Then, around eight thirty p.m., a crouching figure crept by the window. McGowen waited. The figure appeared in the garage doorway and looked around. Possibilities cycled through McGowen’s head. The homeowner? A fellow officer? But his eyes had adjusted to the dark and he could see that the figure was dressed in black and crowned with a watch cap.
McGowen observed as the figure moved along the side of the garage, toward the rear of the structure. The subject had a large, ungainly frame, oddly proportioned. McGowen walked outside and followed, shining his flashlight on the figure as he fiddled with a side gate.
Vaughan, his colleague, took notes as McGowen, under hypnosis, recounted what happened next. The surprise confrontation. The chase into the backyard. The scream like a woman’s scream.
“Oh my God! Don’t hurt me!”
“Was it a woman?” Sandstrom, the hypnotist, asked McGowen.
“No,” he said.
McGowen kept his Kel-Lite flashlight fixed on the figure running from him and shouted repeatedly for him to halt. The Ransacker appeared to be hysterical, screaming “Oh my God, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me!” over and over, darting this way and that, finally diving over a short slate fence into an adjacent yard. McGowen grabbed his service revolver from his holster and fired a warning shot into the ground. The Ransacker froze and wheeled around. He raised his right hand in surrender.
“I give up,” he quavered. “See? See, I’ve got my hands up.”
Remembering the moment during hypnosis pulled McGowen into a deeper trance. He fixated on the face illuminated in the beam of his flashlight.
“Baby. Round. Soft-looking baby.”
“Doesn’t even shave.”
“Very light skin. Soft. Round. Baby face.”
“Baby.”
Standing at the fence, McGowen must have been exhilarated. The grueling eighteen-month manhunt was over. He was seconds from collaring a criminal who’d remained so cunningly invisible that more than one officer had wondered if they were chasing a ghost. But the Visalia Ransacker was real. And a bad man. Yet their evil adversary was hardly intimidating in the flesh. A doughboy, McGowen thought, haplessly plodding around begging in a high-pitched whimper for McGowen not to hurt him. McGowen didn’t intend to hurt him. He was a religious man, an old-fashioned, by-the-book cop. The thrill was in knowing the nightmare was over. The creep was toast. McGowen started over the fence to arrest him.
But the Ransacker had raised only his right hand in surrender. With his left hand he withdrew a blue steel revolver from his coat pocket and fired with unambiguous aim straight at McGowen’s chest. Fortunately McGowen had his flashlight at arm’s length in front of him—muscle memory from police training more than anything else. The bullet struck the lens. The force of the shot knocked McGowen back. His partner, alerted by the gunfire, sprinted into the yard and saw McGowen motionless on the ground. Thinking he had been shot, he ran to where he thought the Ransacker had fled, radioing for help at the same time. Suddenly he heard movement behind him. He whipped around. It was McGowen. Powder burns streaked his face. His right eye was red. Otherwise, he was fine.
“There he goes,” McGowen said.
Seventy officers from three different agencies sealed off a six-square-block area. But nothing. The awkwardly built man-child ran away and disappeared into the night—a moth swallowed by the dark—leaving behind a sock full of collectible coins and jewelry, and two books of Blue Chip stamps.
MCGOWEN’S ACCOUNT OF THE RANSACKER’S DISTINCTIVE APPEARANCE and his bizarre manner was consistent with reports of previous close encounters Visalians had with the near-ubiquitous Peeping Tom.
They decided he never went outside during daylight hours. He was that pale. The few people who’d glimpsed him remarked on his complexion. It’s hard to maintain the skin tone of a fish’s underbelly in Visalia, a farm town in central California where temperatures top 100 degrees in the summer. To understand why his pallor marked him as unusual, it helps to know that Visalia is heavily populated with descendants of Dust Bowl refugees. Native Visalians follow an internal clock set by nature. They remember the epic floods. Anticipate the droughts. Lean against pickups and watch ash fall from wildfires torching chaparral and timber forty miles away. The outdoors isn’t a concept but hard fact. Sun damage is shorthand for knowledge and trust. It says, I understand what it means to hedge a citrus tree; I know that to “chop cotton” means to hack weeds from cotton plants with a hoe; I’ve drifted down the St. John’s River on an inner tube, alkali dust from my feet dissolving into water the color of weak coffee.
His paleness conveyed no such local familiarity. It was uncommon and therefore suspicious. It suggested a cloistered life spent plotting. His pursuers in the Visalia Police Department didn’t know who he was or where he shut himself away. They knew he moved around at night. They had a good idea of what drew him out.
To the teenage girls closing their bedroom curtains, he registered as a glint in the shadows. A flicker of stray light that made them pause. But it was hard to see clearly at night. It was sometime in the winter of 1974 when Glenda,* a sixteen-year-old who lived on West Feemster, was pulling her curtains shut and happened to glance down, noticing a marbly, moon-shaped object in the bushes. Curious, she raised her bedroom window for a closer inspection. The moon-faced object returned her stare, a screwdriver clenched in its left hand.
Like that, he was gone. Where hard, small eyes had been, there was darkness. Skittering sounds could be heard, like some creature with a muscly tail running from light. Bushes rustled. Fences thudded. The clambering grew fainter, but it didn’t matter. A distress call drowned out everything else. At the time, in 1974, Visalia businesses closed at 9:00 p.m., and trouble was mostly confined to men huddled around irrigation ditches fighting over water rights. But there was no mistaking the sound when you heard it. Movies don’t capture the effect of the real thing. It’s impossible to reproduce in a studio. Conversations stop. Heads jerk. Eardrums pound with dread, for nothing signals terror like a teenage girl’s wild, unrestrained scream in the night.
The paleness of the stranger’s face wasn’t its only unsettling feature. A week after the prowling incident, Glenda’s boyfriend, Carl,* was waiting for her outside her house. It was an early autumn evening, warm still, already dark. Glenda’s house was similar to others in the middle-class neighborhood near Mt. Whitney High School in southwest Visalia: single-story, solidly built in the 1950s; at roughly 1,500 square feet, not especially large. Carl sat on the lawn, his presence shadowed in contrast to the glow cast from the brightly lit picture window fronting the house. From his cloaked position in the yard, Carl observed a man emerge from a path that bordered the canal across the street. The man was ambling along but stopped short when his eyes locked on something. Carl followed his absorbed gaze to the window, where Glenda, dressed in a halter top and shorts, was talking with her mother in the living room. The man dropped to his hands and knees.
Carl had been at Glenda’s when she spotted the prowler outside her bedroom; he’d chased him into a neighbor’s yard before losing him in the dark. He knew he was looking at the same man. Even knowing that couldn’t prepare him for what happened next. On his hands and knees, as if magnetized by what he saw in the window, the man began a military-style crawl toward Glenda’s house.