week later a twenty-five-year-old woman living one block north became victim eleven. She was five months pregnant at the time.

  Maybe the reluctance to call police was emblematic of the seventies, I suggested to Shelby. I started in on something about post-Vietnam rootlessness, but Shelby shook his head. He didn’t have an answer, but that wasn’t it. For him, the neighbors’ passivity was just one failure in a case plagued with them, from superiors preoccupied with bullshit politics to a couple of crucial wrong turns Shelby admits he made in his own patrol car to a dispatcher’s instruction to a family calling about a cloth bag they’d found hidden in their hedges that contained a flashlight, ski mask, and gloves: “Throw it away.”

  Shelby lives about thirty miles north of Sacramento now, in the country, where he can do, as he put it, “manly farmer things.” But we’d met for lunch in his old stomping grounds, in the neighborhood where thirty-six years ago he patrolled the twisty streets buffeting the river, his dashboard lights dimmed, directed only by radio sputter and the hope that he’d make the right turn and his headlight beams would land on a young man about five nine in a ski mask. Shelby never encountered another offender like the East Area Rapist in his career. Up on rooftops, they kept finding small items he’d stolen from victims. For some reason, he was tossing them up there. Then, after enough people called in about strange thumps on their roofs, Shelby realized that the stolen items weren’t being tossed but were falling out of his pocket; he was crawling around up there.

  Shelby’s one of those proudly blunt people whose eyes flick away the moment before they say something hard, a giveaway to softness churning underneath. He’d picked the lunch spot, but I could tell that for him this neighborhood would always be the place where he was thwarted by the stutter steps of an opponent, “that sociopathic bastard,” whose voyeur’s lair, indicated by a heap of cigarette butts and zigzag shoe tracks, he once found under a dense tree off Northwood Drive. Another vague presence noted by neighbors but never called in.

  “People say he was so smart,” Shelby said. His eyes flicked away. “Truth is, he didn’t always need to be.”

  EARLY IN MY REPORTING FOR AN EAR-ONS STORY I HAD PITCHED to Los Angeles magazine, while in Sacramento, I came into possession of a flash drive containing over four thousand pages of digitized old police reports. I acquired the flash drive in an old-fashioned trade, the kind in which neither party really trusts the other and so, arms extended and eyes locked, we agree to simultaneously release our goods for the other to grab. I had in my possession a rarely seen disc of a two-hour videotaped interview with a peripheral but important person connected to one of the Southern California homicides. I gave it away without a second thought; I had a copy at home.

  These underground trades, the result of furtive alliances forged from a shared obsession with a faceless serial killer, were common. Online sleuthers, retired detectives, and active detectives— everyone participated. I received more than one e-mail with the subject line “quid pro quo.” I believed, as they did, that I and I alone was going to spot what no else could see. In order to do that, I needed to see everything.

  The grandiose seeker in me couldn’t wait to insert the flash drive into my laptop back at my hotel. At every stoplight, I touched the top pocket in my backpack to make sure the tiny rectangle was still there. I was staying at the Citizen Hotel on J Street downtown. The photos online, of lead-paned windows and mustard-colored striped wallpaper, had appealed to me. The check-in area had built-in bookshelves for walls. The front desk was ornate and painted Chinese red.

  “How would you describe the style here?” I asked the front-desk clerk when I was checking in.

  “Law library meets bordello,” he said.

  I later learned that the building’s architect, George Sellon, had also designed San Quentin.

  Once in my room, I immediately changed into the crisp white hotel bathrobe. I lowered the shades and turned off my phone.
I dumped a bag of minibar gummy bears into a glass and set it next to me on the bed, where I sat cross-legged in front of my laptop. Ahead of me was a rare twenty-four-hour stretch without interference or distraction—no tiny hands slick with paint asking to be washed, no preoccupied hungry husband appearing in the kitchen to inquire about dinner. I inserted the flash drive. My mind in mail-sorter mode, my index finger on the down arrow key, I began to not so much read as devour.

  Police reports read like stories told by robots. They’re terse and demarcated, with little space for judgment or emotion. Initially the sparseness appealed to me. Scrubbed of extraneous detail, I felt sure his name would gleam. I misjudged. The concise format of the reports is deceiving. Absorbed cumulatively, even the most clipped details began to swarm into an indistinguishable mass. Some moments separated from the pack, imparting jolts of powerful feeling I didn’t always see coming—the recently separated thirty-eight-year-old mother who scoots across the floor in the dark to find her son’s toy saw and tries in vain to use it to cut the bindings from her swollen hands; the thirteen-year-old girl tied up in bed who asks her beloved dog after the rapist has left the room, “You dummy, why didn’t you do anything?” The dog nudges her with his nose. She tells him to lie down and go to sleep. He does.

  Hours vanished. The gummy bears were gone. My room was on the tenth floor, right above a tent hosting a wedding reception. I’d sidestepped the bridesmaids in sea-foam green posing for pictures in the hallway on my way in, and now the music started up. It was loud. I picked up the phone to call the front desk. What was I going to say? “Keep the joy down”? I hung up. The truth was, I was jittery from sugar, hunger, and spending too much time alone in the dark absorbing a fifty-chapter horror story narrated in the kind of dead voice used by desk clerks at the DMV. My eyes were stripped by computer glare and as devoid of moisture as if they’d been vacuumed clean by an airplane toilet. Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” wasn’t the soundtrack for my frame of mind.

  The city of Sacramento is located at the north end of California’s Central Valley, at the confluence of the Sacramento River and the American River, and was designed with drainage in mind. The idea is that excess water, from mountain runoff or rainfall, will flow downriver toward the California Delta and into the ocean. I know this only because drainage ditches and cement-lined canals come up frequently in the police reports. It’s clear from the start, from footprints, evidence, suspicious sightings, and even bringing one victim down there, that the East Area Rapist traveled this way, that like a subterranean creature, he bided his time belowground until dark. I was reminded of an iconic scene from The Creature from the Black Lagoon, when the marine biologist Kay, played by the beautiful actress Julie Adams, dives from the expedition ship into the black lagoon, and from an underwater point of view we watch as the terrifying humanoid Creature emerges from a tangle of seaweed to glide underneath her, mirroring her, mesmerized. You keep waiting for her to see him and thrash with panic, but he goes undetected, except for the moment when he brushes a scaly webbed claw against her foot and she jerks a little, unnerved.

  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 creat
e 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.