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

by Michelle McNamara

  “Michelle’s a crime writer,” Patton said.

  Tony looked surprised.

  “I don’t even know what you do,” he said.

  From now on, the three of us told each other, we’ll look out for each other. We’d alert each other when we were going out of town. We’d be better neighbors, we promised.

  Later that night, I kept going over the events of the last few

  days in my head. I thought about the intimacy of that moment in the living room, the unexpected surge of emotion we shared with Tony.

  “We don’t even know his last name,” I said to Patton.

  * * *

  I HAVE A NIGHTLY RITUAL WITH ALICE, WHO IS A TROUBLED SLEEPER and has terrifying dreams. Every night before falling asleep, she’ll call out for me to come into her bedroom.

  “I don’t want to have a dream,” she says. I brush her sandy hair back, put my hand on her forehead, and look straight into her big brown eyes.

  “You are not going to have a dream,” I tell her, with crisp, confident enunciation. Her body releases its tension, and she goes to sleep. I leave the room, hoping that what I promised but have no control over will be true.

  That’s what we do. All of us. We make well-intentioned promises of protection we can’t always keep.

  I’ll look out for you.

  But then you hear a scream and you decide it’s some teenagers playing around. A young man jumping a fence is taking a shortcut. The gunshot at three a.m. is a firecracker or a car backfiring. You sit up in bed for a startled moment. Awaiting you is the cold, hard floor and a conversation that may lead nowhere; you collapse onto your warm pillow, and turn back to sleep.

  Sirens wake you later.

  I saw Tony walking his big white dog this afternoon and waved at him from outside my car, in between fumbling for my keys and remembering something I had to do.

  I still don’t know his last name.

  Contra Costa, 2013

  CONCORD

  The history of Concord, California, involves Satan and a series of misunderstandings. Legend has it that in 1805 Spanish soldiers in pursuit of a band of reluctantly missionized Native Americans cornered their quarry near a willow thicket in what is present-day Concord. The natives took cover in the dense trees, but when the soldiers charged in to seize them, the natives were gone. The spooked Spaniards dubbed the area Monte del Diablo—thicket of the devil—the archaic definition of the word “monte” translating loosely into “woods.” Over the years, it morphed into the more conventional “mountain” or “mount,” and English-speaking newcomers transferred the name to the nearby 3,848-foot peak that dominates the East Bay landscape, and it became Mount Diablo. Devil Mountain. In 2009 a local man named Arthur Mijares filed federal paperwork to try to change the name to Mount Reagan. He found the Devil name offensive.

  “I just happen to be an ordinary man that worships God,” he told the Los Angeles Times. Mijares wasn’t successful, but he needn’t have worried. Concord is thirty-one miles east of San Francisco and feels every mile of it. Whatever sinister wilderness existed has been bulldozed and replaced with enthusiastically bland retail hubs. Across from my hotel is the Willows Shopping Center, a sprawl of worrisomely underattended chain stores and restaurants: Old Navy,

  Pier One Imports, and Fuddruckers. Nearly everyone I ask about Concord mentions the convenience of its BART stop, East Bay’s subway system. “Twenty minutes to Berkeley,” they say.

  Paul Holes and I have agreed that he’ll pick me up outside my hotel at nine a.m. He’s taking me on a tour of the Contra Costa County crime scenes. By morning the temperature is already in the eighties, a blazing day in what will be the hottest month of the year in the East Bay. A silver Taurus pulls up right on time, and a fit, neatly dressed man with short blond hair and a hint of summer tan gets out and calls my name. I’ve never met Holes in person. During our last phone conversation, he cheerfully complained that his family’s golden retriever puppy was keeping him up at night, but he looks as if he’s never had a worry in the world. He’s in his midforties and has a calm, easygoing face and a jock’s gait. He smiles warmly and gives me a firm handshake. We’ll spend the next eight hours talking about rape and murder.

  Of course, Holes isn’t technically a cop; he’s a criminalist, chief of the County Sheriff’s crime lab, but I’ve been spending a lot of time with cops, and he reminds me of them. When I say cops I mean specifically detectives. After spending enough hours with them, I’ve noticed a few things about detectives. They all smell vaguely of soap. I’ve never met a detective with greasy hair. They excel at eye contact and have enviable posture. Irony is never their go-to tone. Wordplay makes them uneasy. The good ones create long conversational vacuums that you reflexively fill, an interrogation strategy that proved to me through my own regrettable prattle how easily confessions can be elicited. They lack facial elasticity; or rather, they contain it. I’ve never met a detective who pulled a face. They don’t recoil or go wide-eyed. I’m a face maker. I married a comedian. Many of my friends are in show business. I’m constantly surrounded by big expressions, which is why I immediately noticed the lack of them in detectives. They maintain a pleasant but vigorous blankness that I admire. I’ve tried to imitate

  it, but I can’t. I came to recognize subtle but discernible shifts in the blankness—a narrowing of the eyes, a jaw squeeze, usually in response to hearing a theory they’ve long since eliminated. A veil comes down. But they’ll never tip their hand. They’ll never tell you, “We already looked into that angle ages ago.” Instead they’ll just absorb it and leave you with a polite “Huh.”

  In their reserve and in virtually every other way, detectives differ from show-biz folks. Detectives listen. They’re getting a read. Entertainers get a read only to gauge their influence on a room. Detectives deal in concrete tasks. I once spent an hour listening to an actress friend analyze a three-line text that hurt her feelings. Eventually I’ll see the cracks in a detective’s veneer, but in the beginning their company is an unexpected relief, like fleeing a moodily lit cast party loud with competitive chatter and joining a meeting of determined Eagle Scouts awaiting their next challenge. I wasn’t a native in the land of the literal-minded, but I enjoyed my time there.

  The EAR’s first attack in the East Bay took place in Concord and is just a 10-minute drive from my hotel. Holes and I dispense with small talk and dive right into discussing the case. The most obvious first question is, what brought him here? Why did he stop attacking in Sacramento and, in October 1978, embark on a nearly yearlong spree in the East Bay? I know the most common theory. Holes does too. He doesn’t buy it.

  “I don’t think he got scared out of Sacramento,” he says.

  Proponents of the “scared away” theory point to the fact that on April 16, 1978, two days after the EAR attacked a fifteen-year-old babysitter in Sacramento, police released enhanced composite sketches of two possible suspects in the Maggiore homicide—an unsolved case in which a young couple was mysteriously gunned down while out walking their dog. After the sketches were released, the EAR stopped attacking in Sacramento; only one more rape in Sacramento County would be attributed to him, and it

  wasn’t until a year later. One of the Maggiore sketches, the thinking goes, must have been uncomfortably accurate.

  Holes is unconvinced. He has studied and is well versed in geographic profiling, a type of analytic crime mapping that tries to determine the most likely area of offender residence. In the late seventies, cops might stand around a map with pins stuck in it and idly speculate. Today, geographic profiling is its own specialty, with algorithms and software. In predatory crimes there is usually a “buffer zone” around a criminal’s residence; targets within the zone are less desirable because of the perceived level of risk associated with operating too close to home. In serial crimes, geographic profilers analyze attack locations in an attempt to home in on the buffer zone, the ring around the bull’s-eye where the criminal lives, because offenders, like
everyone, move in predictable and routine ways.

  “I’ve read a lot of studies about how serial offenders do their victim selection,” Holes says. “It’s during their normal course of living. Say you’re a serial burglar and you drive to work like a normal person every day. You’ve got an anchor point at home and an anchor point at work. But they’re paying attention. They’re sitting like we are here”—Holes gestures at the intersection we’ve stopped at—“and they’re noticing, you know, that might be a good apartment complex over there.”

  The geographic distribution of attacks in Sacramento follows a completely different pattern than in the East Bay, Holes says, and that’s significant.

  “In Sacramento, he’s crisscrossing but he’s staying within that northeast, east suburban area. Geographic profilers call him a ‘marauder.’ He’s branching out at an anchor point. But once he moves down here, he’s becoming a commuter. It’s obvious he’s traveling up and down the 680 corridor.”

  Interstate 680 is a seventy-mile north-south highway that cuts through central Contra Costa County. Most of the EAR’s attacks

  in the East Bay occurred close to I-680, half of them a mile or less from an exit. On a professionally prepared geo-profile map, I saw the East Bay cases represented by a series of small red circles, almost all just right, or east, of 680, red drops cleaving to a yellow vein.

  “You’ll get a feel for it as we drive up and down 680,” says Holes. “I think he’s branching out because he’s got a change in life circumstances. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s still living in Sacramento but now commuting for work and taking advantage of being out of his jurisdiction and attacking.”

  At the word “work” I perk up. I’ve sensed from our recent e-mail correspondence that Holes is onto something regarding the EAR’s possible line of work, but he remains oblique about the specifics. Even now, he waves me off, anticipating my question.

  “We’ll get to that.”

  Holes didn’t grow up here. He was just a kid in 1978. But he’s worked for the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office for twenty-three years and has visited the crime scenes countless times. He’s also dug into what the area looked like back then. He’s pulled permits. Studied aerial photographs. Talked to locals. He possesses a mental map of the area circa October 1978, which he overlays over the current one as we drive. He slows and points to a cul-de-sac. The homes are located just behind the house where the EAR’s first attack in Concord took place.

  “These weren’t here then,” says Holes. “It was a vacant field.”

  We pull up and park at a corner house in a quiet residential neighborhood. A photo attached to the first East Bay file shows an attractive couple with their one-year-old daughter; the little girl wears a polka-dotted birthday hat and a summer dress, and the parents each have a hand on a ball they’re holding up in front of her, presumably one of her gifts. The baby is smiling at the photographer, the parents at the camera. A month and a half after the photo was taken, on October 7, 1978, the husband was awakened

  by something touching his feet. He opened his eyes, startled to see a figure in a dark ski mask looming over him.

  “I just want money and food, that’s all. I’ll kill you if you don’t do what I say.” The intruder held a flashlight in his left hand and a revolver in his right.

  Holes points to the dining room window where thirty-five years ago the EAR slithered in and made his way to the foot of the couple’s bed. The little girl wasn’t bothered and slept through the ordeal.

  The house was built in 1972 and is single-story, L-shaped, occupying roughly the same quarter acre as the other houses on the block. I’m struck by how much the house resembles the other crime-scene locations I’ve seen. You could pick it up and drop it in any of the other neighborhoods.

  “Definitely the same kind of house,” I say. Holes nods.

  “Very few neighborhoods he attacked in had two-story houses,” he says. “Makes a lot of sense if you know your victims are sleeping. In two stories there’s a single way upstairs and single way downstairs. You’re more likely to be cornered in that situation. Also it’s easier to determine what’s going on inside a single-story house, going from window to window. And if you’re prowling, jumping fences, and going through yards, somebody can have a vantage point to see you from a second floor versus downstairs.”

  The husband, under hypnosis, remembered that when he and his wife pulled up around eleven fifteen p.m. on the evening of the attack, he saw a young man standing near a parked van on the side street next to their house. The van was box-shaped and two-tone in color, white over aqua green. The young man appeared to be in his twenties and was white with dark hair, of average height and weight, and he was standing near the right back corner of the van, stooped over, as if checking out a tire. A fragment of an image, one of hundreds half-absorbed peripherally every day. I imagine the husband in a chair, summoning and parsing a snapshot

  made retrospectively crucial. Or not. That was the madness of the case: the uncertain weight of every clue.

  “In this case, what’s striking is the sophistication of how he broke in,” Holes says. “It looks like he tried the side door. He’s cutting near the doorknob. He abandons that effort for whatever reason. He comes out front. There’s a window on the dining room. He punches out a small hole in the window so he can push the latch and then gets in that way.”

  “I know nothing about burglaries. Was he good?”

  “He was good,” says Holes.

  We sit in the hot car and list the ways he was strategically good. Bloodhounds, shoe impressions, and tire tracks showed investigators he was canny about the routes he took. If there was a construction site nearby, he’d park there, as the transient vehicle population allowed him to hide in plain view; people would assume he was associated with the job. He’d approach a house one way but take a different route to escape, so that he wasn’t seen coming and going, and was therefore less likely to be remembered.

  Dogs that normally barked didn’t bark at him, suggesting he may have been preconditioning them with food. He had the unusual habit of throwing a blanket over a lamp or a muted TV when he brought his female victims into living rooms, which allowed him enough light to see but not so much that it would raise notice from outside. And his preplanning. The corner-house couple said that when they returned home, they noticed the husband’s study door was closed, which was unusual, and the front door wasn’t locked, as they believed they’d left it. They wondered if he was already in the house then, maybe hiding among the coats in the hall closet, waiting for their murmurs to grow softer and the bar of light at his feet to go out.

  There’s a pause in my conversation with Holes, one I’ve come to anticipate in discussions about the case. It’s knockdown time. The verbal pivot is akin to the moment when you’ve talked too

  much about an ex, catch yourself, and stop to emphasize that the ex in question is, of course, a worthless piece of shit.

  “He’s very good at committing his crime,” Holes says, “but he’s not rappelling down the side of a building. He’s not doing anything that suggests he has any specialized training.”

  Holes’s parents are from Minnesota, and he retains a chipper midwestern rhythm to his speech, but when he says the EAR wasn’t particularly skillful, his voice loses momentum, and he sounds unconvincing and unconvinced. On to the next recognizable stage in case analysis: self-debate.

  “It’s ballsy. The EAR. That’s the thing,” Holes says, his jaw uncharacteristically clenched. “What sets him apart from other offenders is going into a house. The Zodiac, for instance. In many ways his crimes were kind of cowardly. Lovers’ lanes. From a distance. You step it up when you go inside. You step it up further when there’s a male in that house.”

  We talk about how the male victims are overlooked. He tells me a story about a time when he needed to question a female victim in Stockton who’d been attacked with her husband. Holes decided to contact the husband first, figuring he’d
be better able to handle the cold call. The husband politely told Holes he didn’t think his wife wanted to talk about the attack. She’d buried it. She didn’t want to revisit the experience; nevertheless, the husband reluctantly said, he’d pass Holes’s questions on to his wife. Holes didn’t hear anything. He figured it was a lost cause. Several months later, the wife finally got in touch. She answered Holes’s questions. She was willing to help him, she said. She was willing to remember. Her husband wasn’t.

  “He’s the one who’s having the problems,” she confided.

  The male victims were born in the forties and fifties, a generation for whom therapy was mostly an alien concept. In the police files, gender roles are rigid and unambiguous. Detectives ask the women where they shop and the men about the locking mechanisms

  on the doors and windows. They drape blankets over the women’s shoulders and ferry them to the hospital. The men are asked what they saw, not what they felt. Many of the male victims had military experience. They had toolsheds. They were doers and protectors who’d been robbed of their ability to do and protect. Their rage is in the details: one husband chewed the bindings off his wife’s feet.

  “So much trauma exists to this day,” Holes says, starting the car. He pulls away from the curb. The corner house recedes from view. There’s a brief handwritten note in the file from the female victim, the pretty young mother of the darling little birthday girl, to the lead detective, dated five months after their attack.

  Rod,

  Enclosed please find

  a. missing property list and

  b. list of checks written for July–August.