I'll Be Gone in the Dark(87)
In the year prior to Michelle’s death, Paul had begun creating master resident lists for Sacramento and Orange Counties for the relevant time periods, which combined names from sources such as Ancestry.com’s marriage and divorce records, the appropriate county’s registry of deeds (which entailed using a Web scraper), alumni lists, and old crisscross directories and telephone books.?
Michelle then connected with a computer programmer in Canada who offered to volunteer his help in whatever way he could. Per Paul’s specifications, the programmer built a cross-referencing utility that processes multiple lists and finds matching lines of text. With that application, Paul could begin feeding it two or more lists and then analyze its match results—now numbering over forty thousand.
Once the list of matches had been generated, Paul would go through it and weed out the false positives (far more likely with
common names like John Smith) by using public records aggregators. Paul would then collect as much information as possible on each match until he was satisfied that neither he nor any of his male relatives was viable. The names of those he was unable to rule out would be added to a master list of potential suspects.
IN CASES OF SERIAL BURGLARY, RAPE, OR MURDER, THE SUSPECT lists often swell to several thousand names and beyond. Difficulty in managing a list of this size enforces the need to devise a prioritization system, whereby suspect ranks are determined by factors such as prior criminal offenses and police contacts, availability for all crimes in the series, physical characteristics, and—if a geographic profile has been done—the suspect’s work and home addresses.
Geographic profiling is a specialized criminal investigative technique—perhaps more useful and scientific than behavioral profiling, which is arguably closer to an art than a science— whereby the key locations in a linked crime series are analyzed for the purpose of determining the likely anchor points (home, work, etc.) of a serial offender. This allows one to focus on isolated bubbles within a much broader suspect pool.
Although the general technique has informally been around for a while—you see investigators employing it to find a kidnapper in Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963)—the methodology of geographic profiling didn’t even have a name until the late 1980s, about ten years after the phrase “serial killer” first entered the popular lexicon. Given that it wasn’t yet an established investigative procedure, awareness of geo-profiling could not have been a factor motivating the EAR—a lover of misdirection—to misdirect geographically by commuting great distances to faraway neighborhoods in Southern California. Moreover, his Southern California crimes were not generally recognized as EAR crimes (and he specifically seemed to want to avoid this recognition, which is likely one reason he began killing his victims—to eliminate
witnesses) until DNA evidence established them as such. The logical conclusion, per the principle of Occam’s razor, is that the EAR was living in Southern California during the period in which he was offending there.
That said, while we would not advocate completely eliminating someone merely because a Southern California residence cannot be established, it would take some damn compelling reason to muster any interest in such a suspect.
However, Southern California—due to the infrequency of the EAR’s known offenses there, and the broad distance covered—is not ideal for a geographic profile. Because Sacramento was the area in which our offender was most prolific over the ten-year span of his known crimes, it is the ripest of the case-relevant locations for building a geographic profile.
With twenty-nine distinct locations linked to confirmed EAR attacks and close to a hundred likely connected burglaries, prowler reports, and other incidents, there is more than sufficient data for developing a geographic profile that would spotlight the neighborhoods in which the EAR most likely lived. In geo-profile-speak, these areas are known as buffer zones. Buffer zones are like an eye of a hurricane, carved out by the typical serial offender’s reluctance to strike too close to home.
So, at least in theory, identifying the EAR should simply be a matter of finding people who were living in Southern California in the early 1980s who had previously lived in Sacramento County in the mid-to-late 1970s—most likely living in one of those buffer zones.
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BY LOOKING AT THE AREAS FAMILIAR TO THE OFFENDER IN THE early phases of the series, as opposed to the ones to which he branched out later on, one can analyze the chronology of attacks
in Sacramento and break them up into multiple phases. We’ve chosen five:
Attacks 1–4 (pre–media blackout)
Attacks 5–8 (pre–media blackout)
Attacks 9–15 (post–media blackout following the first news stories about a serial rapist operating in the East Area of Sacramento)
Attacks 16–22 (beginning with the EAR’s major m.o. shift from lone women to couples, and preceding his three-month hiatus in the summer of 1977)
Attacks 24–44 (following the EAR’s summer ’77 hiatus as well as his first known attack outside of Sacramento County)
Creating a Google Map with a layer for each phase allows you to isolate and toggle between phases, comparing the spread within each and determining if a prospective anchor point or an apparent buffer zone remains consistent through the offender’s incrementally expanding radius of activity. In addition, tighter clusters of attacks tend to signify neighborhoods the offender may not know very well.