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.