On the geo-profile map, a blade of red, indicating the peak area for the EAR’s likely home base, runs east to west just north of Kathy’s house.
Kathy also didn’t know that an FBI profiler had presented new findings at a recent EAR Task Force meeting. Something the profiler said resonated with Holes. She said they should consider that in some of the cases the male victim had been the target. In some instances, the EAR may have been exacting revenge on the male for some perceived wrongdoing.
What Kathy told them raised the possibility of a link, a previously overlooked close degree of separation that could lead to the suspect. Many well-known serial cases turn out to possess at least one such connection. An old roommate of Lynda Healy’s, a victim of Ted Bundy, was a cousin of Ted’s, and investigators later unearthed rosters that showed that Ted and Lynda shared at least three classes. Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, lived six doors down from Marine Hedge, his eighth victim. John Wayne Gacy talked publicly in a store with Robert Piest about hiring him for a construction job shortly before Piest disappeared.
The EAR went to great lengths to hide his identity. He covered his face and suppressed his voice. He blinded his victims with a flashlight and threatened to kill them if they looked at him. But he was also brazen. Barking dogs didn’t deter him. Two joggers, a college-age brother and sister, were out running on a foggy night in December 1977 when they spotted a man in a dark ski mask emerging from the hedged walkway of a house on the 3200 block of American River Drive. The man stopped abruptly when he saw the joggers. They continued running. They looked back and saw him quickly climb into an older model step-side pickup truck. Something about the way the man had paused and then moved quickly into the truck made them run faster. They heard the noisy rattle of the truck’s engine as the truck sped toward them. They sprinted around the corner; the truck screeched to a stop and backed up haphazardly to where they were. They ran to another house and hid, watching as the truck followed, turning in circles in the street until the man gave up and sped off.
The EAR was extremely careful about self-preservation, but success and the arrogance it breeds punctures holes in master plans. It whispers grandiose persuasions. He’d already defeated a series of mental barriers that would have stopped most of us: rape, breaking into a stranger’s home, taking control of a couple rather than a lone female. After dozens of uninterrupted successes, his self-confidence might have adrenalized him to the point where he broke his own rule about targeting only victims to whom he had no connection. A guttural whisper heard in the middle of the night thirty-six years ago may be a clue.
After San Ramon, the EAR hit twice in San Jose, forty miles south. Holes and I decide to skip San Jose to save time.
“I want to show you Davis,” he says. “I think Davis is important.”
But first we have two more stops. After San Jose, the EAR returned to Contra Costa County, attacking for the first of what would be three times in Danville. Holes and I head north on 680 toward Danville, to the site of the December 9, 1978, attack, which gave him his most promising lead.
DANVILLE
A hundred years ago, the steady drumming of steam trains was the sound of boom time in the broad green valley adjacent to Mount Diablo. Starting in 1891, the Southern Pacific Railroad ferried passengers up and down a twenty-mile route from San Ramon to just north of Concord. Enterprising visitors disembarked, blueprints and dreams in hand. Land was abundant. Parceling and developing commenced. Passenger service eventually disappeared with the invention of the automobile, but the San Ramon Branch Line continued hauling freight—Bartlett pears, gravel, sheep. The railroad tunneled indistinguishably into the landscape. Train whistles marked time. The depots were all painted the same dandelion yellow with brown trim. The tracks ran past Murwood Elementary in Walnut Creek, and at recess the kids, hearing a rumble and feeling the ground vibrate, stopped their hopscotch or dodgeball and waved at the passing crews, receiving a horn blow in reply.
Southern Pacific helped transform the rural valley, but not in a way that kept its trains running. Industrial hubs never materialized. Single-family homes were developed instead. Central Contra Costa County became “the outer East Bay.” The completion of I-680 in 1964 represented speed, efficiency, and death for the railway. Moving freight was cheaper by truck. The number of train cars dwindled. And kept dwindling. The sprawling orchards were gone now, and crowds of roofs advanced on either side of the tracks. Southern Pacific finally petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to abandon the line. In September 1978, nearly a century after the first track was laid, the line closed for good.
Debate ensued about what to do with the right-of-way. Until a decision was made, the twenty-foot-wide strip of land remained vacant, a shadow corridor bisecting neighborhoods of warmly lit houses. The dead zone didn’t inspire dread as much as inattention. This was especially true of the five-mile stretch that ran through Danville, the town just north of San Ramon. Danville lots were larger, the homes older, its residents wealthier and quieter. The deserted tracks lay beyond tidily cordoned-off backyards. The fence lines were essentially drapes. Shorn of its usefulness, the right-of-way was blotted out. Nothing moved. Nothing was heard. That is, until one December morning when a peculiar noise disturbed the silence. The casual listener may not have been concerned at first. The sound was steady, rhythmic, but to the sensitive ear it signaled an evident urgency: a bloodhound galloping, gripped with purpose.
BY EARLY DECEMBER 1978, THERE EXISTED AMONG CONTRA COSTA County residents the hopeful but mostly unspoken feeling that maybe they could relax. In October the East Area Rapist hadn’t merely surfaced in their area; he’d inflicted on them something that, in its swiftness and ability to shock, resembled a spree: three attacks in twenty-one days. After the third attack, people spent nights locked inside brightly lit homes, fighting sleep and blinking against muzzy visions of ski masks. But weeks passed without incident. Fresh horrors distracted. News anchors interrupted regular programming on November 18 to announce that more than nine hundred Americans, a third of them children, lay dead in a jungle commune in Guyana after drinking Flavor Aid laced with cyanide at the behest of cult leader Jim Jones. The Peoples Temple, Jones’s church, had had its headquarters in San Francisco before relocating to Guyana. The dead included Northern California congressman Leo Ryan, who’d flown there to investigate alleged abuses and was gunned down at an airstrip just before takeoff. The Jonestown Massacre absorbed much of the country’s horrified attention, if not the world’s, but it particularly rocked the Bay Area.