I'll Be Gone in the Dark(18)

An hour and a half earlier, shortly after six thirty a.m., Jane Carson had been cuddling in bed with her three-year-old son when she heard a light switch go on and off, and then someone running down the hallway. Her husband had left for work moments before. “Jack, is that you? Did you forget something?”

A man in a greenish-brown ski mask came through the door.

“Shut up, I want your money, I won’t hurt you,” he said.

Shelby found the precision timing interesting. The man entered the house through the son’s bedroom window just moments after Jane’s husband left. They’d been the victims of an unusual burglary two weeks before, in which the thief took ten or so of their rings and left behind some neighbors’ stolen jewelry. The thief had also entered and exited through the son’s window. Same guy, Shelby thought. A methodical and patient one.

Jane’s rape would end up being the fifth assault attributed to the East Area Rapist, but it was the first one worked by Shelby and Carol Daly, two detectives who would become inextricably linked to the series. A female detective with experience in sex





crimes, Daly was a natural fit to conduct the victim interviews. Her people skills would eventually rocket her all the way to the job of undersheriff. Shelby, however, had a knack for pissing people off. He would call on colleagues to handle suspect interrogations, as his tended to devolve into chaos. He was always butting heads with “the fourth floor,” the top brass. His problems stemmed less from arrogance than plainspokenness. He lacked finesse. A childhood spent roaming a flat landscape empty of people could keep one from developing certain communication skills. “The ability to be tactful has always eluded me,” he says.

There were three more attacks in quick succession that October. At first many of his colleagues thought an unidentified serial offender known as the Early Bird Rapist was responsible, but Shelby knew they were up against a smarter and weirder man than the Early Bird. These were the days before criminal profiling, before terms like “signature” or “ritual behavior” became commonplace. Back then, investigators might say “the presence,” “the personality,” or “the smell of it.” What they meant was the precise and peculiar arrangement of details, as distinct as an odor—the experience of crime-scene déjà vu. There was the consistent physical description, of course. He was white, in his late teens or twenties, about five nine, with a medium, athletic build. Always in some sort of mask. Forced, angry whisper. Clenched jaw. When he got upset, his voice rose to a higher pitch. Small penis. There was the odd deportment—his voice was often hurried but his manner was not. He would open a drawer and stand looking at it for several minutes in silence. Reports of prowlers seen in the neighborhood around the time of an attack often included the detail that the prowler, once alerted that he’d been seen, left the area in a leisurely manner. “Totally unhurried,” one witness said.

His psychosexual needs were specific. He bound his victims’ hands behind their backs, often tying and retying several times,





sometimes with different material. He ordered them to masturbate him with their bound hands. He never fondled them. When he started attacking couples, he’d take the female into the living room and drape a towel over the TV; lighting seemed important. He got off on sexual questioning. “What am I doing?” he’d ask a blindfolded victim as he masturbated with hand lotion found in the house. “Is this like the captain’s?” he asked Jane; her husband was a captain in the air force. He told her to “shut up” at least fifty times, Jane said, but when he was raping her, he had other demands, snapping at her like a director to his actress. “Put some emotion in that,” he ordered her, “or I’ll use my knife.”

He was brazen. Twice he entered homes, pressing on undeterred when he knew victims had spotted him and were frantically dialing the police. Children didn’t bother him. He never hurt them physically, but he would tie up the older ones and put them in another room. He put Jane’s toddler son on the bedroom floor during her attack. The boy fell asleep. When he awoke, he peered over the bed. The EAR had left. His mother lay bound in strips of torn towels and was gagged with a washcloth. He mistook the ligatures for bandages.

“Is the doctor gone?” he whispered.

*

SHELBY WAS FAMILIAR WITH THE BRUTE WAYS OF SKI-MASKED PERVERTS, but he was unsettled by this one’s commitment to reconnaissance. That was unusual. The hang-up phone calls. Pre-prowling. Burglaries. The EAR knew how to turn off outside lights even when they were on a timer. He knew where a hard-to-find garage opener was located. Interviews Shelby conducted suggested that the suspect hadn’t cased out just Jane but her neighbors too, noting where he could park his vehicle, what time the neighbors took out their garbage and left for work.





Carol Daly, Shelby’s colleague that day, would be quoted a year later in the Sacramento Bee saying about the case, “The typical rapist does not have such elaborate schemes.” That was the thought going through Shelby’s mind as he stood on the curb with the bloodhound, looking across the field toward Jane’s house. Another detail troubled him. The offender had poked Jane’s left shoulder with his paring knife. Jane felt he didn’t intend to injure her, that the wound was an accident. Shelby wasn’t so sure. He guessed the guy was suppressing an urge to inflict more pain; until he was caught, the urge would grow.