I'll Be Gone in the Dark(50)
Even more unreal for many of them was the sight of the detectives on the front page of the Bee. Richard Shelby and Jim Bevins. Shelby, tall, gruff, coarse, the guy with the impeccable memory and miserable social skills whom fellow officers tried to keep from interacting with people. And Jim Bevins—Puddin’ Eyes, his cop buddies called him teasingly. No one was liked more than Bevins. Even when he was striding toward you from fifty yards away, you could see that he was the guy sent to deescalate and make everything right.
And here they were on the front page, old men now. Twenty-five years is a long time in cop years. The high mileage showed. Their expressions hinted at something. Sheepishness? Shame? They speculated on what their nemesis was doing now. Shelby voted loony bin. Bevins guessed dead.
Holes fielded reporters’ calls and enjoyed the excitement for a few days. But even though privately he still felt investigative work was his calling, he’d been promoted to criminalist supervisor.
Commitments beckoned. He was married with two young kids. He didn’t have the time to dedicate himself to the ten thousand pages of case files that the new DNA connection unified. It was an unheard-of amount of evidence. Optimism among those who worked the case ran sky high. DNA profile? Sixty cases spanning the state of California? They fought over who would interrogate him first when they got him in the room.
Larry Pool in Orange County was the designated point man. For Pool the news of the DNA connection was great but daunting, as if he’d spent the last couple of years in a small, familiar room only to discover that it was an annex to a warehouse.
He continued to bat away contempt from hardened cops who kept insisting that the monster was dead. Sexually motivated serial killers don’t stop killing unless they’re stopped; maybe some righteous homeowner shot him dead during a burglary. Don’t waste your time, they said.
Seven months later, Pool would be vindicated by some news from the Pacific Northwest. In November 2001, the media’s attention turned to another unidentified serial killer who’d been dormant for nearly two decades and presumed by some to be long dead: Washington’s Green River Killer. As it turned out, this prolific slayer of prostitutes was very much alive and well and living in suburban Seattle. His reason for slowing down? He’d gotten married.
“Technology got me,” Gary Ridgway told cops, the verbal equivalent of an upturned middle finger. He was right. He fooled the cops for years by slackening his face and dimming the light in his eyes. No way this half-wit is a diabolical serial killer, they thought, and always, despite mounting evidence, they let him go.
On April 6, 2001, two days after the news linking the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker hit the media, the phone rang in a house on Thornwood Drive in east Sacramento.
A woman in her early sixties answered. She’d lived in the house for nearly thirty years, though her last name had changed.
“Hello?”
The voice was low. He spoke slowly. She recognized it immediately.
“Remember when we played?”
Part Two
Sacramento, 2012
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The following section is an excerpt from an early draft of Michelle’s article “In the Footsteps of a Killer.”]
THE WOMAN WHO SAT ACROSS FROM ME IN THE CRAMPED OFFICE at a troubled high school in east Sacramento was a stranger. But you wouldn’t have known that from the conversational shorthand we used with each other from the moment we met, the EAR-ONS version of Klingon.
“Dog beating burglary in ’74?” I asked.
The woman, I’ll call her the Social Worker, retied her thick ponytail and took a sip from a can of Rockstar. She’s “almost sixty,” with large, penetrating green eyes and a smoky voice. She greeted me in the parking lot by waving her arms wildly overhead. I liked her right away.
“I don’t believe it’s related,” she said.
The ’74 burglary in Rancho Cordova is the kind of recently uncovered incident members of “the board,” that is A&E’s Cold Case Files message board on EAR-ONS, of which the Social Worker is one of the de facto leaders, thrive on analyzing. I’ve come to appreciate their thoroughness about the case, but at first I was simply daunted. There are over one thousand topics and twenty thousand posts.
I found my way to the board about a year and a half ago after devouring, practically in one sitting, Larry Crompton’s book Sudden Terror, which is an unvarnished avalanche of case details, full of 1970s political incorrectness and strangely moving in its depiction of one matter-of-fact cop’s haunting regret. The abundance of information available on the case astounded me. More than a dozen books are dedicated to December 25, 1996, the night JonBenet Ramsey was murdered. But EAR-ONS? Here was a case that spanned a decade, an entire state, changed DNA law in California?, included sixty victims, a collection of strange utterances from the suspect at crime scenes (“I’ll kill you like I did some people in Bakersfield”), a poem he allegedly wrote (“Excitement’s Crave”), even his voice on tape (a brief, whispery taunt recorded by a device the police put on a victim’s phone), yet there was only a single self-published, hard-to-find book written about it.
When I logged on to the EAR-ONS board for the first time, I was immediately struck by the capable, exhaustive crowdsourcing being done there. Yes, cranks exist, including one well-meaning guy who insists that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, is EARONS (he’s not). But much of the analysis is first-rate. A frequent poster named PortofLeith, for instance, helped uncover the fact that California State University–Sacramento’s academic calendar from the years the EAR was active there correlates with his crimes. There are member-made maps detailing everything from crime-scene locations to witness sightings to the spot where he dropped a bloody motocross glove in Dana Point. Hundreds of posts dissect his possible connections to the military, real estate, and medicine.