People’s relationship with nature changed. Winter’s drizzle and dense tule fog, the weather of dread, had given way to a lovely warmth, to vistas of freshly scrubbed green studded with red and pink camellia petals. But Sacramento’s prized abundance of trees, all those Oregon ash and blue oaks flanking the river, were recast in their eyes, a once verdant canopy now a hunting blind. An urge to prune took over. East siders hacked off tree limbs and uprooted shrubs around their houses. Reinforcing sliding glass windows with dowel rods wasn’t enough. That might keep him out, but they wanted more; they wanted to strip him completely of the ability to hide.
By May 16, a surge of newly installed floodlights lit up the east side like a Christmas tree. In one house tambourines were tied to every door and window. Hammers went under pillows. Nearly three thousand guns were sold in Sacramento County between January and May. Many people refused to sleep between one and four a.m. Some couples slept in shifts, one of them always stationed on the living room couch, a rifle pointed at the window.
Only a madman would strike again.
MAY 17 WAS THE DAY EVERYONE HELD THEIR BREATH AND WAITED to see who would die. They’d awakened that morning to news that the EAR had struck for the fourth time that month, the twenty-first attack attributed to him in less than a year; the latest victims, a couple in the Del Dayo neighborhood, told police he threatened to kill two people that night. In a single twenty-four-hour period, between May 17 and May 18, the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department received 6,169 calls, almost all of them about the East Area Rapist.
The officers responded to the call at 3:55 a.m. on May 17. The thirty-one-year-old male victim was outside his house in light blue pajamas, a length of white shoelace dangling from his left wrist. He spoke angrily in a mix of English and Italian. “What’s the hurry,” he said to the officers. “He’s gone. Just come on in!” When Shelby pulled up to the scene, he recognized the man immediately. Back in November, when he and Daly had led a packed town-hall discussion on the EAR, the man had stood up and criticized the investigation. He and Shelby had exchanged heated words. The incident had taken place six months ago, and maybe it was a coincidence, but the connection contributed to the impression that the EAR was brazen enough to attend events dedicated to his own capture, that he blended in, observed, remembered, and excelled at a certain kind of malevolent patience.
The attack, right off American River Drive in Del Dayo, near a water treatment plant, echoed the previous ones, though this time the EAR’s mood, like the community’s, was especially jittery. He stuttered; it didn’t seem like a put-on. And he had a message to convey, one he practically spit out at his female victim with excited anger. “Those fuckers, those pigs—do you hear me? I’ve never killed before but I’m going to kill now. I want you to tell those fuckers, those pigs, I’m going to go home to my apartment. I have bunches of televisions. I’m going to listen to the radio and watch television and if I hear about this, I’m going to go out tomorrow night and kill two people. People are going to die.”
But he gave the husband, who was tied up in another room, a slightly different message. “You tell those fucking pigs that I could have killed two people tonight. If I don’t see that all over the papers and television, I’ll kill two people tomorrow night.”
He devoured Cheez-It crackers and half a cantaloupe before he left.
The city awoke to a jarring headline in the Sacramento Bee: EAST AREA RAPIST ATTACKS NO. 23, NEXT VICTIMS DIE TONIGHT? The article reported that the Sheriff’s Department had consulted with a panel of local psychiatrists and concluded that the EAR was “a probable paranoid schizophrenic” and that he was likely in “a homosexual panic because of inadequate (physical) endowment.” The inadequate-endowment detail was repeated several times in the article. Whether or not this was the kind of press the EAR sought, or whether he sought press at all, was anyone’s guess, as was the question of whether he’d make good on his threat to kill.
May 1977 was the month the wrought-iron bars went up and the all-night vigils began, when a group of three hundred neighborhood men patrolled east Sacramento County in pickup trucks outfitted with CB radios. Hard acrylic panels were bolted behind windows and doors. Deadbolts were on back order. Meter readers held their identification cards in front of them and announced themselves repeatedly, loudly, when they entered people’s yards. Orders for backyard floodlights went from ten a month to six hundred. A letter to the Sacramento Union, typical of the time: “We used to open our windows at night for fresh air. Not anymore. We took the dog for a walk in the evenings. Not anymore. My sons used to feel safe and secure in their own home. Not anymore. We all used to sleep without waking to every normal evening’s noise. Not anymore.”
Around this time, Shelby found himself in south Sacramento in an unmarked car with another detective on daytime surveillance detail. They were facing east, and to their left was a short street where, midway down the block, a game of tag football was being played. A car headed eastbound, going very slowly, passed by. The car’s speed was unusual, but what really caught Shelby’s attention was the extreme focus with which the driver watched the game. Shelby looked closer at the players; they were all boys except the quarterback, a young woman with long hair, about twenty years old. A few minutes later, the same car returned, inching by, the driver again staring intently at the players. Shelby noted the make and model of the car. When the car circled a third time, he jotted down the plate and radioed it in. “If he comes by again, let’s pull him over,” Shelby told his partner. But that was the last time the driver, a pencil-necked blond guy in his early twenties, came by. His ardent concentration is what lingers in Shelby’s memory. That, and the fact that days later the EAR would attack in south Sacramento for the first time, about a mile away; that crime scene would be the last Shelby worked on before being pulled off the case and reassigned.
The license plate came back unregistered.
* * *
THERE’S A KIND OF PROUDLY SELF-RELIANT, NO-FUSS QUALITY that I’ve come to recognize in longtime Sacramentans. I once scheduled a breakfast interview at the boutique hotel I was staying at downtown. The interviewee’s husband, a cabinetmaker, accompanied her to the meeting. I had already ordered my breakfast, a deconstructed yogurt parfait that came in a tiny mason jar with an antique silver spoon. I encouraged my guests to get something, but when the waitress turned to the husband he shook his head politely and smiled. “Made my own breakfast myself this morning.” I literally had a silver spoon in my mouth when he said it.
I bring this up only to help make sense of certain things. For example, two days after the May 17 attack, a local dentist publicly announced that he was contributing $10,000 to the reward (raising it to $25,000) and, with another businessman, forming the grassroots EARS (East Area Rapist Surveillance) Patrol. Hundreds of local men attended a rally and, with CB radios, began patrolling the east side all night in their cars. The undersheriff conveyed his dismay over this development in a Bee article on May 20; essentially his message was: please don’t. The citizen manhunt pushed on undeterred, accompanied by the noise and light of a surveillance helicopter on loan from the California Highway Patrol that circled relentlessly overhead.
Another example: an article in the Sacramento Union on May 22, “Two Victims Recall East Area Rapist,” quoted Jane using a pseudonym; there were enough identifying details that the EAR, reading it, would have known who it was, which makes what she said all the more remarkable.