I'll Be Gone in the Dark(16)
Terry’s stomach tightened.
“What did he look like?” Terry asked.
Tom described him. Tall. From India. A real creep.
“He was right there when we found her!” Terry said.
Tom’s color drained. He couldn’t believe it. He remembered
clearly that, in the clamor after the discovery of the body, the neighbor, who appeared freshly showered and was dressed in a robe, came out his back door to survey the police cars. He’d turned to Tom and his family, who were out on their back porch.
“Did he say anything?” Terry asked.
Tom nodded.
“What’s going on here?” the neighbor said.
*
THEY NEVER CAUGHT HER KILLER. AND THOSE PIECES OF HER SHATTERED Walkman that I picked up at her crime scene are jangling around in my head thirty years later as I steer my rental car onto Capitol Avenue in Sacramento. I take it east, out of town, until it turns into Folsom Boulevard. I stay on Folsom, past Sac State and the Sutter Center for Psychiatry, past the empty lots of scrub and scattered oak trees. Running parallel on my right is the Gold Line, a light-rail transit system that runs from downtown to Folsom, twenty-five miles east. The route is historic. The tracks were once used for the Sacramento Valley Railroad, built in 1856, the first steam railroad to connect the city with the mining camps in the Sierras. Crossing Bradshaw Road, I spot signs reading PAWN and 6 POCKET SPORTS BAR. Across the road are petroleum storage tanks behind a rusty chain-link fence. I’m at my destination. Where it all started: the city of Rancho Cordova.
Sacramento, 1976–1977
IN THE SEVENTIES, KIDS WHO DIDN’T LIVE HERE CALLED IT RANCHO Cambodia. The American River bisects the east side of Sacramento County, and Rancho Cordova, on the south bank, is cut off from the leafier, more genteel suburbs on the other side of the river. The area began as a Mexican land grant of five thousand acres for farming. In 1848, after James W. Marshall, thirty-five miles upriver, glimpsed glittering metal flakes in a water-wheel drain and declared “I have found it,” the gold dredges descended on Rancho Cordova, leaving huge piles of river rock behind. For a while, it was a vineyard. Mather Air Force Base opened in 1918. But it was the Cold War that really changed Rancho Cordova. In 1953 Aerojet, the rocket and missile-propulsion manufacturer, opened its headquarters here, and with it came a boom in residential housing for its employees, the town’s twisty roads (Zinfandel Drive, Riesling Way) suddenly paved and neatly divided into modest single-story tract houses. Everyone’s family seemed associated with the military or Aerojet.
A rougher element lurked. A man who grew up on La Gloria Way in the midseventies remembers the day the ice cream man who worked around Cordova Meadows Elementary School disappeared. Turns out the guy with the long hair, big beard, and mirrored aviator glasses who had been selling the kids Popsicles was selling LSD and cocaine to a different set of clientele, and he was hauled away by the cops. Stories of growing up in Sacramento
in the seventies are often bait-and-switches like this, a tangle of sweet and scary, small-town postcards with foreboding on the back.
On hot summer days, we waded in the American River, a woman recalls; then another memory, this one of running along the trails by the river and coming upon a homeless camp in the dense brush. Parts of the river were said to be haunted. A group of teenage girls hung out at Land Park and watched shirtless boys wax their cars; they went to Days on the Green in Oakland, that era’s Lollapalooza, to see the Eagles or Peter Frampton or Jethro Tull. They drove up to the Sutterville Road levee and drank beer. They were on the levee drinking the night of April 14, 1978, when a convoy of squad cars, sirens blaring, flew past them on the road below. The convoy was endless. “Never saw anything like it before, or since,” one of the teenagers, now a fifty-two-year-old woman, said. The East Area Rapist, or EAR—the man I would come to call the Golden State Killer—had struck again.
From Folsom I took a left onto Paseo Drive, into the heart of residential Rancho Cordova. This place meant something to him. He attacked here first and kept coming back. By November 1976, there were nine attacks in Sacramento County attributed to the East Area Rapist in six months; four of those took place in Rancho Cordova. In March 1979, when he hadn’t attacked in a year and it seemed he’d left for good, he came back to Rancho Cordova one last time. Was it home? Some of the investigators, especially the ones who worked the case in the beginning, think so.
I pulled up to the site of his first attack, a simple L-shaped single-story house, about a thousand square feet, with a cleanly shorn tree stump in the center of the yard. It was here that the first call came in, at five a.m. on June 18, 1976, from a twenty-three-year-old woman who was speaking into the receiver as best she could from where she lay on the floor, her hands tied behind her
back so tightly that she’d lost circulation. Sheila* had backed up to the phone on her father’s nightstand, knocked it to the ground, and searched with her fingers for 0. She was calling to report a home-invasion rape.
She wanted them to understand that the mask was strange. It was white and made of a coarse, knitlike material, with eyeholes and a seam down the middle, but it fit very tight against his face. When Sheila opened her eyes and saw him in her bedroom doorway, she thought she was dreaming. Who wears a ski mask in Sacramento in June? She blinked and absorbed more of the image. He was about five nine, moderately muscular, wearing a navy blue, short-sleeved T-shirt and gray canvas gloves. Another detail, so unnatural it must have strayed in from her subconscious—a pair of pale legs with dark hair. The parts flew together and formed a whole. The man wasn’t wearing pants. He was erect. His chest rose and fell, exhalations of the real.