I'll Be Gone in the Dark(55)
In April 1977, a boy hoisted his younger sister onto his shoulders. From her higher vantage point, she suddenly saw a prowler in her neighbor’s yard, a white man in dark clothing crouching
in the bushes. When the prowler realized he’d been spotted, he took off running and hurdled several fences. A month later, that neighbor, a young waitress, woke her husband at four a.m. “I hear something. I hear something,” she said. A flashlight lit up their bedroom doorway. She later told police that she believed the EAR when he threatened to kill her, and she lay there, bound in the dark, wondering what it would feel like to have a bullet go through her.
*
READING THROUGH THE SACRAMENTO REPORTS, YOU CAN TRACK public awareness that there’s a serial rapist at large. It’s zero to dim in the first dozen or so attacks; then the media runs with the story, and chatter and paranoia build. By a year into the attacks, victims recount being awakened by flashlight and thinking, Oh shit! It’s him. They behaved in certain ways, they told investigators, based on gossip they’d heard about the East Area Rapist, cowering, for instance, because they’d been told he liked his victims terrified. It’s around a year in that the source of neighbors’ inaction is no longer unawareness or inertia but a fortress mentality. They see something, and they lock their doors, turn off the lights, and retreat to their bedroom, hoping he doesn’t come for them. “I was afraid,” one woman admitted. Then why not call the police? My imagination burbled with what-ifs.
They weren’t thinking of their neighbors, but he was. Part of the thrill of the game for him, I believe, was a kind of connect-the-dots puzzle he played with people. He stole two packs of Winston cigarettes from the first victim, for instance, and left them outside the fourth victim’s house. Junk jewelry stolen from a neighbor two weeks earlier was left at the fifth victim’s house. Victim twenty-one lived within shouting distance of a water treatment plant; a worker there who lived eight miles away became the next
victim. Pills or bullets stolen from a victim would later be found in a neighbor’s yard. Some victims shared surnames or jobs.
It was a power play, a signal of ubiquity. I am both nowhere and everywhere. You may not think you have something in common with your neighbor, but you do: me. I’m the barely spotted presence, the dark-haired, blond-haired, stocky, slight, seen from the back, glimpsed in half-light thread that will continue to connect you even as you fail to look out for each other.
I left Sacramento in a bad mood. I hadn’t slept well. The hungover wedding party crowded the front door of the hotel as I tried to make my way out. At the airport, I walked past a giant red rabbit sculpture I somehow had been too preoccupied to notice when I flew in. I don’t know how I missed it before. The fifty-six-foot-long, ten-thousand-pound aluminum rabbit is suspended by cables and appears to be diving toward the baggage claim area. I searched the term “Sac airport rabbit” on my iPhone while waiting to board my plane. An Associated Press article said that artist Lawrence Argent had been commissioned to create an iconic piece for the new terminal, which was unveiled in October 2011.
“I wanted to play around with the idea that something has come from the outside and leapt into the building,” Argent said.
The Cuff-Links Coda
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The following section is an excerpt from an early draft of Michelle’s article “In the Footsteps of a Killer.”]
THE DAY AFTER I PLACED THE ORDER FOR THE CUFF LINKS, I CALLED the Kid. I told him I was having the cuff links shipped overnight to me.
“To a P.O. box?” the Kid asked. Well no, I admitted. A ludicrous scenario flashed through my mind: EAR-ONS reselling the cuff links to the store where he happened to work inputting customer addresses; he’d no doubt be suspicious of someone who paid forty dollars for next-day delivery of his eight-dollar cuff links.
The best thing to do, I knew, was to turn over the cuff links to EAR-ONS investigators. The risk was that they’d be angry I’d taken this kind of unauthorized initiative. Coincidentally, I had recently scheduled my very first interview with Larry Pool in Orange County. I decided that if I felt the interview was going well, I’d explain the story and hand over the tiny gold cuff links in their square Ziploc bag.
The problem was, of all the investigators, the prospect of meeting with Pool was the most intimidating to me. He’d been described as inaccessible and a little remote. I knew he’d been working on the case for the last fourteen years. He’d been instrumental, along with
victim Keith Harrington’s attorney brother, Bruce, in the passage of Proposition 69—the DNA Fingerprint, Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act, which in 2004 established an all-felon DNA database in California. The California Department of Justice now has the largest working DNA data bank in the country.
Pool and Harrington felt that by expanding the DNA database they’d surely net EAR-ONS. The disappointment when that didn’t happen, it was suggested to me, was sharp. I had imagined Larry Pool as a steely, impassive cop locked away in a dimly lit room, the walls plastered with EAR-ONS composites.
A pleasant but somewhat formal man in wire-rim glasses and a red checkered shirt greeted me in the lobby of the Orange County Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory. We sat in a conference room. He was duty officer for the computer lab that day, and when the occasional colleague poked their head in and said something, Pool would respond with a clipped “Copy that.”