فصل 15

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Part Two Sacramento, 2012

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The following section is an excerpt from an early draft of Michelle’s article “In the Footsteps of a Killer.”]

THE WOMAN WHO SAT ACROSS FROM ME IN THE CRAMPED OFFICE at a troubled high school in east Sacramento was a stranger. But you wouldn’t have known that from the conversational shorthand we used with each other from the moment we met, the EAR-ONS version of Klingon.

“Dog beating burglary in ’74?” I asked.

The woman, I’ll call her the Social Worker, retied her thick ponytail and took a sip from a can of Rockstar. She’s “almost sixty,” with large, penetrating green eyes and a smoky voice. She greeted me in the parking lot by waving her arms wildly overhead. I liked her right away.

“I don’t believe it’s related,” she said.

The ’74 burglary in Rancho Cordova is the kind of recently uncovered incident members of “the board,” that is A&E’s Cold Case Files message board on EAR-ONS, of which the Social Worker is one of the de facto leaders, thrive on analyzing. I’ve come to appreciate their thoroughness about the case, but at first I was simply daunted. There are over one thousand topics and twenty thousand posts.

I found my way to the board about a year and a half ago after devouring, practically in one sitting, Larry Crompton’s book Sudden Terror, which is an unvarnished avalanche of case details, full of 1970s political incorrectness and strangely moving in its depiction of one matter-of-fact cop’s haunting regret. The abundance of information available on the case astounded me. More than a dozen books are dedicated to December 25, 1996, the night JonBenet Ramsey was murdered. But EAR-ONS? Here was a case that spanned a decade, an entire state, changed DNA law in California†, included sixty victims, a collection of strange utterances from the suspect at crime scenes (“I’ll kill you like I did some people in Bakersfield”), a poem he allegedly wrote (“Excitement’s Crave”), even his voice on tape (a brief, whispery taunt recorded by a device the police put on a victim’s phone), yet there was only a single self-published, hard-to-find book written about it.

When I logged on to the EAR-ONS board for the first time, I was immediately struck by the capable, exhaustive crowdsourcing being done there. Yes, cranks exist, including one well-meaning guy who insists that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, is EARONS (he’s not). But much of the analysis is first-rate. A frequent poster named PortofLeith, for instance, helped uncover the fact that California State University–Sacramento’s academic calendar from the years the EAR was active there correlates with his crimes. There are member-made maps detailing everything from crime-scene locations to witness sightings to the spot where he dropped a bloody motocross glove in Dana Point. Hundreds of posts dissect his possible connections to the military, real estate, and medicine.

The EAR-ONS sleuths have skills, and they’re serious about using those skills to catch him. I met with a computer-science graduate student at a Los Angeles Starbucks to discuss his person of interest. Before we met, I received a seven-page dossier, which included footnotes, maps, and yearbook photos of the suspect. I agreed that the suspect looked promising. One unknown detail that niggled at the grad student was his suspect’s shoe size (at 9 or 9½, the EAR’s shoe size is slightly smaller than the average man’s).

Message board members tend to be a paranoid bunch, pseudonym heavy, and perhaps unsurprisingly for people who spend a great deal of time on the Internet discussing serial murder, there are personality conflicts. The Social Worker operates as a kind of gatekeeper between Sacramento investigators and the board community. This irks some posters, who accuse her of hinting at confidential information but then shutting down when asked to share.

That she occasionally has new information to share is not in dispute. On July 2, 2011, the Social Worker posted a drawing of a decal that she said was seen on a suspicious vehicle near the scene of one of the Sacramento rapes.

“It is possibly from NAS [Naval Air Station] North Island, but unconfirmed and has no record. Is it familiar to anyone on the board? Hoping we may find where it is from.”

We. The curious but unmistakable presence of law enforcement became apparent the more I got sucked into the board. The Web detectives, drawn to a decades-old cold case for their own private, idiosyncratic reasons, were the ones hunting the killer with their laptops, but the investigators were subtly steering them.

The Social Worker took me on a driving tour of EAR hot spots, around the maze of modest ranch houses abutting the old Mather Air Force Base, through the larger, leafier neighborhoods of Arden-Arcade and Del Dayo. She began working informally with Sacramento investigators about five years ago, she told me.

“I lived here through the height of it,” she said. She was a young mom then and remembers the terror reaching a nearly debilitating peak around rape number fifteen.

The east Sacramento neighborhoods EAR-ONS preyed on were not built for excitement. I counted an entire block of unbroken beige. The tamped-down cautiousness belies the terrible things that happened here. We turned onto Malaga Way, where on August 29, 1976, the clanging of her wind chimes and the strong smell of aftershave awakened a twelve-year-old girl. A masked man stood at her bedroom window, prying at the upper left corner of the screen with a knife.

“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.”

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.