“How would you describe the style here?” I asked the front-desk clerk when I was checking in.
“Law library meets bordello,” he said.
I later learned that the building’s architect, George Sellon, had also designed San Quentin.
Once in my room, I immediately changed into the crisp white hotel bathrobe. I lowered the shades and turned off my phone. I dumped a bag of minibar gummy bears into a glass and set it next to me on the bed, where I sat cross-legged in front of my laptop. Ahead of me was a rare twenty-four-hour stretch without interference or distraction—no tiny hands slick with paint asking to be washed, no preoccupied hungry husband appearing in the kitchen to inquire about dinner. I inserted the flash drive. My mind in mail-sorter mode, my index finger on the down arrow key, I began to not so much read as devour.
Police reports read like stories told by robots. They’re terse and demarcated, with little space for judgment or emotion. Initially the sparseness appealed to me. Scrubbed of extraneous detail, I felt sure his name would gleam. I misjudged. The concise format of the reports is deceiving. Absorbed cumulatively, even the most clipped details began to swarm into an indistinguishable mass. Some moments separated from the pack, imparting jolts of powerful feeling I didn’t always see coming—the recently separated thirty-eight-year-old mother who scoots across the floor in the dark to find her son’s toy saw and tries in vain to use it to cut the bindings from her swollen hands; the thirteen-year-old girl tied up in bed who asks her beloved dog after the rapist has left the room, “You dummy, why didn’t you do anything?” The dog nudges her with his nose. She tells him to lie down and go to sleep. He does.
Hours vanished. The gummy bears were gone. My room was on the tenth floor, right above a tent hosting a wedding reception. I’d sidestepped the bridesmaids in sea-foam green posing for pictures in the hallway on my way in, and now the music started up. It was loud. I picked up the phone to call the front desk. What was I going to say? “Keep the joy down”? I hung up. The truth was, I was jittery from sugar, hunger, and spending too much time alone in the dark absorbing a fifty-chapter horror story narrated in the kind of dead voice used by desk clerks at the DMV. My eyes were stripped by computer glare and as devoid of moisture as if they’d been vacuumed clean by an airplane toilet. Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” wasn’t the soundtrack for my frame of mind.
The city of Sacramento is located at the north end of California’s Central Valley, at the confluence of the Sacramento River and the American River, and was designed with drainage in mind. The idea is that excess water, from mountain runoff or rainfall, will flow downriver toward the California Delta and into the ocean. I know this only because drainage ditches and cement-lined canals come up frequently in the police reports. It’s clear from the start, from footprints, evidence, suspicious sightings, and even bringing one victim down there, that the East Area Rapist traveled this way, that like a subterranean creature, he bided his time belowground until dark. I was reminded of an iconic scene from The Creature from the Black Lagoon, when the marine biologist Kay, played by the beautiful actress Julie Adams, dives from the expedition ship into the black lagoon, and from an underwater point of view we watch as the terrifying humanoid Creature emerges from a tangle of seaweed to glide underneath her, mirroring her, mesmerized. You keep waiting for her to see him and thrash with panic, but he goes undetected, except for the moment when he brushes a scaly webbed claw against her foot and she jerks a little, unnerved.
The East Area Rapist stalked individuals, but it was clear after reading the police reports that he stalked neighborhoods too, often by traversing Sacramento’s underground maze of canals and drainage ditches. He preferred single-story houses, usually second from the corner, near a greenbelt area—an open field, a park. Before an attack, there’d be evidence of prowling and illegal entries in the homes around the victim’s. Small, inexpensive, sometimes personal items would go missing. Incidents of hang-up phone calls rose sharply in the four- or five-block radius just before an attack. He was doing reconnaissance. He was studying people, learning when they were home. His method appeared to be to pick a neighborhood, target a half-dozen possible victims, and maybe even prioritize them. He maximized options and laid groundwork; that way, when mission night arrived, his urge never went unfulfilled.
That means that women exist who, because of change of schedule, or luck, were never victims, but like the Creature’s shapely object of obsession treading in the lagoon, they felt something terrifying brush against them.
The neighbors, in the scant five or six lines allotted them in the canvass reports, offer evocative haikus of a certain time and place. When questioned, they’re on their way back from the disco club, or a double feature of Earthquake and Airport ’77 at the drive-in, or the Jack LaLanne gym. They report missing two size 5 women’s jackets, one brown suede, the other leather. A girl saw a suspicious man with a “Wolfman Jack” look. Door-to-door solicitors—sprinklers, Fuller Brush, personal photography, painters—were a near-constant presence back then. In one neighborhood, everyone seemed to be heading for work at five a.m. These people took special notice of newer model, “shiny” cars. In other neighborhoods, mostly north of the American River, the only person home to answer the officer’s questions might be the live-in babysitter. These neighbors were suspicious of “dirty” cars, cars with side dents that were “a heap” or “in bad shape.”
In April 1977, a boy hoisted his younger sister onto his shoulders. From her higher vantage point, she suddenly saw a prowler in her neighbor’s yard, a white man in dark clothing crouching in the bushes. When the prowler realized he’d been spotted, he took off running and hurdled several fences. A month later, that neighbor, a young waitress, woke her husband at four a.m. “I hear something. I hear something,” she said. A flashlight lit up their bedroom doorway. She later told police that she believed the EAR when he threatened to kill her, and she lay there, bound in the dark, wondering what it would feel like to have a bullet go through her.
* * *
READING THROUGH THE SACRAMENTO REPORTS, YOU CAN TRACK public awareness that there’s a serial rapist at large. It’s zero to dim in the first dozen or so attacks; then the media runs with the story, and chatter and paranoia build. By a year into the attacks, victims recount being awakened by flashlight and thinking, Oh shit! It’s him. They behaved in certain ways, they told investigators, based on gossip they’d heard about the East Area Rapist, cowering, for instance, because they’d been told he liked his victims terrified. It’s around a year in that the source of neighbors’ inaction is no longer unawareness or inertia but a fortress mentality. They see something, and they lock their doors, turn off the lights, and retreat to their bedroom, hoping he doesn’t come for them. “I was afraid,” one woman admitted. Then why not call the police? My imagination burbled with what-ifs.
They weren’t thinking of their neighbors, but he was. Part of the thrill of the game for him, I believe, was a kind of connect-the-dots puzzle he played with people. He stole two packs of Winston cigarettes from the first victim, for instance, and left them outside the fourth victim’s house. Junk jewelry stolen from a neighbor two weeks earlier was left at the fifth victim’s house. Victim twenty-one lived within shouting distance of a water treatment plant; a worker there who lived eight miles away became the next victim. Pills or bullets stolen from a victim would later be found in a neighbor’s yard. Some victims shared surnames or jobs.