I'll Be Gone in the Dark(25)

Highway 99 ran adjacent to the house, and where the dog lost the scent, at a spot on the shoulder of the northbound lanes, were tire tracks from what looked to be a small foreign car, a VW bug maybe. A technician pulled out a measuring tape. The tire tracks measured four feet three inches center to center.

Right after the attack, when the investigators with their notepads asked Fiona to search her mind, the only thing she could point to that was slightly odd that evening was the garage door. She’d been going back and forth from the house to the garage doing laundry, and she was certain the side door leading to the carport had been closed. When she came back in one time, the door stood open. The wind, she thought. She closed and locked the door. They’d only lived in the house for three weeks and were adjusting to its contours and quirks. It was a corner house, boasting four bedrooms and an in-ground pool in the backyard. One image that would continue to nag at Fiona was that of a man at the Realtor’s open house, standing next to her as they looked out at the pool at the same time. She didn’t know why the impression stayed with her. Had he stood too close? Stayed a beat too long? She tried in vain to build a face, but he was blank. A man, that was all.

Highway 99 ran adjacent to the house, separated by a hundred yards of dirt and a row of large conifers; directly behind them, on the other side of a dinky chain-link fence, was an empty lot. Fiona would come to view the open space around them differently than she first had; what was once a pleasant expanse became a vulnerable point of entry. It wasn’t part of their original plan, but after what happened to them that Memorial Day weekend, she and Phillip spent $3,000 they couldn’t afford to build a brick wall around their new house.

Shelby noted the Realtor’s Sold sign on the front porch. One





of the significant avenues in the investigation was trying to find a common thread among the victims. The detectives gave the victims detailed questionnaires and carefully examined their checks. Areas of interest, or backgrounds that seemed overrepresented, included students and education, medical workers, and the military. Several were noted to have frequented the same pizza restaurant. But by far the most recurrent pattern was real estate. At Jane’s, the first attack Shelby investigated, back in October ’76, he observed a Century 21 sign on a lawn directly across the street. Several victims had just moved in, were moving out, or were next door to new units being sold. As one decade turned to the next and the case grew more complex, the real estate factor would consistently crop up, its significance—if any—remaining murky, right up to the moment a Realtor casually extracted a key from a lockbox and stumbled upon the EAR’s last known victim, a beautiful girl, unrecognizable in death.

After Fiona and Phillip’s attack on Memorial Day weekend, the EAR disappeared from Sacramento for the summer. He wouldn’t return until October. By then Shelby was off the case, reassigned back to patrol. His skirmishes with the higher-ups had begun to flare more openly. High-profile cases are magnets for hierarchical politics, and Shelby could never quite play the game. When he first made detective, in 1972, his boss, Lieutenant Ray Root, had a loose, proactive philosophy. Go out and develop informants, Root instructed, and uncover felonies that might never be reported; develop your own cases rather than wait to be assigned. That philosophy suited Shelby’s temperament. Showing courteous interest in his bosses’ ideas did not. The transfer didn’t upset him, he insists. He was stressed from the manhunt. Exhausted by the infighting. Working a high-profile case like the EAR meant constant scrutiny, and Shelby bristled at the surveillance; inside him lived the memory of that proud young man standing hopefully in front of the Sheriff’s Department





panel, dismissed because it was decided he was lacking the right parts.

IN THE DAYS AFTER HER ATTACK, FIONA FOUND HERSELF STUTTERING as the EAR had. Carol Daly organized a meeting among the female victims at one of their homes. Fiona recalls a lot of murmured exchanges—“You’re doing so well” and “I didn’t leave my home for five days.” Daly played for them a couple of recordings of male voices, but Fiona doesn’t remember any of the victims recognizing them. For some time afterward, she became irrational about personal safety. At night she refused to go into the back of the house where the bedroom was until Phillip came home. She sometimes kept a loaded gun under the driver’s seat of her car. She found she had a lot of nervous energy, and one night when she was using it to furiously vacuum, she blew a fuse, and the whole house and backyard went dark. She became hysterical. Her neighbors, a kind elderly couple who knew what had happened, rushed over and fixed the fuse.

During a break from work not long after the attack, Phillip walked over to the other victims’ home and introduced himself. He didn’t tell Fiona until years later, but he and the other husband would meet sometimes in the early morning hours to ride around in a car together, scanning yards and empty lots. Speeding up. Slowing down. Looking for the outline of a figure slinking along hedges. The two men’s bond was unspoken. Few men would experience what they had, would understand the shattering rage of lying face down on a bed, bound and gagged, as your wife whimpers from another room. They hunted a man whose face they didn’t know. Didn’t matter. The action of moving forward, their hands unrestrained, of physically doing something, was all that did.

*





AN EXCERPT FROM AN ARTICLE PUBLISHED ON FEBRUARY 28, 1979, in the now defunct chain of suburban weekly newspapers known locally as the Green Sheet might help convey what Sacramento was like in the 1970s. THREE RAPE TRIALS LOOM is the headline, with the subhead, “Questions of Publicity.” The first paragraph: “The public defender’s office will attempt to prove publicity about the East Area Rapist makes it impossible for three men charged with multiple rapes to get a fair trial in Sacramento County.”