Not everyone admires the board sleuths or their efforts. One agitator came on recently to rant about what he characterized as wannabe cops with a twisted, pathetic obsession. He accused them of being untrained meddlers with an unhealthy interest in rape and murder.
“WALTER MITTY DETECTIVE,” he wrote.
By then I was convinced one of the Mittys was probably going to solve this thing.
East Sacramento, 2012
THE THINGS THEY SEE: HEADLIGHTS IN AN EMPTY FIELD BEHIND their house where a car shouldn’t be. A man in a white shirt and dark pants climbing through a hole in a neighbor’s fence at three a.m. Jimmied doors. A flashlight beam in their bedroom window. A man emerging from a drainage ditch and sneaking into the backyard next door. Gates previously closed now open. A dark-haired man in a blue leisure suit standing under a tree across the street, staring at them. Mysterious footprints in the yard. A man bursting forth from the bushes and hopping on a bicycle. More flashlights in bedroom windows. The lower half of a man dressed in brown corduroys and tennis shoes running alongside the house and hiding behind a planter. A census worker at the front door wanting to know how many people live in the house in a year the census isn’t being taken. Their neighbor, a thirty-four-year-old man stumbling out of his house in his underwear, arms and legs bound, screaming for help at two in the morning.
The things they hear: Dogs barking. Heavy footsteps on the lava rock path. Someone cutting through the window screen. A thump against the air conditioner. Tampering with the sliding glass door. Scratching at the side of the house. A call for help. A scuffle. Gunshots. A woman’s long scream.
No one calls the police.
The police canvasses net these after-the-fact observations. Occasionally, when the police stop by neighbors’ homes to ask questions, they’re shown a slashed screen or vandalized porch light. Reading through the police reports, I found the neighbors’ inaction peculiar at first. Eventually I became borderline obsessed. Some of the unreported suspicious behavior occurred at the height of the East Area Rapist panic in Sacramento.
“He was prowling these neighborhoods constantly. Why didn’t more people call in?” I asked Richard Shelby. At first glance, Shelby is rough-looking, as a retired cop in his midseventies living out in the sticks of Placer County might be. (“We live so far out in the country we keep our gas in jerricans,” he told me). He’s tall and wary. He’s got a W. C. Fields nose and, of course, he’s missing half of his left ring finger, that injury that almost kept him off the force. But there’s a softness there, in his light blue shirt, in his extremely soft voice I could barely hear, and in the way, when the waitress at lunch told him they were out of lemonade, he didn’t scowl but smiled, softly, and murmured, “Iced tea, then.” Shelby, who had what he admits was a rocky career with the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department, came on the case early, in fall 1976, and was among the first to make the connection that they had a serial rapist on their hands.
“Call in what?” Shelby asked. “It’s night. He’s dressed all in black. Creeping along the hedges. What’s to see?”
“I mean what came out during the police canvasses. What the neighbors full-on admitted they saw and heard,” I said.
A line jotted down during a police canvass of the area around Malaga Road and El Caprice in Rancho Cordova on September 1, 1976, after the third rape, particularly haunted me. “Several of the neighbors stated they heard the screaming, but did not look outside.”
In January 1977, a man who lived just south of the American River and whose home had recently been burglarized glimpsed a young guy peeping into his next-door neighbor’s window. He coughed to let the peeper know he’d been spotted; the stranger ran. The gesture seemed almost polite. A week later a twenty-five-year-old woman living one block north became victim eleven. She was five months pregnant at the time.
Maybe the reluctance to call police was emblematic of the seventies, I suggested to Shelby. I started in on something about post-Vietnam rootlessness, but Shelby shook his head. He didn’t have an answer, but that wasn’t it. For him, the neighbors’ passivity was just one failure in a case plagued with them, from superiors preoccupied with bullshit politics to a couple of crucial wrong turns Shelby admits he made in his own patrol car to a dispatcher’s instruction to a family calling about a cloth bag they’d found hidden in their hedges that contained a flashlight, ski mask, and gloves: “Throw it away.”
Shelby lives about thirty miles north of Sacramento now, in the country, where he can do, as he put it, “manly farmer things.” But we’d met for lunch in his old stomping grounds, in the neighborhood where thirty-six years ago he patrolled the twisty streets buffeting the river, his dashboard lights dimmed, directed only by radio sputter and the hope that he’d make the right turn and his headlight beams would land on a young man about five nine in a ski mask. Shelby never encountered another offender like the East Area Rapist in his career. Up on rooftops, they kept finding small items he’d stolen from victims. For some reason, he was tossing them up there. Then, after enough people called in about strange thumps on their roofs, Shelby realized that the stolen items weren’t being tossed but were falling out of his pocket; he was crawling around up there.
Shelby’s one of those proudly blunt people whose eyes flick away the moment before they say something hard, a giveaway to softness churning underneath. He’d picked the lunch spot, but I could tell that for him this neighborhood would always be the place where he was thwarted by the stutter steps of an opponent, “that sociopathic bastard,” whose voyeur’s lair, indicated by a heap of cigarette butts and zigzag shoe tracks, he once found under a dense tree off Northwood Drive. Another vague presence noted by neighbors but never called in.
“People say he was so smart,” Shelby said. His eyes flicked away. “Truth is, he didn’t always need to be.”
EARLY IN MY REPORTING FOR AN EAR-ONS STORY I HAD PITCHED to Los Angeles magazine, while in Sacramento, I came into possession of a flash drive containing over four thousand pages of digitized old police reports. I acquired the flash drive in an old-fashioned trade, the kind in which neither party really trusts the other and so, arms extended and eyes locked, we agree to simultaneously release our goods for the other to grab. I had in my possession a rarely seen disc of a two-hour videotaped interview with a peripheral but important person connected to one of the Southern California homicides. I gave it away without a second thought; I had a copy at home.
These underground trades, the result of furtive alliances forged from a shared obsession with a faceless serial killer, were common. Online sleuthers, retired detectives, and active detectives— everyone participated. I received more than one e-mail with the subject line “quid pro quo.” I believed, as they did, that I and I alone was going to spot what no else could see. In order to do that, I needed to see everything.
The grandiose seeker in me couldn’t wait to insert the flash drive into my laptop back at my hotel. At every stoplight, I touched the top pocket in my backpack to make sure the tiny rectangle was still there. I was staying at the Citizen Hotel on J Street downtown. The photos online, of lead-paned windows and mustard-colored striped wallpaper, had appealed to me. The check-in area had built-in bookshelves for walls. The front desk was ornate and painted Chinese red.