Holes fielded reporters’ calls and enjoyed the excitement for a few days. But even though privately he still felt investigative work was his calling, he’d been promoted to criminalist supervisor. Commitments beckoned. He was married with two young kids. He didn’t have the time to dedicate himself to the ten thousand pages of case files that the new DNA connection unified. It was an unheard-of amount of evidence. Optimism among those who worked the case ran sky high. DNA profile? Sixty cases spanning the state of California? They fought over who would interrogate him first when they got him in the room.
Larry Pool in Orange County was the designated point man. For Pool the news of the DNA connection was great but daunting, as if he’d spent the last couple of years in a small, familiar room only to discover that it was an annex to a warehouse.
He continued to bat away contempt from hardened cops who kept insisting that the monster was dead. Sexually motivated serial killers don’t stop killing unless they’re stopped; maybe some righteous homeowner shot him dead during a burglary. Don’t waste your time, they said.
Seven months later, Pool would be vindicated by some news from the Pacific Northwest. In November 2001, the media’s attention turned to another unidentified serial killer who’d been dormant for nearly two decades and presumed by some to be long dead: Washington’s Green River Killer. As it turned out, this prolific slayer of prostitutes was very much alive and well and living in suburban Seattle. His reason for slowing down? He’d gotten married.
“Technology got me,” Gary Ridgway told cops, the verbal equivalent of an upturned middle finger. He was right. He fooled the cops for years by slackening his face and dimming the light in his eyes. No way this half-wit is a diabolical serial killer, they thought, and always, despite mounting evidence, they let him go.
On April 6, 2001, two days after the news linking the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker hit the media, the phone rang in a house on Thornwood Drive in east Sacramento. A woman in her early sixties answered. She’d lived in the house for nearly thirty years, though her last name had changed.
“Hello?”
The voice was low. He spoke slowly. She recognized it immediately.
“Remember when we played?”
Part Two
Sacramento, 2012
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The following section is an excerpt from an early draft of Michelle’s article “In the Footsteps of a Killer.”]
THE WOMAN WHO SAT ACROSS FROM ME IN THE CRAMPED OFFICE at a troubled high school in east Sacramento was a stranger. But you wouldn’t have known that from the conversational shorthand we used with each other from the moment we met, the EAR-ONS version of Klingon.
“Dog beating burglary in ’74?” I asked.
The woman, I’ll call her the Social Worker, retied her thick ponytail and took a sip from a can of Rockstar. She’s “almost sixty,” with large, penetrating green eyes and a smoky voice. She greeted me in the parking lot by waving her arms wildly overhead. I liked her right away.
“I don’t believe it’s related,” she said.
The ’74 burglary in Rancho Cordova is the kind of recently uncovered incident members of “the board,” that is A&E’s Cold Case Files message board on EAR-ONS, of which the Social Worker is one of the de facto leaders, thrive on analyzing. I’ve come to appreciate their thoroughness about the case, but at first I was simply daunted. There are over one thousand topics and twenty thousand posts.
I found my way to the board about a year and a half ago after devouring, practically in one sitting, Larry Crompton’s book Sudden Terror, which is an unvarnished avalanche of case details, full of 1970s political incorrectness and strangely moving in its depiction of one matter-of-fact cop’s haunting regret. The abundance of information available on the case astounded me. More than a dozen books are dedicated to December 25, 1996, the night JonBenet Ramsey was murdered. But EAR-ONS? Here was a case that spanned a decade, an entire state, changed DNA law in California†, included sixty victims, a collection of strange utterances from the suspect at crime scenes (“I’ll kill you like I did some people in Bakersfield”), a poem he allegedly wrote (“Excitement’s Crave”), even his voice on tape (a brief, whispery taunt recorded by a device the police put on a victim’s phone), yet there was only a single self-published, hard-to-find book written about it.
When I logged on to the EAR-ONS board for the first time, I was immediately struck by the capable, exhaustive crowdsourcing being done there. Yes, cranks exist, including one well-meaning guy who insists that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, is EARONS (he’s not). But much of the analysis is first-rate. A frequent poster named PortofLeith, for instance, helped uncover the fact that California State University–Sacramento’s academic calendar from the years the EAR was active there correlates with his crimes. There are member-made maps detailing everything from crime-scene locations to witness sightings to the spot where he dropped a bloody motocross glove in Dana Point. Hundreds of posts dissect his possible connections to the military, real estate, and medicine.
The EAR-ONS sleuths have skills, and they’re serious about using those skills to catch him. I met with a computer-science graduate student at a Los Angeles Starbucks to discuss his person of interest. Before we met, I received a seven-page dossier, which included footnotes, maps, and yearbook photos of the suspect. I agreed that the suspect looked promising. One unknown detail that niggled at the grad student was his suspect’s shoe size (at 9 or 9½, the EAR’s shoe size is slightly smaller than the average man’s).
Message board members tend to be a paranoid bunch, pseudonym heavy, and perhaps unsurprisingly for people who spend a great deal of time on the Internet discussing serial murder, there are personality conflicts. The Social Worker operates as a kind of gatekeeper between Sacramento investigators and the board community. This irks some posters, who accuse her of hinting at confidential information but then shutting down when asked to share.
That she occasionally has new information to share is not in dispute. On July 2, 2011, the Social Worker posted a drawing of a decal that she said was seen on a suspicious vehicle near the scene of one of the Sacramento rapes.
“It is possibly from NAS [Naval Air Station] North Island, but unconfirmed and has no record. Is it familiar to anyone on the board? Hoping we may find where it is from.”
We. The curious but unmistakable presence of law enforcement became apparent the more I got sucked into the board. The Web detectives, drawn to a decades-old cold case for their own private, idiosyncratic reasons, were the ones hunting the killer with their laptops, but the investigators were subtly steering them.
The Social Worker took me on a driving tour of EAR hot spots, around the maze of modest ranch houses abutting the old Mather Air Force Base, through the larger, leafier neighborhoods of Arden-Arcade and Del Dayo. She began working informally with Sacramento investigators about five years ago, she told me.
“I lived here through the height of it,” she said. She was a young mom then and remembers the terror reaching a nearly debilitating peak around rape number fifteen.
The east Sacramento neighborhoods EAR-ONS preyed on were not built for excitement. I counted an entire block of unbroken beige. The tamped-down cautiousness belies the terrible things that happened here. We turned onto Malaga Way, where on August 29, 1976, the clanging of her wind chimes and the strong smell of aftershave awakened a twelve-year-old girl. A masked man stood at her bedroom window, prying at the upper left corner of the screen with a knife.