He frequently brought baby lotion to the scene to use as a lubricant.
He liked to steal neighborhood bicycles and escape on them.
Some personal items associated with him: a bag with a long zipper, like a doctor’s bag, or duffel bag; blue tennis shoes; motocross gloves; corduroy pants.
He took driver’s licenses and jewelry, particularly rings.
Some of the things he said, which may or may not be true but are nevertheless interesting: Killing someone in Bakersfield; moving back to LA; “I hate you, Bonnie”; being thrown out of the Air Force.
Something may have been going on with him in late October 1977. In two different attacks around then he was described as sobbing.
Some of the vehicles possibly associated with EAR-ONS: green Chevy van, 1960s yellow sidestep pickup truck, VW bug.
An e-mail forwarded to Michelle by Patton reveals that she had even enlisted her father-in-law, a career US Marine, to do some research on military bases in the area back then, as there was a theory that the rapist might have been an airman.
Begin forwarded message:
From: Larry Oswalt
Date: April 18, 2011, 2:01:06 PM PDT
To: Patton
Subject: Air Force Bases around Sacramento
Mom said Michelle had some questions about Air Force Bases around
Sacramento. Here is the list.
Near Sacramento:
McLellan closed 2001
Mather Closed 1993
Beale still active—40 miles north of Sacramento
Travis is located in Fairfield, CA sort of north of San Francisco and a good ways from Sacramento.
Let me know if you need any additional info.
Dad
Many have attempted to profile EAR-ONS over the years, but Michelle wanted to go one step further and dive deep into the locations of the rapes to see whether geographic profiling could lead to his identity. Among the pieces she left behind were her musings about EAR-ONS’s geography:
My feeling is that the two most important locations are Rancho Cordova and Irvine.
The first and third rapes were only yards apart in Rancho Cordova. He walked away in an unhurried fashion from the third attack without his pants on, suggesting he lived close by.
He murdered Manuela Witthuhn on February 6, 1981, in Irvine. Five years later he murdered Janelle Cruz. Manuela and Janelle lived in the same subdivision, just two miles apart.
Interestingly, Manuela’s answering machine tape was stolen in the attack. Was the suspect’s voice on the tape? If so, was he worried it was recognizable as someone in the neighborhood?
A document Michelle created in August 2014, entitled “Geo-Chapter,” has her rethinking the map after more than three solid years of nonstop research. When you open it, there is just one line: “Carmichael seems like central clearing, like a buffer zone.”
FINDING THE KILLER WITH GEO-PROFILING
While his most fundamental characteristics—his name and his face—are unknown, it can be said with reasonable certainty that the East Area Rapist was, among approximately seven hundred thousand other humans, a resident of Sacramento County in the mid-to-late 1970s.
The EAR’s connection to the many other places in which he struck—Stockton, Modesto, Davis, the East Bay—is less clear.
The East Area Rapist was a highly prolific offender in Sacramento, exhibiting the familiarity and ubiquity of someone who was undoubtedly local. With places like Stockton, Modesto, and Davis, where he struck two or three times apiece, one questions what connection he had to these cities, if any. Perhaps he had family there or had business there. Maybe he was just passing through. Maybe he flung a dart at a map.
But you’d be hard-pressed to find an investigator who doesn’t believe the EAR lived or at least worked in Sacramento.
If we accept that the EAR was living in Sacramento from 1976 through 1978 or 1979, which is nearly certain, and then lived in Southern California during the first half of the 1980s, which is highly probable, then the haystack gets considerably smaller. Devise a list of people who lived in both areas during those time periods, and the suspect pool shrinks from nearly a million to maybe ten thousand.
It would be ideal if the process were as simple as, say, applying filters to a product search on Amazon. With a few clicks, one could filter by gender (male), birth year (1940–1960), race (white), height (5′ 7″ to 5′ 11″), places lived (Carmichael AND Irvine; or Rancho Cordova AND in the 92620 zip code; or Citrus Heights, Goleta, AND Dana Point), and maybe occupation for good measure (real estate agent, construction worker, painter, landscaper, landscape architect, nurse, pharmacist, hospital orderly, cop, security guard, OR serviceman—all of which are among the many occupations that various investigators and armchair sleuths have posited the EAR may have had). Just set all these search parameters and voilà! You’d be left with a manageable yet all-inclusive list of potential suspects.
But it’s not that easy. The names have to come from somewhere, and there’s no central database of, well, people. It must be either composited or built. And creating such a list is indeed one of the projects Michelle felt most optimistic about.
He may have come from Visalia. Or perhaps Goleta was his hometown. He may have lived in the 92620 zip code of Irvine. He may have gone to Cordova High School. His name may appear in both the 1977 Sacramento phone book and the 1983 Orange County phone book. We didn’t need access to restricted information or an official suspect list to uncover some potential suspects who might otherwise have flown under the radar. All the necessary information and tools that could be used to process it were already available in the form of online public records aggregators, vital records, property records, yearbooks, and yellowed phone directories from the 1970s and ’80s (many of which have fortunately been digitized).
In the year prior to Michelle’s death, Paul had begun creating master resident lists for Sacramento and Orange Counties for the relevant time periods, which combined names from sources such as Ancestry.com’s marriage and divorce records, the appropriate county’s registry of deeds (which entailed using a Web scraper), alumni lists, and old crisscross directories and telephone books.†
Michelle then connected with a computer programmer in Canada who offered to volunteer his help in whatever way he could. Per Paul’s specifications, the programmer built a cross-referencing utility that processes multiple lists and finds matching lines of text. With that application, Paul could begin feeding it two or more lists and then analyze its match results—now numbering over forty thousand.
Once the list of matches had been generated, Paul would go through it and weed out the false positives (far more likely with common names like John Smith) by using public records aggregators. Paul would then collect as much information as possible on each match until he was satisfied that neither he nor any of his male relatives was viable. The names of those he was unable to rule out would be added to a master list of potential suspects.
IN CASES OF SERIAL BURGLARY, RAPE, OR MURDER, THE SUSPECT lists often swell to several thousand names and beyond. Difficulty in managing a list of this size enforces the need to devise a prioritization system, whereby suspect ranks are determined by factors such as prior criminal offenses and police contacts, availability for all crimes in the series, physical characteristics, and—if a geographic profile has been done—the suspect’s work and home addresses.
Geographic profiling is a specialized criminal investigative technique—perhaps more useful and scientific than behavioral profiling, which is arguably closer to an art than a science— whereby the key locations in a linked crime series are analyzed for the purpose of determining the likely anchor points (home, work, etc.) of a serial offender. This allows one to focus on isolated bubbles within a much broader suspect pool.
Although the general technique has informally been around for a while—you see investigators employing it to find a kidnapper in Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963)—the methodology of geogra
phic profiling didn’t even have a name until the late 1980s, about ten years after the phrase “serial killer” first entered the popular lexicon. Given that it wasn’t yet an established investigative procedure, awareness of geo-profiling could not have been a factor motivating the EAR—a lover of misdirection—to misdirect geographically by commuting great distances to faraway neighborhoods in Southern California. Moreover, his Southern California crimes were not generally recognized as EAR crimes (and he specifically seemed to want to avoid this recognition, which is likely one reason he began killing his victims—to eliminate witnesses) until DNA evidence established them as such. The logical conclusion, per the principle of Occam’s razor, is that the EAR was living in Southern California during the period in which he was offending there.
That said, while we would not advocate completely eliminating someone merely because a Southern California residence cannot be established, it would take some damn compelling reason to muster any interest in such a suspect.
However, Southern California—due to the infrequency of the EAR’s known offenses there, and the broad distance covered—is not ideal for a geographic profile. Because Sacramento was the area in which our offender was most prolific over the ten-year span of his known crimes, it is the ripest of the case-relevant locations for building a geographic profile.
With twenty-nine distinct locations linked to confirmed EAR attacks and close to a hundred likely connected burglaries, prowler reports, and other incidents, there is more than sufficient data for developing a geographic profile that would spotlight the neighborhoods in which the EAR most likely lived. In geo-profile-speak, these areas are known as buffer zones. Buffer zones are like an eye of a hurricane, carved out by the typical serial offender’s reluctance to strike too close to home.
So, at least in theory, identifying the EAR should simply be a matter of finding people who were living in Southern California in the early 1980s who had previously lived in Sacramento County in the mid-to-late 1970s—most likely living in one of those buffer zones.
* * *
BY LOOKING AT THE AREAS FAMILIAR TO THE OFFENDER IN THE early phases of the series, as opposed to the ones to which he branched out later on, one can analyze the chronology of attacks in Sacramento and break them up into multiple phases. We’ve chosen five:
Attacks 1–4 (pre–media blackout)
Attacks 5–8 (pre–media blackout)
Attacks 9–15 (post–media blackout following the first news stories about a serial rapist operating in the East Area of Sacramento)
Attacks 16–22 (beginning with the EAR’s major m.o. shift from lone women to couples, and preceding his three-month hiatus in the summer of 1977)
Attacks 24–44 (following the EAR’s summer ’77 hiatus as well as his first known attack outside of Sacramento County)
Creating a Google Map with a layer for each phase allows you to isolate and toggle between phases, comparing the spread within each and determining if a prospective anchor point or an apparent buffer zone remains consistent through the offender’s incrementally expanding radius of activity. In addition, tighter clusters of attacks tend to signify neighborhoods the offender may not know very well.
Of particular interest is the swath of Sacramento County where Carmichael, Citrus Heights, and Fair Oaks meet, a part of town where the EAR’s attacks were the most spread out—and which also exhibited the most clear-cut buffer zone. (See figure 1.)
Paul adopted the assumption that the EAR lived somewhere in the vicinity of what’s labeled the North Ridge Country Club on the map, and he observed that, each time the EAR attacked in this area, it was on the opposite side of that ostensible buffer zone from where he attacked previously—a possible interplay between instinct (change of pace) and calculation (avoidance of areas with increased surveillance).
FIGURE 1
Paul decided to attempt a geographic profile using an entirely improvised and nonscientific approach. He ported screenshots of his Google Map into Photoshop and began drawing lines between the attacks in this area, pairing successive ones. Plotting both the midway point of each line as well as where each line intersected with another, and then connecting each set of plot points resulted in shapes that Paul then shaded. The most densely shaded area would theoretically represent the EAR’s approximate home base. (See figure 2.)
Alternately, lines were drawn through the midway points that were perpendicular to the lines connecting the paired attacks, in order to find the densest concentration of intersections. The result was similar. (See figure 3.)
Paul then took a different yet equally ad hoc approach by forming a triangle that connected the three most outlying attacks in the East Area, and then, in order to find its true center, creating a smaller, inverted triangle by connecting the midpoints of the larger shape’s three sides. He repeated the process until he was left with a triangle small enough that it was analogous to a sheet of paper he couldn’t fold in half again. (See figure 4.)
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 3
Each effort, both those described above and those omitted out of mercy toward the reader, yielded a similar result, which suggested that the EAR’s anchor point was somewhere close to the intersection of Dewey Drive and Madison Avenue, at the border between Carmichael and Fair Oaks. This conclusion was supported to some extent by a 1995 FBI study (Warren et al.), which found that the fifth attack in a series was closest to the offender’s home in a plurality of instances (24 percent of cases, versus 18 percent of cases where the first attack was closest). The fifth EAR attack was second closest to the proposed anchor point, whereas attack number seventeen was only nominally closer (by approximately three hundred feet).
FIGURE 4
A couple of years later, Michelle got ahold of a geographic profile performed on the EAR Sacramento attacks by none other than Kim Rossmo, the father of modern geographic profiling. In fact, Rossmo himself coined the term.
Rossmo’s anchor point was near the intersection of Coyle Avenue and Millburn Street—less than half a mile northwest of the anchor point Paul had postulated without ever having seen Rossmo’s analysis. (See figure 5.)
FIGURE 5
FINDING THE KILLER WITH FAMILIAL DNA
Scrolling through the rest of the 3,500 documents in Michelle’s hard drive, one comes upon a file titled “RecentDNAresults,” which features the EAR’s Y-STR markers (short tandem repeats on the Y chromosome that establish male-line ancestry), including the elusive rare PGM marker.
Having the Golden State Killer’s DNA was always the one ace up this investigation’s sleeve.
But a killer’s DNA is only as good as the databases we can compare it to. There was no match in CODIS. And there was no match in the California penal system’s Y-STR database. If the killer’s father, brothers, or uncles had been convicted of a felony in the past sixteen years, an alert would have gone to Paul Holes or Erika Hutchcraft (the current lead investigator in Orange County). They would have looked into the man’s family, zeroed in on a member who was in the area of the crimes, and launched an investigation.
But they had nothing.
There are public databases that the DNA profile could be used to match, filled not with convicted criminals but with genealogical buffs. You can enter the STR markers on the Y chromosome of the killer into these public databases and try to find a match, or at least a surname that could help you with the search.
Paul Holes had done this in 2013, and just like Michelle smiling and proclaiming “I’ve solved it!” Holes thought he had finally caught the man via this technique.
Michelle tells the story in this half-finished section, titled “Sacramento, 2013.”
Paul Holes can still hear the sound of his filing cabinet drawer slamming shut. He’d emptied out everything pertaining to the EAR, boxed it up, and FedEx’ed it to Larry Pool in Orange County.
“Larry’s got it,” Holes thought. Only a matter of time.
A decade later, Holes was sitting in his office, bored out
of his mind. He was chief of the crime lab now. On his second marriage. Two more small children with the second wife. He’d worked at the crime lab long enough to see entire specialties discredited. Hair analysis? Made him cringe to even think about it. He and his co-workers sometimes sat around and laughed at the tools they used to have to work with, unwieldy and defective instruments, like the first generation of mobile phones.
He was starting to make good on the promise he always said he would, that he put off for a decade in order to accrue steady promotions and provide for his family. Investigator Paul Holes. He always liked the sound of it. He was meeting the right people. Getting the right credentials. A move to the DA’s office to work cold-case investigation full time was already in the works.
But there was one problem, one he knew full well he was going to take with him to the DA’s office. The EAR. Each year he hadn’t surfaced, nabbed by DNA or turned in by a tipster, Holes’s interest grew. His wife might call it an obsession. Spreadsheets were made. Leisurely car rides turned into crime-scene tours. Not once, but weekly.
Sometimes when he thought of the destruction wrought by one faceless man, not just the victims but also the victims’ families, the detectives’ shame, the wasted money and time and effort and family time and ruined marriages and sex foregone for lifetimes . . . Holes rarely swore. Wasn’t him. But when he thought about all this, he just felt, fuck you. Fuck. You.
The first generation of detectives who worked the case were having health problems. The second generation of detectives, who worked it when they could grab time here and there, were retiring soon. Time was running out. The EAR was looking back at them, smirking from a door half-closed.
Holes scooted his chair over to his computer. In the last year, ancestral DNA had become popular with people curious about their genealogy and, though this was much less publicized, as a tool for finding unidentified criminals. Many in law enforcement were wary. There were quality-assurance issues. Privacy issues. Holes knew DNA. Knew it well. In his opinion, ancestral DNA was a tool, not a certainty. He had a Y-DNA profile generated from the EAR’s DNA, which means he isolated the EAR’s paternal lineage. The Y-DNA profile could be input into certain genealogical websites, the kind that people use to find first cousins and the like. You input a set of markers from your Y-DNA profile, anywhere from 12 to 111, and a list of matches is returned, surnames of families with whom you might share a common ancestor. Almost always the matches are at a genetic distance of 1 from you, which doesn’t mean much, relative-seeking-wise. You’re looking for the elusive 0—a close match.
I'll Be Gone in the Dark Page 27
