I'll Be Gone in the Dark(77)
MICHELLE: Right.
PAUL HOLES: You know, and they feel Godlike because, in essence, they are controlling whether this victim lives or dies.
Fred Ray
I’M NOT ENJOYING MY SECOND CUP OF TERRIBLE COFFEE IN A CAFé in Kingsburg, California, twenty miles southeast of Fresno, when I’m given an explanation to a mystery that’s puzzled me for years. The man who provides the answer, Fred Ray, is tall and laconic and possesses a slightly nasal drawl befitting a descendent of generations of Central Valley farmers. When Ray isn’t using his long fingers to emphasize a point, he folds his hands and rests them gently on his chest like a scholar. His mostly brown hair is enviously abundant for a retired detective who’s being asked about a thirty-five-year-old double murder he once investigated. I formed a certain ungenerous impression when Ray first loped in with his battered briefcase and Dust Bowl twang. He wanted to meet on the early side to avoid the high school crowd, he told me, but I spot no one under seventy in the tiny café, which consists of a handful of tables covered in thick, clear plastic, shelves of Swedish knick-knacks (Kingsburg is known as Little Sweden), and a narrow glass counter displaying scattered pastries. Two of the café’s few patrons are Ray’s wife and then his pastor, who asks me where I’m from even though I haven’t been identified as an out-of-town visitor. I tell him I’m from Los Angeles.
“Welcome to the state of California,” the pastor says.
But my impression of Ray changes abruptly early in our conversation, when he’s describing his time as a detective with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, in particular his experience
interrogating a certain kind of troubled kid. Outwardly the kids, young white males mostly, presented little threat. The laid-back pace of an old-money coastal town trickled down to them, even if they didn’t live in upscale Hope Ranch, with its horse paths and private beach, but the trailer park on Hollister. These were Garys and Keiths, shaggy-haired late-seventies burnouts who started but never finished Dos Pueblos or San Marcos High. They dragged beat-up armchairs into the avocado groves and hid out smoking homegrown weed. They surfed Haskell’s Beach all day and gathered around bonfires at night, drunk and feeling safely out of reach; they knew the cops would never hike down the sage-scrub-covered bluffs to break up a beach party. Their troubles were petty stuff. Minor aggravations. Except that Ray discovered a surprising number of them engaged in a chilling pastime, one they kept secret even from each other: they got a thrill out of breaking into strangers’ homes in the middle of the night.
They were prowlers. Peepers. Burglary was an afterthought. What they took pride in, Ray learned from talking to them, was their ability to get inside a house, crawl along a floor, and stand unnoticed in the dark, watching people sleep. Ray was amazed at the details they would share with him once he got them started.
“I always had a way of getting guys to talk to me,” Ray says.
“How would you do it?”
He opens his hands. His features soften almost imperceptibly.
“Well, you know, everyone does that,” he says, his tone both conspiratorial and direct. “Everybody has wanted to see what’s going on in someone else’s house.”
That sounds reasonable. I nod. “
Right,” I say.
But then Ray snaps back to his former self, his real self, and I realize that, without my noticing, he’d assumed a slight slouch and slackened his expression to appear more casual. This wasn’t
the ham-fisted method used to coax information out of a suspect as seen on Law and Order. The abrupt transition was startling. I bought the act completely. One of Ray’s most winning mannerisms is a huge, unpredictable smile that’s the opposite of eager and therefore more gratifying when you prompt it. He got me, and he knows it. He grins.
“They all want to tell their story, but they want to tell it to somebody that’s not going to freak out on them. When you sit there showing no emotion, kind of agreeing with them, almost like you’re enjoying what they’re telling you, they’ll talk.”
The parade of troubled young men whom Ray questioned decades ago interests me for a specific reason.
“You interviewed these guys, these prowlers,” I say. “Do you think you might have talked to him?”
“No,” he says quickly.
Then carefully, “I could have.”
But he’s shaking his head.
Him. The third person at every interview I conduct, the faceless killer whose tennis-shoe impressions Ray once tracked through the neighborhood, retracing the man’s path as he crept from window to window, searching for victims. Ray was deeply involved in the case of a serial killer who picked up hitchhikers, shot them in the side of the head, and then had sex with their corpses; over the course of his career, he has stood over headless bodies and examined ritualistic carvings on the decomposing skin of a young woman. Yet the only killer he mentions who made, as he says, “the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” was the one who brought me here. Him.
That Ray doesn’t believe he talked to the unidentified man I’ve dubbed the Golden State Killer doesn’t surprise me. Every detective I’ve interviewed who’s worked the case insists the same thing. They’ve held precut ligatures he left behind and stared at his spermatozoa under a microscope. They’ve played and replayed