PAUL HOLES: My naive thought about flying is, you know . . . every time you flew a plane, you had to file a flight plan; you fly into an airport, they know you’re there, and everything else. But they told me, “No, no. Anybody can come and go here. We have no idea they’re here. If they come in after hours, they tie their plane down. They go do their thing, they come back, we’ll never know they’re here.”
MICHELLE: Is that right?! That is strange.
PAUL HOLES: So, here we’ve got this case, twenty-two hours after the case in Modesto occurred. The case in Modesto has the strange man being picked up at an airport, being dropped off, near new construction, seemingly heading toward the victim’s home.
MICHELLE: But why was that man so strange?
PAUL HOLES: The cab driver said he just had a single bag. And he just says, “Take me to Sylvan and Meadow.” And then, “Drop me off right here.” He gets out and just wanders to where the cab driver says there’s nothing there but houses being built. And then the next case . . . we have an airport connection.
MICHELLE: I’m trying to think of what kind of person would have a plane like that. Like, a small plane?
PAUL HOLES: Well, a small plane opens up possibilities. You know, these developers typically had your multiseat corporate jets. If you’re talking about somebody with a small plane, somebody who’s not a millionaire, you know, or somebody with huge resources, having a . . .
MICHELLE: Yeah.
PAUL HOLES: So, if you’re talking to these developers, and saying, well, “Would you fly? If you have developments across the state, would you fly there?” They answer, “Yeah, we would fly there. Flying an airplane is very expensive, but it was sort of an ego thing. So, we would want to be perceived as successful, because we have our own jet that we’re flying in. And yeah, occasionally we would go and check on our kingdoms that are being built.”
MICHELLE: Right. Hmm. Were there any other little clues from any of the cases that tied into a plane? Like, any kind of . . . didn’t he have, like, a navigator’s something?
PAUL HOLES: No, not that I can think of.
Holes is trying to locate the home of the third Davis victim. This attack, number thirty-seven, occurred on July 6, 1978, at 2:40 in the morning. The victim was a thirty-three-year-old woman—recently separated and in the bed alone—whose sons were sleeping in another room. The EAR used them as leverage, threatening to kill them if she didn’t do what he said. After raping and sodomizing the victim, he sobbed. A three-month hiatus would then follow, after which he resurfaced in the East Bay area.
PAUL HOLES: It was a corner house. I want to say it was the end. I don’t think these houses were here at the time. And there are no houses behind. And then you had the construction going on at the school. So, the attack occurred here. There was lots of construction going on in this area. . . . Here it is. So . . . this victim carpooled with the previous Davis victim.
MICHELLE: Wow. A lot of these scenes are a lot closer to each other than I thought they were. I mean, some aren’t, but . . . some, it’s interesting.
PAUL HOLES: Right. Well, neighborhoods. He got familiar with the neighborhoods. Danville is tightly clustered. Concord. Walnut Creek.
MICHELLE: Certainly, I mean, Rancho Cordova . . . weren’t some right next to each other?
PAUL HOLES: Yeah. Not quite right next to each other, but right around the block. You know, the house between.
MICHELLE: Right. I mean, and if you’re walking away without your pants on, you either live there or your car is right there. Or you’re kind of crazy. Or all of the above.
PAUL HOLES: Well, one of these guys I spent a lot of time on, a serial killer by the name of Phillip Hughes . . . in his interviews with the psychiatrist, he admits to, when he was in high school, leaving his house in the middle of the night—parents had no idea—he’d be nude, and he’d break into other houses in the neighborhood to steal the clothing from the women.
MICHELLE: And this was before he’d actually been violent with anyone?
PAUL HOLES: Yeah, as far as we know. He had killed some animals. You know . . . the whole serial-killer triad thing [the theory that torturing animals, setting fires, and bedwetting past early childhood predict sexual violence in adulthood].
MICHELLE: Right.
PAUL HOLES: But this was at the high school age. I think there’s a certain . . . thrill to being out without the clothes on.
MICHELLE: Right.
PAUL HOLES: Now, there could be a practical thing too, you know? Let’s say it’s his first attack, and he’s going, “Well, how am I going to deal with the pants? I’m just not going to wear them. I don’t want them in the way.”
MICHELLE: Right. Yeah, that’s why it’s interesting to me that in a lot of the murders, he killed them with whatever was handy there.
PAUL HOLES: Yeah. He had a gun, but in terms of the bludgeoning, he used what was there.
MICHELLE: Is there anything about people who bludgeon that’s different from people who do other stuff?
PAUL HOLES: Well, bludgeoning and stabbing in essence are the same thing. You know, it’s very personal. You’re taking out a lot of violence, a lot of anger, on that person. Now, strangulation . . . beating with your fists or strangling, that’s all . . .
MICHELLE: So anything you do with your hands is kind of out of the same thing?
PAUL HOLES: Yeah, it’s all the same. Versus killing with a gun—it’s less personal. And it’s easy. Anybody can kill anybody with a gun. You can kill from a distance. But when you’re in physical confrontation with the person, that’s a personal thing. You know, you read about these guys who are looking in the victim’s eyes as they’re strangling them . . .
MICHELLE: Right.
PAUL HOLES: You know, and they feel Godlike because, in essence, they are controlling whether this victim lives or dies.
Fred Ray
I’M NOT ENJOYING MY SECOND CUP OF TERRIBLE COFFEE IN A CAFÉ in Kingsburg, California, twenty miles southeast of Fresno, when I’m given an explanation to a mystery that’s puzzled me for years. The man who provides the answer, Fred Ray, is tall and laconic and possesses a slightly nasal drawl befitting a descendent of generations of Central Valley farmers. When Ray isn’t using his long fingers to emphasize a point, he folds his hands and rests them gently on his chest like a scholar. His mostly brown hair is enviously abundant for a retired detective who’s being asked about a thirty-five-year-old double murder he once investigated. I formed a certain ungenerous impression when Ray first loped in with his battered briefcase and Dust Bowl twang. He wanted to meet on the early side to avoid the high school crowd, he told me, but I spot no one under seventy in the tiny café, which consists of a handful of tables covered in thick, clear plastic, shelves of Swedish knick-knacks (Kingsburg is known as Little Sweden), and a narrow glass counter displaying scattered pastries. Two of the café’s few patrons are Ray’s wife and then his pastor, who asks me where I’m from even though I haven’t been identified as an out-of-town visitor. I tell him I’m from Los Angeles.
“Welcome to the state of California,” the pastor says.
But my impression of Ray changes abruptly early in our conversation, when he’s describing his time as a detective with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, in particular his experience interrogating a certain kind of troubled kid. Outwardly the kids, young white males mostly, presented little threat. The laid-back pace of an old-money coastal town trickled down to them, even if they didn’t live in upscale Hope Ranch, with its horse paths and private beach, but the trailer park on Hollister. These were Garys and Keiths, shaggy-haired late-seventies burnouts who started but never finished Dos Pueblos or San Marcos High. They dragged beat-up armchairs into the avocado groves and hid out smoking homegrown weed. They surfed Haskell’s Beach all day and gathered around bonfires at night, drunk and feeling safely out of reach; they knew the cops would never hike down the sage-scrub-covered bluffs to break up a beach party. Their troubles were petty
stuff. Minor aggravations. Except that Ray discovered a surprising number of them engaged in a chilling pastime, one they kept secret even from each other: they got a thrill out of breaking into strangers’ homes in the middle of the night.
They were prowlers. Peepers. Burglary was an afterthought. What they took pride in, Ray learned from talking to them, was their ability to get inside a house, crawl along a floor, and stand unnoticed in the dark, watching people sleep. Ray was amazed at the details they would share with him once he got them started.
“I always had a way of getting guys to talk to me,” Ray says.
“How would you do it?”
He opens his hands. His features soften almost imperceptibly.
“Well, you know, everyone does that,” he says, his tone both conspiratorial and direct. “Everybody has wanted to see what’s going on in someone else’s house.”
That sounds reasonable. I nod. “
Right,” I say.
But then Ray snaps back to his former self, his real self, and I realize that, without my noticing, he’d assumed a slight slouch and slackened his expression to appear more casual. This wasn’t the ham-fisted method used to coax information out of a suspect as seen on Law and Order. The abrupt transition was startling. I bought the act completely. One of Ray’s most winning mannerisms is a huge, unpredictable smile that’s the opposite of eager and therefore more gratifying when you prompt it. He got me, and he knows it. He grins.
“They all want to tell their story, but they want to tell it to somebody that’s not going to freak out on them. When you sit there showing no emotion, kind of agreeing with them, almost like you’re enjoying what they’re telling you, they’ll talk.”
The parade of troubled young men whom Ray questioned decades ago interests me for a specific reason.
“You interviewed these guys, these prowlers,” I say. “Do you think you might have talked to him?”
“No,” he says quickly.
Then carefully, “I could have.”
But he’s shaking his head.
Him. The third person at every interview I conduct, the faceless killer whose tennis-shoe impressions Ray once tracked through the neighborhood, retracing the man’s path as he crept from window to window, searching for victims. Ray was deeply involved in the case of a serial killer who picked up hitchhikers, shot them in the side of the head, and then had sex with their corpses; over the course of his career, he has stood over headless bodies and examined ritualistic carvings on the decomposing skin of a young woman. Yet the only killer he mentions who made, as he says, “the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” was the one who brought me here. Him.
That Ray doesn’t believe he talked to the unidentified man I’ve dubbed the Golden State Killer doesn’t surprise me. Every detective I’ve interviewed who’s worked the case insists the same thing. They’ve held precut ligatures he left behind and stared at his spermatozoa under a microscope. They’ve played and replayed audio recordings of hypnotized witnesses and survivors, listening for any throwaway clues to his identity. Decades after retirement, one detective found himself squatting in the woods outside a possible suspect’s house in Oregon, waiting for the trash to come out so he could swipe a DNA sample. The Golden State Killer haunts their dreams. He’s ruined their marriages. He’s burrowed so deeply inside their heads that they want to, or have to, believe that if they locked eyes with him, they’d know.
“It’s kind of like a bloodhound thing,” a detective said to me. “I believe if I were at a mall and he passed by me, I’d know.”
I explain to Ray that the reason I’m interested in his memories of young prowlers is that I recently visited Goleta, the city eight miles west of Santa Barbara on California’s Central Coast where the killer attacked three times between 1979 and 1981. All three attacks took place in an unassuming neighborhood in northeast Goleta, an area occupying less than two square miles. Shoe tracks and twine ligatures presumably dropped by accident from his pockets show that he moved along San Jose Creek, a narrow gorge that begins in the mountains to the north and meanders through the neighborhood of tract homes until emptying into the Pacific Ocean. His victims all lived close to the creek.
I walked along the creek bed, I tell Ray, and was struck by how captivating the overgrown path, shrouded in huge, draping trees and strewn with moss-covered rocks, would be for a certain kind of suburban adolescent boy, a semiwild, underparented kid yearning for refuge. Rope swings dangled from sycamore trees. Adults who’d grown up in the neighborhood told me that in the midseventies some boys built a BMX track down there. There were secret tunnels and cement-lined drainage ditches where kids skateboarded. There were no lights, and the path was confusing and hard to follow. It felt like the kind of place you’d know only if you’d spent a lot of time down there as a kid.
“Especially when you consider the first attack on Queen Ann Lane,” I say. The Queen Ann Lane house isn’t even visible from the street, as it’s located behind another house. You’d notice it only from the path along the creek.
The mention of the October 1, 1979, attack on Queen Ann Lane hardens Ray’s otherwise matter-of-fact face.
“You know, they could have caught him that night,” Ray says.
That was the night he realized he had to kill. The night the victims survived and their neighbor, an off-duty FBI agent, pursued the suspect as he fled on a stolen ten-speed bike. I’ve walked the route of the pursuit and stopped at the place where the agent lost him. The agent was in radio contact with deputies who were on their way. I’ve never quite understood how he wasn’t apprehended.
“I knew what was going to happen,” Ray says. He shakes his head. “I knew exactly what the deputies were going to do.”
What they did was let him slip away.
The One
THE FIRST MOMENT OF JIM WALTHER’S* OVER THIRTY-YEAR ENTANGLEMENT with the EAR case began in Danville, in the early morning hours of February 2, 1979, when he was roused awake by Contra Costa Sheriff’s Deputy Carl Fabbri’s flashlight. Walther said he’d pulled his gray-primer-coated 1968 Pontiac LeMans off Interstate 680 to sleep after leaving his job as a brakeman for the Western Pacific Railroad. Fabbri didn’t buy the story. Walther’s car was parked on Camino Tassajara, a good mile and a half from the freeway. Why drive that far for a nap? He searched Walther’s eyes for signs of sleep. Fabbri’s hackles were up. He was patrolling the neighborhood because he’d unsuccessfully chased a prowler here the night before. Five months earlier, Sacramento’s most infamous phantom, the East Area Rapist, had writhed his way seventy miles southwest to their area. Four attacks. A thirty-two-year-old divorcée living in a corner house near the Iron Horse Regional Trail had been the most recent victim, in December. “Do you like to raise dicks?” he whispered to her. “Then why do you raise mine every time I see you?” The attack was just over a mile from where Walther was now parked.
Deputy Fabbri ordered Walther to stay put and ran a check on him. The kid had an open warrant for outstanding vehicle-code violations. His record showed a low-grade marijuana bust two years earlier—in Sacramento. He was twenty-one, five ten, 150. The broad outline was looking good, if not the particulars. Fabbri and his partner placed Walther under arrest. His protests were routine white noise until Fabbri’s partner took out a Polaroid camera to snap a mug shot, and a switch flipped. Walther went apeshit. Fabbri had to physically subdue him. It was weird. The kid had a minor record. Why was he so freaked out about having his picture taken? They had to hold his head up to get the shot.
En route to jail, Walther conducted a strange, mostly one-way conversation with his arresting officers.
“Nobody ever catches the real criminals,” Walther told them. “They always get away.”
DAMNING COINCIDENCES PILED ON FROM THE START. WHEN asked for his address, Walther put down Sutter Avenue, Carmichael. East Sacramento. A deputy recalled seeing a car like Walther’s distinct one in nearby San Ramon around the time of the EAR attacks there. Shortly after
his arrest, Walther ditched the car and got a new one. He shut down when EAR Task Force investigators questioned him, and he lawyered up, courtesy of his mother—an overbearing woman who referred to her adult son as “my Jimmy” and who’d once nearly come to blows with his probation officer. The lawyer told investigators his client wouldn’t chew on gauze for a saliva sample because “it might be incriminating.” The task force continued to lean on Walther. He continued to resist. He volunteered in passing that his blood type was A and he wore a size 9 shoe, same as the EAR’s. Finally, in August, they called him out of his girlfriend’s apartment and told him they knew she was growing marijuana in there. They gave him a stark choice: either chew on gauze now, or we’re arresting her. He chewed on gauze.
The saliva results eliminated Walther. He was a secretor. The EAR was a nonsecretor. The task force dropped him as a suspect and moved on to fresher dirtbags.
* * *
MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS LATER, PAUL HOLES QUESTIONED THAT elimination. As a veteran of the crime lab, he knew that the secretor-status testing method back then was less than ideal. In the 1980s, quality-control experts had found serious glitches in the method. In the intervening years, scientists had also discovered that a small segment of the population are aberrant secretors, individuals who may express ABO type in some of their fluids but not others. Holes felt that suspect eliminations based on secretor status were unreliable.
Holes also had the benefit of retrospection, three decades’ worth. They knew much more about the EAR now. Holes could open Google Earth on his computer and fly over the attack locations and scenes of suspicious circumstances in chronological order, a dizzying flight from yellow pushpin to miniature blue car to little people representing footprints or witnesses. He could adjust for speed and height. He could sit at his desk and follow the killer’s trail with his eyes. The zigzag path looked random, but for someone, the One, it was not.
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