That Ray doesn’t believe he talked to the unidentified man I’ve dubbed the Golden State Killer doesn’t surprise me. Every detective I’ve interviewed who’s worked the case insists the same thing. They’ve held precut ligatures he left behind and stared at his spermatozoa under a microscope. They’ve played and replayed audio recordings of hypnotized witnesses and survivors, listening for any throwaway clues to his identity. Decades after retirement, one detective found himself squatting in the woods outside a possible suspect’s house in Oregon, waiting for the trash to come out so he could swipe a DNA sample. The Golden State Killer haunts their dreams. He’s ruined their marriages. He’s burrowed so deeply inside their heads that they want to, or have to, believe that if they locked eyes with him, they’d know.
“It’s kind of like a bloodhound thing,” a detective said to me. “I believe if I were at a mall and he passed by me, I’d know.”
I explain to Ray that the reason I’m interested in his memories of young prowlers is that I recently visited Goleta, the city eight miles west of Santa Barbara on California’s Central Coast where the killer attacked three times between 1979 and 1981. All three attacks took place in an unassuming neighborhood in northeast Goleta, an area occupying less than two square miles. Shoe tracks and twine ligatures presumably dropped by accident from his pockets show that he moved along San Jose Creek, a narrow gorge that begins in the mountains to the north and meanders through the neighborhood of tract homes until emptying into the Pacific Ocean. His victims all lived close to the creek.
I walked along the creek bed, I tell Ray, and was struck by how captivating the overgrown path, shrouded in huge, draping trees and strewn with moss-covered rocks, would be for a certain kind of suburban adolescent boy, a semiwild, underparented kid yearning for refuge. Rope swings dangled from sycamore trees. Adults who’d grown up in the neighborhood told me that in the midseventies some boys built a BMX track down there. There were secret tunnels and cement-lined drainage ditches where kids skateboarded. There were no lights, and the path was confusing and hard to follow. It felt like the kind of place you’d know only if you’d spent a lot of time down there as a kid.
“Especially when you consider the first attack on Queen Ann Lane,” I say. The Queen Ann Lane house isn’t even visible from the street, as it’s located behind another house. You’d notice it only from the path along the creek.
The mention of the October 1, 1979, attack on Queen Ann Lane hardens Ray’s otherwise matter-of-fact face.
“You know, they could have caught him that night,” Ray says.
That was the night he realized he had to kill. The night the victims survived and their neighbor, an off-duty FBI agent, pursued the suspect as he fled on a stolen ten-speed bike. I’ve walked the route of the pursuit and stopped at the place where the agent lost him. The agent was in radio contact with deputies who were on their way. I’ve never quite understood how he wasn’t apprehended.
“I knew what was going to happen,” Ray says. He shakes his head. “I knew exactly what the deputies were going to do.”
What they did was let him slip away.
The One
THE FIRST MOMENT OF JIM WALTHER’S* OVER THIRTY-YEAR ENTANGLEMENT with the EAR case began in Danville, in the early morning hours of February 2, 1979, when he was roused awake by Contra Costa Sheriff’s Deputy Carl Fabbri’s flashlight. Walther said he’d pulled his gray-primer-coated 1968 Pontiac LeMans off Interstate 680 to sleep after leaving his job as a brakeman for the Western Pacific Railroad. Fabbri didn’t buy the story. Walther’s car was parked on Camino Tassajara, a good mile and a half from the freeway. Why drive that far for a nap? He searched Walther’s eyes for signs of sleep. Fabbri’s hackles were up. He was patrolling the neighborhood because he’d unsuccessfully chased a prowler here the night before. Five months earlier, Sacramento’s most infamous phantom, the East Area Rapist, had writhed his way seventy miles southwest to their area. Four attacks. A thirty-two-year-old divorcée living in a corner house near the Iron Horse Regional Trail had been the most recent victim, in December. “Do you like to raise dicks?” he whispered to her. “Then why do you raise mine every time I see you?” The attack was just over a mile from where Walther was now parked.
Deputy Fabbri ordered Walther to stay put and ran a check on him. The kid had an open warrant for outstanding vehicle-code violations. His record showed a low-grade marijuana bust two years earlier—in Sacramento. He was twenty-one, five ten, 150. The broad outline was looking good, if not the particulars. Fabbri and his partner placed Walther under arrest. His protests were routine white noise until Fabbri’s partner took out a Polaroid camera to snap a mug shot, and a switch flipped. Walther went apeshit. Fabbri had to physically subdue him. It was weird. The kid had a minor record. Why was he so freaked out about having his picture taken? They had to hold his head up to get the shot.
En route to jail, Walther conducted a strange, mostly one-way conversation with his arresting officers.
“Nobody ever catches the real criminals,” Walther told them. “They always get away.”
DAMNING COINCIDENCES PILED ON FROM THE START. WHEN asked for his address, Walther put down Sutter Avenue, Carmichael. East Sacramento. A deputy recalled seeing a car like Walther’s distinct one in nearby San Ramon around the time of the EAR attacks there. Shortly after his arrest, Walther ditched the car and got a new one. He shut down when EAR Task Force investigators questioned him, and he lawyered up, courtesy of his mother—an overbearing woman who referred to her adult son as “my Jimmy” and who’d once nearly come to blows with his probation officer. The lawyer told investigators his client wouldn’t chew on gauze for a saliva sample because “it might be incriminating.” The task force continued to lean on Walther. He continued to resist. He volunteered in passing that his blood type was A and he wore a size 9 shoe, same as the EAR’s. Finally, in August, they called him out of his girlfriend’s apartment and told him they knew she was growing marijuana in there. They gave him a stark choice: either chew on gauze now, or we’re arresting her. He chewed on gauze.
The saliva results eliminated Walther. He was a secretor. The EAR was a nonsecretor. The task force dropped him as a suspect and moved on to fresher dirtbags.
* * *
MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS LATER, PAUL HOLES QUESTIONED THAT elimination. As a veteran of the crime lab, he knew that the secretor-status testing method back then was less than ideal. In the 1980s, quality-control experts had found serious glitches in the method. In the intervening years, scientists had also discovered that a small segment of the population are aberrant secretors, individuals who may express ABO type in some of their fluids but not others. Holes felt that suspect eliminations based on secretor status were unreliable.
Holes also had the benefit of retrospection, three decades’ worth. They knew much more about the EAR now. Holes could open Google Earth on his computer and fly over the attack locations and scenes of suspicious circumstances in chronological order, a dizzying flight from yellow pushpin to miniature blue car to little people representing footprints or witnesses. He could adjust for speed and height. He could sit at his desk and follow the killer’s trail with his eyes. The zigzag path looked random, but for someone, the One, it was not.