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

by Michelle McNamara

  “Find out where this man’s buried,” the assistant sheriff said.

  “Got it, boss,” said Pool.

  Pool discovered that the dead suspect had been a friend of the victim’s boyfriend. The two men had had a falling-out several weeks before the attack. The victim and her boyfriend had their stereo stolen around the same time, and Pool theorized that the suspect was the robber, probably exacting some revenge on his friend for their fight. He must have touched the lamp when he was in the house stealing the stereo. He wasn’t the killer, just a lousy friend with a burglary habit.

  But Pool’s bosses wanted certainty.

  “We gotta dig him up and check his DNA,” the assistant sheriff said.

  Pool got on a plane and flew to Baltimore to exhume the body. This was the first time the Orange County Sheriff’s Department had dug up a suspect—victims, yes, but never a suspect before. Baltimore Homicide assisted in the exhumation. When they opened the vault, the shoop sound reminded Pool of a huge Pepsi

  can opening. The corpse was in remarkably good condition, just covered in mold. But the smell.

  “Imagine the worst decomp times ten,” Pool said.

  No wonder the Baltimore Homicide detectives had lit up cigars as they crested the hill where the man was buried.

  Pool packed the suspect’s teeth and hair in his carry-on bag. The femur and parts of flesh they put on dry ice in a box, checked in at the airport. Back in Orange County, when Pool went to grab the box as it came around the baggage carousel, he discovered that it was leaking.

  DNA proved Pool’s suspicion. The dead fingerprint guy wasn’t the One.

  * * *

  DOUG FIEDLER* HAD TO BE THE ONE.

  An e-mail materialized in my inbox one night at 12:01 a.m. from “John Doe.”

  John Doe never explained his preference for anonymity. He was concerned with another matter: he’d heard me on a podcast talking about the case, and wanted to share what he considered to be a good tip. “Worldcat.org is a valuable research tool for finding what libraries carry a specific book or media. When you search for Det. Crompton’s Sudden Terror it gives the following locations Salem, Oregon, Post Falls, Idaho, Hayden Lake, Idaho, Sidney, Nebraska, Los Gatos, California. Maybe EAR-ONS used his library to acquire the book to avoid buying it online?”

  It was an interesting idea. Sudden Terror was self-published; it was unlikely that any library would carry it without a borrower specifically requesting that the library acquire it. I was pretty sure I knew who was responsible for Oregon and California (retired

  detectives), so I concentrated on Idaho and Nebraska. I knew the libraries weren’t going to share the names of the borrowers with me, as it’s important to them to protect patrons’ privacy. I stared at my computer. A blank search bar waited for me to find a way to use it. I decided to enter the relevant zip codes along with the name of a high-profile group I felt the EAR might have joined in the intervening years: registered sex offenders.

  For about an hour, I scrolled through the rough mugs of the perverted and depraved. The exercise was feeling like a waste of time. Then I saw him. I experienced a flash, the first since I’d started investigating the case: You.

  I eyeballed his stats. The man, Doug Fiedler, was born in 1955. He was the right height and weight. He was originally from California, and in the late eighties was convicted there of several sexual offenses, including rape by force or fear and lewd and lascivious acts with a child under the age of fourteen.

  From a genealogy website, I learned that his mother was from a large family from Sacramento County. My pulse quickened with every new piece of information I gathered. In the early 1980s, and possibly earlier, she lived in north Stockton, close to the EAR rapes there. Doug’s ex-wife had addresses all over Orange County, including one in Dana Point, just 1.7 miles from the house where Keith and Patty Harrington were murdered.

  He had an animal tattoo on his arm that could easily be mistaken for a bull (during hypnosis a young girl who saw the EAR in her house recalled a tattoo she thought looked like the Schlitz Malt Liquor bull on his forearm).

  I ran his name through a Google News archive. I nearly jumped out of my chair when I saw the results. An August 1969 Los Angeles Times story detailed how a nineteen-year-old boy was hit on the head with a frying pan and stabbed to death by his younger half brother, who had gone to his mother’s aid during a family fight. The younger brother? Doug Fiedler.

  Bludgeoning. Knife. The EAR did a lot strange things during the commission of his crimes, but in my opinion one of the weirdest was his occasional whimpering and crying. Those occasional plaintive calls amid the sobs: “Mommy! Mommy!”

  Doug now lived with his elderly mother in a small town in Idaho. Google Street View revealed it to be a modest white house obscured by overgrown weeds.

  I didn’t say it explicitly, but when I e-mailed Pool about Doug Fiedler, I felt there was a very good chance I was handing him the killer.

  “Nice catch,” Pool wrote back. “Good profile and physical. I just confirmed via phone and other data that he’s been eliminated by DNA (CODIS).”

  For hours I’d felt as if I was hurtling down the street with nothing in my way, like catching a series of green lights. Now the transmission had just fallen out. The wisdom of the time traveler, I realized, can be deceiving. We return to the past armed with more information and cutting-edge innovations. But there are hazards in having so much wizardry at hand. The feast of data means there are more circumstances to bend and connect. You’re tempted to build your villain with the abundance of pieces. It’s understandable. We’re pattern-seekers, all of us. We glimpse the rough outline of what we seek and we get snagged on it, sometimes remaining stuck when we could get free and move on.

  “Keep throwing me suspects like him!” Pool wrote.

  He was letting me down gently. He’d been there. After he told me how excited he’d get about certain suspects when he first started on the case, I asked how he responded now, fifteen years later. He mimed getting a report and looking it over, taciturn and severe.

  “Okay,” he said curtly, and pretended to throw it in the pile.

  But I’d seen him reenact another moment, the one when he walked through his boss’s door, when he spotted the group assembled there for him, on the cusp of a moment you can spend a

  career in law enforcement imagining but never experience. I knew how quickly he sometimes got back to me through e-mail when something interesting popped up.

  I’d seen him imitate that fist pump and “Yes!” I knew that he quietly longed for that moment again.

  Los Angeles, 2014

  “WHAT PEOPLE FORGET ABOUT ROCKY IS THAT FIRST SCENE, WHEN he goes out to train. His legs are killing him. He’s past his prime. It’s freezing. He’s staggering. He can barely get up those steps.”

  Patton was trying to buoy my spirits by telling me about Rocky. I’d been talking to him about dead ends. How many could the average person face before they gave up?

  “But Rocky just kept getting up every morning and doing it. Over and over. It’s like with these cold-case guys. You invest all this time and energy. You call around. You dig through boxes. You coax out stories. You swab. Then, the answer is no. You can’t let that kill you. You have to wake up the next morning, get your coffee, clear your desk, and do it all over again.”

  Patton was talking about himself too, I realized, the way he kept getting back onstage as a young comedian, for no money, to hostile crowds. He had that burning determination in him, and he’s partial to stories about people who do too. Sometimes when he’s standing at the sink doing the dishes, I notice his lips moving but there’s no sound.

  “What are you doing there?” I asked him once.

  “Working out a joke,” he said.

  Starting over. Making it better. Doing it again.

  “Rocky didn’t beat Apollo Creed, remember,” Patton said. “But he shocked him, and the world, because he refused to give up.”

  We w
ere having dinner to celebrate our eighth wedding anniversary. Patton raised his glass of wine. I could tell he hoped to shake me from my listless defeat in the face of dead ends.

  “You have a rogues’ gallery of villains in your future,” he said.

  “Stop it!” I said. “Don’t say that.”

  His intentions were good, I knew. But I couldn’t, or refused, to imagine the future.

  “I don’t want a rogues’ gallery of villains,” I said. “He’s the only one.”

  The moment I said it, I realized how sick that sounded. What I meant was that after the EAR, I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to feverishly search, to breathlessly catch a series of green lights only to keep crashing, ever again.

  From under the table, Patton brought out a large present wrapped beautifully in vintage wrapping paper. He’s an amazing gift giver. He loves to find young artists and artisans and collaborate with them on unique gifts. One year he had made what we jokingly refer to as an inaction figure of me—I’m sitting in bed in my pajamas holding a Starbucks vanilla latte, my laptop open to my true-crime website. Another time he had a young metal worker build me a wooden box. The house we lived in for seven years is depicted in a bronze plate on the front. Inside are a series of hidden miniature drawers, each containing mementos from our life together—ticket stubs, Post-it notes.

  Last year he commissioned artist Scott Campbell to paint three small watercolors of me facing off against notorious crime figures. In one I’m holding a cup of coffee and staring down the Zodiac Killer. In another, I clutch a notebook as if I’m about to interrogate D. B. Cooper, the infamous plane hijacker. And in the third, I’m holding my laptop, a curious smile on my face, standing face-to-face with the One, masked and unknowable, my bane, the EAR.

  I opened this year’s present. Patton had had my Los Angeles

  magazine article professionally bound and placed in a custom-made black slipcase. The case had a compartment where I could store the most important notes from my story. A DVD of an interview I did on the local news was in a bottom drawer.

  I realize later that for two years in a row my wedding anniversary gift has been, in some way or another, about the EAR.

  But that’s not even the most telling sign of how much he’s come to dominate my life. That would be the fact that I’ve forgotten to get Patton as much as a card.

  Sacramento, 2014

  HOLES DUG RELENTLESSLY INTO WALTHER’S BACKGROUND. THE LOCATION of Walther’s family’s home on Sutter Avenue in Carmichael was a central buffer zone around which the EAR preyed. In the midseventies, Walther helped his mom in her job managing low-income apartment complexes in Rancho Cordova; one of the complexes was next door to an EAR attack. Holes learned that in May 1975 Walther was in a bad car accident in Sacramento that resulted in scars on his face. Victim number seven had tried reverse psychology and told the EAR he was good at sex. He responded that people always made fun of him for being small, a presumably truthful statement, because he was indeed underendowed. The EAR also mentioned to her that “something happened to my face.”

  Four attacks were a half mile from Del Campo High School, where Walther went to school. The father of one of the victims taught at the continuation school that Walther transferred to after dropping out of Del Campo. Walther worked in 1976 at a Black Angus restaurant that two victims mentioned to detectives was a frequent dining location for them.

  Walther began working for the Western Pacific Railroad in 1978; the job took him to Stockton, Modesto, and through Davis (on his way to Milpitas), just as the EAR began branching out in those areas. In August 1978, he received two speeding tickets in Walnut Creek. The EAR’s East Bay attacks in that area started

  two months later. A court date related to one of Walther’s Walnut Creek traffic tickets occurred two weeks before the attack there.

  In 1997 Walther was pulled over for running a stop sign. Two steak knives were found in a duct-tape sheath in his waistband. Court documents from his domestic violence arrest reveal that he threatened his ex-wife, saying, “I’m going to cut you up into little pieces.”

  “Be quiet or I’ll cut you up,” the EAR said. He frequently threatened to cut off ears, toes, and fingers.

  Walther was either dead or making a Herculean effort not to be found. Holes repeatedly called coroner’s offices to ask if they had any similar-looking John Does. Finally, he tracked down Walther’s only child, an estranged daughter. A detective from the Contra Costa Investigations Unit told the daughter they were looking for her dad because he was owed money from a jail stint he did in 2004. The daughter said she hadn’t spoken to Walther since 2007. He called her once from a pay phone, she said. He was homeless in Sacramento at the time.

  Holes asked Sacramento law enforcement agencies if they could dig up any paperwork at all on Walther; transients frequently have small interactions with police. If Walther was homeless in the Sacramento area, his name was probably jotted down on some report. Maybe the notation never made it into the system, but it was buried there somewhere. Finally, Holes got the call.

  “We don’t have Walther,” the officer said, “but his brother is listed as a witness in a crime. He lives in a car behind a Union 76 in Antelope.”

  Holes took out a copy of the brother’s property deed, which he had in his file on Walther. There was no mortgage associated with the house, as it was passed to the brother through his father. Holes was confused.

  “Why would Walther’s brother be homeless?” Holes asked out loud. There was a pause on the phone.

  “Are you absolutely sure it was Walther’s brother you were talking to?” Holes asked.

  Soon after, the Sacramento Sheriff’s Office called Holes, the call he’d been waiting for. They’d approached Walther’s brother with serious expressions and a mobile fingerprint device, and he’d crumpled and thrown up his hands. He confessed. The thumbprint confirmed it—the homeless man was Jim Walther. They swabbed him and rushed the DNA sample to the lab.

  Holes was taking me on a driving tour of the relevant East Bay locations when he stopped the car and pointed out the exact spot in Danville where Walther was found sleeping in his parked Pontiac LeMans on February 2, 1979. Holes still has questions that nag him. Why would someone go underground for eight years just to avoid a thirty-day sentence?

  But the most important question, the one he spent eighteen months investigating, has been answered.

  “He wasn’t the EAR,” Holes said. He shook his head. “But I tell you, he was the EAR’s shadow.”

  We stared at the spot.

  “You’re sure they did it right?” I asked about the DNA test.

  Holes paused for a fraction of a moment.

  “Sacramento is very, very good at what they do,” he said.

  We drove on.

  Sacramento, 1978

  DETECTIVE KEN CLARK AND I WERE STANDING OUTSIDE THE SCENE of a double homicide that occurred in east Sacramento in February 1978 when he interrupted his train of thought to ask, “Do you support Obama?” We smiled at each other for a moment and then both started laughing. He shrugged off our political difference and kept pouring forth. Clark was a nonstop chatterer. I didn’t get a word in edgewise, and that worked to my advantage. We stood outside the yard where Clark believes the East Area Rapist shot a young couple to death. The Maggiore murders were never conclusively linked to the EAR, but Clark recently found police reports showing EAR-like prowling and break-ins in the area that night, moving closer and closer until Katie and Brian Maggiore were mysteriously gunned down while out walking their dog. Witnesses got a good glimpse of the suspect. When a composite was released, the EAR suddenly moved west to Contra Costa County. Though Paul Holes already told me he doesn’t buy the “scared away” theory, Clark thinks he was spooked. He shows me the composite. “I think this is the closest image we have of him.”

  Clark shows me the old police reports he’s now digging through for clues. They include traffic stops and Peeping Tom incidents. So much wasn’t
considered relevant then. Clark can’t explain why. It kills him. “They let a good suspect go because his sister-in-law said she once went skinny-dipping with him and she thought he

  had a decent-size penis.” (The EAR did not). “Another, I’m not kidding, had ‘too big a lower lip.’”

  Sacramento teems with angles to explore. What brought him here? Is it a coincidence that all branches of the military transferred their navigation training to Mather Air Force Base on July 1, 1976, just as the rapes began? What about California State University–Sacramento? Their academic calendar dovetails perfectly with the crimes (he never attacked during a school holiday). Using new technology, a geographic profiler pinpoints streets where he believes the EAR may have lived. I revisit the neighborhoods. I talk to old-timers. I feed what I find to the laptop DIY detectives engaged in the hunt.

  [EDITOR’S NOTE: Michelle McNamara died on April 21, 2016.]

  Part Three

  [EDITOR’S NOTE: When Michelle died, she was midway through the writing of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. To prepare the book for release, Michelle’s lead researcher, Paul Haynes, aka the Kid, and acclaimed investigative journalist Billy Jensen, who was a friend of Michelle’s, worked together to tie up loose ends and organize the materials Michelle left behind. The following chapter was written collaboratively by Haynes and Jensen.]

  A WEEK AFTER MICHELLE’S DEATH, WE GAINED ACCESS TO HER HARD drives and began exploring her files on the Golden State Killer. All 3,500 of them. That was on top of the dozens of notebooks, the legal pads, the scraps of paper, and thousands of digitized pages of police reports. And the thirty-seven boxes of files she had received from the Orange County prosecutor, which Michelle lovingly dubbed the Mother Lode.