I'll Be Gone in the Dark(80)

That’s why Ken and his partner had tracked him down thirty years later. Greer had significant medical issues now. Still, no water, thank you. No cigarettes. Finally, their patience and ruses running out, they persuaded him to lick an envelope. They swabbed all his car door handles when he wasn’t looking just to be sure.

Greer was pulled over on that spring night in 1977 near an EAR rape because he fit the general physical description of the attacker; he was a white male, twenty-five, five nine, 150. The first thing the patrol officers picked out with their flashlights was a plastic bottle of hand lotion on the front seat of his car. There was a white mask, similar to the kind used for painting or surgery, on the passenger side dashboard. When they popped his trunk they found rope in an opened cellophane wrapper. There was also a pair of tennis shoes.

And two large, zippered bags. Inside the bags, they found a handgun and a hunting knife.

Ken and his partner sent the DNA collected from Greer to the crime lab. They waited. The results came back.

Unbelievable.

Greer wasn’t the One.

As I’ve said, falling for a suspect is a lot like the first surge of blind love in a relationship. Focus narrows to a single face. The





world and its practical sounds are a wan soundtrack to the powerful silent biopic you’re editing in your mind at all times. No amount of information on the object of your obsession is enough. You crave more. Always more. You note his taste in shoes and even drive by his house, courtesy of Google Maps. You engage in wild confirmation bias. You project. A middle-aged white man smiling and cutting a cake decorated with candles in a picture posted on Facebook isn’t celebrating his birthday, but holding a knife.

I first sensed the parallels when a weary-looking Larry Pool admitted to me that he used to “feel more” about suspects in the beginning, when as an Orange County cold-case detective, he first got the Original Night Stalker case in 1997. He was “fresher then,” he said, his face drawn, sounding like a middle-aged serial dater toughened by the vagaries of love.

Pool recalled an early moment of excitement in the summer of 2001, when he got a call asking him to report to the assistant sheriff’s office. Such calls always meant good news. When he walked in, a group turned to smile at him—his captain, his lieutenant, members of the administrative staff, and most tellingly, Mary Hong, the Orange County criminalist who developed the Original Night Stalker’s DNA profile. Hong worked in a different building.

Pool pumped his fist in the air before he even closed the door. “Yes!” he said. He’d worked the case nonstop, maybe even obsessively, for three years by then.

There’s been a fingerprint match, the assistant sheriff told Pool. A print left on a lamp at one of the East Area Rapist’s Danville scenes was believed to be the killer’s. The victim had heard him turn on the light; the lamp had been recently unpacked and wouldn’t have had anyone else’s prints on it. A retired investigator from Contra Costa had fished out an old copy of the print and recently sent it down to Orange County.





“Excellent,” Pool said.


The suspect died of natural causes five years ago, the assistant sheriff continued, and he slid the man’s file across the table toward Pool. Pool, who knew more about the killer than anyone in the room, opened the folder. Everyone stared at him expectantly. Pool experienced his first pang of disappointment.

“Oh, man. I don’t like his age,” Pool said. The suspect was born in 1934. Pool flipped through the report. He didn’t like the guy’s criminal history, either. Weapons charges. Trafficking. Bank robberies. The guy had been in witness protection. Pool wasn’t feeling it.

He could sense the mood in the room shift.

“I don’t care for him as a suspect,” Pool admitted. “But who knows, maybe that’s why we haven’t found the guy. He’s not what we expect.”

“Find out where this man’s buried,” the assistant sheriff said.

“Got it, boss,” said Pool.

Pool discovered that the dead suspect had been a friend of the victim’s boyfriend. The two men had had a falling-out several weeks before the attack. The victim and her boyfriend had their stereo stolen around the same time, and Pool theorized that the suspect was the robber, probably exacting some revenge on his friend for their fight. He must have touched the lamp when he was in the house stealing the stereo. He wasn’t the killer, just a lousy friend with a burglary habit.

But Pool’s bosses wanted certainty.

“We gotta dig him up and check his DNA,” the assistant sheriff said.

Pool got on a plane and flew to Baltimore to exhume the body. This was the first time the Orange County Sheriff’s Department had dug up a suspect—victims, yes, but never a suspect before. Baltimore Homicide assisted in the exhumation. When they opened the vault, the shoop sound reminded Pool of a huge Pepsi





can opening. The corpse was in remarkably good condition, just covered in mold. But the smell.

“Imagine the worst decomp times ten,” Pool said.

No wonder the Baltimore Homicide detectives had lit up cigars as they crested the hill where the man was buried.

Pool packed the suspect’s teeth and hair in his carry-on bag. The femur and parts of flesh they put on dry ice in a box, checked in at the airport. Back in Orange County, when Pool went to grab the box as it came around the baggage carousel, he discovered that it was leaking.