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

by Michelle McNamara

  “He resurfaced in the East Bay,” Murdock said. “He came to us.”

  Holes began asking older friends and colleagues about the EAR and was surprised at how pervasive the case had been. Everyone had a story. His undersheriff remembered the helicopters whirling overhead, the roving spotlights darting through the quiet subdivisions. A UC-Davis professor said his first date with his wife had been taking part in one of the nightly rape patrols. One of his co-workers quietly confided in Holes that his sister was one of the victims.

  Between October 1978 and July 1979, after which he vanished from Northern California, there were eleven EAR cases in the greater East Bay area, including two in San Jose and one in Fremont. Trying to make headway twenty years later was daunting. Local police departments handled some of the cases. All of the agencies, including Sacramento County, had destroyed their evidence. It was routine Property Room procedure. The cases were past the statute of limitations. Fortunately CCCSO (Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office), where Holes worked, had kept its evidence. The set-aside red EAR files weren’t a fluke; demoralized CCCSO deputies back in the day assured that it would stay that way. It was the opposite of hanging a police commendation plaque. The EAR was their failure. If the human brain was, as experts allege, the best computer in the world, the old guard wanted their conspicuous EAR files to lure one of those young, inquiring computers in, fast and deep. Sometimes the tough cases were just a relay race.

  “We always catch the dumb ones,” cops like to say. They could

  tick off ninety-nine out of a hundred boxes with these kinds of arrests. That one unchecked box though. It could vex you into early death.

  * * *

  IN JULY 1997, HOLES BEGAN PULLING THE EAR RAPE KITS FROM Property and seeing what evidence might be coaxed from them. The CCCSO crime lab wasn’t as advanced as other California labs. Their DNA program was relatively new. Still, it looked as though three kits would yield material for a rudimentary profile. Holes figured that, even though the EAR’s m.o. was distinctive and there was little doubt the Northern California attacks were connected, if he could conclude with scientific certainty that one man was responsible for CCCSO’s three EAR-suspected cases, that could resurrect the investigation. They could dig up old suspects and swab them.

  The DNA-amplification process took a while, but when the results developed, they confirmed the match. The same man, as predicted, was responsible for the three Contra Costa County cases. Holes now had a basic DNA profile of the EAR that would grow more advanced when the lab acquired better equipment. He began delving into the case files themselves, something he’d put aside while he concentrated on the science. He picked up on the EAR’s patterns. Choosing neighborhoods to prowl for information gathering. Phoning victims. Tactically preparing.

  Holes compiled a list of old suspect names and then tracked down retired detective Larry Crompton. Crompton had been a member of the CCCSO’s EAR Task Force at the height of the series. Holes could tell from the number of times Crompton’s name appeared in the reports that he was the de facto leader. He’d either been a worker bee or taken the cases to heart.

  Calling up retired detectives about an old case is a mixed bag.

  Some are flattered. A lot are mildly annoyed. They’re in line at the pharmacy waiting for their heart medication. They’re installing garboard drain plugs on their fishing boats. Your polite enthusiasm represents lost minutes of their day.

  Crompton answered Holes’s call as if he’d just been talking about the EAR that moment, had possibly been talking about the EAR for years, and this unexpected, welcome call was a natural continuation of an ongoing conversation in the Crompton household.

  Crompton was born in Nova Scotia and looks like the kind of tall, lean, honest-faced rancher John Wayne would have trusted in one of his Westerns. He’s got a slightly odd, breathless way of speaking; never hesitant, just brief, confident declarations that could use a little more air.

  Holes wanted to know if Crompton remembered any old suspects who stood out and should be reexamined. He did, and unenthusiastically fed Holes some names. Crompton’s real wish, it turned out, was for Holes to follow up on an old hunch of his that the bosses had prevented him from pursuing at the time.

  Jurisdictional cooperation is spotty at best now but was downright dismal back in the late 1970s. Police Teletype and the gossip mill were the only ways cops heard about cases in other agencies. The EAR disappeared from the East Bay in the summer of 1979. Crompton’s bosses nearly danced with relief. Crompton was panicked. He could tell the guy was escalating, that he was requiring more terror in his victims’ eyes to get off; his threats about killing his victims, previously stilted in manner, were more severe but also looser, like someone shedding his inhibitions. Crompton worried. Inhibition shedding was not what the EAR needed.

  In early 1980, Crompton got a call from Jim Bevins, a Sacramento Sheriff’s investigator he’d become close to through their

  work on the EAR Task Force. Bevins was trying to step away from the case. Its hold over him broke up his marriage. But he wanted to tell Crompton that he was hearing rumors that Santa Barbara had a couple of cases, one a homicide, that felt like the EAR. Crompton called down there.

  They stonewalled. “Nothing like that here,” he was told.

  Several months later at a statewide training conference, Crompton was seated by chance next to a Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s investigator. Small talk ensued. Crompton played dumb. Pretended he wanted to talk shop.

  “What about that double homicide not too long ago?” he asked.

  He never let his face reveal the chill he felt as he listened to the details.

  “I’m telling you, Paul,” Crompton said. “Call down south. Start with Santa Barbara. I heard there was something like five bodies down there.”

  “I will,” Holes promised.

  “I know it’s him,” Crompton said, and hung up.

  TWENTY YEARS LATER, HOLES CALLED SANTA BARBARA AND GOT shut down too. The Sheriff’s Department denied having any cases that resembled what he was talking about. But near the end of the conversation, the detective on the other end either recalled something or had a change of heart about obfuscating.

  “Try Irvine,” he said. “They have something like that, I think.”

  Holes’s call to Irvine led him to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, which put him in touch with criminalist Mary Hong at the crime lab. Holes explained that he’d recently developed a DNA profile for an unidentified white male known as the East Area Rapist, or EAR, who’d committed fifty sexual assaults

  in Northern California from 1976 to 1979. EAR investigators always suspected he’d headed south and committed more crimes there. Holes rattled off a quick description of his m.o. Middle- to upper-middle-class single-story homes. Nighttime home invasions. Sleeping couples. Binding. Female raped. Occasional theft, mostly personalized jewelry that meant something to victim over more valuable items. Ski mask made physical identification difficult but evidence indicated a size 9 shoe, blood type A, nonsecretor.

  “Sounds a lot like our cases,” Hong said.

  At the time Holes and Hong talked, their labs were using different DNA-typing techniques, OC being an early adopter of STR typing. They could compare one gene, DQA1, which matched, but that’s all they had to compare. The Contra Costa lab also wasn’t CODIS-eligible yet, meaning they couldn’t link into the state or national databases. Hong and Holes agreed to keep in touch and update each other when the Contra Costa lab was up and running.

  * * *

  GOVERNMENT-FUNDED CRIME LABS EXPERIENCE ALL THE USUAL economic vagaries one would expect. Elected officials know it’s not popular to reduce the police force, so job cuts often fall on less conspicuous positions, like forensic scientists. Lab equipment isn’t cheap, and lab directors often have to make repeated requests to get what they need.

  Which in part explains why the Contra Costa lab, historically lean, needed about a year and a half to catch up wit
h Orange County. In January 2001, when Contra Costa got its STR typing up and running, Holes asked one of his colleagues, Dave Stockwell, to rerun the DNA extracts from the EAR case to see if the three cases still had the same offender profile. Stockwell reported back they did.

  “Call Mary Hong in Orange County,” Holes told him. “We’ve got the same technology now. Check it against hers.”

  Over the phone, Stockwell and Hong read off the markers to each other.

  “Yes,” Hong said when Stockwell read one of the EAR markers.

  “Yes,” Stockwell said in reply to one of hers.

  Stockwell came into Holes’s office.

  “Perfect match.”

  The news hit the media on April 4, 2001. DNA LINKS ’70S RAPES TO SERIAL SLAYING CASES read the San Francisco Chronicle headline. No one had warned the surviving rape victims that the story was coming out, so many of them got a shock picking up the morning paper at the breakfast table. There it was on the front page of the Sacramento Bee: NEW LEAD FOUND IN SERIAL RAPES: AFTER DECADES, DNA LINKS THE EAST AREA RAPIST TO CRIMES IN ORANGE COUNTY.

  Even more unreal for many of them was the sight of the detectives on the front page of the Bee. Richard Shelby and Jim Bevins. Shelby, tall, gruff, coarse, the guy with the impeccable memory and miserable social skills whom fellow officers tried to keep from interacting with people. And Jim Bevins—Puddin’ Eyes, his cop buddies called him teasingly. No one was liked more than Bevins. Even when he was striding toward you from fifty yards away, you could see that he was the guy sent to deescalate and make everything right.

  And here they were on the front page, old men now. Twenty-five years is a long time in cop years. The high mileage showed. Their expressions hinted at something. Sheepishness? Shame? They speculated on what their nemesis was doing now. Shelby voted loony bin. Bevins guessed dead.

  Holes fielded reporters’ calls and enjoyed the excitement for a few days. But even though privately he still felt investigative work was his calling, he’d been promoted to criminalist supervisor.

  Commitments beckoned. He was married with two young kids. He didn’t have the time to dedicate himself to the ten thousand pages of case files that the new DNA connection unified. It was an unheard-of amount of evidence. Optimism among those who worked the case ran sky high. DNA profile? Sixty cases spanning the state of California? They fought over who would interrogate him first when they got him in the room.

  Larry Pool in Orange County was the designated point man. For Pool the news of the DNA connection was great but daunting, as if he’d spent the last couple of years in a small, familiar room only to discover that it was an annex to a warehouse.

  He continued to bat away contempt from hardened cops who kept insisting that the monster was dead. Sexually motivated serial killers don’t stop killing unless they’re stopped; maybe some righteous homeowner shot him dead during a burglary. Don’t waste your time, they said.

  Seven months later, Pool would be vindicated by some news from the Pacific Northwest. In November 2001, the media’s attention turned to another unidentified serial killer who’d been dormant for nearly two decades and presumed by some to be long dead: Washington’s Green River Killer. As it turned out, this prolific slayer of prostitutes was very much alive and well and living in suburban Seattle. His reason for slowing down? He’d gotten married.

  “Technology got me,” Gary Ridgway told cops, the verbal equivalent of an upturned middle finger. He was right. He fooled the cops for years by slackening his face and dimming the light in his eyes. No way this half-wit is a diabolical serial killer, they thought, and always, despite mounting evidence, they let him go.

  On April 6, 2001, two days after the news linking the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker hit the media, the phone rang in a house on Thornwood Drive in east Sacramento.

  A woman in her early sixties answered. She’d lived in the house for nearly thirty years, though her last name had changed.

  “Hello?”

  The voice was low. He spoke slowly. She recognized it immediately.

  “Remember when we played?”

  Part Two

  Sacramento, 2012

  [EDITOR’S NOTE: The following section is an excerpt from an early draft of Michelle’s article “In the Footsteps of a Killer.”]

  THE WOMAN WHO SAT ACROSS FROM ME IN THE CRAMPED OFFICE at a troubled high school in east Sacramento was a stranger. But you wouldn’t have known that from the conversational shorthand we used with each other from the moment we met, the EAR-ONS version of Klingon.

  “Dog beating burglary in ’74?” I asked.

  The woman, I’ll call her the Social Worker, retied her thick ponytail and took a sip from a can of Rockstar. She’s “almost sixty,” with large, penetrating green eyes and a smoky voice. She greeted me in the parking lot by waving her arms wildly overhead. I liked her right away.

  “I don’t believe it’s related,” she said.

  The ’74 burglary in Rancho Cordova is the kind of recently uncovered incident members of “the board,” that is A&E’s Cold Case Files message board on EAR-ONS, of which the Social Worker is one of the de facto leaders, thrive on analyzing. I’ve come to appreciate their thoroughness about the case, but at first I was simply daunted. There are over one thousand topics and twenty thousand posts.

  I found my way to the board about a year and a half ago after devouring, practically in one sitting, Larry Crompton’s book Sudden Terror, which is an unvarnished avalanche of case details, full of 1970s political incorrectness and strangely moving in its depiction of one matter-of-fact cop’s haunting regret. The abundance of information available on the case astounded me. More than a dozen books are dedicated to December 25, 1996, the night JonBenet Ramsey was murdered. But EAR-ONS? Here was a case that spanned a decade, an entire state, changed DNA law in California†, included sixty victims, a collection of strange utterances from the suspect at crime scenes (“I’ll kill you like I did some people in Bakersfield”), a poem he allegedly wrote (“Excitement’s Crave”), even his voice on tape (a brief, whispery taunt recorded by a device the police put on a victim’s phone), yet there was only a single self-published, hard-to-find book written about it.

  When I logged on to the EAR-ONS board for the first time, I was immediately struck by the capable, exhaustive crowdsourcing being done there. Yes, cranks exist, including one well-meaning guy who insists that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, is EARONS (he’s not). But much of the analysis is first-rate. A frequent poster named PortofLeith, for instance, helped uncover the fact that California State University–Sacramento’s academic calendar from the years the EAR was active there correlates with his crimes. There are member-made maps detailing everything from crime-scene locations to witness sightings to the spot where he dropped a bloody motocross glove in Dana Point. Hundreds of posts dissect his possible connections to the military, real estate, and medicine.

  The EAR-ONS sleuths have skills, and they’re serious about

  using those skills to catch him. I met with a computer-science graduate student at a Los Angeles Starbucks to discuss his person of interest. Before we met, I received a seven-page dossier, which included footnotes, maps, and yearbook photos of the suspect. I agreed that the suspect looked promising. One unknown detail that niggled at the grad student was his suspect’s shoe size (at 9 or 9½, the EAR’s shoe size is slightly smaller than the average man’s).

  Message board members tend to be a paranoid bunch, pseudonym heavy, and perhaps unsurprisingly for people who spend a great deal of time on the Internet discussing serial murder, there are personality conflicts. The Social Worker operates as a kind of gatekeeper between Sacramento investigators and the board community. This irks some posters, who accuse her of hinting at confidential information but then shutting down when asked to share.

  That she occasionally has new information to share is not in dispute. On July 2, 2011, the Social Worker posted a drawing of a decal that she said was seen on a suspicio
us vehicle near the scene of one of the Sacramento rapes.

  “It is possibly from NAS [Naval Air Station] North Island, but unconfirmed and has no record. Is it familiar to anyone on the board? Hoping we may find where it is from.”

  We. The curious but unmistakable presence of law enforcement became apparent the more I got sucked into the board. The Web detectives, drawn to a decades-old cold case for their own private, idiosyncratic reasons, were the ones hunting the killer with their laptops, but the investigators were subtly steering them.

  The Social Worker took me on a driving tour of EAR hot spots, around the maze of modest ranch houses abutting the old Mather Air Force Base, through the larger, leafier neighborhoods of Arden-Arcade and Del Dayo. She began working informally with Sacramento investigators about five years ago, she told me.

  “I lived here through the height of it,” she said. She was a young mom then and remembers the terror reaching a nearly debilitating peak around rape number fifteen.

  The east Sacramento neighborhoods EAR-ONS preyed on were not built for excitement. I counted an entire block of unbroken beige. The tamped-down cautiousness belies the terrible things that happened here. We turned onto Malaga Way, where on August 29, 1976, the clanging of her wind chimes and the strong smell of aftershave awakened a twelve-year-old girl. A masked man stood at her bedroom window, prying at the upper left corner of the screen with a knife.

  “It’s a really dark place, thinking about this stuff,” the Social Worker said. So why did she?

  She’d been channel surfing one night in bed years ago when she came across the tail end of a Cold Case Files episode. She sat up in horrified recognition. Oh my God, she thought, he became a murderer.