I'll Be Gone in the Dark(38)
Goleta, 1979
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Segments of the following chapter have been pieced together from various drafts of “In the Footsteps of a Killer.”]
THE MAN APPROACHED LINDA* AS SHE WAS LEAVING FOR WORK IN the morning. “My dog was stabbed in your backyard last night,” he said. The man was young, in his early twenties, elfin-featured, and a little hyperactive. He pointed to the footbridge that crossed the creek about two hundred feet from where they stood on Berkeley Road in Goleta. He and his dog, Kimo, had come from there, he explained, Kimo off leash and the man lagging casually behind. The city of Goleta is a bedroom community with a safe reputation, boring even, but few people would brave San Jose Creek alone at night. The narrow gorge winds down from the chaparral-covered mountains through the east side of town and is shrouded in huge, draping trees—sycamore, alder, and eucalyptus, with its papery, cracked bark that looks clawed-at. There are no lights, and the only sounds are the clump and rustling of unseen animals seeking food.
But Kimo was a big, protective dog, a 120-pound German shepherd and Alaskan malamute mix. That something might happen to
the dog never occurred to the man. When he exited the footbridge into the residential neighborhood, he saw Kimo dart between Linda’s house and her next-door neighbor’s. Something must have drawn his attention back there. Kimo was nosy. From the man’s vantage point, the 5400 block of Berkeley Road was still. Up until the 1960s, Goleta was a sea of walnut groves and lemon orchards, and in certain pockets, especially adjacent to the creek, you could experience what it must have been like back then, no engines revving, no electronics humming; there was just a blanketing, hushed darkness and a scattering of lights from single-story ranch houses. A surfboard atop a VW bus in someone’s driveway was the only reminder that this was Southern California suburbia in early fall 1979.
A sharp yelp broke the silence. Moments later Kimo reappeared. The dog made his way unsteadily to the sidewalk and collapsed at the man’s feet. The man turned him over. Blood oozed from a long cut to his belly.
Kimo survived. After frantically knocking at several houses, the man was finally able to find a phone and called for help. An urgent care veterinarian closed the wound with seventy stitches, leaving a scar that stretched from Kimo’s sternum to the end of his belly. But the man remained puzzled about the source of the injury. Linda understood. Work could wait. She enlisted the help of her next-door neighbor, and together the three of them carefully scoured the side and back yards for sharp objects, like a lawnmower blade or piece of torn fence, which might have cut the dog. They found nothing. It was strange. Also odd was Linda’s flooded front lawn. Around the same time Kimo was hurt, someone had apparently turned on her hose and left it running.
Linda never learned the dog owner’s name. He thanked her politely and left. She mostly forgot about the incident until another man approached her outside her house with a question in July 1981. A lot had changed in the year and a half since Kimo
was injured. Yellow crime-scene tape had gone up three times in the neighborhood, unusual for an area so small—less than two square miles—and so homey that deputies affectionately nicknamed the teenagers they regularly ran out of the avocado groves for smoking weed the red-eye gang.
This was Santa Barbara County, home to President Reagan’s 688-acre vacation ranch and also a popular retreat for moneyed dilettantes with a hippie bent, where you could wear flip-flops all day or playact in a staged rodeo, where you could enjoy historically preserved Spanish architecture unsullied by garish billboards (a ban won after a multiyear campaign waged by aesthetically inclined civic leaders). From 1950 until 1991, the only stops on Highway 101 between an otherwise open 435 miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco were four traffic lights in Santa Barbara; depending on whom you believe, this was because locals feared that a freeway would block their ocean view, or because they wanted tourists to patronize local businesses, or because they felt people should be encouraged to pause and contemplate life, and what better place to do this than in Santa Barbara, America’s Riviera, ensconced between a rugged mountain range and the Pacific Ocean? Who didn’t want to idle at a stoplight in paradise? The answer, eventually, was no one. The accidents were legion, weekend traffic was a gridlock, and pollution from idling cars became immense.
INVESTIGATORS FELT THEY KNEW THE NIGHT HE LEARNED HE HAD to be careful. They knew the night that changed him. The first crime they could connect him to, where their rewinding stopped: October 1, 1979. Less than a week after Kimo was stabbed. That was the night a Goleta couple on Queen Ann Lane awakened to a blinding flashlight and a young man’s clenched-teeth whisper. The woman was ordered to tie up her boyfriend. Then the intruder tied her. He rummaged around, opening and slamming
drawers. Cursing. Threatening. Asking for money but not focused on it. He led the woman into the living room and made her lie face down on the floor, throwing a pair of tennis shorts over her head as a blindfold. She heard him enter their kitchen. She heard him chanting to himself.
“I’ll kill ’em, I’ll kill ’em, I’ll kill ’em.”
A surge of adrenaline allowed the woman to escape her bindings and flee out the front door screaming. Her boyfriend, bound in the bedroom, was able to hop into the backyard. When he heard the intruder coming, he dropped and rolled behind an orange tree, narrowly eluding the searching beam of the flashlight.