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

by Michelle McNamara

  They were sifting once again through the fresh wreckage of the faceless wrecker. Foam still clung to a bottle of Schlitz Malt Liquor he’d taken from the refrigerator and set down in the backyard. Scuff marks on the fence were photographed. The group at the railroad tracks huddled in the cold, waiting for Pita to make her next move. Their hope lay in a dog’s nostrils connecting with a molecule.

  Then a jerk of movement. Pita caught it; she smelled him. She surged forth, galloping south down the left path alongside the tracks. She was, as police K-9 units say, “in odor.” Her stride was controlled but accelerating, relentless drive her genetic gift. She was, in every sense of the word, unleashed. Crompton and Pita’s handlers chased after her. The sudden commotion on the tracks, with its whiff of danger and unrest, was unusual for a Saturday morning in Danville. It was an unwelcome disruption, one that would repeat in the coming months.

  Pita stopped abruptly about a half mile from where she started, at the point the railroad tracks intersected a residential street. Two other bloodhounds, Betsey and Eli, were also brought in to work the crime scene. Pita’s handler, Judy Robb, noted in her follow-up report that time and even minute changes to wind velocity can

  alter scent pools. However, the three handlers were in agreement on several points. The dogs had sniffed along many fences and darted down numerous side yards. Their behavior suggested that the suspect had spent a lot of time prowling the area. He entered the victim’s backyard by the north-side fence. He left by crossing over the southwest corner of the back fence and headed south along the tracks until at the cross street he likely entered a vehicle.

  The victim had been taken to the hospital by a sergeant. He drove her back home after her exam was finished, but when he parked his county vehicle outside her house, she didn’t move. Raw anguish pinned her to the seat. Daylight provided no comfort. She didn’t want to go back inside. It was tricky. The investigators sympathized, but they needed her. The importance of walking the crime scene with them was gently stressed. She consented to a quick walk-through, then left. Friends came and retrieved her belongings later. She never entered the house again.

  There’s always the question of what to call an unknown perpetrator in police reports. The choice is often “the suspect,” occasionally “the offender,” or sometimes simply “the man.” Whoever wrote the Danville reports elected to use a term that was stark and unambiguous in its charge, its tone of reproach as if a finger were pointing from the very page. The term affected me the moment I read it. It became my private shorthand for the EAR, the simple term I returned to when I lay awake at three a.m. cycling through a hoarder’s collection of murky half clues and indistinct facial features. I admired the plainness of its unblinking claim.

  The responsible.

  * * *

  HOLES PARKS ON A RESIDENTIAL STREET IN DANVILLE THAT’S ADJACENT to the Iron Horse Regional Trail, a path for bikers, horses, and hikers that meanders for forty miles through central Contra

  Costa: the old Southern Pacific Railroad right-of-way paved over and made pedestrian friendly.

  “We’ll get out here and walk,” he says.

  We head south down the trail. We’ve walked maybe ten feet before Holes directs my attention to a backyard.

  “The bloodhounds tracked the EAR’s escape to the corner of the victim’s yard,” he says. He steps forward. A row of agave plants shields the backside of the fence, hindering any attempt at getting closer.

  “He jumps the fence here,” says Holes, pointing. He stares for a long moment at the thick, sword-shaped leaves of the agave plants.

  “I bet this homeowner got so freaked out about the attack, they planted this cactus,” he says.

  We continue walking. We’re following the path that criminalist John Patty took thirty-five years ago when he scoured the area for evidence after the bloodhounds established the EAR’s exit route. Patty found something during his search. He labeled what he found and sealed the items in a plastic bag; the bag went into a box that was taken to the Property Room and slid in tight against hundreds of identical boxes on a steel shelf. There it remained untouched for thirty-three years. On March 31, 2011, Holes called Property to inquire about the ski cap of an EAR suspect from the 1970s whom he was resurrecting. The director of Property had a box ready when Holes arrived. The ski cap was there. Then Holes noticed a Ziploc bag with a tag that read, “Collected from RR Right of Way.” What he found inside changed the course of his investigation.

  Evidence collection, like everything else in police work, requires a paper trail. John Patty’s Scene Evidence Inventory form is hand-scrawled, the answers brief—“1 a) 2 sheets of spiral, 3-hole binder paper bearing pencil writing; b) 1 sheet of spiral, 3-hole binder paper bearing a pencil drawn map; c) 1 length

  of purple yarn 41 inches in length; d) fragment of paper with typewriting.”

  Were the items found together? Scattered across the ground? No photograph or sketch of the scene exists to orient Holes. Patty left a brief notation explaining where along the tracks he found the evidence. That’s it. Holes is able to subject the paper to touch-DNA technology and high-resolution scanning, have multiple experts parse and analyze every aspect of the map, but he lacks one crucial authority who’d give him context: John Patty. He died of cancer in 1991. The bane of cold cases: knowledge disregarded as irrelevant but later deemed critical has died with the knower.

  At first, Holes didn’t know what to make of “the homework evidence.” One page appeared to be the start of a poorly written school-assigned essay on General Custer. The content of the second page was more intriguing. “Mad is the word,” it begins. The author rants about sixth grade and the teacher who humiliated him by forcing him to write sentences repeatedly as punishment. “I never hated anyone as much as I did him,” the writer says of the unnamed teacher.

  The third page is a hand-drawn map of a residential community, depicting a business area, cul-de-sacs, trails, and a lake. Holes noticed some random doodling on the back of the map.

  The evidence puzzled Holes and drew him in fast. Unexpected flashes of clarity kept him pursuing the lead. He cold-called experts for input. An offhand observation by a real estate developer shifted his conception of who the EAR could be. Clues were reconsidered in a new light. Holes knew his theories diverged from his fellow investigators’. He decided not to care too much. He carved out a place for himself as the guy whose views were, as he puts it, “left field.” He asked more questions. He was given several compelling explanations for the curious mix of juvenile writing and obvious design skill exhibited in the evidence. Insights accumulated. The danger of taking a wrong turn in the catacombs

  always looms in this case. Possibilities extend seductively to the horizon. Individual compasses have built-in design flaws of bias and the need to believe. Still, though no specific bull’s-eye had emerged, a larger target began inching laterally into Holes’s view.

  Unexpected discovery is rare in an investigation. It thrills. Deciphering the code that might identify a criminal like the EAR is the turnstile click in the roller-coaster line for a detective. Synapses crackle. The once even-keeled multitasker is officially gripped. The obsessive always remembers the inciting moment. After Holes was finished in Property, he took the pages he found to the nearest photocopier. He was in his lab examining a copy of the hand-drawn map when his clerk spoke up.

  “Paul?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Paul.”

  Holes lowered the map and raised his eyebrows. The clerk gestured that he should turn the map over. Holes did. He’d noticed doodling on the back earlier but hadn’t paid close attention. Now he saw what his clerk meant.

  There were several illegible words, open to interpretation. Two words had been scribbled out, one vigorously so. The name Melanie could be faintly made out. But there was something else. The word was so incompatible with the rest of the nonsensical doodling that it took a second to absorb its meaning; that, and the fact that the construction of
the letters was different, too— outsize, combining cursive with print, the last letter, a T, repeated unnecessarily, taking on a hard, triangular shape. The word’s letters were darker than the others on the page, as if the writer had been pressing down angrily. The rest of the doodles had been scribbled in standard linear fashion, but not this. The word was scrawled diagonally. It took up most of the bottom half of the page. The first letter, a P, was bigger than the other letters and, most disconcertingly, it was backward.

  The overall impression was of an unbalanced mind at work.

  “PUNISHMENT.”

  Holes was hooked.

  OUR WALK ON THE IRON HORSE REGIONAL TRAIL STOPS ABRUPTLY in front of an electrical pole. It’s the second pole north of an intersection a couple hundred yards in the distance, the spot where the bloodhounds lost the EAR’s scent and it’s believed he entered a vehicle.

  “The homework evidence was found in this area,” says Holes.

  He has practical reasons for believing that the pages belonged to the EAR. Tracking dogs aren’t infallible, but the fact that three independent bloodhounds indicated that he escaped south down the tracks is strong evidence; more important to Holes, the route, and where the scent trail ended, is consistent with the usual distance from the target that the EAR was known to park before making an approach. John Patty was a well-respected criminalist and heavily involved in the Contra Costa County cases; if Patty collected the evidence, he must have thought it might be important. The other two items found with the homework evidence are dead ends. The length of purple yarn is a mystery, and the fragment of paper with some typing on it is illegible. But spiral notebook paper isn’t as incongruous at a sexual crime scene as one might imagine. Serial sex offenders and killers frequently take notes as they prowl for victims, sometimes even developing their own code words. More than one witness who called in a suspicious person during the EAR attacks in Sacramento described a man holding a spiral notebook. And the EAR, despite his ability to elude authorities, did drop things occasionally; whether on purpose or not is unclear: a screwdriver, a bloody Band-Aid, a ballpoint pen.

  The ricochet between rage and self-pity in “Mad is the word” is another clue. Violent criminals like the EAR, that is to say,

  serial sex offenders who escalate to homicide, are not only rare but also so varied that generalizing about their backgrounds and behavior is unwise. But common themes do exist. The future nightmare maker begins as an adolescent daydreamer. His world is bisected; violent fantasies act as a muffler against a harsh, disappointing reality. Perceived threats to his self-esteem are disproportionately internalized. Grievances are collected. He rubs his fingers over old scars.

  Violent fantasy advances to mental rehearsal. He memorizes a script and refines methods. He’s the maltreated hero in the story. Staring up at him anguished-eyed is a rotating cast of terrified faces. His distorted belief system operates around a central, vampiric tenet: his feeling of inadequacy is vanquished when he exerts complete power over a victim, when his actions elicit in her an expression of helplessness; it’s a look he recognizes, and hates, in himself.

  The majority of violent fantasizers never act. What makes the ones who do cross over? Stress factors coalesce. An emotional match is lit. The daydreamer steps out of his trance and into a stranger’s house.

  The “Mad is the word” author exhibits the kind of disproportionate emotional response common to violent offenders. A sixth-grade teacher who punished him “built a state of hatred in my heart.” The author chooses self-pitying, melodramatic words to describe his experience. “Suffer.” “Not fair.” “Dreadful.” “Horrid.”

  We begin the walk back to the car. I consider what I know of Danville, which has a trajectory similar to that of many Northern California towns. Once upon a time, it was populated by Native Americans who camped out on Mount Diablo to the northeast, but in 1854 a white man flush with gold rush earnings swooped in and bought ten thousand acres. His name was Dan. Fruit and wheat farming hung in until the 1970s, when new residential construction boomed and people moved in, transforming the

  town into one of the coziest, wealthiest suburbs of the East Bay. Holes says aerial photos he consulted didn’t show a huge construction spike in the neighborhood during the period when the EAR was prowling its backyards. The victim’s house was built in the midsixties. Danville’s quaint history was a draw. The population doubled by 1980.

  The rap on Danville today is that it’s homogeneous and status conscious. It was recently ranked number one in America for highest per capita spending on clothing.

  “Do you think he grew up in an area like this?” I ask Holes.

  “Middle class? Yeah, I think it’s likely he’s not coming from an impoverished background,” he says.

  I raise the issue of the EAR’s unmatched DNA profile. I’m in wildly speculative territory, I know, but I’ve always thought it might indicate that he operates behind a front of respectability. I prod Holes for his opinion on the DNA.

  “It surprises me,” he says. “We’ve had DNA for over ten years on the national level, and we haven’t hit on the guy.”

  “Does it surprise you there’s no familial hit either? Doesn’t that suggest someone who comes from a more straitlaced family?”—an opinion thinly veiled as a question.

  “I think that could be, versus somebody that’s constantly committing criminal acts,” he says cautiously.

  Holes and I have now spent several hours together. He’s great company. Effortless. In fact, his manner is so easygoing and mild that it takes me longer than usual to recognize his conversational patterns. When he’s not on board with a particular idea, he’ll tell me with equanimity. But when he’s uncomfortable with a line of questioning, he sidesteps more obliquely, either by not really answering or by pointing out something of interest in the landscape.

  I sense a similar deflection from him on the topic of the EAR’s socioeconomic background. Holes is a criminalist, I remind myself. He’s a professional quantifier who works with scales and calipers

  . He’s not pedantic, but when presented with lazy inferences, he separates hard fact from mud. He corrects me when I allude to the EAR’s thick calves. The witness actually said heavy thighs. Later in the day, he’ll show me, via an impressive spreadsheet, how foolhardy it is to conclude anything about the EAR’s physicality from victim statements. Eye color and hair color are all over the place. Poor lighting and trauma obscure perceptions. Physical stature is the only constant, Holes points out. The EAR was around five nine. Six feet would be considered on the tall side for a suspect. But they’d still look into him, Holes adds.

  “You always want to err on the side of caution.”

  Ever the scientist.

  Prudence and scientific accuracy await me in the future. But at this point, as we prepare to leave Danville, I’m still in theory-riffing mode. I continue to rattle off other clues that the EAR might wear a mask of normalcy. Most of the murder victims were white-collar professionals who lived in upper-class neighborhoods. He must have presented as though he belonged there. He must have had some type of regular employment. He had ways and means.

  “We know he had a vehicle,” I say.

  Holes nods, his face shadowed. He seems to be turning something over in his mind, debating internally the wisdom of sharing a thought.

  “We know he had a vehicle,” he says. What he says next he says very slowly: “I think he may have had more than that.”

  I’m momentarily unable to imagine what that could be.

  Holes tells me: “I think he may have had a plane.”

  I stumble over the first and only word that comes to mind.

  “Really!?”

  He smiles an enigmatic smile. I’d misread him. He wasn’t disapproving of my speculative questions. He was considering when to add his own narrative line.

  “I’ll elaborate at lunch,” he promises.

  First, we need to make one last stop in Contra Costa County: Walnut Creek.
r />   WALNUT CREEK

  The Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Sidney Bazett house on Reservoir Road in Hillsborough, outside San Francisco, is located at the end of a winding, tree-cloaked driveway and not visible from the street. Its extraordinariness is murmured about but rarely seen. One afternoon in 1949 the owner’s mother-in-law, who was there alone, was surprised by a knock at the front door. The visitor was a middle-aged businessman in thick-lensed glasses. A half-dozen men in professional attire with serious expressions stood behind him. The man explained that his name was Joseph Eichler. He and his family had rented the house for three years, from 1942 until 1945, when the present owners bought it. The Bazett house, with its redwood built-ins and glass walls, where daylight filtered in from so many directions and changed the mood of each room throughout the day, was a work of art that stirred Eichler. He’d never forgotten the house, he explained. In fact, living in it had changed his life. Now a merchant builder, he’d brought along his colleagues to show them the source of his inspiration. The group was invited inside. Crossing the threshold, Eichler, who got his start on Wall Street and was a notoriously tough businessman, began to cry.

  By the mid-1950s, Joseph Eichler was one of the Bay Area’s most successful developers of single-family homes in the California Modern style—post-and-beam construction, flat or low-sloping A-frame roofs, open floor plans, glass walls, atria. His ambition grew with his business. He wanted the rapidly expanding postwar middle class to enjoy clean geometric lines; he wanted to bring the

  Modernist aesthetic to the masses. Eichler began scouting central Contra Costa County for land to build a subdivision. He needed several hundred acres. More than that, he needed the right feeling. It should be an area on the cusp, unspoiled by urban sprawl but with budding infrastructure. In 1954 Eichler visited Walnut Creek. The town was essentially horse country. Ygnacio Valley Road, now a major thoroughfare, comprised two lanes occupied not infrequently by cows. But the area’s first shopping center had recently opened. There was a new hospital. Plans for a freeway were in the works.