He was letting me down gently. He’d been there. After he told me how excited he’d get about certain suspects when he first started on the case, I asked how he responded now, fifteen years later. He mimed getting a report and looking it over, taciturn and severe.
“Okay,” he said curtly, and pretended to throw it in the pile.
But I’d seen him reenact another moment, the one when he walked through his boss’s door, when he spotted the group assembled there for him, on the cusp of a moment you can spend a career in law enforcement imagining but never experience. I knew how quickly he sometimes got back to me through e-mail when something interesting popped up.
I’d seen him imitate that fist pump and “Yes!” I knew that he quietly longed for that moment again.
OceanofPDF.com
Los Angeles, 2014
“WHAT PEOPLE FORGET ABOUT ROCKY IS THAT FIRST SCENE, WHEN he goes out to train. His legs are killing him. He’s past his prime. It’s freezing. He’s staggering. He can barely get up those steps.”
Patton was trying to buoy my spirits by telling me about Rocky. I’d been talking to him about dead ends. How many could the average person face before they gave up?
“But Rocky just kept getting up every morning and doing it. Over and over. It’s like with these cold-case guys. You invest all this time and energy. You call around. You dig through boxes. You coax out stories. You swab. Then, the answer is no. You can’t let that kill you. You have to wake up the next morning, get your coffee, clear your desk, and do it all over again.”
Patton was talking about himself too, I realized, the way he kept getting back onstage as a young comedian, for no money, to hostile crowds. He had that burning determination in him, and he’s partial to stories about people who do too. Sometimes when he’s standing at the sink doing the dishes, I notice his lips moving but there’s no sound.
“What are you doing there?” I asked him once.
“Working out a joke,” he said.
Starting over. Making it better. Doing it again.
“Rocky didn’t beat Apollo Creed, remember,” Patton said. “But he shocked him, and the world, because he refused to give up.”
We were having dinner to celebrate our eighth wedding anniversary. Patton raised his glass of wine. I could tell he hoped to shake me from my listless defeat in the face of dead ends.
“You have a rogues’ gallery of villains in your future,” he said.
“Stop it!” I said. “Don’t say that.”
His intentions were good, I knew. But I couldn’t, or refused, to imagine the future.
“I don’t want a rogues’ gallery of villains,” I said. “He’s the only one.”
The moment I said it, I realized how sick that sounded. What I meant was that after the EAR, I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to feverishly search, to breathlessly catch a series of green lights only to keep crashing, ever again.
From under the table, Patton brought out a large present wrapped beautifully in vintage wrapping paper. He’s an amazing gift giver. He loves to find young artists and artisans and collaborate with them on unique gifts. One year he had made what we jokingly refer to as an inaction figure of me—I’m sitting in bed in my pajamas holding a Starbucks vanilla latte, my laptop open to my true-crime website. Another time he had a young metal worker build me a wooden box. The house we lived in for seven years is depicted in a bronze plate on the front. Inside are a series of hidden miniature drawers, each containing mementos from our life together—ticket stubs, Post-it notes.
Last year he commissioned artist Scott Campbell to paint three small watercolors of me facing off against notorious crime figures. In one I’m holding a cup of coffee and staring down the Zodiac Killer. In another, I clutch a notebook as if I’m about to interrogate D. B. Cooper, the infamous plane hijacker. And in the third, I’m holding my laptop, a curious smile on my face, standing face-to-face with the One, masked and unknowable, my bane, the EAR.
I opened this year’s present. Patton had had my Los Angeles magazine article professionally bound and placed in a custom-made black slipcase. The case had a compartment where I could store the most important notes from my story. A DVD of an interview I did on the local news was in a bottom drawer.
I realize later that for two years in a row my wedding anniversary gift has been, in some way or another, about the EAR.
But that’s not even the most telling sign of how much he’s come to dominate my life. That would be the fact that I’ve forgotten to get Patton as much as a card.
OceanofPDF.com
Sacramento, 2014
HOLES DUG RELENTLESSLY INTO WALTHER’S BACKGROUND. THE LOCATION of Walther’s family’s home on Sutter Avenue in Carmichael was a central buffer zone around which the EAR preyed. In the midseventies, Walther helped his mom in her job managing low-income apartment complexes in Rancho Cordova; one of the complexes was next door to an EAR attack. Holes learned that in May 1975 Walther was in a bad car accident in Sacramento that resulted in scars on his face. Victim number seven had tried reverse psychology and told the EAR he was good at sex. He responded that people always made fun of him for being small, a presumably truthful statement, because he was indeed underendowed. The EAR also mentioned to her that “something happened to my face.”
Four attacks were a half mile from Del Campo High School, where Walther went to school. The father of one of the victims taught at the continuation school that Walther transferred to after dropping out of Del Campo. Walther worked in 1976 at a Black Angus restaurant that two victims mentioned to detectives was a frequent dining location for them.
Walther began working for the Western Pacific Railroad in 1978; the job took him to Stockton, Modesto, and through Davis (on his way to Milpitas), just as the EAR began branching out in those areas. In August 1978, he received two speeding tickets in Walnut Creek. The EAR’s East Bay attacks in that area started two months later. A court date related to one of Walther’s Walnut Creek traffic tickets occurred two weeks before the attack there.
In 1997 Walther was pulled over for running a stop sign. Two steak knives were found in a duct-tape sheath in his waistband. Court documents from his domestic violence arrest reveal that he threatened his ex-wife, saying, “I’m going to cut you up into little pieces.”
“Be quiet or I’ll cut you up,” the EAR said. He frequently threatened to cut off ears, toes, and fingers.
Walther was either dead or making a Herculean effort not to be found. Holes repeatedly called coroner’s offices to ask if they had any similar-looking John Does. Finally, he tracked down Walther’s only child, an estranged daughter. A detective from the Contra Costa Investigations Unit told the daughter they were looking for her dad because he was owed money from a jail stint he did in 2004. The daughter said she hadn’t spoken to Walther since 2007. He called her once from a pay phone, she said. He was homeless in Sacramento at the time.
Holes asked Sacramento law enforcement agencies if they could dig up any paperwork at all on Walther; transients frequently have small interactions with police. If Walther was homeless in the Sacramento area, his name was probably jotted down on some report. Maybe the notation never made it into the system, but it was buried there somewhere. Finally, Holes got the call.
“We don’t have Walther,” the officer said, “but his brother is listed as a witness in a crime. He lives in a car behind a Union 76 in Antelope.”
Holes took out a copy of the brother’s property deed, which he had in his file on Walther. There was no mortgage associated with the house, as it was passed to the brother through his father. Holes was confused.
“Why would Walther’s brother be homeless?” Holes asked out loud. There was a pause on the phone.