Hayes was probably right about the position outside the window. And the rage. But not the familiarity. Charlene Smith was just the latest unlucky stand-in for the lustful, sneering women— mother, schoolgirl, ex-wife—who formed a disapproving circle around the killer in his daydreams, their cacophony of disdain forcing him, always, to his knees; the act of grabbing the log was arousal alchemized to hate, a vicious punishment meted out by one judge: his corroded brain.
* * *
THE BODY COUNT STOOD AT SIX. NEARLY TWENTY YEARS TOO late, they were learning his methods. How he adapted. And that he was mobile. Mapping the crimes took on a contagionlike feel, a search for victim zero. Where was he before Ventura? Someone dug up the old newspaper articles, the ones questioning whether not only Ventura and Orange were connected but Santa Barbara too. DOUBLE MURDERS MAY BE LINKED, POLICE SAY, read the headline in the July 30, 1981, edition of the Santa Ana Register. Nearly twenty years later, the three counties compared information again. There were a few dissimilarities—two of the male Santa Barbara victims had been shot when it appeared they fought back—but too many parallels existed to discount a link. Prowling and peeping. Nighttime attacks on middle-class victims who were sleeping. Bludgeoning. Precut ligatures brought to the scene. Tennis-shoe impressions. Many aspects that were present in a pair of double murders in a town forty miles north.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The Ventura investigation was unquestionably the most labyrinthine of all the stand-alone investigations. Michelle had planned to cover it at great length, but Ventura is only lightly represented in the book due to her protracted quest to obtain the highly elusive case file.
In 2014 Michelle paid the Ventura County Courthouse $1,400 for hard copies of the transcripts from the Joe Alsip preliminary hearings. All 2,806 pages had to be printed from microfilm. Michelle later recalled the clerk eyeing her with some cocktail of confusion and derision as she handed Michelle the massive volume of freshly printed archive material.
Reading the transcripts, which were full of tantalizing allusions to items more fully documented in the official reports, only made Michelle covet the Ventura file that much more. In January 2016, she finally got her hands on the file when she borrowed three dozen boxes of Golden State Killer material from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. She had read through much of that file—which primarily focused on red herring Joe Alsip—by the time of her death, but she did not have time to weave it into the narrative.
For a more complete account of the Smith investigation and the case against Joe Alsip, Colleen Cason’s series “The Silent Witness,” published in the Ventura County Star in November 2002, is an excellent reference.]
Goleta, 1979
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Segments of the following chapter have been pieced together from various drafts of “In the Footsteps of a Killer.”]
THE MAN APPROACHED LINDA* AS SHE WAS LEAVING FOR WORK IN the morning. “My dog was stabbed in your backyard last night,” he said. The man was young, in his early twenties, elfin-featured, and a little hyperactive. He pointed to the footbridge that crossed the creek about two hundred feet from where they stood on Berkeley Road in Goleta. He and his dog, Kimo, had come from there, he explained, Kimo off leash and the man lagging casually behind. The city of Goleta is a bedroom community with a safe reputation, boring even, but few people would brave San Jose Creek alone at night. The narrow gorge winds down from the chaparral-covered mountains through the east side of town and is shrouded in huge, draping trees—sycamore, alder, and eucalyptus, with its papery, cracked bark that looks clawed-at. There are no lights, and the only sounds are the clump and rustling of unseen animals seeking food.
But Kimo was a big, protective dog, a 120-pound German shepherd and Alaskan malamute mix. That something might happen to the dog never occurred to the man. When he exited the footbridge into the residential neighborhood, he saw Kimo dart between Linda’s house and her next-door neighbor’s. Something must have drawn his attention back there. Kimo was nosy. From the man’s vantage point, the 5400 block of Berkeley Road was still. Up until the 1960s, Goleta was a sea of walnut groves and lemon orchards, and in certain pockets, especially adjacent to the creek, you could experience what it must have been like back then, no engines revving, no electronics humming; there was just a blanketing, hushed darkness and a scattering of lights from single-story ranch houses. A surfboard atop a VW bus in someone’s driveway was the only reminder that this was Southern California suburbia in early fall 1979.
A sharp yelp broke the silence. Moments later Kimo reappeared. The dog made his way unsteadily to the sidewalk and collapsed at the man’s feet. The man turned him over. Blood oozed from a long cut to his belly.
Kimo survived. After frantically knocking at several houses, the man was finally able to find a phone and called for help. An urgent care veterinarian closed the wound with seventy stitches, leaving a scar that stretched from Kimo’s sternum to the end of his belly. But the man remained puzzled about the source of the injury. Linda understood. Work could wait. She enlisted the help of her next-door neighbor, and together the three of them carefully scoured the side and back yards for sharp objects, like a lawnmower blade or piece of torn fence, which might have cut the dog. They found nothing. It was strange. Also odd was Linda’s flooded front lawn. Around the same time Kimo was hurt, someone had apparently turned on her hose and left it running.
Linda never learned the dog owner’s name. He thanked her politely and left. She mostly forgot about the incident until another man approached her outside her house with a question in July 1981. A lot had changed in the year and a half since Kimo was injured. Yellow crime-scene tape had gone up three times in the neighborhood, unusual for an area so small—less than two square miles—and so homey that deputies affectionately nicknamed the teenagers they regularly ran out of the avocado groves for smoking weed the red-eye gang.
This was Santa Barbara County, home to President Reagan’s 688-acre vacation ranch and also a popular retreat for moneyed dilettantes with a hippie bent, where you could wear flip-flops all day or playact in a staged rodeo, where you could enjoy historically preserved Spanish architecture unsullied by garish billboards (a ban won after a multiyear campaign waged by aesthetically inclined civic leaders). From 1950 until 1991, the only stops on Highway 101 between an otherwise open 435 miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco were four traffic lights in Santa Barbara; depending on whom you believe, this was because locals feared that a freeway would block their ocean view, or because they wanted tourists to patronize local businesses, or because they felt people should be encouraged to pause and contemplate life, and what better place to do this than in Santa Barbara, America’s Riviera, ensconced between a rugged mountain range and the Pacific Ocean? Who didn’t want to idle at a stoplight in paradise? The answer, eventually, was no one. The accidents were legion, weekend traffic was a gridlock, and pollution from idling cars became immense.
INVESTIGATORS FELT THEY KNEW THE NIGHT HE LEARNED HE HAD to be careful. They knew the night that changed him. The first crime they could connect him to, where their rewinding stopped: October 1, 1979. Less than a week after Kimo was stabbed. That was the night a Goleta couple on Queen Ann Lane awakened to a blinding flashlight and a young man’s clenched-teeth whisper. The woman was ordered to tie up her boyfriend. Then the intruder tied her. He rummaged around, opening and slamming drawers. Cursing. Threatening. Asking for money but not focused on it. He led the woman into the living room and made her lie face down on the floor, throwing a pair of tennis shorts over her head as a blindfold. She heard him enter their kitchen. She heard him chanting to himself.