The night of the attack, a birdbath had been moved to a spot under the telephone line in the backyard, evidently to stand on. But the line was only partially cut, the clumsy hesitation mark of a trainee, like the bent nail of an apprentice carpenter.
Four months later, Richard Shelby was standing on a curb on Shadowbrook Way in Citrus Heights.
Based on the rules of the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department, Shelby should not have been on this or any other case. He shouldn’t have even been in uniform. Shelby knew the rules—to work for the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department in 1966 you had to have all ten digits in their entirety—but he had passed the written exam and physical, and thought he’d try his luck. Luck had been good to him; even the fact that he was missing a good portion of his left ring finger was lucky. He should have been cut in half by the hunter’s errant shotgun blast. The doctors told him he came very close to losing the whole hand.
When the screener spotted Shelby’s finger, he halted the interview. Shelby was curtly dismissed. He wouldn’t be joining the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department after all. The rejection smarted. All his life, Shelby had heard his family speak reverently of an uncle who was a sheriff in Oklahoma. Maybe it was a sign. He wanted to work in a less populated county anyway. Yolo, or Placer. The Central Valley’s open spaces were the landscape of his youth. Summers he’d worked outside on the ranches and farms of east Merced County. Skinny-dipped in the canals. Hunted rabbit and quail in the lower foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The SSD’s “failure to pass” letter arrived a week later. Then, the next day, another letter arrived. This one told him where and when to report for work.
Shelby called for an explanation. Vietnam was becoming big news. In February 1965, the monthly draft was three thousand; the number had increased to thirty-three thousand by October. Protests began throughout the country, turning incrementally more raucous. Available young men were growing scarce. The SSD saw Shelby as a new and relatively rare phenomenon. He had joined the air force more than a decade before, thirteen days after his seventeenth birthday, and completed duty. He had a college degree in criminal justice. He was married. And despite what he was lacking fingerwise, he could outtype the sheriff’s secretary. They changed the rules about finger length. Shelby reported for work August 1, 1966. He stayed twenty-seven years.
The SSD was far from a slick place back then. Everyone competed for the one squad car that had a gooseneck lamp and clipboard affixed to the dash. The armory still had tommy guns from the 1920s. The sirens were located right on top of the cars; the cops who drove them wear hearing aids now. Specialized divisions like the one for sex crimes didn’t exist. You were the expert with hands-on experience if you picked up the phone and were called to a rape scene once. That’s why Shelby found himself on the morning of October 5, 1976, on the curb at Shadow-brook Way.
A bloodhound following a scent trail had brought him to the spot. The trail began at a child’s bedroom window, continued over a fence and through a field of weeds, stopping at the curb. Shelby knocked on the nearest door and looked across the field toward the victim’s house, a distance of about two hundred feet. He wished away his unease.
An hour and a half earlier, shortly after six thirty a.m., Jane Carson had been cuddling in bed with her three-year-old son when she heard a light switch go on and off, and then someone running down the hallway. Her husband had left for work moments before. “Jack, is that you? Did you forget something?”
A man in a greenish-brown ski mask came through the door.
“Shut up, I want your money, I won’t hurt you,” he said.
Shelby found the precision timing interesting. The man entered the house through the son’s bedroom window just moments after Jane’s husband left. They’d been the victims of an unusual burglary two weeks before, in which the thief took ten or so of their rings and left behind some neighbors’ stolen jewelry. The thief had also entered and exited through the son’s window. Same guy, Shelby thought. A methodical and patient one.
Jane’s rape would end up being the fifth assault attributed to the East Area Rapist, but it was the first one worked by Shelby and Carol Daly, two detectives who would become inextricably linked to the series. A female detective with experience in sex crimes, Daly was a natural fit to conduct the victim interviews. Her people skills would eventually rocket her all the way to the job of undersheriff. Shelby, however, had a knack for pissing people off. He would call on colleagues to handle suspect interrogations, as his tended to devolve into chaos. He was always butting heads with “the fourth floor,” the top brass. His problems stemmed less from arrogance than plainspokenness. He lacked finesse. A childhood spent roaming a flat landscape empty of people could keep one from developing certain communication skills. “The ability to be tactful has always eluded me,” he says.
There were three more attacks in quick succession that October. At first many of his colleagues thought an unidentified serial offender known as the Early Bird Rapist was responsible, but Shelby knew they were up against a smarter and weirder man than the Early Bird. These were the days before criminal profiling, before terms like “signature” or “ritual behavior” became commonplace. Back then, investigators might say “the presence,” “the personality,” or “the smell of it.” What they meant was the precise and peculiar arrangement of details, as distinct as an odor—the experience of crime-scene déjà vu. There was the consistent physical description, of course. He was white, in his late teens or twenties, about five nine, with a medium, athletic build. Always in some sort of mask. Forced, angry whisper. Clenched jaw. When he got upset, his voice rose to a higher pitch. Small penis. There was the odd deportment—his voice was often hurried but his manner was not. He would open a drawer and stand looking at it for several minutes in silence. Reports of prowlers seen in the neighborhood around the time of an attack often included the detail that the prowler, once alerted that he’d been seen, left the area in a leisurely manner. “Totally unhurried,” one witness said.
His psychosexual needs were specific. He bound his victims’ hands behind their backs, often tying and retying several times, sometimes with different material. He ordered them to masturbate him with their bound hands. He never fondled them. When he started attacking couples, he’d take the female into the living room and drape a towel over the TV; lighting seemed important. He got off on sexual questioning. “What am I doing?” he’d ask a blindfolded victim as he masturbated with hand lotion found in the house. “Is this like the captain’s?” he asked Jane; her husband was a captain in the air force. He told her to “shut up” at least fifty times, Jane said, but when he was raping her, he had other demands, snapping at her like a director to his actress. “Put some emotion in that,” he ordered her, “or I’ll use my knife.”
He was brazen. Twice he entered homes, pressing on undeterred when he knew victims had spotted him and were frantically dialing the police. Children didn’t bother him. He never hurt them physically, but he would tie up the older ones and put them in another room. He put Jane’s toddler son on the bedroom floor during her attack. The boy fell asleep. When he awoke, he peered over the bed. The EAR had left. His mother lay bound in strips of torn towels and was gagged with a washcloth. He mistook the ligatures for bandages.