I'll Be Gone in the Dark(21)

Both subjects appeared to be eighteen or nineteen years old and around five nine. One was apparently a Mexican male with dark shoulder-length hair, wearing a blue windbreaker and Levi’s, while the other was a white male in an identical outfit.

The custodian had worked at the school for seven years and was well acquainted with the regulars who’d hang around campus after hours. He had never seen either subject before.

*

THE EAR HIT AGAIN IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF MARCH 8, in Arden-Arcade. The Sacramento Bee ran an article (“Rape May Be Linked to Series”) about the attack. The reporter noted that “the victim was separated from her husband and had a small child, who was staying elsewhere Monday night. The east area rapist has never attacked while there was a man in the house, although occasionally there have been children.” If there was ever a question





about whether the EAR was reading his press, it was put to rest after the article was published. His next victim was a teenage girl, but after that he targeted heterosexual couples, eleven in a row, and from then on, couples remained the main focus of his attacks.

On March 18, the Sheriff’s Department received three phone calls between four fifteen and five p.m. “I’m the EAR,” a male said, laughed, and hung up. The second call was a repeat of the first. Then the third: “I’m the East Area Rapist. I have my next victim stalked and you guys can’t catch me.”

That night in Rancho Cordova a sixteen-year-old girl returning home from her part-time job at Kentucky Fried Chicken dropped her take-out bag on her kitchen counter and picked up the phone to dial a friend. Her parents were out of town and she intended to stay at the friend’s house. The call had rung one and a half times when a man in a green ski mask emerged from her parents’ bedroom, a hatchet raised above his head.

This time the victim had a somewhat better look at the EAR’s face, as he wore a ski mask with the center cut out. Acting on a hunch that the EAR was a young Rancho Cordova local, Shelby and Daly brought over a stack of neighborhood yearbooks and watched as the victim flipped through them. She stopped on a page in the 1974 Folsom High School yearbook. She handed the book to Shelby, pointing at a boy’s picture. “That looks most like him.” They ran down the kid’s history. Instability, check. Weirdness, yes. He was working at a gas station on Auburn Boulevard. They hid the victim in the back of an unmarked car and had her peer at him from three feet away as he filled the gas tank. She couldn’t make a positive identification.

*

THE HOUSES HAD DIFFERENT LAYOUTS. SOME OF THE VICTIMS were young teenagers who clutched couch pillows to their stomachs





and, pain-faced and confused, shook their heads when they were asked if they knew what a “climax” was. Others were in their midthirties, had recently divorced their second husbands, and were enrolled in beauty school classes and active in singles clubs. But for the detectives called out of bed in the early morning hours, the scenes record-skipped with a numbing sameness. Cut shoelaces on a shag carpet. Deep red indentations around wrists. Pry marks on window frames. Kitchen cabinets left open. Beer cans and cracker boxes scattered on backyard patios. There was the sound of some sort of bag, paper rustling or a zipper opening, as he stole engraved jewelry, driver’s licenses, photos, coins, occasionally money, though theft was clearly not his driving motive, as he bypassed other valuables, and often what he stole, like a cherished wedding ring ripped violently from a swollen finger, was found dumped somewhere close by.

On April 2, he added a twist to his method, one he would continue to use. The first couple he targeted awoke to a bright, square-lensed flashlight shining in their eyes. He gruffly whispered that he had a gun (“a .45 with fourteen shots”) and threw a length of twine at the woman, ordering her to tie up her boyfriend. When the male was bound, the EAR placed a cup and saucer on his back. “I hear the cup rattle or bedsprings make any noise, I’ll shoot everybody in the house,” he whispered. To the woman he remarked at one point, “I was in the army and I fucked a lot while I was there.”

That the EAR may have a military connection was frequently discussed. There were five military installations within an hour’s drive of Sacramento; Mather Air Force Base, adjacent to Rancho Cordova, had roughly eight thousand personnel alone. There was his penchant for army green and the occasional report of black lace-up military-style boots. Several who encountered him, including those with military backgrounds, felt his authoritative posture and unyielding demeanor were reminiscent of someone





with a background in the armed forces. “The dishes trick,” as his unusual alarm system came to be known, struck some as a technique right out of jungle warfare.

There was also the galling fact that he was outmaneuvering them. He remained free. The Sheriff’s Department borrowed treetop cameras from the State Department of Forestry normally used to catch arsonists. They depleted their overtime budget sending undercover patrols to roam the neighborhoods the EAR frequented. They borrowed military nightscopes and movement detectors used in Vietnam. Yet he was still out there blending in, a man whose ordinariness was his mask.

The Sheriff’s Department brought in an army colonel trained in Special Forces techniques to help them understand the EAR’s tactics. “The major point in training is that of patience,” the colonel told them. “The specially trained person can and will sit in one position for hours if necessary and will not move.” The EAR’s sensitivity to noise—he often turned off air-conditioning and heating units to hear better—was a skill honed in Special Forces personnel. Ditto knives, knots, and planning multiple escape routes. “He can and will make use of any point of concealment,” the colonel said. Look for him “in the place most unlikely for a human being to be, i.e., the bottom portion of an outhouse, the middle of blackberry bushes.” The colonel reiterated: remember the patience. He believes he’s got more stamina than anyone else, and that searchers will give up when he will not.