Contra Costa, 1997
“WHAT’S EAR?” PAUL HOLES ASKED.
John Murdock was taken aback for a moment. He hadn’t heard the acronym in years.
“Why?” Murdock asked.
They were sitting across the aisle from each other on a flight to a California Association of Criminalists conference. It was 1997. Murdock had recently retired as the chief of the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s crime lab. His specialty was firearms and tool marks. Holes, in his late twenties, had landed a job as a deputy sheriff criminalist soon after graduating from UC-Davis with a major in biochemistry. He started in forensic toxicology but soon realized that his passion was CSI. Then his curiosity outgrew the microscope. He began going around with the investigators; he was a cold-case investigator trapped in a crime lab. He enjoyed wandering the Property Room, pulling out boxes of old unsolved cases. What he found there were stories. Statements. Photographs. Incomplete thoughts scribbled in the margins by a distracted investigator. Ambiguities don’t exist in the lab. Old case files teem with them. The puzzles beckoned.
“Paul, that’s not your job,” more than one fellow criminalist scolded him. He didn’t care. He possessed the handsome Eagle Scout’s talent for remaining convivial while doing exactly what he wanted. What he wanted, he realized, was to be an investigator. He was angling to make the move to that division when the chance arose.
Despite their age difference, Murdock and Holes recognized that they had something in common: they excelled at science, but it was stories that pulled them in. Every day after he finished his lab work, Holes would sit down with old case files, appalled and fascinated by the dark off-roads of human behavior. Cold cases stayed with him. He had the scientist’s intolerance for uncertainty. After devouring boxes of old unsolved cases, he noticed a pattern; the same person always signed the most meticulous crime-scene reports: John Murdock.
“I saw EAR marked in big red letters on some folders set aside in a filing cabinet,” Holes explained to Murdock. Holes hadn’t delved into the files yet, but he could tell that they had been set aside in a special, almost hallowed way.
“EAR stands for East Area Rapist,” Murdock said. The name was clearly cataloged in his head, its significance not dimmed by time.
“I don’t know that one,” Holes said.
For the rest of the flight, thirty thousand feet up in the air, Murdock told Holes the story.
He was a hot prowler. He barely registered with the cops at first. In mid-June 1976, he appeared in a young woman’s bedroom in east Sacramento doing “the no-pants dance,” wearing a T-shirt and nothing else. Knife in hand. Whispered threats. Ransacking. He raped her. It was rough, but Sacramento in 1976 had an abundance of predatory creeps. Ski mask and gloves suggested some intelligence, but no-pants dancers are usually rumdum teenagers whose mothers turn them in by the scruff of the neck.
That never happened. More rapes did. Twenty-two in eleven months. His methods were distinct and unwavering. An initial just-a-robber ruse to secure compliance. Females as gagged objects, moved to his specifications. Their hands and feet tied and retied, often with shoelaces. Sexual assault that curiously avoided breasts and kissing. Ransacking as stimulation. Gleefully raising the stakes as east Sacramento entered full-blown panic. Taking on sleeping couples. Stacking dishes on the bound man’s back, threatening to kill his wife or girlfriend if he heard the dishes fall. The East Area Rapist was the bogeyman in the bedroom, the stranger who knew too much—layouts of homes, number of children, work schedules. The ski mask and raspy, faked voice suggested an alter ego, but from whom was he altering?
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department hit walls. Hit walls hard. The same young white males were stopped repeatedly. The right one wasn’t. Or maybe he was. That was the problem. All EAR Task Force investigators had their own mental impression of the suspect’s face, but none were the same. He was a blond stoner in an army jacket. A Mormon on a bike. A slick, olive-skinned Realtor.
Carol Daly was the lead female investigator on the task force. By the twenty-second rape, after another three a.m. trip to the hospital with a distraught victim, she surprised herself with a dark thought. I love my husband. I hate men.
What kept investigator Richard Shelby up at night were the repeated credible reports called in of a suspicious prowler who, once spotted, walked away “at a leisurely pace.”
The creep of a bitch was an ambler.
The community began to glimpse fear in the sheriff’s deputies’ eyes. The EAR was stalking their heads. All their heads. Sundown produced collective dread. It seemed impossible that he’d never be caught. The law of chance would get him eventually, but who wanted to be the schmuck waiting around for that?
Then, as mysteriously as he’d appeared in east Sacramento, he was gone, after a two-year reign of terror, from 1976 to 1978.
“Wow,” said Holes. “What happened then?”
Murdock remembered that Holes was a ten-year-old at the time, unaware of the mass paralysis the case caused, its twists, false hopes, and dead ends. His connection to the case came only from spotting files labeled EAR in red.
“He resurfaced in the East Bay,” Murdock said. “He came to us.”
Holes began asking older friends and colleagues about the EAR and was surprised at how pervasive the case had been. Everyone had a story. His undersheriff remembered the helicopters whirling overhead, the roving spotlights darting through the quiet subdivisions. A UC-Davis professor said his first date with his wife had been taking part in one of the nightly rape patrols. One of his co-workers quietly confided in Holes that his sister was one of the victims.
Between October 1978 and July 1979, after which he vanished from Northern California, there were eleven EAR cases in the greater East Bay area, including two in San Jose and one in Fremont. Trying to make headway twenty years later was daunting. Local police departments handled some of the cases. All of the agencies, including Sacramento County, had destroyed their evidence. It was routine Property Room procedure. The cases were past the statute of limitations. Fortunately CCCSO (Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office), where Holes worked, had kept its evidence. The set-aside red EAR files weren’t a fluke; demoralized CCCSO deputies back in the day assured that it would stay that way. It was the opposite of hanging a police commendation plaque. The EAR was their failure. If the human brain was, as experts allege, the best computer in the world, the old guard wanted their conspicuous EAR files to lure one of those young, inquiring computers in, fast and deep. Sometimes the tough cases were just a relay race.
“We always catch the dumb ones,” cops like to say. They could tick off ninety-nine out of a hundred boxes with these kinds of arrests. That one unchecked box though. It could vex you into early death.
* * *
IN JULY 1997, HOLES BEGAN PULLING THE EAR RAPE KITS FROM Property and seeing what evidence might be coaxed from them. The CCCSO crime lab wasn’t as advanced as other California labs. Their DNA program was relatively new. Still, it looked as though three kits would yield material for a rudimentary profile. Holes figured that, even though the EAR’s m.o. was distinctive and there was little doubt the Northern California attacks were connected, if he could conclude with scientific certainty that one man was responsible for CCCSO’s three EAR-suspected cases, that could resurrect the investigation. They could dig up old suspects and swab them.