I'll Be Gone in the Dark

by Michelle McNamara

  Holes is unconvinced. He has studied and is well versed in geographic profiling, a type of analytic crime mapping that tries to determine the most likely area of offender residence. In the late seventies, cops might stand around a map with pins stuck in it and idly speculate. Today, geographic profiling is its own specialty, with algorithms and software. In predatory crimes there is usually a “buffer zone” around a criminal’s residence; targets within the zone are less desirable because of the perceived level of risk associated with operating too close to home. In serial crimes, geographic profilers analyze attack locations in an attempt to home in on the buffer zone, the ring around the bull’s-eye where the criminal lives, because offenders, like everyone, move in predictable and routine ways.

  “I’ve read a lot of studies about how serial offenders do their victim selection,” Holes says. “It’s during their normal course of living. Say you’re a serial burglar and you drive to work like a normal person every day. You’ve got an anchor point at home and an anchor point at work. But they’re paying attention. They’re sitting like we are here”—Holes gestures at the intersection we’ve stopped at—“and they’re noticing, you know, that might be a good apartment complex over there.”

  The geographic distribution of attacks in Sacramento follows a completely different pattern than in the East Bay, Holes says, and that’s significant.

  “In Sacramento, he’s crisscrossing but he’s staying within that northeast, east suburban area. Geographic profilers call him a ‘marauder.’ He’s branching out at an anchor point. But once he moves down here, he’s becoming a commuter. It’s obvious he’s traveling up and down the 680 corridor.”

  Interstate 680 is a seventy-mile north-south highway that cuts through central Contra Costa County. Most of the EAR’s attacks in the East Bay occurred close to I-680, half of them a mile or less from an exit. On a professionally prepared geo-profile map, I saw the East Bay cases represented by a series of small red circles, almost all just right, or east, of 680, red drops cleaving to a yellow vein.

  “You’ll get a feel for it as we drive up and down 680,” says Holes. “I think he’s branching out because he’s got a change in life circumstances. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s still living in Sacramento but now commuting for work and taking advantage of being out of his jurisdiction and attacking.”

  At the word “work” I perk up. I’ve sensed from our recent e-mail correspondence that Holes is onto something regarding the EAR’s possible line of work, but he remains oblique about the specifics. Even now, he waves me off, anticipating my question.

  “We’ll get to that.”

  Holes didn’t grow up here. He was just a kid in 1978. But he’s worked for the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office for twenty-three years and has visited the crime scenes countless times. He’s also dug into what the area looked like back then. He’s pulled permits. Studied aerial photographs. Talked to locals. He possesses a mental map of the area circa October 1978, which he overlays over the current one as we drive. He slows and points to a cul-de-sac. The homes are located just behind the house where the EAR’s first attack in Concord took place.

  “These weren’t here then,” says Holes. “It was a vacant field.”

  We pull up and park at a corner house in a quiet residential neighborhood. A photo attached to the first East Bay file shows an attractive couple with their one-year-old daughter; the little girl wears a polka-dotted birthday hat and a summer dress, and the parents each have a hand on a ball they’re holding up in front of her, presumably one of her gifts. The baby is smiling at the photographer, the parents at the camera. A month and a half after the photo was taken, on October 7, 1978, the husband was awakened by something touching his feet. He opened his eyes, startled to see a figure in a dark ski mask looming over him.

  “I just want money and food, that’s all. I’ll kill you if you don’t do what I say.” The intruder held a flashlight in his left hand and a revolver in his right.

  Holes points to the dining room window where thirty-five years ago the EAR slithered in and made his way to the foot of the couple’s bed. The little girl wasn’t bothered and slept through the ordeal.

  The house was built in 1972 and is single-story, L-shaped, occupying roughly the same quarter acre as the other houses on the block. I’m struck by how much the house resembles the other crime-scene locations I’ve seen. You could pick it up and drop it in any of the other neighborhoods.

  “Definitely the same kind of house,” I say. Holes nods.

  “Very few neighborhoods he attacked in had two-story houses,” he says. “Makes a lot of sense if you know your victims are sleeping. In two stories there’s a single way upstairs and single way downstairs. You’re more likely to be cornered in that situation. Also it’s easier to determine what’s going on inside a single-story house, going from window to window. And if you’re prowling, jumping fences, and going through yards, somebody can have a vantage point to see you from a second floor versus downstairs.”

  The husband, under hypnosis, remembered that when he and his wife pulled up around eleven fifteen p.m. on the evening of the attack, he saw a young man standing near a parked van on the side street next to their house. The van was box-shaped and two-tone in color, white over aqua green. The young man appeared to be in his twenties and was white with dark hair, of average height and weight, and he was standing near the right back corner of the van, stooped over, as if checking out a tire. A fragment of an image, one of hundreds half-absorbed peripherally every day. I imagine the husband in a chair, summoning and parsing a snapshot made retrospectively crucial. Or not. That was the madness of the case: the uncertain weight of every clue.

  “In this case, what’s striking is the sophistication of how he broke in,” Holes says. “It looks like he tried the side door. He’s cutting near the doorknob. He abandons that effort for whatever reason. He comes out front. There’s a window on the dining room. He punches out a small hole in the window so he can push the latch and then gets in that way.”

  “I know nothing about burglaries. Was he good?”

  “He was good,” says Holes.

  We sit in the hot car and list the ways he was strategically good. Bloodhounds, shoe impressions, and tire tracks showed investigators he was canny about the routes he took. If there was a construction site nearby, he’d park there, as the transient vehicle population allowed him to hide in plain view; people would assume he was associated with the job. He’d approach a house one way but take a different route to escape, so that he wasn’t seen coming and going, and was therefore less likely to be remembered.

  Dogs that normally barked didn’t bark at him, suggesting he may have been preconditioning them with food. He had the unusual habit of throwing a blanket over a lamp or a muted TV when he brought his female victims into living rooms, which allowed him enough light to see but not so much that it would raise notice from outside. And his preplanning. The corner-house couple said that when they returned home, they noticed the husband’s study door was closed, which was unusual, and the front door wasn’t locked, as they believed they’d left it. They wondered if he was already in the house then, maybe hiding among the coats in the hall closet, waiting for their murmurs to grow softer and the bar of light at his feet to go out.

  There’s a pause in my conversation with Holes, one I’ve come to anticipate in discussions about the case. It’s knockdown time. The verbal pivot is akin to the moment when you’ve talked too much about an ex, catch yourself, and stop to emphasize that the ex in question is, of course, a worthless piece of shit.

  “He’s very good at committing his crime,” Holes says, “but he’s not rappelling down the side of a building. He’s not doing anything that suggests he has any specialized training.”

  Holes’s parents are from Minnesota, and he retains a chipper midwestern rhythm to his speech, but when he says the EAR wasn’t particularly skillful, his voice loses momentum, and he sounds unconvincing and unconvinced. On t
o the next recognizable stage in case analysis: self-debate.

  “It’s ballsy. The EAR. That’s the thing,” Holes says, his jaw uncharacteristically clenched. “What sets him apart from other offenders is going into a house. The Zodiac, for instance. In many ways his crimes were kind of cowardly. Lovers’ lanes. From a distance. You step it up when you go inside. You step it up further when there’s a male in that house.”

  We talk about how the male victims are overlooked. He tells me a story about a time when he needed to question a female victim in Stockton who’d been attacked with her husband. Holes decided to contact the husband first, figuring he’d be better able to handle the cold call. The husband politely told Holes he didn’t think his wife wanted to talk about the attack. She’d buried it. She didn’t want to revisit the experience; nevertheless, the husband reluctantly said, he’d pass Holes’s questions on to his wife. Holes didn’t hear anything. He figured it was a lost cause. Several months later, the wife finally got in touch. She answered Holes’s questions. She was willing to help him, she said. She was willing to remember. Her husband wasn’t.

  “He’s the one who’s having the problems,” she confided.

  The male victims were born in the forties and fifties, a generation for whom therapy was mostly an alien concept. In the police files, gender roles are rigid and unambiguous. Detectives ask the women where they shop and the men about the locking mechanisms on the doors and windows. They drape blankets over the women’s shoulders and ferry them to the hospital. The men are asked what they saw, not what they felt. Many of the male victims had military experience. They had toolsheds. They were doers and protectors who’d been robbed of their ability to do and protect. Their rage is in the details: one husband chewed the bindings off his wife’s feet.

  “So much trauma exists to this day,” Holes says, starting the car. He pulls away from the curb. The corner house recedes from view. There’s a brief handwritten note in the file from the female victim, the pretty young mother of the darling little birthday girl, to the lead detective, dated five months after their attack.

  Rod,

  Enclosed please find

  a. missing property list and

  b. list of checks written for July–August.

  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.”