فصل 06

6

Sacramento, 1976–1977

IN THE SEVENTIES, KIDS WHO DIDN’T LIVE HERE CALLED IT RANCHO Cambodia. The American River bisects the east side of Sacramento County, and Rancho Cordova, on the south bank, is cut off from the leafier, more genteel suburbs on the other side of the river. The area began as a Mexican land grant of five thousand acres for farming. In 1848, after James W. Marshall, thirty-five miles upriver, glimpsed glittering metal flakes in a water-wheel drain and declared “I have found it,” the gold dredges descended on Rancho Cordova, leaving huge piles of river rock behind. For a while, it was a vineyard. Mather Air Force Base opened in 1918. But it was the Cold War that really changed Rancho Cordova. In 1953 Aerojet, the rocket and missile-propulsion manufacturer, opened its headquarters here, and with it came a boom in residential housing for its employees, the town’s twisty roads (Zinfandel Drive, Riesling Way) suddenly paved and neatly divided into modest single-story tract houses. Everyone’s family seemed associated with the military or Aerojet.

A rougher element lurked. A man who grew up on La Gloria Way in the midseventies remembers the day the ice cream man who worked around Cordova Meadows Elementary School disappeared. Turns out the guy with the long hair, big beard, and mirrored aviator glasses who had been selling the kids Popsicles was selling LSD and cocaine to a different set of clientele, and he was hauled away by the cops. Stories of growing up in Sacramento in the seventies are often bait-and-switches like this, a tangle of sweet and scary, small-town postcards with foreboding on the back.

On hot summer days, we waded in the American River, a woman recalls; then another memory, this one of running along the trails by the river and coming upon a homeless camp in the dense brush. Parts of the river were said to be haunted. A group of teenage girls hung out at Land Park and watched shirtless boys wax their cars; they went to Days on the Green in Oakland, that era’s Lollapalooza, to see the Eagles or Peter Frampton or Jethro Tull. They drove up to the Sutterville Road levee and drank beer. They were on the levee drinking the night of April 14, 1978, when a convoy of squad cars, sirens blaring, flew past them on the road below. The convoy was endless. “Never saw anything like it before, or since,” one of the teenagers, now a fifty-two-year-old woman, said. The East Area Rapist, or EAR—the man I would come to call the Golden State Killer—had struck again.

From Folsom I took a left onto Paseo Drive, into the heart of residential Rancho Cordova. This place meant something to him. He attacked here first and kept coming back. By November 1976, there were nine attacks in Sacramento County attributed to the East Area Rapist in six months; four of those took place in Rancho Cordova. In March 1979, when he hadn’t attacked in a year and it seemed he’d left for good, he came back to Rancho Cordova one last time. Was it home? Some of the investigators, especially the ones who worked the case in the beginning, think so.

I pulled up to the site of his first attack, a simple L-shaped single-story house, about a thousand square feet, with a cleanly shorn tree stump in the center of the yard. It was here that the first call came in, at five a.m. on June 18, 1976, from a twenty-three-year-old woman who was speaking into the receiver as best she could from where she lay on the floor, her hands tied behind her back so tightly that she’d lost circulation. Sheila had backed up to the phone on her father’s nightstand, knocked it to the ground, and searched with her fingers for 0. She was calling to report a home-invasion rape.

She wanted them to understand that the mask was strange. It was white and made of a coarse, knitlike material, with eyeholes and a seam down the middle, but it fit very tight against his face. When Sheila opened her eyes and saw him in her bedroom doorway, she thought she was dreaming. Who wears a ski mask in Sacramento in June? She blinked and absorbed more of the image. He was about five nine, moderately muscular, wearing a navy blue, short-sleeved T-shirt and gray canvas gloves. Another detail, so unnatural it must have strayed in from her subconscious—a pair of pale legs with dark hair. The parts flew together and formed a whole. The man wasn’t wearing pants. He was erect. His chest rose and fell, exhalations of the real.

He leaped onto Sheila’s bed and pressed the blade of a four-inch knife against her right temple. She pulled the covers over her head to will him away. He yanked them off. “If you make one move or sound, I’ll stick this knife in you,” he whispered.

He tied her wrists behind her back with cord he brought with him, then tied them again with a red-and-white fabric belt he found in Sheila’s closet. He stuffed one of her white nylon slips into her mouth as a gag. Already hints existed of the behavior that would become so recognizable. He put baby oil on his penis before he raped her. He rummaged and ransacked; she could hear the little knocker handles on the side tables in the living room clattering as he opened drawers. He spoke in a low guttural whisper, with a clenched jaw. A one-inch cut near her right eyebrow bled from where he’d pressed the knife, ordering her not to make a sound.

Common sense, and any cop, will tell you that the no-pants rapist is an unsophisticated teenage peeper who just graduated from misdemeanor to crudely conceived felony. The punk doing the no-pants dance suffers from poor impulse control and will be arrested swiftly. His lingering stare has no doubt afforded him creep status in the neighborhood. The cops will kick him awake at his agitated mother’s house in no time. But this no-pants punk wasn’t caught.

There exists something that I think of as the paradox of the smart rapist. Roy Hazelwood, a former FBI profiler who specializes in sexual predators, talks about it in the book The Evil That Men Do, co-written by Stephen G. Michaud: “‘Most people have no trouble connecting intelligence with a complex robbery. But rape-torture is a depraved act, which they cannot remotely relate to. They therefore resist crediting such offenders with intelligence. This is true even of police officers.’”

A closer look at Sheila’s rapist’s methods reveals a calculating mind at work. He was careful to never remove his gloves. Sheila received hang-up phone calls in the weeks leading up to the attack, as if someone were monitoring her schedule. In April she had the feeling she was being followed. She kept seeing a dark, medium-size American-made car. But it was curious—though she felt sure it was the same car, she could never quite make out the driver.

The night of the attack, a birdbath had been moved to a spot under the telephone line in the backyard, evidently to stand on. But the line was only partially cut, the clumsy hesitation mark of a trainee, like the bent nail of an apprentice carpenter.

Four months later, Richard Shelby was standing on a curb on Shadowbrook Way in Citrus Heights.

Based on the rules of the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department, Shelby should not have been on this or any other case. He shouldn’t have even been in uniform. Shelby knew the rules—to work for the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department in 1966 you had to have all ten digits in their entirety—but he had passed the written exam and physical, and thought he’d try his luck. Luck had been good to him; even the fact that he was missing a good portion of his left ring finger was lucky. He should have been cut in half by the hunter’s errant shotgun blast. The doctors told him he came very close to losing the whole hand.

When the screener spotted Shelby’s finger, he halted the interview. Shelby was curtly dismissed. He wouldn’t be joining the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department after all. The rejection smarted. All his life, Shelby had heard his family speak reverently of an uncle who was a sheriff in Oklahoma. Maybe it was a sign. He wanted to work in a less populated county anyway. Yolo, or Placer. The Central Valley’s open spaces were the landscape of his youth. Summers he’d worked outside on the ranches and farms of east Merced County. Skinny-dipped in the canals. Hunted rabbit and quail in the lower foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The SSD’s “failure to pass” letter arrived a week later. Then, the next day, another letter arrived. This one told him where and when to report for work.

Shelby called for an explanation. Vietnam was becoming big news. In February 1965, the monthly draft was three thousand; the number had increased to thirty-three thousand by October. Protests began throughout the country, turning incrementally more raucous. Available young men were growing scarce. The SSD saw Shelby as a new and relatively rare phenomenon. He had joined the air force more than a decade before, thirteen days after his seventeenth birthday, and completed duty. He had a college degree in criminal justice. He was married. And despite what he was lacking fingerwise, he could outtype the sheriff’s secretary. They changed the rules about finger length. Shelby reported for work August 1, 1966. He stayed twenty-seven years.

The SSD was far from a slick place back then. Everyone competed for the one squad car that had a gooseneck lamp and clipboard affixed to the dash. The armory still had tommy guns from the 1920s. The sirens were located right on top of the cars; the cops who drove them wear hearing aids now. Specialized divisions like the one for sex crimes didn’t exist. You were the expert with hands-on experience if you picked up the phone and were called to a rape scene once. That’s why Shelby found himself on the morning of October 5, 1976, on the curb at Shadow-brook Way.

A bloodhound following a scent trail had brought him to the spot. The trail began at a child’s bedroom window, continued over a fence and through a field of weeds, stopping at the curb. Shelby knocked on the nearest door and looked across the field toward the victim’s house, a distance of about two hundred feet. He wished away his unease.

An hour and a half earlier, shortly after six thirty a.m., Jane Carson had been cuddling in bed with her three-year-old son when she heard a light switch go on and off, and then someone running down the hallway. Her husband had left for work moments before. “Jack, is that you? Did you forget something?”

A man in a greenish-brown ski mask came through the door.

“Shut up, I want your money, I won’t hurt you,” he said.

Shelby found the precision timing interesting. The man entered the house through the son’s bedroom window just moments after Jane’s husband left. They’d been the victims of an unusual burglary two weeks before, in which the thief took ten or so of their rings and left behind some neighbors’ stolen jewelry. The thief had also entered and exited through the son’s window. Same guy, Shelby thought. A methodical and patient one.

Jane’s rape would end up being the fifth assault attributed to the East Area Rapist, but it was the first one worked by Shelby and Carol Daly, two detectives who would become inextricably linked to the series. A female detective with experience in sex crimes, Daly was a natural fit to conduct the victim interviews. Her people skills would eventually rocket her all the way to the job of undersheriff. Shelby, however, had a knack for pissing people off. He would call on colleagues to handle suspect interrogations, as his tended to devolve into chaos. He was always butting heads with “the fourth floor,” the top brass. His problems stemmed less from arrogance than plainspokenness. He lacked finesse. A childhood spent roaming a flat landscape empty of people could keep one from developing certain communication skills. “The ability to be tactful has always eluded me,” he says.

There were three more attacks in quick succession that October. At first many of his colleagues thought an unidentified serial offender known as the Early Bird Rapist was responsible, but Shelby knew they were up against a smarter and weirder man than the Early Bird. These were the days before criminal profiling, before terms like “signature” or “ritual behavior” became commonplace. Back then, investigators might say “the presence,” “the personality,” or “the smell of it.” What they meant was the precise and peculiar arrangement of details, as distinct as an odor—the experience of crime-scene déjà vu. There was the consistent physical description, of course. He was white, in his late teens or twenties, about five nine, with a medium, athletic build. Always in some sort of mask. Forced, angry whisper. Clenched jaw. When he got upset, his voice rose to a higher pitch. Small penis. There was the odd deportment—his voice was often hurried but his manner was not. He would open a drawer and stand looking at it for several minutes in silence. Reports of prowlers seen in the neighborhood around the time of an attack often included the detail that the prowler, once alerted that he’d been seen, left the area in a leisurely manner. “Totally unhurried,” one witness said.

His psychosexual needs were specific. He bound his victims’ hands behind their backs, often tying and retying several times, sometimes with different material. He ordered them to masturbate him with their bound hands. He never fondled them. When he started attacking couples, he’d take the female into the living room and drape a towel over the TV; lighting seemed important. He got off on sexual questioning. “What am I doing?” he’d ask a blindfolded victim as he masturbated with hand lotion found in the house. “Is this like the captain’s?” he asked Jane; her husband was a captain in the air force. He told her to “shut up” at least fifty times, Jane said, but when he was raping her, he had other demands, snapping at her like a director to his actress. “Put some emotion in that,” he ordered her, “or I’ll use my knife.”

He was brazen. Twice he entered homes, pressing on undeterred when he knew victims had spotted him and were frantically dialing the police. Children didn’t bother him. He never hurt them physically, but he would tie up the older ones and put them in another room. He put Jane’s toddler son on the bedroom floor during her attack. The boy fell asleep. When he awoke, he peered over the bed. The EAR had left. His mother lay bound in strips of torn towels and was gagged with a washcloth. He mistook the ligatures for bandages.

“Is the doctor gone?” he whispered.

SHELBY WAS FAMILIAR WITH THE BRUTE WAYS OF SKI-MASKED PERVERTS, but he was unsettled by this one’s commitment to reconnaissance. That was unusual. The hang-up phone calls. Pre-prowling. Burglaries. The EAR knew how to turn off outside lights even when they were on a timer. He knew where a hard-to-find garage opener was located. Interviews Shelby conducted suggested that the suspect hadn’t cased out just Jane but her neighbors too, noting where he could park his vehicle, what time the neighbors took out their garbage and left for work.

Carol Daly, Shelby’s colleague that day, would be quoted a year later in the Sacramento Bee saying about the case, “The typical rapist does not have such elaborate schemes.” That was the thought going through Shelby’s mind as he stood on the curb with the bloodhound, looking across the field toward Jane’s house. Another detail troubled him. The offender had poked Jane’s left shoulder with his paring knife. Jane felt he didn’t intend to injure her, that the wound was an accident. Shelby wasn’t so sure. He guessed the guy was suppressing an urge to inflict more pain; until he was caught, the urge would grow.

It did. The suspect began clicking scissors next to blindfolded victims’ ears, threatening to cut off toes, one for each time they moved. He stabbed the bed next to where they lay. Psychological torment stoked him. “You don’t know me, do you?” he whispered to one victim, using her name. “It was too long ago for you, isn’t it? It’s been a long time. But I know you.” He would always let them believe he’d left their house, then, just as their bodies would slacken, their numb fingers inching for their ligatures, he’d shock them with a sudden noise or movement.

After Jane Carson’s attack in October, rumors flew around the community about a serial rapist at large, but the Sheriff’s Department asked the local press to not publicize the crimes, fearing that the spotlight might drive the suspect away from the east side, where they hoped to contain and catch him. Shelby, Daly, and their colleagues in the detective unit went about quietly chasing leads. They checked with parole and probation officers. They looked at deliverymen, milkmen, janitors, and carpet layers. They left their business cards on neighborhood doors and followed up on tips that came in, usually about young men who stared too hard or stayed out too late or were, as one tipster said about his younger brother, “fruity.” They blindfolded Jane and played tape recordings of two suspects’ voices for her. She lay on her bed; her arms shook. “Not him,” she said. They canvassed pawnshops for the stolen items, and visited House of Eight, a porn shop on Del Paso Boulevard, inquiring about customers into bondage. They followed up on a tip about a man who was paying the DMV for women’s registration information, then following them in his car. They questioned him outside his house, where they noted that he stood in the gutter, too distracted to notice the stream of water swirling around his nice leather dress shoes. He wasn’t the EAR, but they got the DMV to stop allowing the practice of purchasing private information. They noted blushing, blinking, arm crossing, and repeating questions in a clear grab for time. None of it led to the EAR.

Meanwhile, gossip in the community mutated in the vacuum of official word. The police weren’t telling the public about the rapes, the rumors went, because the details were too horrible to repeat. He was mutilating women’s breasts. The rumors weren’t true, but the press blackout meant that no one publicly refuted them. Tension peaked on October 18, when the EAR attacked twice in twenty-four hours. One of the victims, a thirty-two-year-old housewife and mother of two, lived on Kipling Drive in Carmichael, one of the more affluent neighborhoods on the east side. Some speculated that the EAR, fed up with his lack of press, was pushing into the nicer neighborhoods to ensure publicity. It worked. Five hundred people attended a town-hall meeting on crime prevention at Del Dayo Elementary School on November 3. Shelby and Daly took turns at the microphone awkwardly trying to answer heated and panicky questions about the EAR.

The next morning, the Sacramento Bee ran a story by police reporter Warren Holloway: MAN HUNTED AS SUSPECT IN 8 RAPES. The press blackout was over.

Maybe it was a coincidence, but on the evening of November 10, the same day the Bee ran a follow-up story (EAST AREA RAPIST . . . FEAR GRIPS SERENE NEIGHBORHOODS), a man in a leather hood entered the window of a house in Citrus Heights and sneaked up on a sixteen-year-old girl watching television alone in the den. He pointed a knife at her and issued a chilling warning: “Make one move and you’ll be silent forever and I’ll be gone in the dark.”

This time the EAR took his victim outside the house, leading her down an embankment to a cement drainage ditch, about twenty feet wide and ten feet deep, where they walked about a half mile west to an old willow tree. The girl later retraced the path with Shelby and some other detectives; cut shoestrings, shredded Levi’s and green panties lay in a heap in weeds near the tree. The girl said she hadn’t been raped. Coaxing information from people in the aftermath of a violent attack is tricky, especially when, like Shelby, you’re a blunt, six-three older male and the victim is a female teenager who’s emotionally about to capsize. You look them in the eye and ask the hard question. You may or may not believe the answer. You ask later, less pointedly, maybe in the middle of talking about something else. They repeat their earlier answer. That’s all you can do.

The EAR may have thought she was someone else. “Don’t you go to American River College?” he asked her. When she answered no, he pressed his knife against her throat and asked again. Again she said no. The girl told the detectives she resembled a neighbor who had gone to American River College, a local community college. But there was the weird precision timing again. She was only going to be alone in the house for a short window of time. Her parents had gone to the hospital to visit her brother, and she had a date scheduled with her boyfriend later that night. Before he took her to the drainage ditch the EAR had carefully replaced the screen on the window he’d entered and turned off the television and the house lights, as if he knew people would be returning soon and didn’t want to raise an alarm.

The girl added to the ever-growing catalog of fleeting details glimpsed in the dark through a loosened blindfold. Black, square-toed shoes. A small flashlight, small enough that it disappeared into his left hand. Military fatigue pants. While she was tied up, he kept scrambling up the west side of the embankment and looking out at something, the girl said. Back and forth. Fidgety like. Shelby climbed the embankment. They were, as always, minutes or hours behind him. You could plant your feet in the man’s footprints, but without knowing what drew him to that spot, yours was the chump’s view, dumbly scanning the horizon for a hint. Overgrowth of tangled brush. Fences. Backyards. Too much. Not enough. Square one.

The leather hood the girl described extended beneath the EAR’s shirt and had slits for eyes and mouth; that sounded to Shelby like the kind of hoods arc welders wear underneath their helmets. He hit up welding equipment companies for customer names. Nothing panned out. Meanwhile, the phones rang at the Sheriff’s Department with people spilling names. The detectives tried to eyeball everybody. Guys were eliminated if they had big feet, a sunken chest, a potbelly, a beard, a wandering left eye, a limp, custom arch supports, or a sister-in-law who confided that she skinny-dipped once with her husband’s younger brother and he had a big penis.

The EAR attacked another teenage girl, this one in Fair Oaks, on December 18. There were two more victims in January. RAPIST STRIKES AGAIN, 14TH TIME IN 15 MONTHS read the headline in the January 24 edition of the Sacramento Bee. A quote by an anonymous sheriff’s detective conveyed the brittle weariness setting in: “‘It was exactly the same as all the rest.’”

ON THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 2, 1977, A THIRTY-YEAR-OLD woman in Carmichael lay bound, blindfolded, and gagged on her bed. After listening for a long time and hearing nothing, she worked the gag out of her mouth and called out for her seven-year-old daughter, whom she sensed was in the room. “Are you okay?” she asked. Her daughter shushed her. “Momma, be quiet.” Somebody pushed down on the woman’s bed abruptly and let go, as if to tell her he was still there. For several minutes she lay with her eyes wide open against her orange-and-white terry-cloth blindfold, listening to him breathing somewhere close by.

Hypnotists elicited details about suspicious sightings. Detectives looked for a black-and-white motorcycle with fiberglass saddlebags. A black, possibly ex–California Highway Patrol car with a loud exhaust. A white van with no side windows. A biker named Don with muttonchops and a large mustache. A woman called about an employee at a local grocery store. The man’s penis, she said knowingly, “is very rough like it’s been used to death.”

Desperate for fingerprint evidence, the detectives tried a method called iodine–silver plate transfer for lifting latent prints from human skin; Carol Daly was tasked with blowing a fine powder through a tube over the victims’ naked bodies. Nothing. There were small victories. In February, a woman in Carmichael struggled with the EAR for his gun. He beat her over the head. When Shelby and Daly examined the victim’s head wound they noticed a spot of blood on her hair about two inches from the injury. Daly snipped the bloodied hair and had it sent to the crime lab for typing. The victim’s blood was type B. This spot, determined to be the EAR’s, was A positive.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The section that follows was pieced together from Michelle’s notes.]

IT WAS AROUND TEN THIRTY ON THE NIGHT OF FEBRUARY 16, 1977. The Moore family was settled into their home on Ripon Court in the Sacramento neighborhood of College-Glen. Eighteen-year-old Douglas cut himself some cake in the kitchen while his fifteen-year-old sister Priscilla watched TV in the living room. Suddenly, an unexpected noise capsized the ordinariness of their weekday evening—a crash that came from the backyard. It was the family’s electric smoker. Someone had just hopped the fence and knocked into it.

Mavis Moore turned on the patio light and peered through the drapes just in time to glimpse a figure running through the backyard. Douglas impulsively began pursuit, and his father, Dale, grabbed a flashlight and followed him through the side door.

Dale found himself trailing behind as he watched his son chase the blond-haired man who had been prowling their backyard— across Ripon Court and into the space between two neighboring residences, where the prowler disappeared over the fence. Douglas followed, and as he reached the crest of the fence, a loud pop sounded. Dale watched as his son fell backward onto the grass.

“I’ve been shot,” Douglas cried out as his father attended to him. Another shot followed, without consequence. Dale moved Douglas out of the line of fire.

An ambulance arrived and rushed Douglas to the hospital. The bullet had entered his stomach and left multiple holes in his intestines, bladder, and rectum.

AS THE POLICE WENT DOOR TO DOOR CONDUCTING A NEIGHBORHOOD canvass, their notebooks began to fill up with details eerily similar to the descriptions detectives would hear when canvassing after an EAR attack: neighbors heard sounds in their yards as though their fences had just been scaled; one neighbor heard someone walking on her roof; fence slats were discovered kicked out and side gates were found open. A rolling tide of barking dogs seemed to indicate the direction of a phantom prowler. Residents in the general area reported prowler incidents and burglaries in the weeks leading up to the Moore shooting.

And all witness reports, including Doug Moore’s, yielded a familiar set of descriptors: a white male between twenty-five and thirty years old, five nine to five ten, with heavy legs and sandy blond neck-length hair, wearing a watch cap, a windbreaker, Levi’s cords, and tennis shoes.

Among the clues collected was the usual outlier, an intriguing potential lead that may have had no relationship at all with the incident culminating in Doug Moore’s shooting—and even if it did, it seemed to offer little in the way of concrete information: A custodian leaving his shift at the nearby Thomas Jefferson School crossed paths with a pair of loiterers in front of a building on campus. One of them asked him the time as he passed, while the other appeared to be concealing something—possibly a transistor radio—beneath his coat.

Both subjects appeared to be eighteen or nineteen years old and around five nine. One was apparently a Mexican male with dark shoulder-length hair, wearing a blue windbreaker and Levi’s, while the other was a white male in an identical outfit.

The custodian had worked at the school for seven years and was well acquainted with the regulars who’d hang around campus after hours. He had never seen either subject before.

THE EAR HIT AGAIN IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF MARCH 8, in Arden-Arcade. The Sacramento Bee ran an article (“Rape May Be Linked to Series”) about the attack. The reporter noted that “the victim was separated from her husband and had a small child, who was staying elsewhere Monday night. The east area rapist has never attacked while there was a man in the house, although occasionally there have been children.” If there was ever a question about whether the EAR was reading his press, it was put to rest after the article was published. His next victim was a teenage girl, but after that he targeted heterosexual couples, eleven in a row, and from then on, couples remained the main focus of his attacks.

On March 18, the Sheriff’s Department received three phone calls between four fifteen and five p.m. “I’m the EAR,” a male said, laughed, and hung up. The second call was a repeat of the first. Then the third: “I’m the East Area Rapist. I have my next victim stalked and you guys can’t catch me.”

That night in Rancho Cordova a sixteen-year-old girl returning home from her part-time job at Kentucky Fried Chicken dropped her take-out bag on her kitchen counter and picked up the phone to dial a friend. Her parents were out of town and she intended to stay at the friend’s house. The call had rung one and a half times when a man in a green ski mask emerged from her parents’ bedroom, a hatchet raised above his head.

This time the victim had a somewhat better look at the EAR’s face, as he wore a ski mask with the center cut out. Acting on a hunch that the EAR was a young Rancho Cordova local, Shelby and Daly brought over a stack of neighborhood yearbooks and watched as the victim flipped through them. She stopped on a page in the 1974 Folsom High School yearbook. She handed the book to Shelby, pointing at a boy’s picture. “That looks most like him.” They ran down the kid’s history. Instability, check. Weirdness, yes. He was working at a gas station on Auburn Boulevard. They hid the victim in the back of an unmarked car and had her peer at him from three feet away as he filled the gas tank. She couldn’t make a positive identification.

THE HOUSES HAD DIFFERENT LAYOUTS. SOME OF THE VICTIMS were young teenagers who clutched couch pillows to their stomachs and, pain-faced and confused, shook their heads when they were asked if they knew what a “climax” was. Others were in their midthirties, had recently divorced their second husbands, and were enrolled in beauty school classes and active in singles clubs. But for the detectives called out of bed in the early morning hours, the scenes record-skipped with a numbing sameness. Cut shoelaces on a shag carpet. Deep red indentations around wrists. Pry marks on window frames. Kitchen cabinets left open. Beer cans and cracker boxes scattered on backyard patios. There was the sound of some sort of bag, paper rustling or a zipper opening, as he stole engraved jewelry, driver’s licenses, photos, coins, occasionally money, though theft was clearly not his driving motive, as he bypassed other valuables, and often what he stole, like a cherished wedding ring ripped violently from a swollen finger, was found dumped somewhere close by.

On April 2, he added a twist to his method, one he would continue to use. The first couple he targeted awoke to a bright, square-lensed flashlight shining in their eyes. He gruffly whispered that he had a gun (“a .45 with fourteen shots”) and threw a length of twine at the woman, ordering her to tie up her boyfriend. When the male was bound, the EAR placed a cup and saucer on his back. “I hear the cup rattle or bedsprings make any noise, I’ll shoot everybody in the house,” he whispered. To the woman he remarked at one point, “I was in the army and I fucked a lot while I was there.”

That the EAR may have a military connection was frequently discussed. There were five military installations within an hour’s drive of Sacramento; Mather Air Force Base, adjacent to Rancho Cordova, had roughly eight thousand personnel alone. There was his penchant for army green and the occasional report of black lace-up military-style boots. Several who encountered him, including those with military backgrounds, felt his authoritative posture and unyielding demeanor were reminiscent of someone with a background in the armed forces. “The dishes trick,” as his unusual alarm system came to be known, struck some as a technique right out of jungle warfare.

There was also the galling fact that he was outmaneuvering them. He remained free. The Sheriff’s Department borrowed treetop cameras from the State Department of Forestry normally used to catch arsonists. They depleted their overtime budget sending undercover patrols to roam the neighborhoods the EAR frequented. They borrowed military nightscopes and movement detectors used in Vietnam. Yet he was still out there blending in, a man whose ordinariness was his mask.

The Sheriff’s Department brought in an army colonel trained in Special Forces techniques to help them understand the EAR’s tactics. “The major point in training is that of patience,” the colonel told them. “The specially trained person can and will sit in one position for hours if necessary and will not move.” The EAR’s sensitivity to noise—he often turned off air-conditioning and heating units to hear better—was a skill honed in Special Forces personnel. Ditto knives, knots, and planning multiple escape routes. “He can and will make use of any point of concealment,” the colonel said. Look for him “in the place most unlikely for a human being to be, i.e., the bottom portion of an outhouse, the middle of blackberry bushes.” The colonel reiterated: remember the patience. He believes he’s got more stamina than anyone else, and that searchers will give up when he will not.

Shelby wondered if they hadn’t caught him for another reason. He noticed that they would station undercover patrols in a neighborhood he was known to frequent, but that night the EAR would attack somewhere else. He seemed more aware of police procedure than the average citizen. He always wore gloves and parked outside the standard police perimeter. “Freeze!” he shouted once at a woman as she tried to scramble away from him. Shelby wasn’t the only one to bring it up. The thought crossed other minds in the Sheriff’s Department too. Was he one of them?

One night Shelby followed up on a prowler tip. The woman who called in the tip seemed surprised when Shelby knocked on the front door and announced himself. For the last several minutes she thought an officer was already there, she told him; she could swear she heard the sound of a police radio just outside her house.

“He will let the searchers walk within an inch of him and will not move,” the colonel had warned.

By the end of April, the victim count was seventeen. The EAR was averaging two victims a month. If you were paying attention, and most people were, it was bad.

Then came May.

THE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT ACCEPTED AN OFFER FROM A PSYCHIC who said she could identify the EAR. She chanted and ate raw hamburger. They looked into having the EAR’s “biorhythm chart” done but were told it wouldn’t work without his birth date. Around midnight on May 2, a little over two weeks since the last attack, a thirty-year-old woman on La Riviera Drive heard a thump outside, the same sound her young sons made when they jumped the fence from the levee into the yard. She went to the window, but didn’t see anything. The abrupt glare of a flashlight, the first hint of danger, startled her and her husband, a major in the air force, around three a.m.

Two days later, a man in a beige ski mask and dark blue jacket, resembling a US Navy jacket, lunged out of the darkness at a young woman and her male co-worker as they walked to her car parked in his driveway in Orangevale. Both cases had the familiar smell. The hang-up phone calls beforehand. The dishes trick. The unsettling pairing, in one instance, of brutal rape followed by a break to eat Ritz crackers in the kitchen. Both couples told the detectives the EAR seemed like someone straining to appear tough, a bad actor who took gulping breaths in an attempt to seem angry and unhinged. The woman in Orangevale said he entered the bathroom for several minutes; it sounded to her that he was hyperventilating in there.

EAST AREA RAPIST ATTACKS 20TH VICTIM IN ORANGEVALE read the headline in the next day’s Bee.

Pressure was building at the Sheriff’s Department. Normally hands-off bosses became agitatedly hands-on. It was only May and their overtime budget was nearly depleted for the year. They were elbow-deep in dead-end calls about ex-boyfriends and Public Works employees checking street lighting. Slouching and leisurely sipping from Styrofoam cups of coffee disappeared from daily briefings, replaced by pacing and restless legs. Detectives stared at maps and tried to predict his next attack. They had a feeling he would hit next in the area around Sunrise Mall, in Citrus Heights; reports of prowling and break-ins were emanating from there.

Around twelve forty-five a.m. on May 13, a family on Merlindale Drive, not far from Sunrise Mall, heard someone on their roof. Dogs in adjacent yards began barking. A neighbor called the family around one a.m. to say they heard someone crawling on their roof too. Squad cars arrived within minutes; the roof creeper was gone.

The next night, a block over, a young waitress and her husband, a restaurant manager, were the next victims.

Disbelief set in. A roughly ten-mile corridor following the American River east into unincorporated Sacramento County was under siege. No one required context anymore. There was no “Have you heard?” You had heard. “There’s this guy” was replaced by “He.” Teachers at Sacramento State gave up teaching and entire class sessions were devoted to discussions about the EAR, any student with new information pumped for details.

People’s relationship with nature changed. Winter’s drizzle and dense tule fog, the weather of dread, had given way to a lovely warmth, to vistas of freshly scrubbed green studded with red and pink camellia petals. But Sacramento’s prized abundance of trees, all those Oregon ash and blue oaks flanking the river, were recast in their eyes, a once verdant canopy now a hunting blind. An urge to prune took over. East siders hacked off tree limbs and uprooted shrubs around their houses. Reinforcing sliding glass windows with dowel rods wasn’t enough. That might keep him out, but they wanted more; they wanted to strip him completely of the ability to hide.

By May 16, a surge of newly installed floodlights lit up the east side like a Christmas tree. In one house tambourines were tied to every door and window. Hammers went under pillows. Nearly three thousand guns were sold in Sacramento County between January and May. Many people refused to sleep between one and four a.m. Some couples slept in shifts, one of them always stationed on the living room couch, a rifle pointed at the window.

Only a madman would strike again.

MAY 17 WAS THE DAY EVERYONE HELD THEIR BREATH AND WAITED to see who would die. They’d awakened that morning to news that the EAR had struck for the fourth time that month, the twenty-first attack attributed to him in less than a year; the latest victims, a couple in the Del Dayo neighborhood, told police he threatened to kill two people that night. In a single twenty-four-hour period, between May 17 and May 18, the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department received 6,169 calls, almost all of them about the East Area Rapist.

The officers responded to the call at 3:55 a.m. on May 17. The thirty-one-year-old male victim was outside his house in light blue pajamas, a length of white shoelace dangling from his left wrist. He spoke angrily in a mix of English and Italian. “What’s the hurry,” he said to the officers. “He’s gone. Just come on in!” When Shelby pulled up to the scene, he recognized the man immediately. Back in November, when he and Daly had led a packed town-hall discussion on the EAR, the man had stood up and criticized the investigation. He and Shelby had exchanged heated words. The incident had taken place six months ago, and maybe it was a coincidence, but the connection contributed to the impression that the EAR was brazen enough to attend events dedicated to his own capture, that he blended in, observed, remembered, and excelled at a certain kind of malevolent patience.

The attack, right off American River Drive in Del Dayo, near a water treatment plant, echoed the previous ones, though this time the EAR’s mood, like the community’s, was especially jittery. He stuttered; it didn’t seem like a put-on. And he had a message to convey, one he practically spit out at his female victim with excited anger. “Those fuckers, those pigs—do you hear me? I’ve never killed before but I’m going to kill now. I want you to tell those fuckers, those pigs, I’m going to go home to my apartment. I have bunches of televisions. I’m going to listen to the radio and watch television and if I hear about this, I’m going to go out tomorrow night and kill two people. People are going to die.”

But he gave the husband, who was tied up in another room, a slightly different message. “You tell those fucking pigs that I could have killed two people tonight. If I don’t see that all over the papers and television, I’ll kill two people tomorrow night.”

He devoured Cheez-It crackers and half a cantaloupe before he left.

The city awoke to a jarring headline in the Sacramento Bee: EAST AREA RAPIST ATTACKS NO. 23, NEXT VICTIMS DIE TONIGHT? The article reported that the Sheriff’s Department had consulted with a panel of local psychiatrists and concluded that the EAR was “a probable paranoid schizophrenic” and that he was likely in “a homosexual panic because of inadequate (physical) endowment.” The inadequate-endowment detail was repeated several times in the article. Whether or not this was the kind of press the EAR sought, or whether he sought press at all, was anyone’s guess, as was the question of whether he’d make good on his threat to kill.

May 1977 was the month the wrought-iron bars went up and the all-night vigils began, when a group of three hundred neighborhood men patrolled east Sacramento County in pickup trucks outfitted with CB radios. Hard acrylic panels were bolted behind windows and doors. Deadbolts were on back order. Meter readers held their identification cards in front of them and announced themselves repeatedly, loudly, when they entered people’s yards. Orders for backyard floodlights went from ten a month to six hundred. A letter to the Sacramento Union, typical of the time: “We used to open our windows at night for fresh air. Not anymore. We took the dog for a walk in the evenings. Not anymore. My sons used to feel safe and secure in their own home. Not anymore. We all used to sleep without waking to every normal evening’s noise. Not anymore.”

Around this time, Shelby found himself in south Sacramento in an unmarked car with another detective on daytime surveillance detail. They were facing east, and to their left was a short street where, midway down the block, a game of tag football was being played. A car headed eastbound, going very slowly, passed by. The car’s speed was unusual, but what really caught Shelby’s attention was the extreme focus with which the driver watched the game. Shelby looked closer at the players; they were all boys except the quarterback, a young woman with long hair, about twenty years old. A few minutes later, the same car returned, inching by, the driver again staring intently at the players. Shelby noted the make and model of the car. When the car circled a third time, he jotted down the plate and radioed it in. “If he comes by again, let’s pull him over,” Shelby told his partner. But that was the last time the driver, a pencil-necked blond guy in his early twenties, came by. His ardent concentration is what lingers in Shelby’s memory. That, and the fact that days later the EAR would attack in south Sacramento for the first time, about a mile away; that crime scene would be the last Shelby worked on before being pulled off the case and reassigned.

The license plate came back unregistered.

THERE’S A KIND OF PROUDLY SELF-RELIANT, NO-FUSS QUALITY that I’ve come to recognize in longtime Sacramentans. I once scheduled a breakfast interview at the boutique hotel I was staying at downtown. The interviewee’s husband, a cabinetmaker, accompanied her to the meeting. I had already ordered my breakfast, a deconstructed yogurt parfait that came in a tiny mason jar with an antique silver spoon. I encouraged my guests to get something, but when the waitress turned to the husband he shook his head politely and smiled. “Made my own breakfast myself this morning.” I literally had a silver spoon in my mouth when he said it.

I bring this up only to help make sense of certain things. For example, two days after the May 17 attack, a local dentist publicly announced that he was contributing $10,000 to the reward (raising it to $25,000) and, with another businessman, forming the grassroots EARS (East Area Rapist Surveillance) Patrol. Hundreds of local men attended a rally and, with CB radios, began patrolling the east side all night in their cars. The undersheriff conveyed his dismay over this development in a Bee article on May 20; essentially his message was: please don’t. The citizen manhunt pushed on undeterred, accompanied by the noise and light of a surveillance helicopter on loan from the California Highway Patrol that circled relentlessly overhead.

Another example: an article in the Sacramento Union on May 22, “Two Victims Recall East Area Rapist,” quoted Jane using a pseudonym; there were enough identifying details that the EAR, reading it, would have known who it was, which makes what she said all the more remarkable.

“I’d feel cheated if someone blew his head off. I’d ask them to please aim low,” she said.

THAT FRIDAY MORNING, MAY 27, THE START OF MEMORIAL DAY weekend, Fiona Williams did some chores around the house, then took her three-year-old son, Justin, with her to Jumbo Market on Florin Road to shop for groceries. She dropped him at the babysitter’s and went to an optometrist appointment. She picked up her paycheck at the library, where she worked part-time, deposited it at the bank, and did some more shopping at Penney’s. After that, she picked up Justin at the sitter’s, and they went to Mel’s Coffee Shop for dinner. When they got home, they swam for a while in the pool. Around dusk she watered the front lawn, still in her swimsuit, as Justin toddled around.

Fiona was aware of what was happening, of course; the local TV news blared with fresh hysteria every night. But she wasn’t necessarily on high alert. He was the East Area Rapist, after all. He’d never hit in south Sacramento, the neighborhood where Fiona lived in a new house with her husband, Phillip, and Justin. But the EAR lingered in their minds. Phillip worked as a supervisor at a water treatment plant in Del Dayo. The most recent victims, the couple attacked on May 17, lived just yards from the plant. Phillip worked the swing shift, so when he came in, his colleagues had filled him in on the swarming police presence across the way. The EAR had put a gun to the husband’s head. “Shut up, if you say one more thing I’ll kill, do you understand?”

Phillip didn’t know the couple; they were strangers cloistered behind police cars, the subject of murmured workplace gossip. But he would come to know them soon.

When Phillip returned home from work around twelve thirty a.m. Fiona and Justin were asleep. He drank a beer and watched some television, then climbed into bed and dozed off. About twenty minutes later he and Fiona woke at the same time, and reached for each other. They began fooling around. Several minutes later a scratching sound in the bedroom startled them. The sliding glass door to the patio opened and a man in a red ski mask entered. That they knew instantly who it was didn’t lessen the shock. The feeling was surreal, as if a larger-than-life movie character, someone you’d just been watching on television, emerged from behind the drapes and began talking to you. He carried a two-cell flashlight in his left hand. He held what looked like a .45 pistol in his right hand, extending it into the flashlight’s beam to show them.

“Lay perfectly still, or I will kill all of you,” he said. “I will kill you. I will kill her. I will kill your little boy.”

He threw a length of cord at Fiona and ordered her to tie up Phillip. The EAR tied her next. He rummaged and threatened, slashing his flashlight across the bedroom in jarring motions. He stacked plates on Phillip’s back, then led Fiona into the living room.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked him.

“Shut up!” he hissed at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said impulsively, in response to being yelled at.

“Shut up!”

He pushed her onto the living room floor, where he’d already laid down towels. After raping her several times he said, “I have something for you to tell the fucking pigs. They got it mixed up the last time. I said I would kill two people. I’m not going to kill you. If this is on the TV or in the papers tomorrow, I’ll kill two people. Are you listening? Do you hear me? I have TVs in my apartment and I’ll be watching them. If this is on the news, I’ll kill two people.”

When he mentioned the TVs in his apartment, an image flashed in Fiona’s mind of LBJ in the Oval Office watching a trio of televisions he had next to his desk, a clip often played on the news back in the sixties. The EAR noticeably stuttered on l words, particularly “listening.” His breathing was rapid—loud, sucking inhalations. She almost hoped he was faking, because if he wasn’t, he sounded seriously unhinged.

“It scares my mommy when it’s on the news,” he said between gulping breaths.

It was a little after four a.m. when the first officer entered the opened rear patio door, hesitantly making his way toward the woman calling out to him. She lay face down on her living room floor, naked, her wrists and ankles tied behind her with shoelaces. A ski-masked stranger had just spent an hour and a half terrorizing Fiona and her husband. He brutally raped her. Fiona was five two, 110 pounds—a wisp of a woman. She was also a native Sacramentan, in possession of a dry, matter-of-fact manner, a clear-eyed resilience that belied her petite size.

“Well, I guess the East Area Rapist is the South Area Rapist now,” she said.†

Shelby arrived at the yellow house with brown trim at five a.m. A crime-scene technician had laid plastic bags over the area on the floor where the rape occurred to preserve evidence. A green wine bottle and two packages of sausages were scattered on the back patio, about fifteen feet from the door. Shelby accompanied the bloodhound and his tracker as the dog nosed its way through the backyard toward a flowerbed in the northeast corner, where they found shoe impressions.

Highway 99 ran adjacent to the house, and where the dog lost the scent, at a spot on the shoulder of the northbound lanes, were tire tracks from what looked to be a small foreign car, a VW bug maybe. A technician pulled out a measuring tape. The tire tracks measured four feet three inches center to center.

Right after the attack, when the investigators with their notepads asked Fiona to search her mind, the only thing she could point to that was slightly odd that evening was the garage door. She’d been going back and forth from the house to the garage doing laundry, and she was certain the side door leading to the carport had been closed. When she came back in one time, the door stood open. The wind, she thought. She closed and locked the door. They’d only lived in the house for three weeks and were adjusting to its contours and quirks. It was a corner house, boasting four bedrooms and an in-ground pool in the backyard. One image that would continue to nag at Fiona was that of a man at the Realtor’s open house, standing next to her as they looked out at the pool at the same time. She didn’t know why the impression stayed with her. Had he stood too close? Stayed a beat too long? She tried in vain to build a face, but he was blank. A man, that was all.

Highway 99 ran adjacent to the house, separated by a hundred yards of dirt and a row of large conifers; directly behind them, on the other side of a dinky chain-link fence, was an empty lot. Fiona would come to view the open space around them differently than she first had; what was once a pleasant expanse became a vulnerable point of entry. It wasn’t part of their original plan, but after what happened to them that Memorial Day weekend, she and Phillip spent $3,000 they couldn’t afford to build a brick wall around their new house.

Shelby noted the Realtor’s Sold sign on the front porch. One of the significant avenues in the investigation was trying to find a common thread among the victims. The detectives gave the victims detailed questionnaires and carefully examined their checks. Areas of interest, or backgrounds that seemed overrepresented, included students and education, medical workers, and the military. Several were noted to have frequented the same pizza restaurant. But by far the most recurrent pattern was real estate. At Jane’s, the first attack Shelby investigated, back in October ’76, he observed a Century 21 sign on a lawn directly across the street. Several victims had just moved in, were moving out, or were next door to new units being sold. As one decade turned to the next and the case grew more complex, the real estate factor would consistently crop up, its significance—if any—remaining murky, right up to the moment a Realtor casually extracted a key from a lockbox and stumbled upon the EAR’s last known victim, a beautiful girl, unrecognizable in death.

After Fiona and Phillip’s attack on Memorial Day weekend, the EAR disappeared from Sacramento for the summer. He wouldn’t return until October. By then Shelby was off the case, reassigned back to patrol. His skirmishes with the higher-ups had begun to flare more openly. High-profile cases are magnets for hierarchical politics, and Shelby could never quite play the game. When he first made detective, in 1972, his boss, Lieutenant Ray Root, had a loose, proactive philosophy. Go out and develop informants, Root instructed, and uncover felonies that might never be reported; develop your own cases rather than wait to be assigned. That philosophy suited Shelby’s temperament. Showing courteous interest in his bosses’ ideas did not. The transfer didn’t upset him, he insists. He was stressed from the manhunt. Exhausted by the infighting. Working a high-profile case like the EAR meant constant scrutiny, and Shelby bristled at the surveillance; inside him lived the memory of that proud young man standing hopefully in front of the Sheriff’s Department panel, dismissed because it was decided he was lacking the right parts.

IN THE DAYS AFTER HER ATTACK, FIONA FOUND HERSELF STUTTERING as the EAR had. Carol Daly organized a meeting among the female victims at one of their homes. Fiona recalls a lot of murmured exchanges—“You’re doing so well” and “I didn’t leave my home for five days.” Daly played for them a couple of recordings of male voices, but Fiona doesn’t remember any of the victims recognizing them. For some time afterward, she became irrational about personal safety. At night she refused to go into the back of the house where the bedroom was until Phillip came home. She sometimes kept a loaded gun under the driver’s seat of her car. She found she had a lot of nervous energy, and one night when she was using it to furiously vacuum, she blew a fuse, and the whole house and backyard went dark. She became hysterical. Her neighbors, a kind elderly couple who knew what had happened, rushed over and fixed the fuse.

During a break from work not long after the attack, Phillip walked over to the other victims’ home and introduced himself. He didn’t tell Fiona until years later, but he and the other husband would meet sometimes in the early morning hours to ride around in a car together, scanning yards and empty lots. Speeding up. Slowing down. Looking for the outline of a figure slinking along hedges. The two men’s bond was unspoken. Few men would experience what they had, would understand the shattering rage of lying face down on a bed, bound and gagged, as your wife whimpers from another room. They hunted a man whose face they didn’t know. Didn’t matter. The action of moving forward, their hands unrestrained, of physically doing something, was all that did.

AN EXCERPT FROM AN ARTICLE PUBLISHED ON FEBRUARY 28, 1979, in the now defunct chain of suburban weekly newspapers known locally as the Green Sheet might help convey what Sacramento was like in the 1970s. THREE RAPE TRIALS LOOM is the headline, with the subhead, “Questions of Publicity.” The first paragraph: “The public defender’s office will attempt to prove publicity about the East Area Rapist makes it impossible for three men charged with multiple rapes to get a fair trial in Sacramento County.”

In February 1979, the East Area Rapist hadn’t attacked in Sacramento County in ten months. Signs indicated he’d moved on and was prowling the East Bay. Yet the article describes how the Public Defender’s Office was conducting phone surveys of Sacramento residents, trying to gauge “to what extent an aura of fear exists in this community because of the East Area Rapist.” The Public Defender’s Office worried that the East Area Rapist’s top-dog infamy would poison the jury pool, that jurors would convict their clients—the Woolly, Midday, and City College Rapists—in a misguided attempt to punish the unidentified offender whose moniker still caused such terror that many potential survey responders, upon hearing the caller’s question, didn’t get past the four words “the East Area Rapist” before hanging up.

It might help convey what Sacramento was like in the seventies to know that in an article about three serial rapists overshadowed by a fourth, a fifth at-large serial rapist isn’t even mentioned. The Early Bird Rapist was active in Sacramento from 1972 to early ’76, when he seemed to go underground. Four years of break-ins and sexual assaults and approximately forty victims, and yet a Google search shows references to him only in relation to the EAR.

A woman wrote me an e-mail about a close encounter she believes she had with the East Area Rapist when she was a teenager. She and a friend were taking a shortcut to their high school in Arden-Arcade, a neighborhood on Sacramento County’s east side. She remembers the morning was cold, and believes it was either fall or winter of 1976 or ’77. They decided to walk down a cement path that ran along a creek and ended up hitting a dead end, a fenced-in backyard. When they turned around a man was standing twenty feet from them. He wore a black ski mask that covered his face except for his eyes. He started toward them, keeping one hand in his jacket. The woman, thinking quickly, reached her hand up and felt around for a lock on the fence. The gate pushed open, and the two friends ran screaming into the backyard. The homeowners, alerted by the racket, came out and herded them into the house. She remembers being interviewed by investigators at the time. She was writing to tell me that the masked man was built differently than I’d described in my magazine article about the EAR. The man she encountered was extremely muscular, the woman wrote. “Overkill so.”

I forwarded the e-mail to Shelby, now retired from the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department. “Probably did see the EAR,” he wrote back. “However muscle description sounds like Richard Kisling perfectly.”

Richard Kisling? I looked Kisling up—yet another serial rapist once active in the Sacramento area who, like the EAR, wore a ski mask and tied up the husbands while he raped their wives.

Sacramento’s was not an isolated problem. US crime rates show a steady rise in violent crime throughout the 1960s and ’70s, peaking in 1980. Taxi Driver came out in February 1976; the bleak and violent film was hailed as an encapsulation of its time, to no one’s surprise. Many retired cops I talk to, from Sacramento but other places too, uniformly recall 1968 to 1980 as a particularly grim period. And unlike some other places, Sacramento, a city built by pioneers who forded rivers and passed over snowy mountain ranges to get there, is known for its flinty survival instincts.

My point is not to declare a plague but to underscore prominence: in a city inhabited by tough locals and lousy with violent offenders, one predator stood out.

It might help convey what Sacramento was like in the 1970s, and something about the EAR, to know that whenever I tell an inquiring native that I’m writing about a serial rapist from Sacramento, no one has ever asked which one.