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 me
mory 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 dog 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.
“Michelle’s a crime writer,” Patton said.
Tony looked surprised.
“I don’t even know what you do,” he said.
From now on, the three of us told each other, we’ll look out for each other. We’d alert each other when we were going out of town. We’d be better neighbors, we promised.
Later that night, I kept going over the events of the last few days in my head. I thought about the intimacy of that moment in the living room, the unexpected surge of emotion we shared with Tony.
“We don’t even know his last name,” I said to Patton.
* * *
I HAVE A NIGHTLY RITUAL WITH ALICE, WHO IS A TROUBLED SLEEPER and has terrifying dreams. Every night before falling asleep, she’ll call out for me to come into her bedroom.
“I don’t want to have a dream,” she says. I brush her sandy hair back, put my hand on her forehead, and look straight into her big brown eyes.
“You are not going to have a dream,” I tell her, with crisp, confident enunciation. Her body releases its tension, and she goes to sleep. I leave the room, hoping that what I promised but have no control over will be true.
That’s what we do. All of us. We make well-intentioned promises of protection we can’t always keep.
I’ll look out for you.
But then you hear a scream and you decide it’s some teenagers playing around. A young man jumping a fence is taking a shortcut. The gunshot at three a.m. is a firecracker or a car backfiring. You sit up in bed for a startled moment. Awaiting you is the cold, hard floor and a conversation that may lead nowhere; you collapse onto your warm pillow, and turn back to sleep.
Sirens wake you later.
I saw Tony walking his big white dog this afternoon and waved at him from outside my car, in between fumbling for my keys and remembering something I had to do.
I still don’t know his last name.
Contra Costa, 2013
CONCORD
The history of Concord, California, involves Satan and a series of misunderstandings. Legend has it that in 1805 Spanish soldiers in pursuit of a band of reluctantly missionized Native Americans cornered their quarry near a willow thicket in what is present-day Concord. The natives took cover in the dense trees, but when the soldiers charged in to seize them, the natives were gone. The spooked Spaniards dubbed the area Monte del Diablo—thicket of the devil—the archaic definition of the word “monte” translating loosely into “woods.” Over the years, it morphed into the more conventional “mountain” or “mount,” and English-speaking newcomers transferred the name to the nearby 3,848-foot peak that dominates the East Bay landscape, and it became Mount Diablo. Devil Mountain. In 2009 a local man named Arthur Mijares filed federal paperwork to try to change the name to Mount Reagan. He found the Devil name offensive.
“I just happen to be an ordinary man that worships God,” he told the Los Angeles Times. Mijares wasn’t successful, but he needn’t have worried. Concord is thirty-one miles east of San Francisco and feels every mile of it. Whatever sinister wilderness existed has been bulldozed and replaced with enthusiastically bland retail hubs. Across from my hotel is the Willows Shopping Center, a sprawl of worrisomely underattended chain stores and restaurants: Old Navy, Pier One Imports, and Fuddruckers. Nearly everyone I ask about Concord mentions the convenience of its BART stop, East Bay’s subway system. “Twenty minutes to Berkeley,” they say.
Paul Holes and I have agreed that he’ll pick me up outside my hotel at nine a.m. He’s taking me on a tour of the Contra Costa County crime scenes. By morning the temperature is already in the eighties, a blazing day in what will be the hottest month of the year in the East Bay. A silver Taurus pulls up right on time, and a fit, neatly dressed man with short blond hair and a hint of summer tan gets out and calls my name. I’ve never met Holes in person. During our last phone conversation, he cheerfully complained that his family’s golden retriever puppy was keeping him up at night, but he looks as if he’s never had a worry in the world. He’s in his midforties and has a calm, easygoing face and a jock’s gait. He smiles warmly and gives me a firm handshake. We’ll spend the next eight hours talking about rape and murder.
Of course, Holes isn’t technically a cop; he’s a criminalist, chief of the County Sheriff’s crime lab, but I’ve been spending a lot of time with cops, and he reminds me of them. When I say cops I mean specifically detectives. After spending enough hours with them, I’ve noticed a few things about detectives. They all smell vaguely of soap. I’ve never met a detective with greasy hair. They excel at eye contact and have enviable posture. Irony is never their go-to tone. Wordplay makes them uneasy. The good ones create long conversational vacuums that you reflexively fill, an interrogation strategy that proved to me through my own regrettable prattle how easily confessions can be elicited. They lack facial elasticity; or rather, they contain it. I’ve never met a detective who pulled a face. They don’t recoil or go wide-eyed. I’m a face maker. I married a comedian. Many of my friends are in show business. I’m constantly surrounded by big expressions, which is why I immediately noticed the lack of them in detectives. They maintain a pleasant but vigorous blankness that I admire. I’ve tried to imitate it, but I can’t. I came to recognize subtle but discernible shifts in the blankness—a narrowing of the eyes, a jaw squeeze, usually in response to hearing a theory they’ve long since eliminated. A veil comes down. But they’ll never tip their hand. They’ll never tell you, “We already looked into that angle ages ago.”
Instead they’ll just absorb it and leave you with a polite “Huh.”
In their reserve and in virtually every other way, detectives differ from show-biz folks. Detectives listen. They’re getting a read. Entertainers get a read only to gauge their influence on a room. Detectives deal in concrete tasks. I once spent an hour listening to an actress friend analyze a three-line text that hurt her feelings. Eventually I’ll see the cracks in a detective’s veneer, but in the beginning their company is an unexpected relief, like fleeing a moodily lit cast party loud with competitive chatter and joining a meeting of determined Eagle Scouts awaiting their next challenge. I wasn’t a native in the land of the literal-minded, but I enjoyed my time there.
The EAR’s first attack in the East Bay took place in Concord and is just a 10-minute drive from my hotel. Holes and I dispense with small talk and dive right into discussing the case. The most obvious first question is, what brought him here? Why did he stop attacking in Sacramento and, in October 1978, embark on a nearly yearlong spree in the East Bay? I know the most common theory. Holes does too. He doesn’t buy it.
“I don’t think he got scared out of Sacramento,” he says.
Proponents of the “scared away” theory point to the fact that on April 16, 1978, two days after the EAR attacked a fifteen-year-old babysitter in Sacramento, police released enhanced composite sketches of two possible suspects in the Maggiore homicide—an unsolved case in which a young couple was mysteriously gunned down while out walking their dog. After the sketches were released, the EAR stopped attacking in Sacramento; only one more rape in Sacramento County would be attributed to him, and it wasn’t until a year later. One of the Maggiore sketches, the thinking goes, must have been uncomfortably accurate.
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