A large open field and a school were across the street at the time. The house next door was empty and posted for lease. Dogs tracked the EAR’s scent around the corner, where he’d evidently gotten into a vehicle; he’d parked in front of a house where a pool was being built.
Police patrolling the neighborhood after the rape stopped a drunk driver with a knife and sheath. They stopped a man with his pants down who said he was looking for his lost cat. In his car were photographs of unsuspecting women taken with a zoom lens. They were just two of the dark compulsives scuttling through the suburbs at night, like the waterways cemented over but still churning underneath Walnut Creek.
Twenty-three days later, the EAR returned to Rancho San Miguel.
Investigators who’ve worked the lead on serial cases say there are times when they feel that the offender is speaking to them, as if their private thoughts have been telegraphed and he’s responding. It’s a wordless dialogue familiar to obsessive competitors, an exchange of small gestures whose meaning only the two people locked in battle understand. In the first leg of the race between cop and at-large criminal, the investigator is the clock-watcher with the anxious, racing mind, and the offender is the string puller with the haunting smirk.
The second Eichler was just a hundred feet from the first. The victim was a thirteen-year-old this time. Her father and sister were in the house, unaware of what was taking place. The tracking dogs yanked their handlers around a corner and stopped abruptly in a familiar place: the same spot as before, in front of the house where the pool was being built.
The details of the crime coalesced to form a disembodied shiteating grin.
“Has he ever gone back?” the thirteen-year-old asked the investigators interviewing her after the attack.
“Never,” said the first investigator.
“Never, ever, ever,” said the second.
“The safest house in the area,” said the first.
As if any house was ever going to feel safe again.
THE NEIGHBORHOOD DOESN’T FIT EXACTLY WITH HOLES’S CONSTRUCTION angle. The Eichlers were all built in the 1950s. Rancho San Miguel didn’t have active development going on at the time, though there was some adjacent development. It’s two miles from the 680 freeway.
“It’s a little off the beaten track,” says Holes, looking around. “Something is pulling him out to this outside neighborhood.”
The drive through Contra Costa County is different for Holes than it is for me. I’m seeing the neighborhoods for the first time. Holes is driving through old murders. Every “Welcome to . . .” sign is accompanied by the memory of forensic evidence, of blurry-eyed afternoons spent in the lab hunched over a microscope. Walnut Creek particularly resonates for Holes, reminding him of the mystery of a missing girl.
Elaine Davis was going to sew a brass button on her navy peacoat. Her mother left their home on Pioneer Avenue, in north Walnut Creek, to pick up Elaine’s father from work. It was ten thirty p.m. on December 1, 1969, a Monday night. When the Davises returned home, Elaine, a seventeen-year-old straight-A student with sandy blonde hair and a heart-shaped face, was gone. Her three-year-old sister was still asleep in her crib. The house appeared undisturbed. Elaine, who was nearsighted, had left her badly needed glasses behind. Items of Elaine’s began to surface. The button she intended to sew on her coat was found in a field behind her house. Her brown loafer with a gold buckle was picked up on Interstate 680 in Alamo. A housewife spotted a petite girl’s navy peacoat on a remote stretch of highway in the Santa Cruz Mountains, seventy-five miles away.
Eighteen days after Elaine disappeared, a female body floated ashore at Lighthouse Point in Santa Cruz. A radiologist studied the bones and concluded that the woman was twenty-five to thirty years old. It wasn’t Elaine. The Jane Doe was buried in an unmarked grave. The Davis disappearance went cold.
Thirty-one years later, a Walnut Creek police detective nearing retirement brought the case file to Holes, who reviewed it. Holes concluded that the radiologist was wrong and couldn’t have made an accurate determination of age. Holes joined other officials in an effort to exhume the Jane Doe’s body. Twenty-five feet deep on the side of a hill, shovels connected with a plastic body bag filled with bones.
Elaine’s father was dead. Her mother lived in Sacramento. Two days after the exhumation, Walnut Creek detectives asked to speak with her. Elaine’s younger sister came in from out of town for the meeting. The detectives told the mother and sister the news: we’ve identified Elaine.
“The family buries her,” says Holes. “A week later, Mom dies.”
We leave Walnut Creek, heading north. Mount Diablo, a mass of strange protrusions towering above valleys cut precisely into planned communities, recedes. Black mountain cats are said to slink among the high rocks on Mount Diablo. Mysterious lights have been glimpsed. In 1873 a live frog was found partially embedded in a slab of limestone 228 feet underground, according to local legend. In late August and early September, just after the first fall rain, hundreds of male tarantulas emerge from holes in the ground. They skitter through mint-scented mountain sage in search of burrows delicately draped in silk, where females are ready to mate. Visitors armed with flashlights flock to the mountain around sunset or just after dark, the best time to see the tarantulas. Bats wheel over gray pines and live oaks. Great horned owls hoot solemnly. Beams from flashlights weaving across trails sometimes catch a piece of earth that’s moving; closer inspection reveals the scuttling of saucer-size tarantulas. The male tarantulas never return to their holes. They mate as much as they can and then die, from starvation or cold.
We cross the bridge to Solano County, where we’ll turn east toward Davis.
“On a clear day, you can see Sacramento from here. And the Sierras,” says Holes.
He lives halfway between Sacramento and the East Bay. On weekends he often finds himself visiting the crime scenes.
“I like to drive,” he says. Whenever he’s in Southern California, he visits the crime scenes there too. During trips to Disneyland with his family, when the kids grow drowsy, his wife oversees naptime at the hotel while Holes takes a drive. To the Northwood subdivision in Irvine, to 13 Encina, where Janelle Cruz lived, or to 35 Columbus, where Drew Witthuhn cleaned up his sister-in-law Manuela’s blood.
“Each time I’m trying to look for Why here?” Holes says. “Why this?”
DAVIS
[EDITOR’S NOTE: This section features selections from the audio transcript from the trip to Davis.]
PAUL HOLES: This is how the EAR would have traveled down to the East Bay. Along I-80, right here.
MICHELLE: If you had to guess his point of origin, in terms of where he went to school . . . I won’t keep you to it. I’m just curious.
PAUL HOLES: If I were to guess? Sac State. If he was college-educated. Locationwise, if you take a look at where his attacks are, you know, you have the whole Rancho Cordova cluster. You have the attacks along La Riviera. You have the attacks that are right there, right by Sac State. Sac State seems likely. Now, you have some community colleges up in the Sacramento area that he could have gone to. Uh, high school? Uh . . . whew. There’s so many possibilities.
MICHELLE: I mean, you don’t feel like, maybe he grew up in Goleta?
PAUL HOLES: I wouldn’t say that, but when I look at the Sac cases, and—this is one thing I want to show you at some point—when you do a flyover of the order of his attacks in Sacramento, you see very early on, he is literally crisscrossing Sacramento. He is showing intimate familiarity with the area.
MICHELLE: He’s not showing up just to go to Sac State.
PAUL HOLES: No, no. I think he has a history up in Sacramento. Now, does he have a history in Goleta? I mean, anything’s possible. We don’t know. But down south, Goleta is—for me—that’s ground zero down south. And there’s something in Irvine. Some reason why he has two cases there.