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

by Michelle McNamara

  “Well, you know, everyone does that,” he says, his tone both conspiratorial and direct. “Everybody has wanted to see what’s going on in someone else’s house.”

  That sounds reasonable. I nod. “

  Right,” I say.

  But then Ray snaps back to his former self, his real self, and I realize that, without my noticing, he’d assumed a slight slouch and slackened his expression to appear more casual. This wasn’t

  the ham-fisted method used to coax information out of a suspect as seen on Law and Order. The abrupt transition was startling. I bought the act completely. One of Ray’s most winning mannerisms is a huge, unpredictable smile that’s the opposite of eager and therefore more gratifying when you prompt it. He got me, and he knows it. He grins.

  “They all want to tell their story, but they want to tell it to somebody that’s not going to freak out on them. When you sit there showing no emotion, kind of agreeing with them, almost like you’re enjoying what they’re telling you, they’ll talk.”

  The parade of troubled young men whom Ray questioned decades ago interests me for a specific reason.

  “You interviewed these guys, these prowlers,” I say. “Do you think you might have talked to him?”

  “No,” he says quickly.

  Then carefully, “I could have.”

  But he’s shaking his head.

  Him. The third person at every interview I conduct, the faceless killer whose tennis-shoe impressions Ray once tracked through the neighborhood, retracing the man’s path as he crept from window to window, searching for victims. Ray was deeply involved in the case of a serial killer who picked up hitchhikers, shot them in the side of the head, and then had sex with their corpses; over the course of his career, he has stood over headless bodies and examined ritualistic carvings on the decomposing skin of a young woman. Yet the only killer he mentions who made, as he says, “the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” was the one who brought me here. Him.

  That Ray doesn’t believe he talked to the unidentified man I’ve dubbed the Golden State Killer doesn’t surprise me. Every detective I’ve interviewed who’s worked the case insists the same thing. They’ve held precut ligatures he left behind and stared at his spermatozoa under a microscope. They’ve played and replayed

  audio recordings of hypnotized witnesses and survivors, listening for any throwaway clues to his identity. Decades after retirement, one detective found himself squatting in the woods outside a possible suspect’s house in Oregon, waiting for the trash to come out so he could swipe a DNA sample. The Golden State Killer haunts their dreams. He’s ruined their marriages. He’s burrowed so deeply inside their heads that they want to, or have to, believe that if they locked eyes with him, they’d know.

  “It’s kind of like a bloodhound thing,” a detective said to me. “I believe if I were at a mall and he passed by me, I’d know.”

  I explain to Ray that the reason I’m interested in his memories of young prowlers is that I recently visited Goleta, the city eight miles west of Santa Barbara on California’s Central Coast where the killer attacked three times between 1979 and 1981. All three attacks took place in an unassuming neighborhood in northeast Goleta, an area occupying less than two square miles. Shoe tracks and twine ligatures presumably dropped by accident from his pockets show that he moved along San Jose Creek, a narrow gorge that begins in the mountains to the north and meanders through the neighborhood of tract homes until emptying into the Pacific Ocean. His victims all lived close to the creek.

  I walked along the creek bed, I tell Ray, and was struck by how captivating the overgrown path, shrouded in huge, draping trees and strewn with moss-covered rocks, would be for a certain kind of suburban adolescent boy, a semiwild, underparented kid yearning for refuge. Rope swings dangled from sycamore trees. Adults who’d grown up in the neighborhood told me that in the midseventies some boys built a BMX track down there. There were secret tunnels and cement-lined drainage ditches where kids skateboarded. There were no lights, and the path was confusing and hard to follow. It felt like the kind of place you’d know only if you’d spent a lot of time down there as a kid.

  “Especially when you consider the first attack on Queen Ann

  Lane,” I say. The Queen Ann Lane house isn’t even visible from the street, as it’s located behind another house. You’d notice it only from the path along the creek.

  The mention of the October 1, 1979, attack on Queen Ann Lane hardens Ray’s otherwise matter-of-fact face.

  “You know, they could have caught him that night,” Ray says.

  That was the night he realized he had to kill. The night the victims survived and their neighbor, an off-duty FBI agent, pursued the suspect as he fled on a stolen ten-speed bike. I’ve walked the route of the pursuit and stopped at the place where the agent lost him. The agent was in radio contact with deputies who were on their way. I’ve never quite understood how he wasn’t apprehended.

  “I knew what was going to happen,” Ray says. He shakes his head. “I knew exactly what the deputies were going to do.”

  What they did was let him slip away.

  The One

  THE FIRST MOMENT OF JIM WALTHER’S* OVER THIRTY-YEAR ENTANGLEMENT with the EAR case began in Danville, in the early morning hours of February 2, 1979, when he was roused awake by Contra Costa Sheriff’s Deputy Carl Fabbri’s flashlight. Walther said he’d pulled his gray-primer-coated 1968 Pontiac LeMans off Interstate 680 to sleep after leaving his job as a brakeman for the Western Pacific Railroad. Fabbri didn’t buy the story. Walther’s car was parked on Camino Tassajara, a good mile and a half from the freeway. Why drive that far for a nap? He searched Walther’s eyes for signs of sleep. Fabbri’s hackles were up. He was patrolling the neighborhood because he’d unsuccessfully chased a prowler here the night before. Five months earlier, Sacramento’s most infamous phantom, the East Area Rapist, had writhed his way seventy miles southwest to their area. Four attacks. A thirty-two-year-old divorcée living in a corner house near the Iron Horse Regional Trail had been the most recent victim, in December. “Do you like to raise dicks?” he whispered to her. “Then why do you raise mine every time I see you?” The attack was just over a mile from where Walther was now parked.

  Deputy Fabbri ordered Walther to stay put and ran a check on him. The kid had an open warrant for outstanding vehicle-code violations. His record showed a low-grade marijuana bust

  two years earlier—in Sacramento. He was twenty-one, five ten, 150. The broad outline was looking good, if not the particulars. Fabbri and his partner placed Walther under arrest. His protests were routine white noise until Fabbri’s partner took out a Polaroid camera to snap a mug shot, and a switch flipped. Walther went apeshit. Fabbri had to physically subdue him. It was weird. The kid had a minor record. Why was he so freaked out about having his picture taken? They had to hold his head up to get the shot.

  En route to jail, Walther conducted a strange, mostly one-way conversation with his arresting officers.

  “Nobody ever catches the real criminals,” Walther told them. “They always get away.”

  DAMNING COINCIDENCES PILED ON FROM THE START. WHEN asked for his address, Walther put down Sutter Avenue, Carmichael. East Sacramento. A deputy recalled seeing a car like Walther’s distinct one in nearby San Ramon around the time of the EAR attacks there. Shortly after his arrest, Walther ditched the car and got a new one. He shut down when EAR Task Force investigators questioned him, and he lawyered up, courtesy of his mother—an overbearing woman who referred to her adult son as “my Jimmy” and who’d once nearly come to blows with his probation officer. The lawyer told investigators his client wouldn’t chew on gauze for a saliva sample because “it might be incriminating.” The task force continued to lean on Walther. He continued to resist. He volunteered in passing that his blood type was A and he wore a size 9 shoe, same as the EAR’s. Finally, in August, they called him out of his girlfriend’s apartment and told him they knew she was growing marijuan
a in there. They gave him a stark choice: either chew on gauze now, or we’re arresting her. He chewed on gauze.

  The saliva results eliminated Walther. He was a secretor. The

  EAR was a nonsecretor. The task force dropped him as a suspect and moved on to fresher dirtbags.

  * * *

  MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS LATER, PAUL HOLES QUESTIONED THAT elimination. As a veteran of the crime lab, he knew that the secretor-status testing method back then was less than ideal. In the 1980s, quality-control experts had found serious glitches in the method. In the intervening years, scientists had also discovered that a small segment of the population are aberrant secretors, individuals who may express ABO type in some of their fluids but not others. Holes felt that suspect eliminations based on secretor status were unreliable.

  Holes also had the benefit of retrospection, three decades’ worth. They knew much more about the EAR now. Holes could open Google Earth on his computer and fly over the attack locations and scenes of suspicious circumstances in chronological order, a dizzying flight from yellow pushpin to miniature blue car to little people representing footprints or witnesses. He could adjust for speed and height. He could sit at his desk and follow the killer’s trail with his eyes. The zigzag path looked random, but for someone, the One, it was not.

  Holes regrets not making a switch to the investigations unit twenty years ago, when he was first tempted. Certainty won. He had two small kids. He was climbing the ranks in forensic science. You can see why he’s chief material. He’s blond and fit, with a handsome, genial face. He never winces or eye-rolls. His parents are from Minnesota, and he retains a hint of the long o. I once referred to Rupert Murdoch and he shrugged, not recognizing the name. “We run in different circles,” he said. Looking at him, you’d never guess that his parents once gave him the book Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives as a “thinking of you” gift.

  DNA testing once required hours of tedious manual work. In a sexual assault case, for example, you would take a swab from a plastic tube, isolate the sperm, and locate the DNA markers via a dot-blot technique that involved a series of white strips, trays, and specialized washes. Increasingly, as technology advanced, robotic arms and instruments did the work. In turn, Holes had more time to dedicate to cold cases. Holes believed Walther might be the One.

  When he first came across the “homework” evidence in the Sheriff’s Property Room that spring afternoon in 2011, he had been looking for a ski mask—Walther’s ski mask. He knew that back when Walther was suspect number one, task force investigators had interviewed his friend, a guy who’d been arrested with him for selling marijuana in Sacramento in ’77. The friend gave them a few of Walther’s belongings, including a black ski mask. Walther’s DNA profile wasn’t currently in the system; Holes wondered if he could develop a profile from hairs or skin cells extracted from the mask.

  Unfortunately, Walther was in the wind. The man had disappeared off the face of the earth. He’d failed to appear for a court date related to a misdemeanor domestic violence charge in 2003, and there was a warrant out for his arrest. His driver’s license was suspended in June 2004. After that, nothing. No credit. No job trail. No welfare. Holes tried to reconstruct Walther’s messy life as best he could. He requested and received Walther’s school records and noted with interest that his sixth-grade teacher was male, somewhat unusual for the time. Holes got the teacher on the phone. The elderly man said he didn’t recall Walther. But sentence writing would fit with the kind of schoolroom punishment he meted out then, he said.

  The teacher mentioned that about ten years ago an unidentified male called him and sang “Freedom Isn’t Free,” a song he’d made unruly kids sing in class. “Remember that,” the caller said,

  and hung up. The call had upset the teacher enough that he changed his number and kept it unlisted. He told Holes he was sorry he couldn’t be more helpful.

  Holes looked up the words to the song “Freedom Isn’t Free,” by Paul Colwell.

  “There was a general by the name of George,” starts the fourth verse, “With a small band of men at Valley Forge.”

  * * *

  RON GREER* HAD TO BE THE ONE. HE WAS A THREE-PACK-A-DAY smoker living in a rundown apartment, and here they were, casually offering him what they knew through surveillance was his preferred brand of cigarettes, and he wouldn’t take a single smoke. He was tightly wound and wary. Sacramento Sheriff’s Detective Ken Clark and his partner did everything they could to relax the guy. They weren’t going to leave without eyeballing a direct DNA deposit. But Greer declined to take even a sip from a water bottle. He knows what’s up, Ken figured. Yep. Nervous and forensically wise. He’s the One.

  Greer came to them via a thirty-year-old supplemental report. Many of the investigators share the belief that the EAR’s name is lost in the paperwork somewhere, jotted down on a vehicle stop or suspicious-circumstance report. His cover story was either airtight, or he was eliminated by a lousy but accepted alibi. Ken and his partner began methodically reviewing the old reports. Greer’s name popped up early.

  He was stopped driving southbound on Sunrise Boulevard in a two-door yellow Datsun at 4:27 a.m. on April 15, 1977, just minutes after an EAR rape had been called in blocks away. He told police he was on his way to his job working as a janitor at a

  rice mill. They noted that he was extremely quiet and cooperative. They opened his trunk; their interest grew considerably. He consented to a residence search. His mother had recently died, he told them, and he was living with his sister now. Or, more specifically, on his sister’s property, in a trashed storage trailer buried in some bushes on a steep hillside in Fair Oaks. The trailer couldn’t have been more than eight feet long and wasn’t tall enough to stand up in. He seemed to have a solid work alibi for an earlier EAR rape. Still, the investigators who dealt with Greer never forgot him. They couldn’t shake the memory of what they found inside his car.

  That’s why Ken and his partner had tracked him down thirty years later. Greer had significant medical issues now. Still, no water, thank you. No cigarettes. Finally, their patience and ruses running out, they persuaded him to lick an envelope. They swabbed all his car door handles when he wasn’t looking just to be sure.

  Greer was pulled over on that spring night in 1977 near an EAR rape because he fit the general physical description of the attacker; he was a white male, twenty-five, five nine, 150. The first thing the patrol officers picked out with their flashlights was a plastic bottle of hand lotion on the front seat of his car. There was a white mask, similar to the kind used for painting or surgery, on the passenger side dashboard. When they popped his trunk they found rope in an opened cellophane wrapper. There was also a pair of tennis shoes.

  And two large, zippered bags. Inside the bags, they found a handgun and a hunting knife.

  Ken and his partner sent the DNA collected from Greer to the crime lab. They waited. The results came back.

  Unbelievable.

  Greer wasn’t the One.

  As I’ve said, falling for a suspect is a lot like the first surge of blind love in a relationship. Focus narrows to a single face. The

  world and its practical sounds are a wan soundtrack to the powerful silent biopic you’re editing in your mind at all times. No amount of information on the object of your obsession is enough. You crave more. Always more. You note his taste in shoes and even drive by his house, courtesy of Google Maps. You engage in wild confirmation bias. You project. A middle-aged white man smiling and cutting a cake decorated with candles in a picture posted on Facebook isn’t celebrating his birthday, but holding a knife.

  I first sensed the parallels when a weary-looking Larry Pool admitted to me that he used to “feel more” about suspects in the beginning, when as an Orange County cold-case detective, he first got the Original Night Stalker case in 1997. He was “fresher then,” he said, his face drawn, sounding like a middle-aged serial dater toughened by the vagaries of love.

  Pool recalled an early mo
ment of excitement in the summer of 2001, when he got a call asking him to report to the assistant sheriff’s office. Such calls always meant good news. When he walked in, a group turned to smile at him—his captain, his lieutenant, members of the administrative staff, and most tellingly, Mary Hong, the Orange County criminalist who developed the Original Night Stalker’s DNA profile. Hong worked in a different building.

  Pool pumped his fist in the air before he even closed the door. “Yes!” he said. He’d worked the case nonstop, maybe even obsessively, for three years by then.

  There’s been a fingerprint match, the assistant sheriff told Pool. A print left on a lamp at one of the East Area Rapist’s Danville scenes was believed to be the killer’s. The victim had heard him turn on the light; the lamp had been recently unpacked and wouldn’t have had anyone else’s prints on it. A retired investigator from Contra Costa had fished out an old copy of the print and recently sent it down to Orange County.

  “Excellent,” Pool said.

  The suspect died of natural causes five years ago, the assistant sheriff continued, and he slid the man’s file across the table toward Pool. Pool, who knew more about the killer than anyone in the room, opened the folder. Everyone stared at him expectantly. Pool experienced his first pang of disappointment.

  “Oh, man. I don’t like his age,” Pool said. The suspect was born in 1934. Pool flipped through the report. He didn’t like the guy’s criminal history, either. Weapons charges. Trafficking. Bank robberies. The guy had been in witness protection. Pool wasn’t feeling it.

  He could sense the mood in the room shift.

  “I don’t care for him as a suspect,” Pool admitted. “But who knows, maybe that’s why we haven’t found the guy. He’s not what we expect.”