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.