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

by Michelle McNamara

  In a walnut orchard in the northeast part of town, across from Heather Farm Park, Eichler’s search came to an end. Mount Diablo shimmered in the distance. Here was the perfect place, he thought, for a community of creative professionals, progressive types who appreciated modern art and design, people who were tired of living in cookie-cutter houses where you could find your way around blindfolded. The subdivision of 563 houses, 375 Eichler homes, the rest standard tract, was completed in 1958. A brochure shows a beautiful woman in a flowing dress gazing out a wall of glass into her tidy backyard. The roof is post and beam; the chairs, Eames. Eichler named his new community Rancho San Miguel.

  The neighborhood had its detractors. Some thought the Eichler design, with its blank wall to the street and orientation toward the backyard, was antisocial. Waving from the front window at neighbors was no longer possible. Others thought the houses were ugly and resembled garages. Nevertheless, Eichlers, as people call them, have developed a devoted cult following, and Rancho San Miguel, with its parks and good schools, has remained a consistently coveted place to live. But the unusual homes, with rear glass walls, sliding doors, and high fences sealing off individual backyards, have also attracted another kind of following, not forward-thinking but darkly motivated, a fact that

  isn’t mentioned publicly but has been puzzled over privately for years.

  Holes and I pull up to the site of the first Walnut Creek EAR attack, an Eichler in Rancho San Miguel.

  “I call this the Bermuda Triangle of Contra Costa County,” says Holes. “We’ve had other serial killers attack in this same neighborhood. A missing girl. A known serial-killer attack. A housewife in 1966 that was strangled and her panties torn off. The two EAR attacks. And it’s like, why?”

  In the spring of 1979 a seventeen-year-old girl who lived in Rancho San Miguel in Walnut Creek began to receive a series of anonymous calls. What was especially unsettling was that the calls followed her to homes where she was babysitting. The parents would leave, the kids put to bed. A ring would knife through the quiet. “Hello?” The familiar blankness was always followed by a click, the only sign there was a human being with intent on the other line.

  The girl sat regularly for two families who lived in Eichlers across from each other on El Divisadero. In early May, a nightgown and telephone directory went missing from her own house; even so, she didn’t feel the hot breath of a threat moving in close. The thing about Eichlers is, they draw your attention to the outside. Walls of glass display occupants like rare museum objects. At night the play of light against dark means your view is limited to your reflection. The opaqueness fires the queasy imagination.

  In five months, the movie When a Stranger Calls would be released. Based on a well-known urban legend, the story involves a teenage babysitter who’s tormented by a series of increasingly sinister calls. “Have you checked the children?” an unidentified man asks. The off-white rotary phone sits menacingly in the living room like a time bomb. The drip of fear spikes at the end of the opening scene, when the detective trying to help the babysitter calls her back with an urgent message.

  “We’ve traced the call. It’s coming from inside the house.”

  Animal fear writ modern.

  When a Stranger Calls hadn’t come out yet on June 2, 1979. No anonymous calls came for the babysitter in Walnut Creek that Saturday night; there was no sense that a silent phone meant that an alternate approach was being considered and planned.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table when she heard footsteps or a man’s voice; she couldn’t remember which came first, only that he shot up suddenly, as if spring-loaded from the dark hallway and into her terrified heart.

  He said little and repeated what little he said. He communicated with jerky, unpredictable bursts of violence. He shoved her head down. He tied her wrists tightly with plastic cable ties. He bit her left nipple. Criminalists are required to take photographs of victims at the scene. No one looks happy, but everyone looks into the camera. Not the babysitter. Her gaze is averted, eyes anchored low. They seem unlikely to ever come up.

  A large open field and a school were across the street at the time. The house next door was empty and posted for lease. Dogs tracked the EAR’s scent around the corner, where he’d evidently gotten into a vehicle; he’d parked in front of a house where a pool was being built.

  Police patrolling the neighborhood after the rape stopped a drunk driver with a knife and sheath. They stopped a man with his pants down who said he was looking for his lost cat. In his car were photographs of unsuspecting women taken with a zoom lens. They were just two of the dark compulsives scuttling through the suburbs at night, like the waterways cemented over but still churning underneath Walnut Creek.

  Twenty-three days later, the EAR returned to Rancho San Miguel.

  Investigators who’ve worked the lead on serial cases say there are times when they feel that the offender is speaking to them, as

  if their private thoughts have been telegraphed and he’s responding. It’s a wordless dialogue familiar to obsessive competitors, an exchange of small gestures whose meaning only the two people locked in battle understand. In the first leg of the race between cop and at-large criminal, the investigator is the clock-watcher with the anxious, racing mind, and the offender is the string puller with the haunting smirk.

  The second Eichler was just a hundred feet from the first. The victim was a thirteen-year-old this time. Her father and sister were in the house, unaware of what was taking place. The tracking dogs yanked their handlers around a corner and stopped abruptly in a familiar place: the same spot as before, in front of the house where the pool was being built.

  The details of the crime coalesced to form a disembodied shiteating grin.

  “Has he ever gone back?” the thirteen-year-old asked the investigators interviewing her after the attack.

  “Never,” said the first investigator.

  “Never, ever, ever,” said the second.

  “The safest house in the area,” said the first.

  As if any house was ever going to feel safe again.

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD DOESN’T FIT EXACTLY WITH HOLES’S CONSTRUCTION angle. The Eichlers were all built in the 1950s. Rancho San Miguel didn’t have active development going on at the time, though there was some adjacent development. It’s two miles from the 680 freeway.

  “It’s a little off the beaten track,” says Holes, looking around. “Something is pulling him out to this outside neighborhood.”

  The drive through Contra Costa County is different for Holes than it is for me. I’m seeing the neighborhoods for the first time. Holes is driving through old murders. Every “Welcome to . . .”

  sign is accompanied by the memory of forensic evidence, of blurry-eyed afternoons spent in the lab hunched over a microscope. Walnut Creek particularly resonates for Holes, reminding him of the mystery of a missing girl.

  Elaine Davis was going to sew a brass button on her navy peacoat. Her mother left their home on Pioneer Avenue, in north Walnut Creek, to pick up Elaine’s father from work. It was ten thirty p.m. on December 1, 1969, a Monday night. When the Davises returned home, Elaine, a seventeen-year-old straight-A student with sandy blonde hair and a heart-shaped face, was gone. Her three-year-old sister was still asleep in her crib. The house appeared undisturbed. Elaine, who was nearsighted, had left her badly needed glasses behind. Items of Elaine’s began to surface. The button she intended to sew on her coat was found in a field behind her house. Her brown loafer with a gold buckle was picked up on Interstate 680 in Alamo. A housewife spotted a petite girl’s navy peacoat on a remote stretch of highway in the Santa Cruz Mountains, seventy-five miles away.

  Eighteen days after Elaine disappeared, a female body floated ashore at Lighthouse Point in Santa Cruz. A radiologist studied the bones and concluded that the woman was twenty-five to thirty years old. It wasn’t Elaine. The Jane Doe was buried in an unmarked grave. The Davis disappearance went cold.

  Thirty-one
years later, a Walnut Creek police detective nearing retirement brought the case file to Holes, who reviewed it. Holes concluded that the radiologist was wrong and couldn’t have made an accurate determination of age. Holes joined other officials in an effort to exhume the Jane Doe’s body. Twenty-five feet deep on the side of a hill, shovels connected with a plastic body bag filled with bones.

  Elaine’s father was dead. Her mother lived in Sacramento. Two days after the exhumation, Walnut Creek detectives asked to

  speak with her. Elaine’s younger sister came in from out of town for the meeting. The detectives told the mother and sister the news: we’ve identified Elaine.

  “The family buries her,” says Holes. “A week later, Mom dies.”

  We leave Walnut Creek, heading north. Mount Diablo, a mass of strange protrusions towering above valleys cut precisely into planned communities, recedes. Black mountain cats are said to slink among the high rocks on Mount Diablo. Mysterious lights have been glimpsed. In 1873 a live frog was found partially embedded in a slab of limestone 228 feet underground, according to local legend. In late August and early September, just after the first fall rain, hundreds of male tarantulas emerge from holes in the ground. They skitter through mint-scented mountain sage in search of burrows delicately draped in silk, where females are ready to mate. Visitors armed with flashlights flock to the mountain around sunset or just after dark, the best time to see the tarantulas. Bats wheel over gray pines and live oaks. Great horned owls hoot solemnly. Beams from flashlights weaving across trails sometimes catch a piece of earth that’s moving; closer inspection reveals the scuttling of saucer-size tarantulas. The male tarantulas never return to their holes. They mate as much as they can and then die, from starvation or cold.

  We cross the bridge to Solano County, where we’ll turn east toward Davis.

  “On a clear day, you can see Sacramento from here. And the Sierras,” says Holes.

  He lives halfway between Sacramento and the East Bay. On weekends he often finds himself visiting the crime scenes.

  “I like to drive,” he says. Whenever he’s in Southern California, he visits the crime scenes there too. During trips to Disneyland with his family, when the kids grow drowsy, his wife oversees naptime at the hotel while Holes takes a drive. To the Northwood subdivision in Irvine, to 13 Encina, where Janelle Cruz lived, or

  to 35 Columbus, where Drew Witthuhn cleaned up his sister-in-law Manuela’s blood.

  “Each time I’m trying to look for Why here?” Holes says. “Why this?”

  DAVIS

  [EDITOR’S NOTE: This section features selections from the audio transcript from the trip to Davis.]

  PAUL HOLES: This is how the EAR would have traveled down to the East Bay. Along I-80, right here.

  MICHELLE: If you had to guess his point of origin, in terms of where he went to school . . . I won’t keep you to it. I’m just curious.

  PAUL HOLES: If I were to guess? Sac State. If he was college-educated. Locationwise, if you take a look at where his attacks are, you know, you have the whole Rancho Cordova cluster. You have the attacks along La Riviera. You have the attacks that are right there, right by Sac State. Sac State seems likely. Now, you have some community colleges up in the Sacramento area that he could have gone to. Uh, high school? Uh . . . whew. There’s so many possibilities.

  MICHELLE: I mean, you don’t feel like, maybe he grew up in Goleta?

  PAUL HOLES: I wouldn’t say that, but when I look at the Sac cases, and—this is one thing I want to show you at some point—when you do a flyover of the order of his attacks in Sacramento, you see very early on, he is literally crisscrossing Sacramento. He is showing intimate familiarity with the area.

  MICHELLE: He’s not showing up just to go to Sac State.

  PAUL HOLES: No, no. I think he has a history up in Sacramento. Now, does he have a history in Goleta? I mean, anything’s possible. We don’t know. But down south, Goleta is—for me—that’s ground zero down south. And there’s something in Irvine. Some reason why he has two cases there.

  MICHELLE: And that are not far apart at all.

  PAUL HOLES: No. No. Ventura and Laguna Niguel are the two outliers. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Holes is referring to the Dana Point case here; some people mistakenly consider Dana Point part of Laguna Niguel.]

  PAUL HOLES: Davis/Modesto, to me, is significant.

  MICHELLE: Modesto was just once or twice?

  PAUL HOLES: Twice.

  MICHELLE: Okay.

  PAUL HOLES: So, when I did my initial geographic assessment, I broke the EAR into phases. The first phase being up in Sacramento. Second phase being Modesto/Davis. Third phase being East Bay, and then the fourth phase being down in Southern California. When you get to this phase two—I lump Stockton into Sacramento because the EAR goes back to Sacramento after Stockton, but then once he hits in Modesto, he doesn’t go back to Sacramento until after he comes down into the East Bay. And he’s toggling back and forth between Modesto and Davis. It’s a hundred ten driving miles between those two cities. And between the second Modesto attack and the second Davis attack, it’s just twenty-two hours’ difference. Why is he toggling back and forth? I think it’s work-related. He’s not doing this to throw law enforcement off. I think there’s a work-related reason why he’s being sent to Modesto and having to go to Davis, and going back and forth.

  MICHELLE: There’s only a twenty-two-hour difference?

  PAUL HOLES: Twenty-two-hour difference.

  MICHELLE: Wow. I didn’t know it was so close in time.

  PAUL HOLES: And it just so happens, in those two cases, and

  only those two cases . . . In the Modesto case, you have the cab driver that picks up the strange man from the airport, who he drops off and is last seen headed toward new construction under way that’s just south of where the victims are attacked. And in the Davis case, that’s where the footprints lead back from the victim’s house to the UC-Davis airport. Shoe prints. That’s what I’m going to show you. So, is it possible that you’ve got the EAR flying into Modesto for that one attack, and then flying up to UC-Davis for the second attack?

  MICHELLE: For work?

  PAUL HOLES: For work. And, what does that say about who he is?

  MICHELLE: Yeah.

  PAUL HOLES: Well, your common joe ain’t flying an airplane.

  MICHELLE: No.

  PAUL HOLES: Your common joe ain’t producing a diagram that is, “How should I lay out this land?”

  MICHELLE: Right.

  PAUL HOLES: It takes somebody with resources. Because when you read the case file on the EAR, you don’t think this is somebody of wealth, right?

  MICHELLE: Right.

  PAUL HOLES: I don’t get that. This seems contradictory to that. But that’s what the EAR was about. Everything about him was misdirection.

  MICHELLE: So, you’re leaning toward thinking he had more resources?

  PAUL HOLES: I think he has . . . well, I think if this turns out EAR was doing this not for just a school project, but he’s actually looking at developing land and working for a developer, he’s at least minimally hooked in to the company at a level where he’s got a lot of say in that company.

  PAUL HOLES: So, this is Village Homes in Davis. Village Homes is a very famous development. What I’m showing you is, coincidentally, an aerial photo of Village Homes as it was in between the first and second Davis attacks. So, literally, they just happened to take this picture eight days before attack number thirty-six. This is what it looked like. And look at all of this new construction that’s going on just north of the attack. I’ll take you out and show you the whole airport thing.

  PAUL HOLES: The Stockton victim I’ve been talking to, she worked for a major developer in the Central Valley. The victim did a lot of work for him. She ended up leaving his company when she got pregnant. I was showing this diagram [the “homework” evidence map] to a friend of mine who works in development. He told me, “This was done by a professional. . . . He’s draft
ing these symbols.” Now, this is an opinion that’s coming from a forensic expert in the construction business. So I put a lot of credence in that opinion.

  MICHELLE: I think you’re right. I don’t believe this is a fantasy.

  PAUL HOLES: I don’t think so. You know, you have a landscape architect from UC-Davis going, “There’s unique features in here that are only seen in Village Homes.”

  MICHELLE: Oh really?

  PAUL HOLES: Yes. And you’ll see this when we go out there. Village Homes is a very unusual development. So, you have the EAR going and attacking there. Could it be possible that the EAR is going to Village Homes and when he sees some of those features, he incorporates those in this diagram, for whatever he’s working on?

  MICHELLE: Right. As something he would submit, along the lines of “Hey, we should do this,” or something like that?

  PAUL HOLES: Yeah.

  Holes arrives at the apartment complex where the first Davis attack took place.

  This attack, number thirty-four, occurred at approximately three fifty a.m. on June 7, 1978—two days after the EAR’s first attack in Modesto. The victim was a twenty-one-year-old UC-Davis student who lived in a multistory apartment building, which Larry Pool would later deem a “structural anomaly”—as this was the only time the EAR was known to have targeted such a dwelling.