“It’s a really dark place, thinking about this stuff,” the Social Worker said. So why did she?
She’d been channel surfing one night in bed years ago when she came across the tail end of a Cold Case Files episode. She sat up in horrified recognition. Oh my God, she thought, he became a murderer.
An uneasy memory from that period nagged her, and she reached out to a detective with the Sacramento Police Department to see whether it was all in her mind. It wasn’t. He confirmed that, before the EAR’s penchant for phoning victims had ever been publicized, she had filed three police reports about an obscene caller, a stalker who, she said, “knew everything about me.” She now believes the caller was EAR-ONS.
The American River flashed blue in the distance. She feels “spiritually” called, the Social Worker told me, to help solve the case.
“But I’ve learned you’ve got to watch out, to take care of yourself. Or it can consume you.”
Can? We’d spent the last four hours talking of nothing else but EAR-ONS. When her husband senses where she’s headed at dinner parties, he kicks her under the table and whispers, “Don’t start.” I once spent an afternoon tracking down every detail I could about a member of the 1972 Rio Americano High School water polo team because in the yearbook photo he appeared lean and to have big calves (at one point a purported EAR-ONS trait). She once dined with a suspect and then bagged his water bottle for DNA. In the police files, suspects’ names are often logged last name first, and at my lowest, most dazed point, I actually began looking into one “Lary Burg” before my eyes and brain realigned to recognize Burglary.
There’s a scream permanently lodged in my throat now. When my husband, trying not to awaken me, tiptoed into our bedroom one night, I leaped out of bed, grabbed my nightstand lamp, and swung it at his head. Luckily, I missed. When I saw the lamp overturned on the bedroom floor in the morning, I remembered what I’d done and winced. Then I felt around the covers for where I’d left my laptop and resumed my Talmudic study of the police reports.
However, I didn’t laugh at the Social Worker’s gentle warning about not becoming obsessed. I nodded. We’re skirting a rabbit hole, I agreed to pretend, rather than deep inside it.
Joining us inside the rabbit hole is a thirty-year-old man from South Florida whom I’ll call the Kid. The Kid has a film degree and, he’s hinted, a somewhat troubled relationship with his family. Details matter to the Kid. He recently stopped watching a cable broadcast of Dirty Harry because “it blew up from [an aspect ratio of] 2.35:1 to 1.78:1 after the opening credits.” He’s smart, meticulous, and occasionally brusque. He’s also, in my opinion, the case’s greatest amateur hope.
Most people familiar with the EAR-ONS case agree that one of the best leads is his geographic trail. There are only so many white men born between let’s say 1943 and 1959 who lived or worked in Sacramento, Santa Barbara County, and Orange County between 1976 and 1986.
But only the Kid has spent nearly four thousand hours data mining the possibilities, cold-searching everything from Ancestry.com to USSearch.com. He owns, courtesy of eBay, a copy of the R. L. Polk 1977 Sacramento Suburban Directory. He has the 1983 Orange County telephone directory digitized on his hard drive.
My first inkling that the Kid’s work was high quality came at the beginning of my interest in the case when, after noting from his posts on the board that he seemed knowledgeable, I e-mailed him about a possible suspect I’d uncovered. I’ve now come to realize that getting excited about a suspect is a lot like that first surge of stupid love in a relationship, in which, despite vague alarm bells, you plow forward convinced that he is the One.
I all but had my suspect in handcuffs. But the Kid was about a year of researching and several databases ahead of me. “Haven’t done anything with that name in a while,” he wrote back. Included in the e-mail was the image of a dour nerd in a sweater vest, my suspect’s sophomore year picture. “Not in my top tier,” wrote the Kid.
He later underscored how tricky suspect assessment is by pointing out that just based on geographic history and physical description a good EAR-ONS suspect would be Tom Hanks. (Who, it should be emphasized, can be eliminated by the shooting schedule of Bosom Buddies alone).
I was vacationing last spring in Florida with my family and made arrangements to meet the Kid in person at a coffee shop. He’s attractive, clean-cut with sandy brown hair, and articulate, an altogether unlikely candidate for compulsive data miner of cold cases he has no connection to. He declined coffee but chainsmoked Camel Lights. We talked for a bit about California and the movie business; he told me he once traveled to Los Angeles just to see the director’s cut of his favorite film, Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World.
Mostly we discussed our common obsession. The case is so complex and difficult to distill to people that I always find it something of a relief to be in the presence of someone who knows the shorthand. We both seemed a little mystified and self-conscious about our preoccupation. At a wedding reception recently, the groom interrupted a conversation between his mother and the Kid, who is an old friend. “Tell her about your serial killer!” the groom suggested to the Kid before moving on.
What I always think about, I told him, are experiments that show that animals in captivity would rather have to search for their food than have it given to them. Seeking is the lever that tips our dopamine gush. What I don’t mention is the uneasy realization I’ve had about how much our frenetic searching mirrors the compulsive behavior—the trampled flowerbeds, scratch marks on window screens, crank calls—of the one we seek.
Something Jeff Klapakis, a detective with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department, said offhand finally made me feel less strange about my fascination. We were sitting in his and his partner’s EAR-ONS “war room,” a back office teeming with plastic bins stacked with old file folders. Over his right shoulder hung a poster-size Google Earth map of Goleta with the sites of the double homicides marked, nineteen months between them but only 0.6 miles apart. The San Jose Creek curved down the middle of the map, its massive, draping trees providing EAR-ONS with cover.
I asked Klapakis what made him come out of retirement to work on the case. He shrugged.
“I love puzzles,” he said.
The Kid was getting at the same thing when he wrote a brief explanation for any investigators who might come across his research. His interest, he wrote using the third person, is “inexplicable in short form, except to say that it’s a big question with a simple answer, and he’s compelled to know the answer.”
The Kid eventually shared with me his pièce de résistance, which he calls “The Master List,” a 118-page document with some two thousand men’s names and their information, including dates of birth, address histories, criminal records, and even photos when available. His thoroughness—it has an index—left me agape. There are notations under some men’s names (“dedicated cycling advocate” and “Relative: Bonnie”) that seem nonsensical unless you know, as we do, far too much about a possibly dead serial killer who was last active when Reagan was president.
“At some point, I’ll have to walk away from all this and move on with my life,” the Kid wrote me in an e-mail. “The irony has been that, the more time and money I invest into this very impractical (and to most, inexplicable) endeavor, the more apt I am to continue doing so, so that I may perhaps identify this fucker and thus justify my investment.”