There’s a pause in my conversation with Holes, one I’ve come to anticipate in discussions about the case. It’s knockdown time. The verbal pivot is akin to the moment when you’ve talked too much about an ex, catch yourself, and stop to emphasize that the ex in question is, of course, a worthless piece of shit.
“He’s very good at committing his crime,” Holes says, “but he’s not rappelling down the side of a building. He’s not doing anything that suggests he has any specialized training.”
Holes’s parents are from Minnesota, and he retains a chipper midwestern rhythm to his speech, but when he says the EAR wasn’t particularly skillful, his voice loses momentum, and he sounds unconvincing and unconvinced. On to the next recognizable stage in case analysis: self-debate.
“It’s ballsy. The EAR. That’s the thing,” Holes says, his jaw uncharacteristically clenched. “What sets him apart from other offenders is going into a house. The Zodiac, for instance. In many ways his crimes were kind of cowardly. Lovers’ lanes. From a distance. You step it up when you go inside. You step it up further when there’s a male in that house.”
We talk about how the male victims are overlooked. He tells me a story about a time when he needed to question a female victim in Stockton who’d been attacked with her husband. Holes decided to contact the husband first, figuring he’d be better able to handle the cold call. The husband politely told Holes he didn’t think his wife wanted to talk about the attack. She’d buried it. She didn’t want to revisit the experience; nevertheless, the husband reluctantly said, he’d pass Holes’s questions on to his wife. Holes didn’t hear anything. He figured it was a lost cause. Several months later, the wife finally got in touch. She answered Holes’s questions. She was willing to help him, she said. She was willing to remember. Her husband wasn’t.
“He’s the one who’s having the problems,” she confided.
The male victims were born in the forties and fifties, a generation for whom therapy was mostly an alien concept. In the police files, gender roles are rigid and unambiguous. Detectives ask the women where they shop and the men about the locking mechanisms on the doors and windows. They drape blankets over the women’s shoulders and ferry them to the hospital. The men are asked what they saw, not what they felt. Many of the male victims had military experience. They had toolsheds. They were doers and protectors who’d been robbed of their ability to do and protect. Their rage is in the details: one husband chewed the bindings off his wife’s feet.
“So much trauma exists to this day,” Holes says, starting the car. He pulls away from the curb. The corner house recedes from view. There’s a brief handwritten note in the file from the female victim, the pretty young mother of the darling little birthday girl, to the lead detective, dated five months after their attack.
Rod,
Enclosed please find
a. missing property list and
b. list of checks written for July–August.
All jewelry was taken from either our bedroom chest drawer or the top of dresser. Other items are appropriately indicated.
I do hope this will be all that will be needed as we are desperately trying to get our lives back to normal. I’m sure we both can appreciate each other’s positions.
Good luck in the piecing together!
The tone was reasonable, direct, and resilient. Upbeat even. I found it extraordinary. Some people, I thought when I read it, can endure horrible, traumatic things and move on. A few pages later in the file, there’s another short note, handwritten by a sheriff’s deputy. This family no longer lives in Contra Costa County, the note says. They’ve moved to a city hundreds of miles away.
Good luck in the piecing together!
I’d read the exclamation point as optimism. But what it meant was good-bye.
WE HEAD EAST. THE SECOND ATTACK IN CONCORD OCCURRED A week after the first and is located less than a half mile away. Holes slows for a stop sign. He points to the street perpendicular to us, again consulting his mental map of October 1978. “Right in this area there’s new construction going on. So people, construction workers, delivery trucks, are coming down this road”—he indicates the one we’re on—“or that road, in order to get to the construction location.”
Of the two primary thoroughfares someone could take to the construction site in October 1978, Holes says, one route passes the first attack location, and the other passes the second. I remember that Holes said he believed the EAR came to the area for work.
“Building? Construction?” I ask.
“That’s the avenue I’m pursuing,” he says.
I notice that he says “the” and not “an.”
“Do you know who the developer of that construction site was?”
He doesn’t answer, but his expression says he does.
We pull up to the second Concord crime scene, another single-story, L-shaped home, this one cream with green trim. A giant oak dominates the small front yard. Nothing about the neighborhood suggests that people with a great deal of weekday leisure time live here. No one ambles by with a dog. No one is speed walking with an iPod. Few cars pass.
In this case, the EAR hinted at a possibility, one that flickers intriguingly throughout the series a handful of times. It was Friday the thirteenth, four thirty a.m. The EAR’s psychosexual script that he forced upon his victims with his flashlight and clenched-teeth threats was by now, his thirty-ninth attack, so well established that, reading the police reports, one can be forgiven for missing the clue, the key change of a single word: “I” to “we.”
“All we want is food and money, and then we’ll get the hell out of here,” he ranted at the disoriented couple. “I just want food and money for my girlfriend and me.”
Once the couple was restrained and compliant, he began his frenetic ransacking, slamming kitchen cupboards, rummaging through drawers. The female victim was led to the family room. He laid her on the floor.
“You want to live?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said.
He blindfolded her with a bathroom towel.
“This had better be the best fuck I’ve ever had, or I’m going to kill you.”
She told investigators she kept flashing on In Cold Blood, on the story of a family annihilated in the middle of the night by fickle killers.
However, what followed, while terrifying for the victim, seemed oddly juvenile and of little interest to her attacker. He quickly and perfunctorily ran his hands over her thighs; she could feel that he was wearing thick leather gloves. He made her masturbate him for a minute, then penetrated her and was done in thirty seconds. He jumped up and began ransacking again. It seemed that the raiding of the house stimulated him more than actual sex.
A door opened and she felt a draft; he was in their attached garage. A trash bag rustled. He seemed to be going back and forth from the house to the garage. She heard him say something, but not to her.
“Here, put this in the car,” he whispered.
There was no reply; she heard no footsteps. A vehicle never started up. She never knew how or when he left, just that at some point he did.
It wasn’t the only time the EAR suggested he had an accomplice. The first victim heard what she thought were two separate voices in her living room whispering heated, overlapping threats. “Shut up,” followed quickly by, “I told you to shut up.”
Another victim heard a car horn honk four times outside, and then someone began ringing the doorbell. There was knocking at the front window. She heard muffled voices, possibly a woman’s. She couldn’t tell if the EAR’s voice was among them. He left, and the voices went away, but the victim, who was bound and face down on her living room floor, couldn’t tell if the events occurred at the same time, or were related at all.
“My buddy is out in the car waiting,” he said once.
Was it a lie, a bolstering tactic when he psychologically felt the need for backup? An attempt to misdirect the police? Most of the investigators believe it was a bluff. Holes isn’t so sure.