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

by Michelle McNamara

  Shortly after Crompton’s book came out, the Sheriff’s Office received an e-mail from Kathy. She was furious about how she was portrayed. They didn’t have the authority to put her in touch with Crompton, who was retired, but Holes and a female colleague invited Kathy to meet with them in person at the office.

  “She was shaking like a leaf,” Holes recalled, in a voice that said he didn’t blame her. Kathy barely made eye contact with him in the meeting, something he attributed to her residual trauma. The relationship between victims and cold-case investigators is an odd combination of intimate and remote. Holes was ten years old when a man in a mask put a knife to Kathy’s neck and pushed her down on the cold linoleum kitchen floor. Nineteen years later, Holes pulled a Ziploc bag with her case number on it from Property and withdrew a swab from a plastic tube. Kathy was a stranger to him. He’d studied her rapist’s sperm cells in a microscope, but he’d never looked her in the eye or shaken her hand.

  He asked very few questions in the meeting and let his female colleague take the lead. Then Kathy said something that focused his attention.

  She and her husband, David, had long since divorced. Like many couples who were victims of the EAR, their relationship didn’t survive. Kathy said that David told her after the attack that he thought he recognized the EAR’s voice, but he couldn’t quite place it.

  What Kathy said was important for two reasons. First, she’d never seen the geo-profile. She didn’t know that, while Contra Costa County didn’t provide the same obvious living pattern as Sacramento, the geo-profiler had determined that the most likely area of the offender’s residence was there anyway: San Ramon. It was central to the East Bay series, and one of the few places he hit only once. As the distance from an offender’s residence increases, so do the number of potential targets. But occasionally a predatory offender, either because he’s drawn to a particular victim or confident he won’t be caught, attacks closer to home.

  On the geo-profile map, a blade of red, indicating the peak area for the EAR’s likely home base, runs east to west just north of Kathy’s house.

  Kathy also didn’t know that an FBI profiler had presented new findings at a recent EAR Task Force meeting. Something the profiler said resonated with Holes. She said they should consider that in some of the cases the male victim had been the target. In some instances, the EAR may have been exacting revenge on the male for some perceived wrongdoing.

  What Kathy told them raised the possibility of a link, a previously overlooked close degree of separation that could lead to the suspect. Many well-known serial cases turn out to possess at least one such connection. An old roommate of Lynda Healy’s, a victim of Ted Bundy, was a cousin of Ted’s, and investigators later unearthed rosters that showed that Ted and Lynda shared at least three classes. Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, lived six doors down from Marine Hedge, his eighth victim. John Wayne Gacy talked publicly in a store with Robert Piest about hiring him for a construction job shortly before Piest disappeared.

  The EAR went to great lengths to hide his identity. He covered his face and suppressed his voice. He blinded his victims with a flashlight and threatened to kill them if they looked at him. But he was also brazen. Barking dogs didn’t deter him. Two joggers, a college-age brother and sister, were out running on a foggy night in December 1977 when they spotted a man in a dark ski mask emerging from the hedged walkway of a house on the 3200 block of American River Drive. The man stopped abruptly when he saw the joggers. They continued running. They looked back and saw him quickly climb into an older model step-side pickup truck. Something about the way the man had paused and then moved quickly into the truck made them run faster. They heard the noisy rattle of the truck’s engine as the truck sped toward them. They sprinted around the corner; the truck screeched to a stop and backed up haphazardly to where they were. They ran to another house and hid, watching as the truck followed, turning in circles in the street until the man gave up and sped off.

  The EAR was extremely careful about self-preservation, but success and the arrogance it breeds punctures holes in master plans. It whispers grandiose persuasions. He’d already defeated a series of mental barriers that would have stopped most of us: rape, breaking into a stranger’s home, taking control of a couple rather than a lone female. After dozens of uninterrupted successes, his self-confidence might have adrenalized him to the point where he broke his own rule about targeting only victims to whom he had no connection. A guttural whisper heard in the middle of the night thirty-six years ago may be a clue.

  After San Ramon, the EAR hit twice in San Jose, forty miles south. Holes and I decide to skip San Jose to save time.

  “I want to show you Davis,” he says. “I think Davis is important.”

  But first we have two more stops. After San Jose, the EAR returned to Contra Costa County, attacking for the first of what would be three times in Danville. Holes and I head north on 680 toward Danville, to the site of the December 9, 1978, attack, which gave him his most promising lead.

  DANVILLE

  A hundred years ago, the steady drumming of steam trains was the sound of boom time in the broad green valley adjacent to Mount Diablo. Starting in 1891, the Southern Pacific Railroad ferried passengers up and down a twenty-mile route from San Ramon to just north of Concord. Enterprising visitors disembarked, blueprints and dreams in hand. Land was abundant. Parceling and developing commenced. Passenger service eventually disappeared with the invention of the automobile, but the San Ramon Branch Line continued hauling freight—Bartlett pears, gravel, sheep. The railroad tunneled indistinguishably into the landscape. Train whistles marked time. The depots were all painted the same dandelion yellow with brown trim. The tracks ran past Murwood Elementary in Walnut Creek, and at recess the kids, hearing a rumble and feeling the ground vibrate, stopped their hopscotch or dodgeball and waved at the passing crews, receiving a horn blow in reply.

  Southern Pacific helped transform the rural valley, but not in a way that kept its trains running. Industrial hubs never materialized. Single-family homes were developed instead. Central Contra Costa County became “the outer East Bay.” The completion of I-680 in 1964 represented speed, efficiency, and death for the railway. Moving freight was cheaper by truck. The number of train cars dwindled. And kept dwindling. The sprawling orchards were gone now, and crowds of roofs advanced on either side of the tracks. Southern Pacific finally petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to abandon the line. In September 1978, nearly a century after the first track was laid, the line closed for good.

  Debate ensued about what to do with the right-of-way. Until a decision was made, the twenty-foot-wide strip of land remained vacant, a shadow corridor bisecting neighborhoods of warmly lit houses. The dead zone didn’t inspire dread as much as inattention. This was especially true of the five-mile stretch that ran through Danville, the town just north of San Ramon. Danville lots were larger, the homes older, its residents wealthier and quieter. The deserted tracks lay beyond tidily cordoned-off backyards. The fence lines were essentially drapes. Shorn of its usefulness, the right-of-way was blotted out. Nothing moved. Nothing was heard. That is, until one December morning when a peculiar noise disturbed the silence. The casual listener may not have been concerned at first. The sound was steady, rhythmic, but to the sensitive ear it

  signaled an evident urgency: a bloodhound galloping, gripped with purpose.

  BY EARLY DECEMBER 1978, THERE EXISTED AMONG CONTRA COSTA County residents the hopeful but mostly unspoken feeling that maybe they could relax. In October the East Area Rapist hadn’t merely surfaced in their area; he’d inflicted on them something that, in its swiftness and ability to shock, resembled a spree: three attacks in twenty-one days. After the third attack, people spent nights locked inside brightly lit homes, fighting sleep and blinking against muzzy visions of ski masks. But weeks passed without incident. Fresh horrors distracted. News anchors interrupted regular programming on November 18 to announce that more than nine hundred Americans,
a third of them children, lay dead in a jungle commune in Guyana after drinking Flavor Aid laced with cyanide at the behest of cult leader Jim Jones. The Peoples Temple, Jones’s church, had had its headquarters in San Francisco before relocating to Guyana. The dead included Northern California congressman Leo Ryan, who’d flown there to investigate alleged abuses and was gunned down at an airstrip just before takeoff. The Jonestown Massacre absorbed much of the country’s horrified attention, if not the world’s, but it particularly rocked the Bay Area.

  Thanksgiving weekend came and went peacefully. A new moon lacquered the sky the night of November 30, extinguishing light that shone on even the most desolate hiding spots. The determined concealer was presented with ideal conditions. But December dawned without news of another EAR attack. No one was neglecting to lock up just yet, but reflexes spring-coiled with panicky anticipation slowly began to ease.

  It’s probably not a coincidence that the EAR stole clock radios from five homes, even when more valuable items were there for the taking. Time was important to him—controlling it, manipulating

  it. He possessed uncanny instincts about how much time had to pass before precautions weakened. Keeping communities and victims uncertain about his presence gave him a strategic advantage, of course. The blindfolded victim tied up in the dark develops the feral senses of a savannah animal. The sliding glass door quietly shutting registers as a loud, mechanical click. She calculates the distance of ever fainter footsteps. Hope flickers. Still, she waits. Time passes in tense perception. She strains to hear breathing other than her own. Fifteen minutes go by. The dread sense of being watched, of being pinned down by a possessing gaze she can’t see, is gone. Thirty minutes. Forty-five. She allows her body to slacken almost imperceptibly. Her shoulders fall. It’s then, at the precipice of an exhale, that the nightmare snaps into action again—the knife grazes the skin, and the labored breathing resumes, grows closer, until she feels him settling in next to her, an animal waiting patiently for its half-dying quarry to still.

  The illusion of being gone was a cruel and effective trick. The victim on whom the trick was played would wait much longer the next time she thought the EAR left; some victims, catatonic with dread, waited hours, waited until birds chirped and weak sunlight flickered at the edges of their blindfolds. The extra time before the police were called allowed the EAR to put greater distance between him and the crime scene.

  By early December, it had been six weeks since the EAR had struck in Contra Costa County. The community was the equivalent of the cautiously hopeful victim who believes he’s left her home for good. No one from Sacramento or the East Bay, neither the public nor the investigators, knew at the time that during the EAR’s absence from their area he’d committed two rapes forty miles south in San Jose, one in early November and another on December 2. Even if they had known about the San Jose rapes, the EAR’s route might have relieved them. He appeared to be following a steady southerly course: first Concord, then eighteen

  miles down I-680 to San Ramon, and next San Jose, in another county altogether.

  As night fell on Friday, December 8, residents of the bedroom communities nestled at the base of Mount Diablo, outer East Bay towns like Concord, Walnut Creek, Danville, and San Ramon, went to bed feeling spared. Common sense suggested that he’d keep moving south and hit in Santa Cruz or Monterey. They were in his rearview mirror, receding targets. The worst was over. Midnight turned to one a.m. Refrigerators hummed in darkened houses. A car occasionally whooshed by, punctuating the quiet. The collective circadian rhythm was in rest mode.

  Not everywhere. In Danville, just east of the abandoned railroad tracks, a six-foot wooden fence concealed by large trees buckled under the weight of someone scaling it.

  No outdoor lights illuminated the ranch-style house that lay behind the fence. Nighttime was ideal for the fence hopper. Shrouds lured him. He roved in dark clothes, searching for the rare blot among the luminous houses. His black pupils sought shadows.

  He crossed the backyard to the patio. No lights were on inside. A woman’s purse lay on the kitchen counter. Prying the sliding glass doors required only a small amount of pressure and resulted in little noise. He stepped into the kitchen. Somewhere a radio was playing softly. The 2,100-square-foot house was mostly empty of furniture or personal effects because it was for sale. Friendly Realtors had been welcoming strangers inside for the last two months. Had he been one of the forgettable looky-loos? He would have murmured, if he spoke at all. While other potential buyers asked questions, implying interest, he would have registered as faintly critical, his absorption suggesting possible disapproval. Memorization misinterpreted as judgment.

  He bypassed rooms with closed doors and headed directly for the master bedroom, in the northwest corner of the house. Standing

  in the doorway, he faced the bed from a distance of about ten feet. A woman lay there alone. She was sleeping, positioned on her stomach, face to pillow, the kind of “flung off the cliff of consciousness” sleep that anchors rather than drifts. Who was she in the moment before he wrenched her awake from unburdened sleep? Esther McDonald* was small, what the generation when her name was popular might have called “a slip of a thing.” Back home in a cold midwestern state, a marriage at nineteen had lasted a decade with no kids or staying power. Suddenly she was thirty, which is older in Middle America than on the coasts. “California Dreamin’” wasn’t a song but a siren call for a sunnier future. She and a girlfriend moved to San Francisco. The Summer of Love was over, but the Bay Area retained its reputation for improvisation, a place where you could shed your past and debut a new life.

  There were jobs: a wholesale florist and an electric motor repair company. A pawnbroker twenty years her senior wooed her with jewelry and invited her to live with him in Danville. The house was five miles from the Calaveras Fault, a major branch of the San Andreas. Six months later, they split amicably. He moved out, put the house on the market, and told her she was welcome to stay until it sold. A romance was bubbling with a co-worker; the pawnbroker was still around. Matters of the heart were bidirectional and unresolved.

  That’s who she was as she slept around two a.m. on a cold night in December: a woman starting over in a state where the covered wagons stopped and storied reinventions began, a woman navigating an unremarkably complicated love life, a woman about to be irrevocably changed. What is the lasting damage when you believe the warm spot you were just sleeping in will be your grave? Time sands the edges of the injuries, but they never lose their

  hold. A nameless syndrome circulates permanently through the body, sometimes long dormant, other times radiating powerful waves of pain and fear.

  A hand gripped her neck. A blunt-tipped weapon dug into the side of her throat. At least a dozen investigators in Northern California could have correctly predicted the first words whispered in the dark.

  “Don’t move.”

  “Don’t scream.”

  He was back. Or, more accurately, he had doubled back. The uncertainty of his course, the randomness of his strikes made him an unpredictable dark force, a one-man crime wave.

  The first deputies alerted by dispatch arrived at 5:19 a.m. Tension ratcheted at the telltale signs. Knotted white shoelaces. Torn strips of orange towel. Cut phone lines. The house was bracingly cold. He’d turned off the thermostat, along with the radio, apparently for optimal hearing. Radio calls went out. Phones rang. People began arriving in the blue-black light of dawn. Crime-scene investigator Larry Crompton pulled up. The search for meaningful details focused him, made him alert despite the early hour. He noted the Realtor’s sign in the front yard, the vacant property next door, and the railroad tracks out back—all ideal conditions that stoked the EAR’s compulsions and telescoped his roving to a single target.

  In a few weeks, Crompton would be promoted to sergeant and join the urgently formed EAR Task Force. He was unaware as he entered the house, the door shutting behind him, that this case would be the one he would carry fo
r the rest of his life. It would become like a game of hangman he refused to lose, all the guesses wrong, the stick figure nearly fatally hung; Crompton kept the last move open, staving off defeat by waiting until he, or one of his successors, could reverse the momentum and fill in the blanks. Only then, the final letter correct, would the long, bruising

  chase in the dark end in the simplest but long-sought-after prize: a man’s name.

  The first of three bloodhounds, Pita, arrived. She exhibited excitement immediately, her nose wrenching the air. Who knows what goes through the minds of tracking dogs, whether they absorb the hopes of the solemn people milling around them. Pita’s job was enviably clear-cut. Find the scent and follow it. A small group of handlers and cops, including Crompton, watched Pita exit the house through the back patio and head confidently to the southwest corner of the backyard. She agitated at the fence, wanting over. She was led out the yard and around the other side, to the abandoned railroad tracks. She raised her nose.