I'll Be Gone in the Dark(51)
The EAR-ONS sleuths have skills, and they’re serious about
using those skills to catch him. I met with a computer-science graduate student at a Los Angeles Starbucks to discuss his person of interest. Before we met, I received a seven-page dossier, which included footnotes, maps, and yearbook photos of the suspect. I agreed that the suspect looked promising. One unknown detail that niggled at the grad student was his suspect’s shoe size (at 9 or 9?, the EAR’s shoe size is slightly smaller than the average man’s).
Message board members tend to be a paranoid bunch, pseudonym heavy, and perhaps unsurprisingly for people who spend a great deal of time on the Internet discussing serial murder, there are personality conflicts. The Social Worker operates as a kind of gatekeeper between Sacramento investigators and the board community. This irks some posters, who accuse her of hinting at confidential information but then shutting down when asked to share.
That she occasionally has new information to share is not in dispute. On July 2, 2011, the Social Worker posted a drawing of a decal that she said was seen on a suspicious vehicle near the scene of one of the Sacramento rapes.
“It is possibly from NAS [Naval Air Station] North Island, but unconfirmed and has no record. Is it familiar to anyone on the board? Hoping we may find where it is from.”
We. The curious but unmistakable presence of law enforcement became apparent the more I got sucked into the board. The Web detectives, drawn to a decades-old cold case for their own private, idiosyncratic reasons, were the ones hunting the killer with their laptops, but the investigators were subtly steering them.
The Social Worker took me on a driving tour of EAR hot spots, around the maze of modest ranch houses abutting the old Mather Air Force Base, through the larger, leafier neighborhoods of Arden-Arcade and Del Dayo. She began working informally with Sacramento investigators about five years ago, she told me.
“I lived here through the height of it,” she said. She was a young mom then and remembers the terror reaching a nearly debilitating peak around rape number fifteen.
The east Sacramento neighborhoods EAR-ONS preyed on were not built for excitement. I counted an entire block of unbroken beige. The tamped-down cautiousness belies the terrible things that happened here. We turned onto Malaga Way, where on August 29, 1976, the clanging of her wind chimes and the strong smell of aftershave awakened a twelve-year-old girl. A masked man stood at her bedroom window, prying at the upper left corner of the screen with a knife.
“It’s a really dark place, thinking about this stuff,” the Social Worker said. So why did she?
She’d been channel surfing one night in bed years ago when she came across the tail end of a Cold Case Files episode. She sat up in horrified recognition. Oh my God, she thought, he became a murderer.
An uneasy memory from that period nagged her, and she reached out to a detective with the Sacramento Police Department to see whether it was all in her mind. It wasn’t. He confirmed that, before the EAR’s penchant for phoning victims had ever been publicized, she had filed three police reports about an obscene caller, a stalker who, she said, “knew everything about me.” She now believes the caller was EAR-ONS.
The American River flashed blue in the distance. She feels “spiritually” called, the Social Worker told me, to help solve the case.
“But I’ve learned you’ve got to watch out, to take care of yourself. Or it can consume you.”
Can? We’d spent the last four hours talking of nothing else but EAR-ONS. When her husband senses where she’s headed at dinner parties, he kicks her under the table and whispers, “Don’t start.” I once spent an afternoon tracking down every detail I
could about a member of the 1972 Rio Americano High School water polo team because in the yearbook photo he appeared lean and to have big calves (at one point a purported EAR-ONS trait). She once dined with a suspect and then bagged his water bottle for DNA. In the police files, suspects’ names are often logged last name first, and at my lowest, most dazed point, I actually began looking into one “Lary Burg” before my eyes and brain realigned to recognize Burglary.
There’s a scream permanently lodged in my throat now. When my husband, trying not to awaken me, tiptoed into our bedroom one night, I leaped out of bed, grabbed my nightstand lamp, and swung it at his head. Luckily, I missed. When I saw the lamp overturned on the bedroom floor in the morning, I remembered what I’d done and winced. Then I felt around the covers for where I’d left my laptop and resumed my Talmudic study of the police reports.
However, I didn’t laugh at the Social Worker’s gentle warning about not becoming obsessed. I nodded. We’re skirting a rabbit hole, I agreed to pretend, rather than deep inside it.
Joining us inside the rabbit hole is a thirty-year-old man from South Florida whom I’ll call the Kid. The Kid has a film degree and, he’s hinted, a somewhat troubled relationship with his family. Details matter to the Kid. He recently stopped watching a cable broadcast of Dirty Harry because “it blew up from [an aspect ratio of] 2.35:1 to 1.78:1 after the opening credits.” He’s smart, meticulous, and occasionally brusque. He’s also, in my opinion, the case’s greatest amateur hope.
Most people familiar with the EAR-ONS case agree that one of the best leads is his geographic trail. There are only so many white men born between let’s say 1943 and 1959 who lived or worked in Sacramento, Santa Barbara County, and Orange County between 1976 and 1986.