I'll Be Gone in the Dark(49)
Crompton answered Holes’s call as if he’d just been talking about the EAR that moment, had possibly been talking about the EAR for years, and this unexpected, welcome call was a natural continuation of an ongoing conversation in the Crompton household.
Crompton was born in Nova Scotia and looks like the kind of tall, lean, honest-faced rancher John Wayne would have trusted in one of his Westerns. He’s got a slightly odd, breathless way of speaking; never hesitant, just brief, confident declarations that could use a little more air.
Holes wanted to know if Crompton remembered any old suspects who stood out and should be reexamined. He did, and unenthusiastically fed Holes some names. Crompton’s real wish, it turned out, was for Holes to follow up on an old hunch of his that the bosses had prevented him from pursuing at the time.
Jurisdictional cooperation is spotty at best now but was downright dismal back in the late 1970s. Police Teletype and the gossip mill were the only ways cops heard about cases in other agencies. The EAR disappeared from the East Bay in the summer of 1979. Crompton’s bosses nearly danced with relief. Crompton was panicked. He could tell the guy was escalating, that he was requiring more terror in his victims’ eyes to get off; his threats about killing his victims, previously stilted in manner, were more severe but also looser, like someone shedding his inhibitions. Crompton worried. Inhibition shedding was not what the EAR needed.
In early 1980, Crompton got a call from Jim Bevins, a Sacramento Sheriff’s investigator he’d become close to through their
work on the EAR Task Force. Bevins was trying to step away from the case. Its hold over him broke up his marriage. But he wanted to tell Crompton that he was hearing rumors that Santa Barbara had a couple of cases, one a homicide, that felt like the EAR. Crompton called down there.
They stonewalled. “Nothing like that here,” he was told.
Several months later at a statewide training conference, Crompton was seated by chance next to a Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s investigator. Small talk ensued. Crompton played dumb. Pretended he wanted to talk shop.
“What about that double homicide not too long ago?” he asked.
He never let his face reveal the chill he felt as he listened to the details.
“I’m telling you, Paul,” Crompton said. “Call down south. Start with Santa Barbara. I heard there was something like five bodies down there.”
“I will,” Holes promised.
“I know it’s him,” Crompton said, and hung up.
TWENTY YEARS LATER, HOLES CALLED SANTA BARBARA AND GOT shut down too. The Sheriff’s Department denied having any cases that resembled what he was talking about. But near the end of the conversation, the detective on the other end either recalled something or had a change of heart about obfuscating.
“Try Irvine,” he said. “They have something like that, I think.”
Holes’s call to Irvine led him to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, which put him in touch with criminalist Mary Hong at the crime lab. Holes explained that he’d recently developed a DNA profile for an unidentified white male known as the East Area Rapist, or EAR, who’d committed fifty sexual assaults
in Northern California from 1976 to 1979. EAR investigators always suspected he’d headed south and committed more crimes there. Holes rattled off a quick description of his m.o. Middle-to upper-middle-class single-story homes. Nighttime home invasions. Sleeping couples. Binding. Female raped. Occasional theft, mostly personalized jewelry that meant something to victim over more valuable items. Ski mask made physical identification difficult but evidence indicated a size 9 shoe, blood type A, nonsecretor.
“Sounds a lot like our cases,” Hong said.
At the time Holes and Hong talked, their labs were using different DNA-typing techniques, OC being an early adopter of STR typing. They could compare one gene, DQA1, which matched, but that’s all they had to compare. The Contra Costa lab also wasn’t CODIS-eligible yet, meaning they couldn’t link into the state or national databases. Hong and Holes agreed to keep in touch and update each other when the Contra Costa lab was up and running.
*
GOVERNMENT-FUNDED CRIME LABS EXPERIENCE ALL THE USUAL economic vagaries one would expect. Elected officials know it’s not popular to reduce the police force, so job cuts often fall on less conspicuous positions, like forensic scientists. Lab equipment isn’t cheap, and lab directors often have to make repeated requests to get what they need.
Which in part explains why the Contra Costa lab, historically lean, needed about a year and a half to catch up with Orange County. In January 2001, when Contra Costa got its STR typing up and running, Holes asked one of his colleagues, Dave Stockwell, to rerun the DNA extracts from the EAR case to see if the three cases still had the same offender profile. Stockwell reported back they did.
“Call Mary Hong in Orange County,” Holes told him. “We’ve got the same technology now. Check it against hers.”
Over the phone, Stockwell and Hong read off the markers to each other.
“Yes,” Hong said when Stockwell read one of the EAR markers.
“Yes,” Stockwell said in reply to one of hers.
Stockwell came into Holes’s office.
“Perfect match.”
The news hit the media on April 4, 2001. DNA LINKS ’70S RAPES TO SERIAL SLAYING CASES read the San Francisco Chronicle headline. No one had warned the surviving rape victims that the story was coming out, so many of them got a shock picking up the morning paper at the breakfast table. There it was on the front page of the Sacramento Bee: NEW LEAD FOUND IN SERIAL RAPES: AFTER DECADES, DNA LINKS THE EAST AREA RAPIST TO CRIMES IN ORANGE COUNTY.