I'll Be Gone in the Dark

by Michelle McNamara

  I opened this year’s present. Patton had had my Los Angeles magazine article professionally bound and placed in a custom-made black slipcase. The case had a compartment where I could store the most important notes from my story. A DVD of an interview I did on the local news was in a bottom drawer.

  I realize later that for two years in a row my wedding anniversary gift has been, in some way or another, about the EAR.

  But that’s not even the most telling sign of how much he’s come to dominate my life. That would be the fact that I’ve forgotten to get Patton as much as a card.

  Sacramento, 2014

  HOLES DUG RELENTLESSLY INTO WALTHER’S BACKGROUND. THE LOCATION of Walther’s family’s home on Sutter Avenue in Carmichael was a central buffer zone around which the EAR preyed. In the midseventies, Walther helped his mom in her job managing low-income apartment complexes in Rancho Cordova; one of the complexes was next door to an EAR attack. Holes learned that in May 1975 Walther was in a bad car accident in Sacramento that resulted in scars on his face. Victim number seven had tried reverse psychology and told the EAR he was good at sex. He responded that people always made fun of him for being small, a presumably truthful statement, because he was indeed underendowed. The EAR also mentioned to her that “something happened to my face.”

  Four attacks were a half mile from Del Campo High School, where Walther went to school. The father of one of the victims taught at the continuation school that Walther transferred to after dropping out of Del Campo. Walther worked in 1976 at a Black Angus restaurant that two victims mentioned to detectives was a frequent dining location for them.

  Walther began working for the Western Pacific Railroad in 1978; the job took him to Stockton, Modesto, and through Davis (on his way to Milpitas), just as the EAR began branching out in those areas. In August 1978, he received two speeding tickets in Walnut Creek. The EAR’s East Bay attacks in that area started two months later. A court date related to one of Walther’s Walnut Creek traffic tickets occurred two weeks before the attack there.

  In 1997 Walther was pulled over for running a stop sign. Two steak knives were found in a duct-tape sheath in his waistband. Court documents from his domestic violence arrest reveal that he threatened his ex-wife, saying, “I’m going to cut you up into little pieces.”

  “Be quiet or I’ll cut you up,” the EAR said. He frequently threatened to cut off ears, toes, and fingers.

  Walther was either dead or making a Herculean effort not to be found. Holes repeatedly called coroner’s offices to ask if they had any similar-looking John Does. Finally, he tracked down Walther’s only child, an estranged daughter. A detective from the Contra Costa Investigations Unit told the daughter they were looking for her dad because he was owed money from a jail stint he did in 2004. The daughter said she hadn’t spoken to Walther since 2007. He called her once from a pay phone, she said. He was homeless in Sacramento at the time.

  Holes asked Sacramento law enforcement agencies if they could dig up any paperwork at all on Walther; transients frequently have small interactions with police. If Walther was homeless in the Sacramento area, his name was probably jotted down on some report. Maybe the notation never made it into the system, but it was buried there somewhere. Finally, Holes got the call.

  “We don’t have Walther,” the officer said, “but his brother is listed as a witness in a crime. He lives in a car behind a Union 76 in Antelope.”

  Holes took out a copy of the brother’s property deed, which he had in his file on Walther. There was no mortgage associated with the house, as it was passed to the brother through his father. Holes was confused.

  “Why would Walther’s brother be homeless?” Holes asked out loud. There was a pause on the phone.

  “Are you absolutely sure it was Walther’s brother you were talking to?” Holes asked.

  Soon after, the Sacramento Sheriff’s Office called Holes, the call he’d been waiting for. They’d approached Walther’s brother with serious expressions and a mobile fingerprint device, and he’d crumpled and thrown up his hands. He confessed. The thumbprint confirmed it—the homeless man was Jim Walther. They swabbed him and rushed the DNA sample to the lab.

  Holes was taking me on a driving tour of the relevant East Bay locations when he stopped the car and pointed out the exact spot in Danville where Walther was found sleeping in his parked Pontiac LeMans on February 2, 1979. Holes still has questions that nag him. Why would someone go underground for eight years just to avoid a thirty-day sentence?

  But the most important question, the one he spent eighteen months investigating, has been answered.

  “He wasn’t the EAR,” Holes said. He shook his head. “But I tell you, he was the EAR’s shadow.”

  We stared at the spot.

  “You’re sure they did it right?” I asked about the DNA test.

  Holes paused for a fraction of a moment.

  “Sacramento is very, very good at what they do,” he said.

  We drove on.

  Sacramento, 1978

  DETECTIVE KEN CLARK AND I WERE STANDING OUTSIDE THE SCENE of a double homicide that occurred in east Sacramento in February 1978 when he interrupted his train of thought to ask, “Do you support Obama?” We smiled at each other for a moment and then both started laughing. He shrugged off our political difference and kept pouring forth. Clark was a nonstop chatterer. I didn’t get a word in edgewise, and that worked to my advantage. We stood outside the yard where Clark believes the East Area Rapist shot a young couple to death. The Maggiore murders were never conclusively linked to the EAR, but Clark recently found police reports showing EAR-like prowling and break-ins in the area that night, moving closer and closer until Katie and Brian Maggiore were mysteriously gunned down while out walking their dog. Witnesses got a good glimpse of the suspect. When a composite was released, the EAR suddenly moved west to Contra Costa County. Though Paul Holes already told me he doesn’t buy the “scared away” theory, Clark thinks he was spooked. He shows me the composite. “I think this is the closest image we have of him.”

  Clark shows me the old police reports he’s now digging through for clues. They include traffic stops and Peeping Tom incidents. So much wasn’t considered relevant then. Clark can’t explain why. It kills him. “They let a good suspect go because his sister-in-law said she once went skinny-dipping with him and she thought he had a decent-size penis.” (The EAR did not). “Another, I’m not kidding, had ‘too big a lower lip.’”

  Sacramento teems with angles to explore. What brought him here? Is it a coincidence that all branches of the military transferred their navigation training to Mather Air Force Base on July 1, 1976, just as the rapes began? What about California State University–Sacramento? Their academic calendar dovetails perfectly with the crimes (he never attacked during a school holiday). Using new technology, a geographic profiler pinpoints streets where he believes the EAR may have lived. I revisit the neighborhoods. I talk to old-timers. I feed what I find to the laptop DIY detectives engaged in the hunt.

  [EDITOR’S NOTE: Michelle McNamara died on April 21, 2016.]

  Part Three

  [EDITOR’S NOTE: When Michelle died, she was midway through the writing of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. To prepare the book for release, Michelle’s lead researcher, Paul Haynes, aka the Kid, and acclaimed investigative journalist Billy Jensen, who was a friend of Michelle’s, worked together to tie up loose ends and organize the materials Michelle left behind. The following chapter was written collaboratively by Haynes and Jensen.]

  A WEEK AFTER MICHELLE’S DEATH, WE GAINED ACCESS TO HER HARD drives and began exploring her files on the Golden State Killer. All 3,500 of them. That was on top of the dozens of notebooks, the legal pads, the scraps of paper, and thousands of digitized pages of police reports. And the thirty-seven boxes of files she had received from the Orange County prosecutor, which Michelle lovingly dubbed the Mother Lode.

  Thousands of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and only one person knew what it was
supposed to look like. That one person wasn’t Michelle. It was the killer himself.

  Michelle’s white whale was not the Black Dahlia Killer, or the Zodiac Killer, or even Jack the Ripper—infamous agents of unsolved crimes whose “bodies of work”—and thus the files of investigative source material—were relatively small.

  No. Michelle was after a monster who had raped upward of fifty women and had murdered at least ten people. There were more than fifty-five crime scenes, with thousands of pieces of evidence.

  We opened Michelle’s main hard drive and began going through the chapters she had completed. They reminded us why we were drawn to her writing in the first place.

  Her prose jumps off the page and sits down next to you, weaving tales of Michelle on the streets of Rancho Cordova, Irvine, and Goleta on the trail of a killer. The amount of detail is massive. But her writing, at once dogged and empathetic, works the specifics into a fluent narrative. Just when the average reader might get fatigued by too many facts, she turns a phrase or shows a telling detail that brings it all around again. In the manuscript and on True Crime Diary, Michelle always found the perfect balance between the typical extremes of the genre. She didn’t flinch from evoking key elements of the horror and yet avoided lurid overindulgence in grisly details, as well as sidestepping self-righteous justice crusading or victim hagiography. What her words evoked was the intrigue, the curiosity, the compulsion to solve a puzzle and resolve the soul-chilling blank spots.

  But there were parts of the story that Michelle had not completed. We laid out what she had finished. She had a nuance that one doesn’t normally encounter in true crime (except maybe in Capote—and when he was looking for a hook, he sometimes would just make it up). Michelle was writing a nonfiction book with a style that couldn’t be replicated. We thought about it and even took a brief stab. But it was fruitless. She had told this story in so many forms—in the chapters she had completed, in the story for Los Angeles magazine, and in her numerous blog posts— that there was enough material to fill in many of the gaps.

  That being said, there were topics she would have definitely expanded on had she been able to complete the book. Many of those files or scribbled notes presented a lead she wanted to follow—or a red herring she might have disregarded. Where a friend’s bucket list might be littered with items like “Trip to Paris” and “Try skydiving,” Michelle’s included “Go to Modesto,” “Complete the reverse directory of Goleta residents,” and “Figure out way to submit DNA to 23andMe or Ancestry.com.”

  * * *

  BACK IN 2011, AFTER SHE POSTED HER FIRST STORY ON TRUE CRIME Diary about EAR-ONS (she hadn’t yet given him the Golden State Killer moniker), Michelle first became aware of Paul when he posted a link to her piece on the A&E Cold Case Files forum, which at that time was the only place where a dialogue about the case was taking place.

  Michelle wrote him immediately.

  “Hi!” she began. “You’re one of my favorite posters.” She proceeded to describe a rare surname she’d stumbled upon, whose few bearers shared some interesting geography. Maybe they were worth looking into.

  “I struggle with insomnia,” she explained, “and when I can’t sleep, I sleuth around for good EAR suspects. I don’t know what your system is, if any, but I’ve been doing two things—running down names in the Goleta cemetery, and running names gleaned from alumni lists from multiple schools in Irvine, particularly the Northwood neighborhood. Not counting sheep, exactly, but hypnotic in its own way.”

  The results of Michelle’s insomnia were laid bare on her hard drive:

  Old maps and aerial photographs of Goleta, used to compare against the “homework” evidence map

  Images of the soles of shoes and bindings from the crime scenes

  An analysis of the turf-plugger tool, possibly used in the Domingo murder

  A folder bursting at the seams about the Visalia Ransacker, and theories she was putting forth to connect him to EAR-ONS

  There was a list of some specific items taken from the victims of the East Area Rapist:

  Silver Dollar “MISSILE”

  Silver Dollar “M.S.R.” 8.8.72

  Ring with “For my angel” 1.11.70

  One set of cuff links, yellow gold, initial “NR” in script

  Man’s gold ring, 80 pt diamond, square shape, 3 gold nuggets

  Ring “[redacted] Always [redacted]” 2.11.71

  Gold initial ring WSJ

  Antique silver spoon ring by Prelude by International

  Class ring Lycoming College 1965

  As well as a note mentioning that the rapist had a particular penchant for clock radios, having stolen five of them.

  Nestled among the array was a spreadsheet containing the names and addresses of the 1976 Dos Pueblos High School cross country team, a rabbit hole she went down with the thought that the EAR might have been a young runner with muscular legs.

  One document was titled “Possibly Interesting People.” It was a list pasted together over time, with notes and nuggets added as Michelle ran down the names and birth dates of potential suspects. Some of the fragments retained the tag “Sent from my iPhone”—betraying its contents’ origin as a quick note to self while Michelle was killing time at a movie premiere.

  In another notepad, she wrote: “Don’t underestimate the fantasy: not raping in front of men—afraid of male; functional; privacy, writhing male not part of his fantasy. Mommy and crying. No remorse. Probably part of fantasy.”

  There were even notes on her own psychology:

  He was a compulsive prowler and searcher. We, who hunt him, suffer from the same affliction. He peered through windows. I tap “return.” Return. Return. Click Mouse click, mouse click.

  Rats search for their own food.

  The hunt is the adrenaline rush, not the catch. He’s the fake shark in Jaws, barely seen so doubly feared.

  Michelle would reach out to witnesses from the old reports if she felt there was some detail left unelaborated or a nagging question the investigators neglected to ask. One of those witnesses was Andrew Marquette.*

  The night of June 10, 1979, was an especially hot one, and Marquette had left his bedroom window open to catch a breeze while he tried to sleep. Around midnight, he heard the crunch of footsteps on the rock path beneath his window. He peered out and saw a stranger creeping slowly alongside his house, his eyes fixed on the window of his neighbors. Marquette looked into the same window and could see the couple that lived there putting their child to bed.

  Marquette continued observing the subject as he slunk toward a pine tree and receded into the grassy darkness. He fetched a .22 pistol he kept near his bed and racked the slide. It was a sound the prowler must have recognized, as he immediately sprang into motion and scrambled over the fence into the front yard. Marquette went to his neighbors’ house and knocked on the front door. No one answered.

  He returned the pistol to his house and began heading back next door to try his neighbors’ again. Midway there, a passing car’s headlights swept across the homes on the north side of the block and briefly illuminated the prowler, who was now on a bike, leaning against a house. As Marquette started to approach, the subject began pedaling furiously across the lawn, fleeing from Marquette and disappearing into the night. Marquette called the police. They cruised up and down the neighborhood, searching for the prowler to no avail.

  Several hours later, the forty-seventh EAR attack occurred half a block away. Investigators reconnected with Marquette during the canvass, and he told the same story.

  The prowler was a white male in his twenties with collar-length hair, wearing Levi’s and a dark-colored T-shirt—consistent with what the latest EAR victim described. The bicycle on which the prowler had fled was found abandoned later that morning, several blocks away, next to an Olympia beer can from the victim’s fridge. Investigators quickly realized that this was the same bike stolen several hours before the attack from an open garage a mile away. Near that garage, detectives
found a pair of white, knotted shoelaces.

  Michelle felt that Marquette was someone worth reinterviewing. She contacted him in late 2015.

  She sent him a map she had sketched, along with her understanding of the schematic of that night’s events, and asked him to confirm and amend where appropriate. Paul compiled a seventeen-picture photo lineup, and Michelle asked Marquette which of the individuals most closely resembled the man he saw that night.

  On the phone, she asked Marquette to spit out the first word that came to mind to describe the prowler he observed. Marquette replied without missing a beat: “Schoolboy.”

  In a 2011 file called “EAR CLUES,” Michelle attempted to consolidate many of the known facts about the man into a profile:

  Physically he’s most often described as 5′ 9″ to 5′ 11″, with a swimmer’s build. Lean, but with a muscular chest and noticeably big calves. Very small penis, both narrow and short. 9–9½ shoe size. Dirty blond hair. Bigger than normal nose. Type A blood type, nonsecretor.

  He used the phone to contact his victims, sometimes before an attack, sometimes after. Sometimes just hang-up phone calls. Sometimes with theatrical, scary-movie deep breathing and threats.

  He wore ski masks. He brought guns. He had what looked like a pen style navigator flashlight, and he liked to startle his victims awake by beaming it at them, blinding them. He tore towels into strips, or used shoelaces, to bind victims.

  He had a script, and he stuck to it. Some variation of, “Do what I say, or I’ll kill you.” He alleged he only wanted money and food. Sometimes he said it was for his apartment. Other times he mentioned his van. He would make the woman tie up the man, then separate them. Sometimes he’d stack dishes on the man’s back and tell him if he heard a crash he’d kill the female victim.