I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

by Michelle McNamara

  The next night, a block over, a young waitress and her husband, a restaurant manager, were the next victims.

  Disbelief set in. A roughly ten-mile corridor following the American River east into unincorporated Sacramento County was under siege. No one required context anymore. There was no “Have you heard?” You had heard. “There’s this guy” was replaced by “He.” Teachers at Sacramento State gave up teaching and entire

  class sessions were devoted to discussions about the EAR, any student with new information pumped for details.

  People’s relationship with nature changed. Winter’s drizzle and dense tule fog, the weather of dread, had given way to a lovely warmth, to vistas of freshly scrubbed green studded with red and pink camellia petals. But Sacramento’s prized abundance of trees, all those Oregon ash and blue oaks flanking the river, were recast in their eyes, a once verdant canopy now a hunting blind. An urge to prune took over. East siders hacked off tree limbs and uprooted shrubs around their houses. Reinforcing sliding glass windows with dowel rods wasn’t enough. That might keep him out, but they wanted more; they wanted to strip him completely of the ability to hide.

  By May 16, a surge of newly installed floodlights lit up the east side like a Christmas tree. In one house tambourines were tied to every door and window. Hammers went under pillows. Nearly three thousand guns were sold in Sacramento County between January and May. Many people refused to sleep between one and four a.m. Some couples slept in shifts, one of them always stationed on the living room couch, a rifle pointed at the window.

  Only a madman would strike again.

  MAY 17 WAS THE DAY EVERYONE HELD THEIR BREATH AND WAITED to see who would die. They’d awakened that morning to news that the EAR had struck for the fourth time that month, the twenty-first attack attributed to him in less than a year; the latest victims, a couple in the Del Dayo neighborhood, told police he threatened to kill two people that night. In a single twenty-four-hour period, between May 17 and May 18, the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department received 6,169 calls, almost all of them about the East Area Rapist.

  The officers responded to the call at 3:55 a.m. on May 17. The thirty-one-year-old male victim was outside his house in light

  blue pajamas, a length of white shoelace dangling from his left wrist. He spoke angrily in a mix of English and Italian. “What’s the hurry,” he said to the officers. “He’s gone. Just come on in!” When Shelby pulled up to the scene, he recognized the man immediately. Back in November, when he and Daly had led a packed town-hall discussion on the EAR, the man had stood up and criticized the investigation. He and Shelby had exchanged heated words. The incident had taken place six months ago, and maybe it was a coincidence, but the connection contributed to the impression that the EAR was brazen enough to attend events dedicated to his own capture, that he blended in, observed, remembered, and excelled at a certain kind of malevolent patience.

  The attack, right off American River Drive in Del Dayo, near a water treatment plant, echoed the previous ones, though this time the EAR’s mood, like the community’s, was especially jittery. He stuttered; it didn’t seem like a put-on. And he had a message to convey, one he practically spit out at his female victim with excited anger. “Those fuckers, those pigs—do you hear me? I’ve never killed before but I’m going to kill now. I want you to tell those fuckers, those pigs, I’m going to go home to my apartment. I have bunches of televisions. I’m going to listen to the radio and watch television and if I hear about this, I’m going to go out tomorrow night and kill two people. People are going to die.”

  But he gave the husband, who was tied up in another room, a slightly different message. “You tell those fucking pigs that I could have killed two people tonight. If I don’t see that all over the papers and television, I’ll kill two people tomorrow night.”

  He devoured Cheez-It crackers and half a cantaloupe before he left.

  The city awoke to a jarring headline in the Sacramento Bee: EAST AREA RAPIST ATTACKS NO. 23, NEXT VICTIMS DIE TONIGHT? The article reported that the Sheriff’s Department had consulted with a panel of local psychiatrists and concluded that the EAR was

  “a probable paranoid schizophrenic” and that he was likely in “a homosexual panic because of inadequate (physical) endowment.” The inadequate-endowment detail was repeated several times in the article. Whether or not this was the kind of press the EAR sought, or whether he sought press at all, was anyone’s guess, as was the question of whether he’d make good on his threat to kill.

  May 1977 was the month the wrought-iron bars went up and the all-night vigils began, when a group of three hundred neighborhood men patrolled east Sacramento County in pickup trucks outfitted with CB radios. Hard acrylic panels were bolted behind windows and doors. Deadbolts were on back order. Meter readers held their identification cards in front of them and announced themselves repeatedly, loudly, when they entered people’s yards. Orders for backyard floodlights went from ten a month to six hundred. A letter to the Sacramento Union, typical of the time: “We used to open our windows at night for fresh air. Not anymore. We took the dog for a walk in the evenings. Not anymore. My sons used to feel safe and secure in their own home. Not anymore. We all used to sleep without waking to every normal evening’s noise. Not anymore.”

  Around this time, Shelby found himself in south Sacramento in an unmarked car with another detective on daytime surveillance detail. They were facing east, and to their left was a short street where, midway down the block, a game of tag football was being played. A car headed eastbound, going very slowly, passed by. The car’s speed was unusual, but what really caught Shelby’s attention was the extreme focus with which the driver watched the game. Shelby looked closer at the players; they were all boys except the quarterback, a young woman with long hair, about twenty years old. A few minutes later, the same car returned, inching by, the driver again staring intently at the players. Shelby noted the make and model of the car. When the car circled a third time, he jotted down the plate and radioed it in. “If he comes

  by again, let’s pull him over,” Shelby told his partner. But that was the last time the driver, a pencil-necked blond guy in his early twenties, came by. His ardent concentration is what lingers in Shelby’s memory. That, and the fact that days later the EAR would attack in south Sacramento for the first time, about a mile away; that crime scene would be the last Shelby worked on before being pulled off the case and reassigned.

  The license plate came back unregistered.

  * * *

  THERE’S A KIND OF PROUDLY SELF-RELIANT, NO-FUSS QUALITY that I’ve come to recognize in longtime Sacramentans. I once scheduled a breakfast interview at the boutique hotel I was staying at downtown. The interviewee’s husband, a cabinetmaker, accompanied her to the meeting. I had already ordered my breakfast, a deconstructed yogurt parfait that came in a tiny mason jar with an antique silver spoon. I encouraged my guests to get something, but when the waitress turned to the husband he shook his head politely and smiled. “Made my own breakfast myself this morning.” I literally had a silver spoon in my mouth when he said it.

  I bring this up only to help make sense of certain things. For example, two days after the May 17 attack, a local dentist publicly announced that he was contributing $10,000 to the reward (raising it to $25,000) and, with another businessman, forming the grassroots EARS (East Area Rapist Surveillance) Patrol. Hundreds of local men attended a rally and, with CB radios, began patrolling the east side all night in their cars. The undersheriff conveyed his dismay over this development in a Bee article on May 20; essentially his message was: please don’t. The citizen manhunt pushed on undeterred, accompanied by the noise and light of a surveillance helicopter on loan from the California Highway Patrol that circled relentlessly overhead.

  Another example: an article in the Sacramento Union on May 22, “Two Victims Recall East Area Rapist,” quoted Jane using a pseudonym; there were enough identifying details that the EAR, reading it, would have known who it wa
s, which makes what she said all the more remarkable.

  “I’d feel cheated if someone blew his head off. I’d ask them to please aim low,” she said.

  THAT FRIDAY MORNING, MAY 27, THE START OF MEMORIAL DAY weekend, Fiona Williams* did some chores around the house, then took her three-year-old son, Justin, with her to Jumbo Market on Florin Road to shop for groceries. She dropped him at the babysitter’s and went to an optometrist appointment. She picked up her paycheck at the library, where she worked part-time, deposited it at the bank, and did some more shopping at Penney’s. After that, she picked up Justin at the sitter’s, and they went to Mel’s Coffee Shop for dinner. When they got home, they swam for a while in the pool. Around dusk she watered the front lawn, still in her swimsuit, as Justin toddled around.

  Fiona was aware of what was happening, of course; the local TV news blared with fresh hysteria every night. But she wasn’t necessarily on high alert. He was the East Area Rapist, after all. He’d never hit in south Sacramento, the neighborhood where Fiona lived in a new house with her husband, Phillip, and Justin. But the EAR lingered in their minds. Phillip worked as a supervisor at a water treatment plant in Del Dayo. The most recent victims, the couple attacked on May 17, lived just yards from the plant. Phillip worked the swing shift, so when he came in, his colleagues had filled him in on the swarming police presence across the way. The EAR had put a gun to the husband’s head. “Shut up, if you say one more thing I’ll kill, do you understand?”

  Phillip didn’t know the couple; they were strangers cloistered behind police cars, the subject of murmured workplace gossip. But he would come to know them soon.

  When Phillip returned home from work around twelve thirty a.m. Fiona and Justin were asleep. He drank a beer and watched some television, then climbed into bed and dozed off. About twenty minutes later he and Fiona woke at the same time, and reached for each other. They began fooling around. Several minutes later a scratching sound in the bedroom startled them. The sliding glass door to the patio opened and a man in a red ski mask entered. That they knew instantly who it was didn’t lessen the shock. The feeling was surreal, as if a larger-than-life movie character, someone you’d just been watching on television, emerged from behind the drapes and began talking to you. He carried a two-cell flashlight in his left hand. He held what looked like a .45 pistol in his right hand, extending it into the flashlight’s beam to show them.

  “Lay perfectly still, or I will kill all of you,” he said. “I will kill you. I will kill her. I will kill your little boy.”

  He threw a length of cord at Fiona and ordered her to tie up Phillip. The EAR tied her next. He rummaged and threatened, slashing his flashlight across the bedroom in jarring motions. He stacked plates on Phillip’s back, then led Fiona into the living room.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked him.

  “Shut up!” he hissed at her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said impulsively, in response to being yelled at.

  “Shut up!”

  He pushed her onto the living room floor, where he’d already laid down towels. After raping her several times he said, “I have something for you to tell the fucking pigs. They got it mixed up the last time. I said I would kill two people. I’m not going to kill you. If this is on the TV or in the papers tomorrow, I’ll kill two

  people. Are you listening? Do you hear me? I have TVs in my apartment and I’ll be watching them. If this is on the news, I’ll kill two people.”

  When he mentioned the TVs in his apartment, an image flashed in Fiona’s mind of LBJ in the Oval Office watching a trio of televisions he had next to his desk, a clip often played on the news back in the sixties. The EAR noticeably stuttered on l words, particularly “listening.” His breathing was rapid—loud, sucking inhalations. She almost hoped he was faking, because if he wasn’t, he sounded seriously unhinged.

  “It scares my mommy when it’s on the news,” he said between gulping breaths.

  It was a little after four a.m. when the first officer entered the opened rear patio door, hesitantly making his way toward the woman calling out to him. She lay face down on her living room floor, naked, her wrists and ankles tied behind her with shoelaces. A ski-masked stranger had just spent an hour and a half terrorizing Fiona and her husband. He brutally raped her. Fiona was five two, 110 pounds—a wisp of a woman. She was also a native Sacramentan, in possession of a dry, matter-of-fact manner, a clear-eyed resilience that belied her petite size.

  “Well, I guess the East Area Rapist is the South Area Rapist now,” she said.†

  Shelby arrived at the yellow house with brown trim at five a.m. A crime-scene technician had laid plastic bags over the area on the floor where the rape occurred to preserve evidence. A green wine bottle and two packages of sausages were scattered on the back patio, about fifteen feet from the door. Shelby accompanied the bloodhound and his tracker as the dog nosed its way through the

  backyard toward a flowerbed in the northeast corner, where they found shoe impressions.

  Highway 99 ran adjacent to the house, and where the dog lost the scent, at a spot on the shoulder of the northbound lanes, were tire tracks from what looked to be a small foreign car, a VW bug maybe. A technician pulled out a measuring tape. The tire tracks measured four feet three inches center to center.

  Right after the attack, when the investigators with their notepads asked Fiona to search her mind, the only thing she could point to that was slightly odd that evening was the garage door. She’d been going back and forth from the house to the garage doing laundry, and she was certain the side door leading to the carport had been closed. When she came back in one time, the door stood open. The wind, she thought. She closed and locked the door. They’d only lived in the house for three weeks and were adjusting to its contours and quirks. It was a corner house, boasting four bedrooms and an in-ground pool in the backyard. One image that would continue to nag at Fiona was that of a man at the Realtor’s open house, standing next to her as they looked out at the pool at the same time. She didn’t know why the impression stayed with her. Had he stood too close? Stayed a beat too long? She tried in vain to build a face, but he was blank. A man, that was all.

  Highway 99 ran adjacent to the house, separated by a hundred yards of dirt and a row of large conifers; directly behind them, on the other side of a dinky chain-link fence, was an empty lot. Fiona would come to view the open space around them differently than she first had; what was once a pleasant expanse became a vulnerable point of entry. It wasn’t part of their original plan, but after what happened to them that Memorial Day weekend, she and Phillip spent $3,000 they couldn’t afford to build a brick wall around their new house.

  Shelby noted the Realtor’s Sold sign on the front porch. One

  of the significant avenues in the investigation was trying to find a common thread among the victims. The detectives gave the victims detailed questionnaires and carefully examined their checks. Areas of interest, or backgrounds that seemed overrepresented, included students and education, medical workers, and the military. Several were noted to have frequented the same pizza restaurant. But by far the most recurrent pattern was real estate. At Jane’s, the first attack Shelby investigated, back in October ’76, he observed a Century 21 sign on a lawn directly across the street. Several victims had just moved in, were moving out, or were next door to new units being sold. As one decade turned to the next and the case grew more complex, the real estate factor would consistently crop up, its significance—if any—remaining murky, right up to the moment a Realtor casually extracted a key from a lockbox and stumbled upon the EAR’s last known victim, a beautiful girl, unrecognizable in death.

  After Fiona and Phillip’s attack on Memorial Day weekend, the EAR disappeared from Sacramento for the summer. He wouldn’t return until October. By then Shelby was off the case, reassigned back to patrol. His skirmishes with the higher-ups had begun to flare more openly. High-profile cases are magnets for hierarchical politics, and Shelby coul
d never quite play the game. When he first made detective, in 1972, his boss, Lieutenant Ray Root, had a loose, proactive philosophy. Go out and develop informants, Root instructed, and uncover felonies that might never be reported; develop your own cases rather than wait to be assigned. That philosophy suited Shelby’s temperament. Showing courteous interest in his bosses’ ideas did not. The transfer didn’t upset him, he insists. He was stressed from the manhunt. Exhausted by the infighting. Working a high-profile case like the EAR meant constant scrutiny, and Shelby bristled at the surveillance; inside him lived the memory of that proud young man standing hopefully in front of the Sheriff’s Department

  panel, dismissed because it was decided he was lacking the right parts.

  IN THE DAYS AFTER HER ATTACK, FIONA FOUND HERSELF STUTTERING as the EAR had. Carol Daly organized a meeting among the female victims at one of their homes. Fiona recalls a lot of murmured exchanges—“You’re doing so well” and “I didn’t leave my home for five days.” Daly played for them a couple of recordings of male voices, but Fiona doesn’t remember any of the victims recognizing them. For some time afterward, she became irrational about personal safety. At night she refused to go into the back of the house where the bedroom was until Phillip came home. She sometimes kept a loaded gun under the driver’s seat of her car. She found she had a lot of nervous energy, and one night when she was using it to furiously vacuum, she blew a fuse, and the whole house and backyard went dark. She became hysterical. Her neighbors, a kind elderly couple who knew what had happened, rushed over and fixed the fuse.