I'll Be Gone in the Dark

by Michelle McNamara

  Holes regrets not making a switch to the investigations unit twenty years ago, when he was first tempted. Certainty won. He had two small kids. He was climbing the ranks in forensic science. You can see why he’s chief material. He’s blond and fit, with a handsome, genial face. He never winces or eye-rolls. His parents are from Minnesota, and he retains a hint of the long o. I once referred to Rupert Murdoch and he shrugged, not recognizing the name. “We run in different circles,” he said. Looking at him, you’d never guess that his parents once gave him the book Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives as a “thinking of you” gift.

  DNA testing once required hours of tedious manual work. In a sexual assault case, for example, you would take a swab from a plastic tube, isolate the sperm, and locate the DNA markers via a dot-blot technique that involved a series of white strips, trays, and specialized washes. Increasingly, as technology advanced, robotic arms and instruments did the work. In turn, Holes had more time to dedicate to cold cases. Holes believed Walther might be the One.

  When he first came across the “homework” evidence in the Sheriff’s Property Room that spring afternoon in 2011, he had been looking for a ski mask—Walther’s ski mask. He knew that back when Walther was suspect number one, task force investigators had interviewed his friend, a guy who’d been arrested with him for selling marijuana in Sacramento in ’77. The friend gave them a few of Walther’s belongings, including a black ski mask. Walther’s DNA profile wasn’t currently in the system; Holes wondered if he could develop a profile from hairs or skin cells extracted from the mask.

  Unfortunately, Walther was in the wind. The man had disappeared off the face of the earth. He’d failed to appear for a court date related to a misdemeanor domestic violence charge in 2003, and there was a warrant out for his arrest. His driver’s license was suspended in June 2004. After that, nothing. No credit. No job trail. No welfare. Holes tried to reconstruct Walther’s messy life as best he could. He requested and received Walther’s school records and noted with interest that his sixth-grade teacher was male, somewhat unusual for the time. Holes got the teacher on the phone. The elderly man said he didn’t recall Walther. But sentence writing would fit with the kind of schoolroom punishment he meted out then, he said.

  The teacher mentioned that about ten years ago an unidentified male called him and sang “Freedom Isn’t Free,” a song he’d made unruly kids sing in class. “Remember that,” the caller said, and hung up. The call had upset the teacher enough that he changed his number and kept it unlisted. He told Holes he was sorry he couldn’t be more helpful.

  Holes looked up the words to the song “Freedom Isn’t Free,” by Paul Colwell.

  “There was a general by the name of George,” starts the fourth verse, “With a small band of men at Valley Forge.”

  * * *

  RON GREER* HAD TO BE THE ONE. HE WAS A THREE-PACK-A-DAY smoker living in a rundown apartment, and here they were, casually offering him what they knew through surveillance was his preferred brand of cigarettes, and he wouldn’t take a single smoke. He was tightly wound and wary. Sacramento Sheriff’s Detective Ken Clark and his partner did everything they could to relax the guy. They weren’t going to leave without eyeballing a direct DNA deposit. But Greer declined to take even a sip from a water bottle. He knows what’s up, Ken figured. Yep. Nervous and forensically wise. He’s the One.

  Greer came to them via a thirty-year-old supplemental report. Many of the investigators share the belief that the EAR’s name is lost in the paperwork somewhere, jotted down on a vehicle stop or suspicious-circumstance report. His cover story was either airtight, or he was eliminated by a lousy but accepted alibi. Ken and his partner began methodically reviewing the old reports. Greer’s name popped up early.

  He was stopped driving southbound on Sunrise Boulevard in a two-door yellow Datsun at 4:27 a.m. on April 15, 1977, just minutes after an EAR rape had been called in blocks away. He told police he was on his way to his job working as a janitor at a rice mill. They noted that he was extremely quiet and cooperative. They opened his trunk; their interest grew considerably. He consented to a residence search. His mother had recently died, he told them, and he was living with his sister now. Or, more specifically, on his sister’s property, in a trashed storage trailer buried in some bushes on a steep hillside in Fair Oaks. The trailer couldn’t have been more than eight feet long and wasn’t tall enough to stand up in. He seemed to have a solid work alibi for an earlier EAR rape. Still, the investigators who dealt with Greer never forgot him. They couldn’t shake the memory of what they found inside his car.

  That’s why Ken and his partner had tracked him down thirty years later. Greer had significant medical issues now. Still, no water, thank you. No cigarettes. Finally, their patience and ruses running out, they persuaded him to lick an envelope. They swabbed all his car door handles when he wasn’t looking just to be sure.

  Greer was pulled over on that spring night in 1977 near an EAR rape because he fit the general physical description of the attacker; he was a white male, twenty-five, five nine, 150. The first thing the patrol officers picked out with their flashlights was a plastic bottle of hand lotion on the front seat of his car. There was a white mask, similar to the kind used for painting or surgery, on the passenger side dashboard. When they popped his trunk they found rope in an opened cellophane wrapper. There was also a pair of tennis shoes.

  And two large, zippered bags. Inside the bags, they found a handgun and a hunting knife.

  Ken and his partner sent the DNA collected from Greer to the crime lab. They waited. The results came back.

  Unbelievable.

  Greer wasn’t the One.

  As I’ve said, falling for a suspect is a lot like the first surge of blind love in a relationship. Focus narrows to a single face. The world and its practical sounds are a wan soundtrack to the powerful silent biopic you’re editing in your mind at all times. No amount of information on the object of your obsession is enough. You crave more. Always more. You note his taste in shoes and even drive by his house, courtesy of Google Maps. You engage in wild confirmation bias. You project. A middle-aged white man smiling and cutting a cake decorated with candles in a picture posted on Facebook isn’t celebrating his birthday, but holding a knife.

  I first sensed the parallels when a weary-looking Larry Pool admitted to me that he used to “feel more” about suspects in the beginning, when as an Orange County cold-case detective, he first got the Original Night Stalker case in 1997. He was “fresher then,” he said, his face drawn, sounding like a middle-aged serial dater toughened by the vagaries of love.

  Pool recalled an early moment of excitement in the summer of 2001, when he got a call asking him to report to the assistant sheriff’s office. Such calls always meant good news. When he walked in, a group turned to smile at him—his captain, his lieutenant, members of the administrative staff, and most tellingly, Mary Hong, the Orange County criminalist who developed the Original Night Stalker’s DNA profile. Hong worked in a different building.

  Pool pumped his fist in the air before he even closed the door. “Yes!” he said. He’d worked the case nonstop, maybe even obsessively, for three years by then.

  There’s been a fingerprint match, the assistant sheriff told Pool. A print left on a lamp at one of the East Area Rapist’s Danville scenes was believed to be the killer’s. The victim had heard him turn on the light; the lamp had been recently unpacked and wouldn’t have had anyone else’s prints on it. A retired investigator from Contra Costa had fished out an old copy of the print and recently sent it down to Orange County.

  “Excellent,” Pool said.

  The suspect died of natural causes five years ago, the assistant sheriff continued, and he slid the man’s file across the table toward Pool. Pool, who knew more about the killer than anyone in the room, opened the folder. Everyone stared at him expectantly. Pool experienced his first pang of disappointment.

  “Oh, man. I don’t like his age,” Pool sai
d. The suspect was born in 1934. Pool flipped through the report. He didn’t like the guy’s criminal history, either. Weapons charges. Trafficking. Bank robberies. The guy had been in witness protection. Pool wasn’t feeling it.

  He could sense the mood in the room shift.

  “I don’t care for him as a suspect,” Pool admitted. “But who knows, maybe that’s why we haven’t found the guy. He’s not what we expect.”

  “Find out where this man’s buried,” the assistant sheriff said.

  “Got it, boss,” said Pool.

  Pool discovered that the dead suspect had been a friend of the victim’s boyfriend. The two men had had a falling-out several weeks before the attack. The victim and her boyfriend had their stereo stolen around the same time, and Pool theorized that the suspect was the robber, probably exacting some revenge on his friend for their fight. He must have touched the lamp when he was in the house stealing the stereo. He wasn’t the killer, just a lousy friend with a burglary habit.

  But Pool’s bosses wanted certainty.

  “We gotta dig him up and check his DNA,” the assistant sheriff said.

  Pool got on a plane and flew to Baltimore to exhume the body. This was the first time the Orange County Sheriff’s Department had dug up a suspect—victims, yes, but never a suspect before. Baltimore Homicide assisted in the exhumation. When they opened the vault, the shoop sound reminded Pool of a huge Pepsi can opening. The corpse was in remarkably good condition, just covered in mold. But the smell.

  “Imagine the worst decomp times ten,” Pool said.

  No wonder the Baltimore Homicide detectives had lit up cigars as they crested the hill where the man was buried.

  Pool packed the suspect’s teeth and hair in his carry-on bag. The femur and parts of flesh they put on dry ice in a box, checked in at the airport. Back in Orange County, when Pool went to grab the box as it came around the baggage carousel, he discovered that it was leaking.

  DNA proved Pool’s suspicion. The dead fingerprint guy wasn’t the One.

  * * *

  DOUG FIEDLER* HAD TO BE THE ONE.

  An e-mail materialized in my inbox one night at 12:01 a.m. from “John Doe.”

  John Doe never explained his preference for anonymity. He was concerned with another matter: he’d heard me on a podcast talking about the case, and wanted to share what he considered to be a good tip. “Worldcat.org is a valuable research tool for finding what libraries carry a specific book or media. When you search for Det. Crompton’s Sudden Terror it gives the following locations Salem, Oregon, Post Falls, Idaho, Hayden Lake, Idaho, Sidney, Nebraska, Los Gatos, California. Maybe EAR-ONS used his library to acquire the book to avoid buying it online?”

  It was an interesting idea. Sudden Terror was self-published; it was unlikely that any library would carry it without a borrower specifically requesting that the library acquire it. I was pretty sure I knew who was responsible for Oregon and California (retired detectives), so I concentrated on Idaho and Nebraska. I knew the libraries weren’t going to share the names of the borrowers with me, as it’s important to them to protect patrons’ privacy. I stared at my computer. A blank search bar waited for me to find a way to use it. I decided to enter the relevant zip codes along with the name of a high-profile group I felt the EAR might have joined in the intervening years: registered sex offenders.

  For about an hour, I scrolled through the rough mugs of the perverted and depraved. The exercise was feeling like a waste of time. Then I saw him. I experienced a flash, the first since I’d started investigating the case: You.

  I eyeballed his stats. The man, Doug Fiedler, was born in 1955. He was the right height and weight. He was originally from California, and in the late eighties was convicted there of several sexual offenses, including rape by force or fear and lewd and lascivious acts with a child under the age of fourteen.

  From a genealogy website, I learned that his mother was from a large family from Sacramento County. My pulse quickened with every new piece of information I gathered. In the early 1980s, and possibly earlier, she lived in north Stockton, close to the EAR rapes there. Doug’s ex-wife had addresses all over Orange County, including one in Dana Point, just 1.7 miles from the house where Keith and Patty Harrington were murdered.

  He had an animal tattoo on his arm that could easily be mistaken for a bull (during hypnosis a young girl who saw the EAR in her house recalled a tattoo she thought looked like the Schlitz Malt Liquor bull on his forearm).

  I ran his name through a Google News archive. I nearly jumped out of my chair when I saw the results. An August 1969 Los Angeles Times story detailed how a nineteen-year-old boy was hit on the head with a frying pan and stabbed to death by his younger half brother, who had gone to his mother’s aid during a family fight. The younger brother? Doug Fiedler.

  Bludgeoning. Knife. The EAR did a lot strange things during the commission of his crimes, but in my opinion one of the weirdest was his occasional whimpering and crying. Those occasional plaintive calls amid the sobs: “Mommy! Mommy!”

  Doug now lived with his elderly mother in a small town in Idaho. Google Street View revealed it to be a modest white house obscured by overgrown weeds.

  I didn’t say it explicitly, but when I e-mailed Pool about Doug Fiedler, I felt there was a very good chance I was handing him the killer.

  “Nice catch,” Pool wrote back. “Good profile and physical. I just confirmed via phone and other data that he’s been eliminated by DNA (CODIS).”

  For hours I’d felt as if I was hurtling down the street with nothing in my way, like catching a series of green lights. Now the transmission had just fallen out. The wisdom of the time traveler, I realized, can be deceiving. We return to the past armed with more information and cutting-edge innovations. But there are hazards in having so much wizardry at hand. The feast of data means there are more circumstances to bend and connect. You’re tempted to build your villain with the abundance of pieces. It’s understandable. We’re pattern-seekers, all of us. We glimpse the rough outline of what we seek and we get snagged on it, sometimes remaining stuck when we could get free and move on.

  “Keep throwing me suspects like him!” Pool wrote.

  He was letting me down gently. He’d been there. After he told me how excited he’d get about certain suspects when he first started on the case, I asked how he responded now, fifteen years later. He mimed getting a report and looking it over, taciturn and severe.

  “Okay,” he said curtly, and pretended to throw it in the pile.

  But I’d seen him reenact another moment, the one when he walked through his boss’s door, when he spotted the group assembled there for him, on the cusp of a moment you can spend a career in law enforcement imagining but never experience. I knew how quickly he sometimes got back to me through e-mail when something interesting popped up.

  I’d seen him imitate that fist pump and “Yes!” I knew that he quietly longed for that moment again.

  Los Angeles, 2014

  “WHAT PEOPLE FORGET ABOUT ROCKY IS THAT FIRST SCENE, WHEN he goes out to train. His legs are killing him. He’s past his prime. It’s freezing. He’s staggering. He can barely get up those steps.”

  Patton was trying to buoy my spirits by telling me about Rocky. I’d been talking to him about dead ends. How many could the average person face before they gave up?

  “But Rocky just kept getting up every morning and doing it. Over and over. It’s like with these cold-case guys. You invest all this time and energy. You call around. You dig through boxes. You coax out stories. You swab. Then, the answer is no. You can’t let that kill you. You have to wake up the next morning, get your coffee, clear your desk, and do it all over again.”

  Patton was talking about himself too, I realized, the way he kept getting back onstage as a young comedian, for no money, to hostile crowds. He had that burning determination in him, and he’s partial to stories about people who do too. Sometimes when he’s standing at the sink doing the dishes, I notice
his lips moving but there’s no sound.

  “What are you doing there?” I asked him once.

  “Working out a joke,” he said.

  Starting over. Making it better. Doing it again.

  “Rocky didn’t beat Apollo Creed, remember,” Patton said. “But he shocked him, and the world, because he refused to give up.”

  We were having dinner to celebrate our eighth wedding anniversary. Patton raised his glass of wine. I could tell he hoped to shake me from my listless defeat in the face of dead ends.

  “You have a rogues’ gallery of villains in your future,” he said.

  “Stop it!” I said. “Don’t say that.”

  His intentions were good, I knew. But I couldn’t, or refused, to imagine the future.

  “I don’t want a rogues’ gallery of villains,” I said. “He’s the only one.”

  The moment I said it, I realized how sick that sounded. What I meant was that after the EAR, I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to feverishly search, to breathlessly catch a series of green lights only to keep crashing, ever again.

  From under the table, Patton brought out a large present wrapped beautifully in vintage wrapping paper. He’s an amazing gift giver. He loves to find young artists and artisans and collaborate with them on unique gifts. One year he had made what we jokingly refer to as an inaction figure of me—I’m sitting in bed in my pajamas holding a Starbucks vanilla latte, my laptop open to my true-crime website. Another time he had a young metal worker build me a wooden box. The house we lived in for seven years is depicted in a bronze plate on the front. Inside are a series of hidden miniature drawers, each containing mementos from our life together—ticket stubs, Post-it notes.

  Last year he commissioned artist Scott Campbell to paint three small watercolors of me facing off against notorious crime figures. In one I’m holding a cup of coffee and staring down the Zodiac Killer. In another, I clutch a notebook as if I’m about to interrogate D. B. Cooper, the infamous plane hijacker. And in the third, I’m holding my laptop, a curious smile on my face, standing face-to-face with the One, masked and unknowable, my bane, the EAR.