“Does he have someone who’s assisting him at times? In the sexual assaults, no, but on the burglary side? Who knows? It happens enough throughout the series, that you go, ‘Maybe.’ Maybe we have to consider that possibility.”
Holes concedes that much of what the EAR said was deflection and misdirection. He ranted about living in his van or at a camp by the river, but he rarely emitted the kind of body odor a transient would. He invented connections to his victims. “I knew when I saw you at the junior prom I had to have you,” he whispered to a blindfolded teenager, but she’d heard tape being pulled from her bedroom wall—her junior prom picture coming down. “I’ve seen you at the lake,” he said to a woman with a ski boat in her driveway.
Some of the lies—about killing people in Bakersfield, about being kicked out of the military—probably played into a tough-guy image he nurtured of himself. The fake connections to victims were possibly part of his fantasy or an attempt to unsettle them with opaque familiarity. Holes and I speculate about his other behavior, like the gasping breaths. They were described as huge, gulping intakes of air, bordering on hyperventilation. A criminal profiler who examined the case in the seventies felt that the breathing was a scare tactic, a way to make his victims think he was a lunatic capable of anything. Holes says a fellow investigator who has asthma wondered if it was legitimately respiratory distress; adrenaline can trigger an attack.
The EAR is a card face down on a table. Our speculation is a cul-de-sac. Round and round we go.
“San Ramon?” asks Holes.
SAN RAMON
We head for 680, which will take us seventeen miles south to the next attack, the third that month. October 1978. Carter was president. Grease had been the huge summer movie, and John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John’s “Summer Nights” was still a radio mainstay, though the Who’s “Who Are You” was climbing the charts. The fresh-scrubbed face of thirteen-year-old Brooke Shields stared blankly from the cover of Seventeen. The Yankees beat the Dodgers in the World Series. Sid Vicious’s girlfriend Nancy Spungen bled to death from a stab wound on a bathroom floor at the Chelsea Hotel. John Paul II was the new pope. Three days before the San Ramon attack, the movie Halloween was released.
“What about the crying? Do you think that was real?” I ask Holes.
Nearly a dozen victims reported that he cried. He sobbed, they said. He stumbled and seemed lost. He whimpered in a high-pitched voice like a child. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he wept. “Mommy, please help me. I don’t want to do this, Mommy.”
“I do,” says Holes. “Women have good insight into men’s behaviors. There are times when the victims say his anger is a put-on, he’s acting, but other times, when he’s in a corner sobbing uncontrollably, it feels real to them. He’s conflicted. The crying is always after the sexual attack. That’s when he’s sobbing.”
There’s an exception among the victims who believed the tears were real. The Stockton woman, the one whose husband struggled to come to terms with their attack, didn’t buy the crying, Holes tells me.
“She heard those sounds. But she wouldn’t attribute them to crying,” says Holes.
“What did she think it was?” I ask.
“High-pitched hysteria,” Holes says. “Like laughter.”
For years no one seems to have noticed that the 911 emergency number didn’t work in unincorporated San Ramon, even though the phone company charged residents for the service. A woman who lived at the end of a quiet court discovered the discrepancy. The discordant squawk her receiver emitted indicating a failed call was a jolt she didn’t need after two hours of sexual violence at the hands of a stranger. The woman, using the pseudonym Kathy, is quoted in an Oakland Tribune article that ran on December 10, 1978, six weeks after her attack. When Kathy awoke the night of her rape, her eyes frantically sought to adjust to the darkness. She could make out only one thing in the pitch-black: a disembodied wild gaze, his “‘little eyes, just staring.’”
“‘I just really hate that guy,’” Kathy says matter-of-factly of her unidentified rapist. She explains she’s also angry with the phone company for not providing emergency service when they said they did. Of this outrage, Kathy tells the reporter, she can exact some quantifiable justice: she has the 911 charge deducted from her bill now, a savings of twenty-eight cents a month.
Help came after Kathy dialed the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office directly.
In the wake of the two rapes in Concord the Sheriff’s Office had issued an alert to its deputies. Sacramento’s warning had proved prescient: The EAR was pressing his ski mask against their windows now. Everyone needed to be vigilant. A strike force began identifying neighborhoods where the EAR might hit. License numbers of vehicles parked next to open areas, or otherwise deemed suspicious, were quietly recorded.
Bug-eyed attentive wasn’t the San Ramon beat’s usual mode. From 1970 to 1980, the city more than quadrupled its population, but it was, and still is, ringed by rolling grasslands studded with oak trees, vast swaths of undeveloped country that suggest space and impose quiet. Police radios lulled with extended silences. Patrol headlights swept over the same detached garages, the same darkened windows on ranch homes occupied by young families. Suspicious figures rarely peeled off from San Ramon’s unvarying suburban silhouette; the fence lines were unbroken, the shrubs never shook. Deputies were trained for action but accustomed to stillness.
That changed on October 28 just after five a.m., when dispatch delivered to the graveyard shift a blast of static followed by scant but alarming details. Home-invasion rape and robbery. Montclair Place. A one-man unit was the first to respond to the scene. The victims, Kathy and her husband, David,* calmly met the deputy at the front door. After confirming that the couple didn’t need immediate medical care, the deputy’s interest was absorbed by the odd scene behind them. The house was almost completely empty. Drawers of the few pieces of furniture were haphazardly pulled open and bare. Closet doors stood open, revealing hanging rods and nothing else. Had they been completely cleaned out by the intruder? No, Kathy and David explained, they were in the process of moving out.
He’d come for them during their last few hours in the house.
There was the real estate factor again. And the canny timing that suggested inside knowledge. Kathy and David had a three-year-old son; they pointed out to investigators that the EAR never opened or even approached their son’s bedroom door. Other victims with small children noticed the same thing. How he zeroed in on victims and gained knowledge about their lives and the layouts of their homes was a question of endless speculation.
Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, called the preattack time he spent casing for victims “patrolling.” Banality was his camouflage. He’d back his truck into a 7-Eleven on Pacific Highway South, the gritty stretch around the Seattle-Tacoma airport known for prostitution. Sometimes he’d pop the hood. He was a slight man with a putty-colored face who was preoccupied with engine trouble. His presence never registered. The washed-out gray landscape absorbed him seamlessly. Only a close, patient observer could have picked up on the detail that signaled something was wrong: time didn’t concern the man. His pupils flicked like a pendulum, fixing on everything but his engine, a quick-change of hungry considerations tracking as forcefully as a planchette on a Ouija board.