The ricochet between rage and self-pity in “Mad is the word” is another clue. Violent criminals like the EAR, that is to say, serial sex offenders who escalate to homicide, are not only rare but also so varied that generalizing about their backgrounds and behavior is unwise. But common themes do exist. The future nightmare maker begins as an adolescent daydreamer. His world is bisected; violent fantasies act as a muffler against a harsh, disappointing reality. Perceived threats to his self-esteem are disproportionately internalized. Grievances are collected. He rubs his fingers over old scars.
Violent fantasy advances to mental rehearsal. He memorizes a script and refines methods. He’s the maltreated hero in the story. Staring up at him anguished-eyed is a rotating cast of terrified faces. His distorted belief system operates around a central, vampiric tenet: his feeling of inadequacy is vanquished when he exerts complete power over a victim, when his actions elicit in her an expression of helplessness; it’s a look he recognizes, and hates, in himself.
The majority of violent fantasizers never act. What makes the ones who do cross over? Stress factors coalesce. An emotional match is lit. The daydreamer steps out of his trance and into a stranger’s house.
The “Mad is the word” author exhibits the kind of disproportionate emotional response common to violent offenders. A sixth-grade teacher who punished him “built a state of hatred in my heart.” The author chooses self-pitying, melodramatic words to describe his experience. “Suffer.” “Not fair.” “Dreadful.” “Horrid.”
We begin the walk back to the car. I consider what I know of Danville, which has a trajectory similar to that of many Northern California towns. Once upon a time, it was populated by Native Americans who camped out on Mount Diablo to the northeast, but in 1854 a white man flush with gold rush earnings swooped in and bought ten thousand acres. His name was Dan. Fruit and wheat farming hung in until the 1970s, when new residential construction boomed and people moved in, transforming the town into one of the coziest, wealthiest suburbs of the East Bay. Holes says aerial photos he consulted didn’t show a huge construction spike in the neighborhood during the period when the EAR was prowling its backyards. The victim’s house was built in the midsixties. Danville’s quaint history was a draw. The population doubled by 1980.
The rap on Danville today is that it’s homogeneous and status conscious. It was recently ranked number one in America for highest per capita spending on clothing.
“Do you think he grew up in an area like this?” I ask Holes.
“Middle class? Yeah, I think it’s likely he’s not coming from an impoverished background,” he says.
I raise the issue of the EAR’s unmatched DNA profile. I’m in wildly speculative territory, I know, but I’ve always thought it might indicate that he operates behind a front of respectability. I prod Holes for his opinion on the DNA.
“It surprises me,” he says. “We’ve had DNA for over ten years on the national level, and we haven’t hit on the guy.”
“Does it surprise you there’s no familial hit either? Doesn’t that suggest someone who comes from a more straitlaced family?”—an opinion thinly veiled as a question.
“I think that could be, versus somebody that’s constantly committing criminal acts,” he says cautiously.
Holes and I have now spent several hours together. He’s great company. Effortless. In fact, his manner is so easygoing and mild that it takes me longer than usual to recognize his conversational patterns. When he’s not on board with a particular idea, he’ll tell me with equanimity. But when he’s uncomfortable with a line of questioning, he sidesteps more obliquely, either by not really answering or by pointing out something of interest in the landscape.
I sense a similar deflection from him on the topic of the EAR’s socioeconomic background. Holes is a criminalist, I remind myself. He’s a professional quantifier who works with scales and calipers. He’s not pedantic, but when presented with lazy inferences, he separates hard fact from mud. He corrects me when I allude to the EAR’s thick calves. The witness actually said heavy thighs. Later in the day, he’ll show me, via an impressive spreadsheet, how foolhardy it is to conclude anything about the EAR’s physicality from victim statements. Eye color and hair color are all over the place. Poor lighting and trauma obscure perceptions. Physical stature is the only constant, Holes points out. The EAR was around five nine. Six feet would be considered on the tall side for a suspect. But they’d still look into him, Holes adds.
“You always want to err on the side of caution.”
Ever the scientist.
Prudence and scientific accuracy await me in the future. But at this point, as we prepare to leave Danville, I’m still in theory-riffing mode. I continue to rattle off other clues that the EAR might wear a mask of normalcy. Most of the murder victims were white-collar professionals who lived in upper-class neighborhoods. He must have presented as though he belonged there. He must have had some type of regular employment. He had ways and means.
“We know he had a vehicle,” I say.
Holes nods, his face shadowed. He seems to be turning something over in his mind, debating internally the wisdom of sharing a thought.
“We know he had a vehicle,” he says. What he says next he says very slowly: “I think he may have had more than that.”
I’m momentarily unable to imagine what that could be.
Holes tells me: “I think he may have had a plane.”
I stumble over the first and only word that comes to mind.
“Really!?”
He smiles an enigmatic smile. I’d misread him. He wasn’t disapproving of my speculative questions. He was considering when to add his own narrative line.
“I’ll elaborate at lunch,” he promises.
First, we need to make one last stop in Contra Costa County: Walnut Creek.
WALNUT CREEK
The Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Sidney Bazett house on Reservoir Road in Hillsborough, outside San Francisco, is located at the end of a winding, tree-cloaked driveway and not visible from the street. Its extraordinariness is murmured about but rarely seen. One afternoon in 1949 the owner’s mother-in-law, who was there alone, was surprised by a knock at the front door. The visitor was a middle-aged businessman in thick-lensed glasses. A half-dozen men in professional attire with serious expressions stood behind him. The man explained that his name was Joseph Eichler. He and his family had rented the house for three years, from 1942 until 1945, when the present owners bought it. The Bazett house, with its redwood built-ins and glass walls, where daylight filtered in from so many directions and changed the mood of each room throughout the day, was a work of art that stirred Eichler. He’d never forgotten the house, he explained. In fact, living in it had changed his life. Now a merchant builder, he’d brought along his colleagues to show them the source of his inspiration. The group was invited inside. Crossing the threshold, Eichler, who got his start on Wall Street and was a notoriously tough businessman, began to cry.
By the mid-1950s, Joseph Eichler was one of the Bay Area’s most successful developers of single-family homes in the California Modern style—post-and-beam construction, flat or low-sloping A-frame roofs, open floor plans, glass walls, atria. His ambition grew with his business. He wanted the rapidly expanding postwar middle class to enjoy clean geometric lines; he wanted to bring the Modernist aesthetic to the masses. Eichler began scouting central Contra Costa County for land to build a subdivision. He needed several hundred acres. More than that, he needed the right feeling. It should be an area on the cusp, unspoiled by urban sprawl but with budding infrastructure. In 1954 Eichler visited Walnut Creek. The town was essentially horse country. Ygnacio Valley Road, now a major thoroughfare, comprised two lanes occupied not infrequently by cows. But the area’s first shopping center had recently opened. There was a new hospital. Plans for a freeway were in the works.