فصل 20

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OUR WALK ON THE IRON HORSE REGIONAL TRAIL STOPS ABRUPTLY in front of an electrical pole. It’s the second pole north of an intersection a couple hundred yards in the distance, the spot where the bloodhounds lost the EAR’s scent and it’s believed he entered a vehicle.

“The homework evidence was found in this area,” says Holes.

He has practical reasons for believing that the pages belonged to the EAR. Tracking dogs aren’t infallible, but the fact that three independent bloodhounds indicated that he escaped south down the tracks is strong evidence; more important to Holes, the route, and where the scent trail ended, is consistent with the usual distance from the target that the EAR was known to park before making an approach. John Patty was a well-respected criminalist and heavily involved in the Contra Costa County cases; if Patty collected the evidence, he must have thought it might be important. The other two items found with the homework evidence are dead ends. The length of purple yarn is a mystery, and the fragment of paper with some typing on it is illegible. But spiral notebook paper isn’t as incongruous at a sexual crime scene as one might imagine. Serial sex offenders and killers frequently take notes as they prowl for victims, sometimes even developing their own code words. More than one witness who called in a suspicious person during the EAR attacks in Sacramento described a man holding a spiral notebook. And the EAR, despite his ability to elude authorities, did drop things occasionally; whether on purpose or not is unclear: a screwdriver, a bloody Band-Aid, a ballpoint pen.

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.

In a walnut orchard in the northeast part of town, across from Heather Farm Park, Eichler’s search came to an end. Mount Diablo shimmered in the distance. Here was the perfect place, he thought, for a community of creative professionals, progressive types who appreciated modern art and design, people who were tired of living in cookie-cutter houses where you could find your way around blindfolded. The subdivision of 563 houses, 375 Eichler homes, the rest standard tract, was completed in 1958. A brochure shows a beautiful woman in a flowing dress gazing out a wall of glass into her tidy backyard. The roof is post and beam; the chairs, Eames. Eichler named his new community Rancho San Miguel.

The neighborhood had its detractors. Some thought the Eichler design, with its blank wall to the street and orientation toward the backyard, was antisocial. Waving from the front window at neighbors was no longer possible. Others thought the houses were ugly and resembled garages. Nevertheless, Eichlers, as people call them, have developed a devoted cult following, and Rancho San Miguel, with its parks and good schools, has remained a consistently coveted place to live. But the unusual homes, with rear glass walls, sliding doors, and high fences sealing off individual backyards, have also attracted another kind of following, not forward-thinking but darkly motivated, a fact that isn’t mentioned publicly but has been puzzled over privately for years.

Holes and I pull up to the site of the first Walnut Creek EAR attack, an Eichler in Rancho San Miguel.

“I call this the Bermuda Triangle of Contra Costa County,” says Holes. “We’ve had other serial killers attack in this same neighborhood. A missing girl. A known serial-killer attack. A housewife in 1966 that was strangled and her panties torn off. The two EAR attacks. And it’s like, why?”

In the spring of 1979 a seventeen-year-old girl who lived in Rancho San Miguel in Walnut Creek began to receive a series of anonymous calls. What was especially unsettling was that the calls followed her to homes where she was babysitting. The parents would leave, the kids put to bed. A ring would knife through the quiet. “Hello?” The familiar blankness was always followed by a click, the only sign there was a human being with intent on the other line.

The girl sat regularly for two families who lived in Eichlers across from each other on El Divisadero. In early May, a nightgown and telephone directory went missing from her own house; even so, she didn’t feel the hot breath of a threat moving in close. The thing about Eichlers is, they draw your attention to the outside. Walls of glass display occupants like rare museum objects. At night the play of light against dark means your view is limited to your reflection. The opaqueness fires the queasy imagination.

In five months, the movie When a Stranger Calls would be released. Based on a well-known urban legend, the story involves a teenage babysitter who’s tormented by a series of increasingly sinister calls. “Have you checked the children?” an unidentified man asks. The off-white rotary phone sits menacingly in the living room like a time bomb. The drip of fear spikes at the end of the opening scene, when the detective trying to help the babysitter calls her back with an urgent message.

“We’ve traced the call. It’s coming from inside the house.”

Animal fear writ modern.

When a Stranger Calls hadn’t come out yet on June 2, 1979. No anonymous calls came for the babysitter in Walnut Creek that Saturday night; there was no sense that a silent phone meant that an alternate approach was being considered and planned.

She was sitting at the kitchen table when she heard footsteps or a man’s voice; she couldn’t remember which came first, only that he shot up suddenly, as if spring-loaded from the dark hallway and into her terrified heart.

He said little and repeated what little he said. He communicated with jerky, unpredictable bursts of violence. He shoved her head down. He tied her wrists tightly with plastic cable ties. He bit her left nipple. Criminalists are required to take photographs of victims at the scene. No one looks happy, but everyone looks into the camera. Not the babysitter. Her gaze is averted, eyes anchored low. They seem unlikely to ever come up.

A large open field and a school were across the street at the time. The house next door was empty and posted for lease. Dogs tracked the EAR’s scent around the corner, where he’d evidently gotten into a vehicle; he’d parked in front of a house where a pool was being built.

Police patrolling the neighborhood after the rape stopped a drunk driver with a knife and sheath. They stopped a man with his pants down who said he was looking for his lost cat. In his car were photographs of unsuspecting women taken with a zoom lens. They were just two of the dark compulsives scuttling through the suburbs at night, like the waterways cemented over but still churning underneath Walnut Creek.

Twenty-three days later, the EAR returned to Rancho San Miguel.

Investigators who’ve worked the lead on serial cases say there are times when they feel that the offender is speaking to them, as if their private thoughts have been telegraphed and he’s responding. It’s a wordless dialogue familiar to obsessive competitors, an exchange of small gestures whose meaning only the two people locked in battle understand. In the first leg of the race between cop and at-large criminal, the investigator is the clock-watcher with the anxious, racing mind, and the offender is the string puller with the haunting smirk.

The second Eichler was just a hundred feet from the first. The victim was a thirteen-year-old this time. Her father and sister were in the house, unaware of what was taking place. The tracking dogs yanked their handlers around a corner and stopped abruptly in a familiar place: the same spot as before, in front of the house where the pool was being built.

The details of the crime coalesced to form a disembodied shiteating grin.

“Has he ever gone back?” the thirteen-year-old asked the investigators interviewing her after the attack.

“Never,” said the first investigator.

“Never, ever, ever,” said the second.

“The safest house in the area,” said the first.

As if any house was ever going to feel safe again.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD DOESN’T FIT EXACTLY WITH HOLES’S CONSTRUCTION angle. The Eichlers were all built in the 1950s. Rancho San Miguel didn’t have active development going on at the time, though there was some adjacent development. It’s two miles from the 680 freeway.

“It’s a little off the beaten track,” says Holes, looking around. “Something is pulling him out to this outside neighborhood.”

The drive through Contra Costa County is different for Holes than it is for me. I’m seeing the neighborhoods for the first time. Holes is driving through old murders. Every “Welcome to . . .” sign is accompanied by the memory of forensic evidence, of blurry-eyed afternoons spent in the lab hunched over a microscope. Walnut Creek particularly resonates for Holes, reminding him of the mystery of a missing girl.

Elaine Davis was going to sew a brass button on her navy peacoat. Her mother left their home on Pioneer Avenue, in north Walnut Creek, to pick up Elaine’s father from work. It was ten thirty p.m. on December 1, 1969, a Monday night. When the Davises returned home, Elaine, a seventeen-year-old straight-A student with sandy blonde hair and a heart-shaped face, was gone. Her three-year-old sister was still asleep in her crib. The house appeared undisturbed. Elaine, who was nearsighted, had left her badly needed glasses behind. Items of Elaine’s began to surface. The button she intended to sew on her coat was found in a field behind her house. Her brown loafer with a gold buckle was picked up on Interstate 680 in Alamo. A housewife spotted a petite girl’s navy peacoat on a remote stretch of highway in the Santa Cruz Mountains, seventy-five miles away.

Eighteen days after Elaine disappeared, a female body floated ashore at Lighthouse Point in Santa Cruz. A radiologist studied the bones and concluded that the woman was twenty-five to thirty years old. It wasn’t Elaine. The Jane Doe was buried in an unmarked grave. The Davis disappearance went cold.

Thirty-one years later, a Walnut Creek police detective nearing retirement brought the case file to Holes, who reviewed it. Holes concluded that the radiologist was wrong and couldn’t have made an accurate determination of age. Holes joined other officials in an effort to exhume the Jane Doe’s body. Twenty-five feet deep on the side of a hill, shovels connected with a plastic body bag filled with bones.

Elaine’s father was dead. Her mother lived in Sacramento. Two days after the exhumation, Walnut Creek detectives asked to speak with her. Elaine’s younger sister came in from out of town for the meeting. The detectives told the mother and sister the news: we’ve identified Elaine.

“The family buries her,” says Holes. “A week later, Mom dies.”

We leave Walnut Creek, heading north. Mount Diablo, a mass of strange protrusions towering above valleys cut precisely into planned communities, recedes. Black mountain cats are said to slink among the high rocks on Mount Diablo. Mysterious lights have been glimpsed. In 1873 a live frog was found partially embedded in a slab of limestone 228 feet underground, according to local legend. In late August and early September, just after the first fall rain, hundreds of male tarantulas emerge from holes in the ground. They skitter through mint-scented mountain sage in search of burrows delicately draped in silk, where females are ready to mate. Visitors armed with flashlights flock to the mountain around sunset or just after dark, the best time to see the tarantulas. Bats wheel over gray pines and live oaks. Great horned owls hoot solemnly. Beams from flashlights weaving across trails sometimes catch a piece of earth that’s moving; closer inspection reveals the scuttling of saucer-size tarantulas. The male tarantulas never return to their holes. They mate as much as they can and then die, from starvation or cold.

We cross the bridge to Solano County, where we’ll turn east toward Davis.

“On a clear day, you can see Sacramento from here. And the Sierras,” says Holes.

He lives halfway between Sacramento and the East Bay. On weekends he often finds himself visiting the crime scenes.

“I like to drive,” he says. Whenever he’s in Southern California, he visits the crime scenes there too. During trips to Disneyland with his family, when the kids grow drowsy, his wife oversees naptime at the hotel while Holes takes a drive. To the Northwood subdivision in Irvine, to 13 Encina, where Janelle Cruz lived, or to 35 Columbus, where Drew Witthuhn cleaned up his sister-in-law Manuela’s blood.

“Each time I’m trying to look for Why here?” Holes says. “Why this?”

DAVIS

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This section features selections from the audio transcript from the trip to Davis.]

PAUL HOLES: This is how the EAR would have traveled down to the East Bay. Along I-80, right here.

MICHELLE: If you had to guess his point of origin, in terms of where he went to school . . . I won’t keep you to it. I’m just curious.

PAUL HOLES: If I were to guess? Sac State. If he was college-educated. Locationwise, if you take a look at where his attacks are, you know, you have the whole Rancho Cordova cluster. You have the attacks along La Riviera. You have the attacks that are right there, right by Sac State. Sac State seems likely. Now, you have some community colleges up in the Sacramento area that he could have gone to. Uh, high school? Uh . . . whew. There’s so many possibilities.

MICHELLE: I mean, you don’t feel like, maybe he grew up in Goleta?

PAUL HOLES: I wouldn’t say that, but when I look at the Sac cases, and—this is one thing I want to show you at some point—when you do a flyover of the order of his attacks in Sacramento, you see very early on, he is literally crisscrossing Sacramento. He is showing intimate familiarity with the area.

MICHELLE: He’s not showing up just to go to Sac State.

PAUL HOLES: No, no. I think he has a history up in Sacramento. Now, does he have a history in Goleta? I mean, anything’s possible. We don’t know. But down south, Goleta is—for me—that’s ground zero down south. And there’s something in Irvine. Some reason why he has two cases there.

MICHELLE: And that are not far apart at all.

PAUL HOLES: No. No. Ventura and Laguna Niguel are the two outliers. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Holes is referring to the Dana Point case here; some people mistakenly consider Dana Point part of Laguna Niguel.]

PAUL HOLES: Davis/Modesto, to me, is significant.

MICHELLE: Modesto was just once or twice?

PAUL HOLES: Twice.

MICHELLE: Okay.

PAUL HOLES: So, when I did my initial geographic assessment, I broke the EAR into phases. The first phase being up in Sacramento. Second phase being Modesto/Davis. Third phase being East Bay, and then the fourth phase being down in Southern California. When you get to this phase two—I lump Stockton into Sacramento because the EAR goes back to Sacramento after Stockton, but then once he hits in Modesto, he doesn’t go back to Sacramento until after he comes down into the East Bay. And he’s toggling back and forth between Modesto and Davis. It’s a hundred ten driving miles between those two cities. And between the second Modesto attack and the second Davis attack, it’s just twenty-two hours’ difference. Why is he toggling back and forth? I think it’s work-related. He’s not doing this to throw law enforcement off. I think there’s a work-related reason why he’s being sent to Modesto and having to go to Davis, and going back and forth.

MICHELLE: There’s only a twenty-two-hour difference?

PAUL HOLES: Twenty-two-hour difference.

MICHELLE: Wow. I didn’t know it was so close in time.

PAUL HOLES: And it just so happens, in those two cases, and only those two cases . . . In the Modesto case, you have the cab driver that picks up the strange man from the airport, who he drops off and is last seen headed toward new construction under way that’s just south of where the victims are attacked. And in the Davis case, that’s where the footprints lead back from the victim’s house to the UC-Davis airport. Shoe prints. That’s what I’m going to show you. So, is it possible that you’ve got the EAR flying into Modesto for that one attack, and then flying up to UC-Davis for the second attack?

MICHELLE: For work?

PAUL HOLES: For work. And, what does that say about who he is?

MICHELLE: Yeah.

PAUL HOLES: Well, your common joe ain’t flying an airplane.

MICHELLE: No.

PAUL HOLES: Your common joe ain’t producing a diagram that is, “How should I lay out this land?”

MICHELLE: Right.

PAUL HOLES: It takes somebody with resources. Because when you read the case file on the EAR, you don’t think this is somebody of wealth, right?

MICHELLE: Right.

PAUL HOLES: I don’t get that. This seems contradictory to that. But that’s what the EAR was about. Everything about him was misdirection.

MICHELLE: So, you’re leaning toward thinking he had more resources?

PAUL HOLES: I think he has . . . well, I think if this turns out EAR was doing this not for just a school project, but he’s actually looking at developing land and working for a developer, he’s at least minimally hooked in to the company at a level where he’s got a lot of say in that company.

PAUL HOLES: So, this is Village Homes in Davis. Village Homes is a very famous development. What I’m showing you is, coincidentally, an aerial photo of Village Homes as it was in between the first and second Davis attacks. So, literally, they just happened to take this picture eight days before attack number thirty-six. This is what it looked like. And look at all of this new construction that’s going on just north of the attack. I’ll take you out and show you the whole airport thing.

PAUL HOLES: The Stockton victim I’ve been talking to, she worked for a major developer in the Central Valley. The victim did a lot of work for him. She ended up leaving his company when she got pregnant. I was showing this diagram [the “homework” evidence map] to a friend of mine who works in development. He told me, “This was done by a professional. . . . He’s drafting these symbols.” Now, this is an opinion that’s coming from a forensic expert in the construction business. So I put a lot of credence in that opinion.

MICHELLE: I think you’re right. I don’t believe this is a fantasy.

PAUL HOLES: I don’t think so. You know, you have a landscape architect from UC-Davis going, “There’s unique features in here that are only seen in Village Homes.”

MICHELLE: Oh really?

PAUL HOLES: Yes. And you’ll see this when we go out there. Village Homes is a very unusual development. So, you have the EAR going and attacking there. Could it be possible that the EAR is going to Village Homes and when he sees some of those features, he incorporates those in this diagram, for whatever he’s working on?

MICHELLE: Right. As something he would submit, along the lines of “Hey, we should do this,” or something like that?

PAUL HOLES: Yeah.

Holes arrives at the apartment complex where the first Davis attack took place.

This attack, number thirty-four, occurred at approximately three fifty a.m. on June 7, 1978—two days after the EAR’s first attack in Modesto. The victim was a twenty-one-year-old UC-Davis student who lived in a multistory apartment building, which Larry Pool would later deem a “structural anomaly”—as this was the only time the EAR was known to have targeted such a dwelling.

He entered the second-story apartment through the patio sliding glass door. He was particularly violent with this victim, punching her several times in the face after she initially resisted. While raping her, he forcefully shoved her face into the floor, leaving her with a broken nose and a concussion.

Certain factors suggest that this attack may have been more impulsive than most of the others: he was wearing a nylon stocking instead of a ski mask; the only known weapons were a nail file and a screwdriver; and the assailant appeared to be wearing his T-shirt inside out. The crime was undoubtedly an EAR attack, however, based on verbiage and the signature element of the rapist placing his penis in the victim’s bound hands and forcing her to masturbate him.

PAUL HOLES: Alright, so the first Davis one was the college girl that was attending UC-Davis. A textile major.

MICHELLE: This is the one where they thought they saw him peeling out of the parking lot?

PAUL HOLES: Yep. It was a black Camaro, or something like that. But I’m not sure that was him.

PAUL HOLES: So, this has changed. I actually lived here once myself.

MICHELLE: Oh, wow. Is this technically campus housing?

PAUL HOLES: These are off-campus dorms. I think they were different back in the seventies. This has even changed since I was here.

Holes stops and lets the car idle.

PAUL HOLES: This is all college kids. Russell Boulevard, you see all the college kids biking. So, if he’s up in Davis for any reason, I think this would be a case where he’s seeing somebody that he follows back.

MICHELLE: Oh, okay.

PAUL HOLES: He sees a girl that, for whatever reason, catches his eye, and then he figures out where she lives. I don’t think he’s prowling or burglarizing. This is atypical from his . . .

MICHELLE: Usual thing.

PAUL HOLES: Yeah.

They move on to the second location, which was the scene of attack number thirty-six. The second of three Davis strikes, it occurred around three a.m. on June 24, 1978—one day after EAR rape number thirty-five, in Modesto.

The victim was a thirty-two-year-old housewife whose husband was in bed with her. Both were bound. Also present was the couple’s ten-year-old son, whom the attacker locked in the bathroom. He rummaged through the house before returning to the female, moving her to the living room, and raping her. Prior to leaving the house, he stole seventeen rolls of pennies.

PAUL HOLES: We’re now entering Village Homes.

MICHELLE: Okay.

PAUL HOLES: All the streets are named after Lord of the Rings.

MICHELLE: Oh. Really?

PAUL HOLES: Yep. The developer, Michael Corbett, was heavily involved in Lord of the Rings.

MICHELLE: Heavily involved meaning . . .

PAUL HOLES: Well, big fan.

MICHELLE: Oh, okay. He was a nerd.

PAUL HOLES: He and his wife, Judy Corbett, are the ones that pushed this development. All these houses . . . we’re on the street, these are the backs of these houses. The fronts of the houses face a green common area. And that was to help facilitate more of the community feel. So, neighbors are coming out. They have gardens—community gardens; green spaces that are shared.

MICHELLE: So, if you were a student, you wouldn’t live here?

PAUL HOLES: Unlikely. I mean, you could, but at that time, these were new houses. Students couldn’t afford these.

Holes drives through the community looking for the home where the attack took place.

PAUL HOLES: So, our victim . . . lived in this one. Right here on the right-hand side.

MICHELLE: Hmm.

PAUL HOLES: And all of that on this side was actively being constructed at the time. So, you see the long, narrow cul-de-sacs, to which the city said, “Absolutely not.” And then the Corbetts had the fire departments bring the fire trucks out here, to show them, yes, you can turn around back here. I’ll drive around so you can kind of see some of the features of this place. Solar. All the houses were passive solar. That was big, back in the day.

PAUL HOLES: Here’s an example here. This is a pedestrian bridge over the open-swale drainage. And this is the way the EAR came up.

MICHELLE: How do you know that?

PAUL HOLES: Shoe prints. Corbett was telling me this area down here was like a sandbox. Every day, he raked it smooth. And after the attack, he’s out here, and there’s a shoe impression in his freshly raked sandbox. And he followed that shoe impression to the victim’s house, around the house, through the green area. And I’m talking to him, and he goes, “Well, I was in the Boy Scouts, and one of the things I really enjoyed doing was tracking. And I used to track all the time.” And so, he says, “I found these shoe prints and I felt I needed to track them.” So, he’s got more of an elevated ability than the average person. I wouldn’t say he’s some search-and-rescue expert, but . . .

MICHELLE: He kinda knew what he was doing.

PAUL HOLES: Yeah. So, then he’s saying, these shoe prints came down through here and went out this way.

MICHELLE: Huh.

PAUL HOLES: It’s like a common green area.

MICHELLE: Wait, so they kind of went in a loop, around?

PAUL HOLES: Yes, so, he went and he came up this way, and looped around from the victim’s house, and these shoe prints were in the victim’s backyard.

MICHELLE: This is an interesting development. I really don’t think I’ve ever been inside something like this.

PAUL HOLES: It’s unique. Village Homes was world-famous. François Mitterrand flew in in a helicopter to visit this area because of how novel it was. Students from all over, and developers, were coming here to take a look at it. And so that’s where you can see, you know, “Village Homes in Davis. We’re doing a development; let’s see what they’re doing and what we can incorporate into our thing.” It was featured . . . on the cover of Sunset magazine. Betty Ford rode her bike around here. I drove my wife through here, and she goes, “I’d never live here.”

MICHELLE: It is a little claustrophobic.

PAUL HOLES: It’s claustrophobic, and it’s a predator’s paradise. You can’t see anything. I mean, he can come in, he can attack, and he can leave, and nobody would ever know.

PAUL HOLES: The third victim—and I’ll take you by that after this—was in the neighborhood that’s right over there. So, the three Davis attacks are pretty close together.

MICHELLE: Yeah, they are.

PAUL HOLES: One of the interesting things is that this victim and the third Davis victim carpooled together. Their kids were at the same nursery school. And that’s the only known connection between victims that I’m aware of. But that’s never really been explored.

MICHELLE: Right.

PAUL HOLES: Nobody’s gone back to these victims to talk to them. Could the EAR have seen them together in a carpool and that’s why he chose them, or was it just coincidence because he attacked so close together?

MICHELLE: Right. Did each know that the other was a victim? You don’t even know that?

PAUL HOLES: I don’t even know that, no.

PAUL HOLES: So, EAR came out here . . . and now he’s tracking along on this side. And they kind of dismissed some of this at first; the initial officer that Corbett called out, Corbett tells him, “Hey, I’ve tracked these shoe prints,” and the officer goes, “Well, this is a common jogging path, and it’s so far away, I can’t see the offender ever parking his vehicle down here and then getting up here to attack.” Well, the shoe prints end up going down, following the path on this olive grove, down that way.

PAUL HOLES: So, here’s the other side of this olive grove.

MICHELLE: Okay. So, he might have been parked like on a shoulder right here?

PAUL HOLES: Nope. ’Cause the shoe prints continued.

MICHELLE: Oh my gosh. Isn’t that a little risky that he’d be seen?

PAUL HOLES: Late at night? This is pitch-black!

MICHELLE: Okay. And he’s probably wearing dark clothing.

PAUL HOLES: I mean, what does he do all the time? And he’s in neighborhoods, with houses. Walking around. That’s probably riskier than this.

MICHELLE: Yeah, I guess that’s true.

Holes drives deeper into UC-Davis property, with various research buildings spread out to the right and agricultural fields to the left.

PAUL HOLES: So, he tracks the shoe prints . . . all the way down to here. I can’t get through here. This is what’s called Bee Biology. They do a lot of bee studies here.

MICHELLE: Oh, uh huh.

PAUL HOLES: When I initially read this case file, I couldn’t make it out. I thought it was Boo Biology. And I’m thinking it’s on campus way over there, and I’m going, “This is nothing.” But when you look at where he says he lost track, the shoe prints ended up veering down to the left. What’s down here? Well . . . look here. It’s the airport!

MICHELLE: Oh!

PAUL HOLES: So, I’m now calling airports saying, “What kind of records do you have?”

They both laugh.

PAUL HOLES: My naive thought about flying is, you know . . . every time you flew a plane, you had to file a flight plan; you fly into an airport, they know you’re there, and everything else. But they told me, “No, no. Anybody can come and go here. We have no idea they’re here. If they come in after hours, they tie their plane down. They go do their thing, they come back, we’ll never know they’re here.”

MICHELLE: Is that right?! That is strange.

PAUL HOLES: So, here we’ve got this case, twenty-two hours after the case in Modesto occurred. The case in Modesto has the strange man being picked up at an airport, being dropped off, near new construction, seemingly heading toward the victim’s home.

MICHELLE: But why was that man so strange?

PAUL HOLES: The cab driver said he just had a single bag. And he just says, “Take me to Sylvan and Meadow.” And then, “Drop me off right here.” He gets out and just wanders to where the cab driver says there’s nothing there but houses being built. And then the next case . . . we have an airport connection.

MICHELLE: I’m trying to think of what kind of person would have a plane like that. Like, a small plane?

PAUL HOLES: Well, a small plane opens up possibilities. You know, these developers typically had your multiseat corporate jets. If you’re talking about somebody with a small plane, somebody who’s not a millionaire, you know, or somebody with huge resources, having a . . .

MICHELLE: Yeah.

PAUL HOLES: So, if you’re talking to these developers, and saying, well, “Would you fly? If you have developments across the state, would you fly there?” They answer, “Yeah, we would fly there. Flying an airplane is very expensive, but it was sort of an ego thing. So, we would want to be perceived as successful, because we have our own jet that we’re flying in. And yeah, occasionally we would go and check on our kingdoms that are being built.”

MICHELLE: Right. Hmm. Were there any other little clues from any of the cases that tied into a plane? Like, any kind of . . . didn’t he have, like, a navigator’s something?

PAUL HOLES: No, not that I can think of.

Holes is trying to locate the home of the third Davis victim. This attack, number thirty-seven, occurred on July 6, 1978, at 2:40 in the morning. The victim was a thirty-three-year-old woman—recently separated and in the bed alone—whose sons were sleeping in another room. The EAR used them as leverage, threatening to kill them if she didn’t do what he said. After raping and sodomizing the victim, he sobbed. A three-month hiatus would then follow, after which he resurfaced in the East Bay area.

PAUL HOLES: It was a corner house. I want to say it was the end. I don’t think these houses were here at the time. And there are no houses behind. And then you had the construction going on at the school. So, the attack occurred here. There was lots of construction going on in this area. . . . Here it is. So . . . this victim carpooled with the previous Davis victim.

MICHELLE: Wow. A lot of these scenes are a lot closer to each other than I thought they were. I mean, some aren’t, but . . . some, it’s interesting.

PAUL HOLES: Right. Well, neighborhoods. He got familiar with the neighborhoods. Danville is tightly clustered. Concord. Walnut Creek.

MICHELLE: Certainly, I mean, Rancho Cordova . . . weren’t some right next to each other?

PAUL HOLES: Yeah. Not quite right next to each other, but right around the block. You know, the house between.

MICHELLE: Right. I mean, and if you’re walking away without your pants on, you either live there or your car is right there. Or you’re kind of crazy. Or all of the above.

PAUL HOLES: Well, one of these guys I spent a lot of time on, a serial killer by the name of Phillip Hughes . . . in his interviews with the psychiatrist, he admits to, when he was in high school, leaving his house in the middle of the night—parents had no idea—he’d be nude, and he’d break into other houses in the neighborhood to steal the clothing from the women.

MICHELLE: And this was before he’d actually been violent with anyone?

PAUL HOLES: Yeah, as far as we know. He had killed some animals. You know . . . the whole serial-killer triad thing [the theory that torturing animals, setting fires, and bedwetting past early childhood predict sexual violence in adulthood].

MICHELLE: Right.

PAUL HOLES: But this was at the high school age. I think there’s a certain . . . thrill to being out without the clothes on.

MICHELLE: Right.

PAUL HOLES: Now, there could be a practical thing too, you know? Let’s say it’s his first attack, and he’s going, “Well, how am I going to deal with the pants? I’m just not going to wear them. I don’t want them in the way.”

MICHELLE: Right. Yeah, that’s why it’s interesting to me that in a lot of the murders, he killed them with whatever was handy there.

PAUL HOLES: Yeah. He had a gun, but in terms of the bludgeoning, he used what was there.

MICHELLE: Is there anything about people who bludgeon that’s different from people who do other stuff?

PAUL HOLES: Well, bludgeoning and stabbing in essence are the same thing. You know, it’s very personal. You’re taking out a lot of violence, a lot of anger, on that person. Now, strangulation . . . beating with your fists or strangling, that’s all . . .

MICHELLE: So anything you do with your hands is kind of out of the same thing?

PAUL HOLES: Yeah, it’s all the same. Versus killing with a gun—it’s less personal. And it’s easy. Anybody can kill anybody with a gun. You can kill from a distance. But when you’re in physical confrontation with the person, that’s a personal thing. You know, you read about these guys who are looking in the victim’s eyes as they’re strangling them . . .

MICHELLE: Right.

PAUL HOLES: You know, and they feel Godlike because, in essence, they are controlling whether this victim lives or dies.