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THE HOUSES HAD DIFFERENT LAYOUTS. SOME OF THE VICTIMS were young teenagers who clutched couch pillows to their stomachs and, pain-faced and confused, shook their heads when they were asked if they knew what a “climax” was. Others were in their midthirties, had recently divorced their second husbands, and were enrolled in beauty school classes and active in singles clubs. But for the detectives called out of bed in the early morning hours, the scenes record-skipped with a numbing sameness. Cut shoelaces on a shag carpet. Deep red indentations around wrists. Pry marks on window frames. Kitchen cabinets left open. Beer cans and cracker boxes scattered on backyard patios. There was the sound of some sort of bag, paper rustling or a zipper opening, as he stole engraved jewelry, driver’s licenses, photos, coins, occasionally money, though theft was clearly not his driving motive, as he bypassed other valuables, and often what he stole, like a cherished wedding ring ripped violently from a swollen finger, was found dumped somewhere close by.
On April 2, he added a twist to his method, one he would continue to use. The first couple he targeted awoke to a bright, square-lensed flashlight shining in their eyes. He gruffly whispered that he had a gun (“a .45 with fourteen shots”) and threw a length of twine at the woman, ordering her to tie up her boyfriend. When the male was bound, the EAR placed a cup and saucer on his back. “I hear the cup rattle or bedsprings make any noise, I’ll shoot everybody in the house,” he whispered. To the woman he remarked at one point, “I was in the army and I fucked a lot while I was there.”
That the EAR may have a military connection was frequently discussed. There were five military installations within an hour’s drive of Sacramento; Mather Air Force Base, adjacent to Rancho Cordova, had roughly eight thousand personnel alone. There was his penchant for army green and the occasional report of black lace-up military-style boots. Several who encountered him, including those with military backgrounds, felt his authoritative posture and unyielding demeanor were reminiscent of someone with a background in the armed forces. “The dishes trick,” as his unusual alarm system came to be known, struck some as a technique right out of jungle warfare.
There was also the galling fact that he was outmaneuvering them. He remained free. The Sheriff’s Department borrowed treetop cameras from the State Department of Forestry normally used to catch arsonists. They depleted their overtime budget sending undercover patrols to roam the neighborhoods the EAR frequented. They borrowed military nightscopes and movement detectors used in Vietnam. Yet he was still out there blending in, a man whose ordinariness was his mask.
The Sheriff’s Department brought in an army colonel trained in Special Forces techniques to help them understand the EAR’s tactics. “The major point in training is that of patience,” the colonel told them. “The specially trained person can and will sit in one position for hours if necessary and will not move.” The EAR’s sensitivity to noise—he often turned off air-conditioning and heating units to hear better—was a skill honed in Special Forces personnel. Ditto knives, knots, and planning multiple escape routes. “He can and will make use of any point of concealment,” the colonel said. Look for him “in the place most unlikely for a human being to be, i.e., the bottom portion of an outhouse, the middle of blackberry bushes.” The colonel reiterated: remember the patience. He believes he’s got more stamina than anyone else, and that searchers will give up when he will not.
Shelby wondered if they hadn’t caught him for another reason. He noticed that they would station undercover patrols in a neighborhood he was known to frequent, but that night the EAR would attack somewhere else. He seemed more aware of police procedure than the average citizen. He always wore gloves and parked outside the standard police perimeter. “Freeze!” he shouted once at a woman as she tried to scramble away from him. Shelby wasn’t the only one to bring it up. The thought crossed other minds in the Sheriff’s Department too. Was he one of them?
One night Shelby followed up on a prowler tip. The woman who called in the tip seemed surprised when Shelby knocked on the front door and announced himself. For the last several minutes she thought an officer was already there, she told him; she could swear she heard the sound of a police radio just outside her house.
“He will let the searchers walk within an inch of him and will not move,” the colonel had warned.
By the end of April, the victim count was seventeen. The EAR was averaging two victims a month. If you were paying attention, and most people were, it was bad.
Then came May.
* * *
THE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT ACCEPTED AN OFFER FROM A PSYCHIC who said she could identify the EAR. She chanted and ate raw hamburger. They looked into having the EAR’s “biorhythm chart” done but were told it wouldn’t work without his birth date. Around midnight on May 2, a little over two weeks since the last attack, a thirty-year-old woman on La Riviera Drive heard a thump outside, the same sound her young sons made when they jumped the fence from the levee into the yard. She went to the window, but didn’t see anything. The abrupt glare of a flashlight, the first hint of danger, startled her and her husband, a major in the air force, around three a.m.
Two days later, a man in a beige ski mask and dark blue jacket, resembling a US Navy jacket, lunged out of the darkness at a young woman and her male co-worker as they walked to her car parked in his driveway in Orangevale. Both cases had the familiar smell. The hang-up phone calls beforehand. The dishes trick. The unsettling pairing, in one instance, of brutal rape followed by a break to eat Ritz crackers in the kitchen. Both couples told the detectives the EAR seemed like someone straining to appear tough, a bad actor who took gulping breaths in an attempt to seem angry and unhinged. The woman in Orangevale said he entered the bathroom for several minutes; it sounded to her that he was hyperventilating in there.
EAST AREA RAPIST ATTACKS 20TH VICTIM IN ORANGEVALE read the headline in the next day’s Bee.
Pressure was building at the Sheriff’s Department. Normally hands-off bosses became agitatedly hands-on. It was only May and their overtime budget was nearly depleted for the year. They were elbow-deep in dead-end calls about ex-boyfriends and Public Works employees checking street lighting. Slouching and leisurely sipping from Styrofoam cups of coffee disappeared from daily briefings, replaced by pacing and restless legs. Detectives stared at maps and tried to predict his next attack. They had a feeling he would hit next in the area around Sunrise Mall, in Citrus Heights; reports of prowling and break-ins were emanating from there.
Around twelve forty-five a.m. on May 13, a family on Merlindale Drive, not far from Sunrise Mall, heard someone on their roof. Dogs in adjacent yards began barking. A neighbor called the family around one a.m. to say they heard someone crawling on their roof too. Squad cars arrived within minutes; the roof creeper was gone.
The next night, a block over, a young waitress and her husband, a restaurant manager, were the next victims.
Disbelief set in. A roughly ten-mile corridor following the American River east into unincorporated Sacramento County was under siege. No one required context anymore. There was no “Have you heard?” You had heard. “There’s this guy” was replaced by “He.” Teachers at Sacramento State gave up teaching and entire class sessions were devoted to discussions about the EAR, any student with new information pumped for details.