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

by Michelle McNamara

  “Debbi,” her grandmother replied, “it’s not nice of you to joke like that.”

  She moved to San Diego almost immediately after. Her mother’s side of the family gradually receded from her life. Shortly after her mother’s death, she’d overheard a family exchange that would haunt her. “Linda,” her grandmother told her aunt. “I’m so glad it wasn’t you. I don’t know what I would do if it had been you.”

  Over the years, Debbi has reached out to her grandmother and to her aunt, hoping to rekindle a connection. They’ve never responded.

  Orange County, 2000

  OLD-TIMERS AT THE ORANGE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT WOULD see Larry Pool’s furrowed brow, the victims’ photos pinned to the board above his cubicle, the binders accumulating around him like a dreary fortress.

  “Guy’s dead,” they’d tell Pool flatly, as if repeating a basketball score from last night’s game. “Or a lifer. Those guys never stop.”

  “Those guys” were psychopaths, serial killers, monsters. Whatever you called them, the conventional wisdom was that extremely violent serial offenders didn’t stop killing until they were forced to by death, disability, or imprisonment. Pool’s target had last struck in 1986. It was 2000.

  “So why do you care?” The old-timers would needle Pool. The attitude rankled him. It ignited his rectitude and made him double down on a belief he kept to himself: he was going to catch the guy.

  Santa Barbara didn’t yet have DNA, but the m.o. was strong enough that Pool included it in the series of murders along with Cruz. October 1, 1979, to May 5, 1986. Ten bodies. Two survivors. The scope of the case gave investigators a lot to work with. They decided to hold off contacting the media until they’d exhausted leads. They didn’t want to tip the killer off. Pool agreed with the old-timers that a guy this prolifically violent might be doing time somewhere on a serious charge. He scoured arrest records. Peepers. Prowlers. Burglars. Rapists. They exhumed an ex-con’s body in Baltimore. Zip. Nothing.

  Pool kept the search command roving in his brain. One day he flashed back on the first autopsy he ever witnessed, near the end of Police Academy training. The body was removed from the bag and laid onto the steel table. The deceased male was five eleven, with dark hair, brawny. And hog-tied. He was wearing women’s shoes, hosiery, panties, and a stuffed bra. The cause of death was toluene poisoning; he’d been sniffing glue out of a sock while indulging in some kind of autoerotic experience. Pool could see ejaculate on the panties. The sight made an impression on the straitlaced Pool. Looking back, he wondered if maybe their killer sometimes experimented with binding himself when he didn’t have a victim. He thought back and placed the autopsy in October 1986, five months after the last murder.

  He dug up the hog-tied guy’s history. There was no criminal record; no link to the other crime locations. He’d been cremated. If he was their guy, Pool thought, we’re toast. Pool gathered coroners’ reports from May 5 through December 31, 1986, in every county in Southern California and began combing through them. Leads failed to develop. After a while, going to the media didn’t sound so bad.

  The October 1, 2000, edition of the Orange County Register ran the first article about the DNA link: “DNA May Point to Serial Killer in the Area.” Pool was described as having ninety-three binders of material on the case in his office.

  “Our killer is the original ‘Night Stalker,’” Pool said.

  His intention was only to point out that their killer’s crimes predated those of Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker, who terrorized Southern California from 1984 to 1985, but much to his chagrin the confusing nickname stuck. It was the Original Night Stalker from then on.

  The article opened with speculation about where the killer could be. Dead. Behind bars. Plotting his next murder. There was no speculation about his past. Privately many of the Orange

  County investigators suspected the killer came from Goleta, as that’s where the murders started. One of Pool’s colleagues, Larry Montgomery, even drove up there and spent a few days asking elementary-school teachers, active and retired, from the neighborhood around San Jose Creek if they recalled any troubled young boys they taught in the midsixties, boys who worried them in an abusing-small-animals sort of way. He returned with a few names, but they checked out and had grown up okay.

  The October 1, 1979, attack did possess some juvenile elements that suggested maybe a local punk. The stolen ten-speed. The steak knife grabbed from inside the house. But other clues, passed over at the time, suggested experience honed somewhere else, not in the dope haze of cliquey surfers who were long on talk and short on misdemeanors, but in isolation, solitary but compulsive—alienation channeled into raw criminal skill. He didn’t just jimmy a lock at the couple’s house that night. He pulled the doorframe off and threw it over the fence.

  The fact, too, that he was able, on a ten-speed, to evade an armed FBI agent pursuing him in a car, with a fleet of sheriff’s deputies on their way? Stan Los, the FBI agent who chased him, would later catch shit from local cops about why he didn’t shoot the guy. Los bristled at the taunt but remained resolute about his decision. All he had was a woman screaming and an ordinary white male on a bike who accelerated every time Los hollered or honked at him. He lacked the necessary context to shoot.

  Los wasn’t a fortune-teller. He couldn’t have predicted, when the guy threw the bike on the sidewalk and sprinted between 5417 and 5423 San Patricio Drive, hopping the fence, that the next time he’d emerge, he’d be coarsened, his knots tighter, no longer in need of chants to pump himself up; he’d be a full-blown killer. The night of the pursuit, he was pedaling away from Los to escape, obviously, but he was also running toward something else, a state of mind, one where trivial everyday matters disappeared

  and the compulsive fantasies, lapping at the edges of his thoughts, blew open and took force.

  Los couldn’t have taken a shot. Not that he doesn’t occasionally reconstruct the events of that night, the lost seconds restarting his car, the U-turn, the figure on the bike about fifty yards away, merging with the right edge of his lights, how the headlights acted as a kind of command. Bike dropped. Man running. Had Los the power to foresee what the man would become, he would have taken aim with his .38 special and brought him down right there.

  Everyone agreed that October 1, 1979, was the precipice, the night a would-be killer crossed over.

  The mystery prowler would ultimately target a northeast neighborhood around the intersection of Cathedral Oaks and Patterson, within a two-mile-square radius. All three Santa Barbara attacks would be adjacent to San Jose Creek, a stream that begins in the laurel-covered mountains and meanders down through east Goleta before emptying into the Pacific. The creek’s suburban stretch is a Huckleberry Finn dream of moss-covered rocks and rope swings and delinquents’ cigarette butts shrouded by a canopy of trees. Looking at the crime locations on a Goleta map, Pool was struck by the way the killer hewed to the creek like an umbilical cord.

  The Goleta attacks were noteworthy for another reason. Control was this offender’s chosen language. It was in the bindings. The blitz attacks. He might be a forgettable loser in the daytime, but he ruled in the houses he sneaked into, a static mask imposing horror. He sometimes left milk and bread out in the kitchen, the psychopath communicating confident leisure.

  Yet this master criminal always lost control in Goleta. Three times he hit there; three times he was thwarted. He was never able to sexually assault the female victims; in the first attack she got away, and in the second and third, the males resisted and were shot to death. He was probably concerned that the gunshots

  would attract police, so he quickly killed the female victims and fled.

  Tracking back the killer’s predatory development was like watching a horror movie in reverse, but rewinding was important. “A criminal is more vulnerable in his history than his future,” writes David Canter, a leading British crime psychologist, in his book Criminal Shadows. Canter believes the key to solving
a series of crimes is to find out what happened before the first crime rather than establishing where the offender went after the most recent one. “Before he committed the crime he may not have known himself that he would do it,” writes Canter, “so he may not have been so careful before as afterwards.”

  That he was careful later there was no doubt. He was a watcher. Calculating. Take, for example, Ventura. He hit multiple times in Santa Barbara and Orange Counties, but only once in Ventura. Why? Joe Alsip’s arrest for the Smith murders was huge news. Why risk committing another double homicide in Ventura, raising doubts about Alsip’s guilt, when the sucker was about to take the fall for you?

  * * *

  THE FACT THAT THE THREE HOME INVASIONS OCCURRED IN GOLETA, Santa Barbara’s more recently developed and less genteel neighbor to the west, didn’t stop the Sheriff’s Office from trying to keep the crimes under wraps. Like most longtime institutions, the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office had developed an organizational culture, and its reputation was for insularity and secretiveness. Hair on the back of a detective’s neck might be raised by what he saw at a crime scene, but his job required that he remain poker-faced to the public. That’s certainly the impression Sheriff’s Detective O. B. Thomas was trying to convey on the afternoon of Friday, July 31, 1981, when he began canvassing the neighborhood

  around 449 Toltec Way, five days after he was the first officer to arrive in response to an emergency call there. Canvassing consists of knocking on neighbors’ doors and asking them about any unusual or suspicious sightings or incidents. There was no need to panic the public. Thomas asked the questions but revealed little about what had happened. You wouldn’t know from his face what he’d seen.

  Linda lived just a block from Toltec Way. When Detective Thomas knocked on her door and took out his notepad, he triggered a memory. She remembered the wounded dog, her flooded lawn, and the curious absence of any sharp objects in either her or her neighbor’s backyard that could have cut the animal. She told Detective Thomas the story. He asked her if she could remember the date of the incident. Linda thought back, and then consulted her diary. September 24, 1979, she said.

  The date’s significance was clear to them immediately. That was a week before the first attack. Detectives knew very little about the suspect they sought other than what a witness who glimpsed him fleeing in the dark told them: he was an adult white male. They didn’t know what drew him to this sleepy pocket of tract homes, but they knew some things. He carried a knife— he’d dropped one running from the first scene. He was a night prowler; they’d followed his shoe impressions as he crept from house to house searching for victims. And he liked the creek. Maybe he used the undergrowth and canopy of trees to move about undetected. Maybe he had history there, had played as a kid among the moss-covered rocks and rope swings. Whatever the reason, shoe prints and precut ligatures he’d dropped signaled his presence there. And all three houses he invaded shared one characteristic: they were close to the creek.

  From where they stood, Linda and Detective Thomas could see the tangle of trees and the low white wooden fence that paralleled the creek. There was the footbridge that Kimo had emerged

  from that night, his radar alerted to something moving in the dark that shouldn’t be. It was becoming clear what had probably happened next. The dog peeled off between the houses to nose around, and the prowler, startled and no doubt annoyed, gutted him to keep him away. Maybe he got Kimo’s blood on him and used Linda’s hose to wash it off. There were often signs of his presence in a neighborhood before he struck, small, disquieting details only understood in retrospect.

  Years later, after the invention of Google Earth, cold-case investigators created a digital map and time line detailing the suspect’s violent trail across California. Bright yellow pushpin icons along San Jose Creek represent the locations where he hit in northeast Goleta. The neighborhood hasn’t changed much in thirty-five years. Zoom in further and there’s the backyard where his presence was first signaled by a dog’s yelp in the night. The depth of his shoe impressions shows that he often remained in one position for long periods of time, pressed against a wall or crouching in a garden. It’s easy to imagine him standing in the dark backyard as Kimo whimpers out front, as his owner knocks on doors, and then a car rumbles up to take them away. Quiet settles over the night again. He creeps between the houses, turns on the hose to wash the splatter from his shoes, and sneaks away, rivulets of watery blood disappearing into the grass behind him.

  Contra Costa, 1997

  “WHAT’S EAR?” PAUL HOLES ASKED.

  John Murdock was taken aback for a moment. He hadn’t heard the acronym in years.

  “Why?” Murdock asked.

  They were sitting across the aisle from each other on a flight to a California Association of Criminalists conference. It was 1997. Murdock had recently retired as the chief of the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s crime lab. His specialty was firearms and tool marks. Holes, in his late twenties, had landed a job as a deputy sheriff criminalist soon after graduating from UC-Davis with a major in biochemistry. He started in forensic toxicology but soon realized that his passion was CSI. Then his curiosity outgrew the microscope. He began going around with the investigators; he was a cold-case investigator trapped in a crime lab. He enjoyed wandering the Property Room, pulling out boxes of old unsolved cases. What he found there were stories. Statements. Photographs. Incomplete thoughts scribbled in the margins by a distracted investigator. Ambiguities don’t exist in the lab. Old case files teem with them. The puzzles beckoned.

  “Paul, that’s not your job,” more than one fellow criminalist scolded him. He didn’t care. He possessed the handsome Eagle Scout’s talent for remaining convivial while doing exactly what he wanted. What he wanted, he realized, was to be an investigator. He was angling to make the move to that division when the chance arose.

  Despite their age difference, Murdock and Holes recognized that they had something in common: they excelled at science, but it was stories that pulled them in. Every day after he finished his lab work, Holes would sit down with old case files, appalled and fascinated by the dark off-roads of human behavior. Cold cases stayed with him. He had the scientist’s intolerance for uncertainty. After devouring boxes of old unsolved cases, he noticed a pattern; the same person always signed the most meticulous crime-scene reports: John Murdock.

  “I saw EAR marked in big red letters on some folders set aside in a filing cabinet,” Holes explained to Murdock. Holes hadn’t delved into the files yet, but he could tell that they had been set aside in a special, almost hallowed way.

  “EAR stands for East Area Rapist,” Murdock said. The name was clearly cataloged in his head, its significance not dimmed by time.

  “I don’t know that one,” Holes said.

  For the rest of the flight, thirty thousand feet up in the air, Murdock told Holes the story.

  He was a hot prowler. He barely registered with the cops at first. In mid-June 1976, he appeared in a young woman’s bedroom in east Sacramento doing “the no-pants dance,” wearing a T-shirt and nothing else. Knife in hand. Whispered threats. Ransacking. He raped her. It was rough, but Sacramento in 1976 had an abundance of predatory creeps. Ski mask and gloves suggested some intelligence, but no-pants dancers are usually rumdum teenagers whose mothers turn them in by the scruff of the neck.

  That never happened. More rapes did. Twenty-two in eleven months. His methods were distinct and unwavering. An initial just-a-robber ruse to secure compliance. Females as gagged objects, moved to his specifications. Their hands and feet tied and

  retied, often with shoelaces. Sexual assault that curiously avoided breasts and kissing. Ransacking as stimulation. Gleefully raising the stakes as east Sacramento entered full-blown panic. Taking on sleeping couples. Stacking dishes on the bound man’s back, threatening to kill his wife or girlfriend if he heard the dishes fall. The East Area Rapist was the bogeyman in the bedroom, the stranger who knew too much—layouts of homes, nu
mber of children, work schedules. The ski mask and raspy, faked voice suggested an alter ego, but from whom was he altering?

  The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department hit walls. Hit walls hard. The same young white males were stopped repeatedly. The right one wasn’t. Or maybe he was. That was the problem. All EAR Task Force investigators had their own mental impression of the suspect’s face, but none were the same. He was a blond stoner in an army jacket. A Mormon on a bike. A slick, olive-skinned Realtor.

  Carol Daly was the lead female investigator on the task force. By the twenty-second rape, after another three a.m. trip to the hospital with a distraught victim, she surprised herself with a dark thought. I love my husband. I hate men.

  What kept investigator Richard Shelby up at night were the repeated credible reports called in of a suspicious prowler who, once spotted, walked away “at a leisurely pace.”

  The creep of a bitch was an ambler.

  The community began to glimpse fear in the sheriff’s deputies’ eyes. The EAR was stalking their heads. All their heads. Sundown produced collective dread. It seemed impossible that he’d never be caught. The law of chance would get him eventually, but who wanted to be the schmuck waiting around for that?

  Then, as mysteriously as he’d appeared in east Sacramento, he was gone, after a two-year reign of terror, from 1976 to 1978.

  “Wow,” said Holes. “What happened then?”

  Murdock remembered that Holes was a ten-year-old at the time, unaware of the mass paralysis the case caused, its twists, false hopes, and dead ends. His connection to the case came only from spotting files labeled EAR in red.