I'll Be Gone in the Dark(26)
In February 1979, the East Area Rapist hadn’t attacked in Sacramento County in ten months. Signs indicated he’d moved on and was prowling the East Bay. Yet the article describes how the Public Defender’s Office was conducting phone surveys of Sacramento residents, trying to gauge “to what extent an aura of fear exists in this community because of the East Area Rapist.” The Public Defender’s Office worried that the East Area Rapist’s top-dog infamy would poison the jury pool, that jurors would convict their clients—the Woolly, Midday, and City College Rapists—in a misguided attempt to punish the unidentified offender whose moniker still caused such terror that many potential survey responders, upon hearing the caller’s question, didn’t get past the four words “the East Area Rapist” before hanging up.
It might help convey what Sacramento was like in the seventies to know that in an article about three serial rapists overshadowed by a fourth, a fifth at-large serial rapist isn’t even mentioned. The Early Bird Rapist was active in Sacramento from 1972 to early ’76, when he seemed to go underground. Four years of break-ins and sexual assaults and approximately forty victims, and yet a Google search shows references to him only in relation to the EAR.
A woman wrote me an e-mail about a close encounter she believes she had with the East Area Rapist when she was a teenager. She and a friend were taking a shortcut to their high school in Arden-Arcade, a neighborhood on Sacramento County’s east side. She remembers the morning was cold, and believes it was either
fall or winter of 1976 or ’77. They decided to walk down a cement path that ran along a creek and ended up hitting a dead end, a fenced-in backyard. When they turned around a man was standing twenty feet from them. He wore a black ski mask that covered his face except for his eyes. He started toward them, keeping one hand in his jacket. The woman, thinking quickly, reached her hand up and felt around for a lock on the fence. The gate pushed open, and the two friends ran screaming into the backyard. The homeowners, alerted by the racket, came out and herded them into the house. She remembers being interviewed by investigators at the time. She was writing to tell me that the masked man was built differently than I’d described in my magazine article about the EAR. The man she encountered was extremely muscular, the woman wrote. “Overkill so.”
I forwarded the e-mail to Shelby, now retired from the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department. “Probably did see the EAR,” he wrote back. “However muscle description sounds like Richard Kisling perfectly.”
Richard Kisling? I looked Kisling up—yet another serial rapist once active in the Sacramento area who, like the EAR, wore a ski mask and tied up the husbands while he raped their wives.
Sacramento’s was not an isolated problem. US crime rates show a steady rise in violent crime throughout the 1960s and ’70s, peaking in 1980. Taxi Driver came out in February 1976; the bleak and violent film was hailed as an encapsulation of its time, to no one’s surprise. Many retired cops I talk to, from Sacramento but other places too, uniformly recall 1968 to 1980 as a particularly grim period. And unlike some other places, Sacramento, a city built by pioneers who forded rivers and passed over snowy mountain ranges to get there, is known for its flinty survival instincts.
My point is not to declare a plague but to underscore prominence
: in a city inhabited by tough locals and lousy with violent offenders, one predator stood out.
It might help convey what Sacramento was like in the 1970s, and something about the EAR, to know that whenever I tell an inquiring native that I’m writing about a serial rapist from Sacramento, no one has ever asked which one.
Visalia
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The following chapter was pieced together from Michelle’s notes and early drafts of “In the Footsteps of a Killer,” a piece Michelle wrote for Los Angeles magazine, originally published in February 2013 and later supplemented online.]
ONE FRIDAY MORNING IN LATE FEBRUARY OF 1977, RICHARD SHELBY was at his desk at the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department when his phone rang. On the other end was a Sergeant Vaughan of the Visalia PD. Vaughan thought he had potentially useful information for their EAR investigation.
From April 1974 until December of the following year, Visalia had been plagued by a rash of bizarre burglaries committed by a young offender they dubbed the Ransacker. The Ransacker struck as many as 130 times over a period of less than two years, but there had been no activity since December of 1975, and the EAR series began in Sacramento just six months later. Moreover, there seemed to be a host of similarities between the two offenders. Perhaps it was an angle worth exploring.
THE RANSACKER WAS AS PROLIFIC AS HE WAS WEIRD. HE OFTEN HIT multiple homes in one night—sometimes four, sometimes five, once as many as a dozen. The Ransacker targeted the same four residential neighborhoods repeatedly. He preferred personal items like
photographs and wedding rings, leaving behind things of greater value. Investigators noted that he seemed to have a thing for hand lotion.
But he was a perv with a mean streak, and with an apparent bone to pick with the domestic unit. If there were family photos around, he’d tear them up or hide them, sometimes breaking the picture frames, sometimes stealing the photos entirely. He’d pour orange juice from the refrigerator onto clothing from the closet, like a bratty child with a bad temper. He’d thoroughly trash the place. This seemed to be his paramount objective over theft, hence his moniker. For good measure, he’d remove cash from its hiding places and leave it on the bed. He’d stick to stealing trinkets and personalized jewelry, piggy banks and redeemable Blue Chip stamps. He unplugged appliances and clock radios. He liked to take single earrings from pairs. The Ransacker was big on spite.