“Are you absolutely sure it was Walther’s brother you were talking to?” Holes asked.
Soon after, the Sacramento Sheriff’s Office called Holes, the call he’d been waiting for. They’d approached Walther’s brother with serious expressions and a mobile fingerprint device, and he’d crumpled and thrown up his hands. He confessed. The thumbprint confirmed it—the homeless man was Jim Walther. They swabbed him and rushed the DNA sample to the lab.
Holes was taking me on a driving tour of the relevant East Bay locations when he stopped the car and pointed out the exact spot in Danville where Walther was found sleeping in his parked Pontiac LeMans on February 2, 1979. Holes still has questions that nag him. Why would someone go underground for eight years just to avoid a thirty-day sentence?
But the most important question, the one he spent eighteen months investigating, has been answered.
“He wasn’t the EAR,” Holes said. He shook his head. “But I tell you, he was the EAR’s shadow.”
We stared at the spot.
“You’re sure they did it right?” I asked about the DNA test.
Holes paused for a fraction of a moment.
“Sacramento is very, very good at what they do,” he said.
We drove on.
OceanofPDF.com
Sacramento, 1978
DETECTIVE KEN CLARK AND I WERE STANDING OUTSIDE THE SCENE of a double homicide that occurred in east Sacramento in February 1978 when he interrupted his train of thought to ask, “Do you support Obama?” We smiled at each other for a moment and then both started laughing. He shrugged off our political difference and kept pouring forth. Clark was a nonstop chatterer. I didn’t get a word in edgewise, and that worked to my advantage. We stood outside the yard where Clark believes the East Area Rapist shot a young couple to death. The Maggiore murders were never conclusively linked to the EAR, but Clark recently found police reports showing EAR-like prowling and break-ins in the area that night, moving closer and closer until Katie and Brian Maggiore were mysteriously gunned down while out walking their dog. Witnesses got a good glimpse of the suspect. When a composite was released, the EAR suddenly moved west to Contra Costa County. Though Paul Holes already told me he doesn’t buy the “scared away” theory, Clark thinks he was spooked. He shows me the composite. “I think this is the closest image we have of him.”
Clark shows me the old police reports he’s now digging through for clues. They include traffic stops and Peeping Tom incidents. So much wasn’t considered relevant then. Clark can’t explain why. It kills him. “They let a good suspect go because his sister-in-law said she once went skinny-dipping with him and she thought he had a decent-size penis.” (The EAR did not). “Another, I’m not kidding, had ‘too big a lower lip.’”
Sacramento teems with angles to explore. What brought him here? Is it a coincidence that all branches of the military transferred their navigation training to Mather Air Force Base on July 1, 1976, just as the rapes began? What about California State University–Sacramento? Their academic calendar dovetails perfectly with the crimes (he never attacked during a school holiday). Using new technology, a geographic profiler pinpoints streets where he believes the EAR may have lived. I revisit the neighborhoods. I talk to old-timers. I feed what I find to the laptop DIY detectives engaged in the hunt.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Michelle McNamara died on April 21, 2016.]
OceanofPDF.com
Part Three
[EDITOR’S NOTE: When Michelle died, she was midway through the writing of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. To prepare the book for release, Michelle’s lead researcher, Paul Haynes, aka the Kid, and acclaimed investigative journalist Billy Jensen, who was a friend of Michelle’s, worked together to tie up loose ends and organize the materials Michelle left behind. The following chapter was written collaboratively by Haynes and Jensen.]
A WEEK AFTER MICHELLE’S DEATH, WE GAINED ACCESS TO HER HARD drives and began exploring her files on the Golden State Killer. All 3,500 of them. That was on top of the dozens of notebooks, the legal pads, the scraps of paper, and thousands of digitized pages of police reports. And the thirty-seven boxes of files she had received from the Orange County prosecutor, which Michelle lovingly dubbed the Mother Lode.
Thousands of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and only one person knew what it was supposed to look like. That one person wasn’t Michelle. It was the killer himself.
Michelle’s white whale was not the Black Dahlia Killer, or the Zodiac Killer, or even Jack the Ripper—infamous agents of unsolved crimes whose “bodies of work”—and thus the files of investigative source material—were relatively small.
No. Michelle was after a monster who had raped upward of fifty women and had murdered at least ten people. There were more than fifty-five crime scenes, with thousands of pieces of evidence.
We opened Michelle’s main hard drive and began going through the chapters she had completed. They reminded us why we were drawn to her writing in the first place.
Her prose jumps off the page and sits down next to you, weaving tales of Michelle on the streets of Rancho Cordova, Irvine, and Goleta on the trail of a killer. The amount of detail is massive. But her writing, at once dogged and empathetic, works the specifics into a fluent narrative. Just when the average reader might get fatigued by too many facts, she turns a phrase or shows a telling detail that brings it all around again. In the manuscript and on True Crime Diary, Michelle always found the perfect balance between the typical extremes of the genre. She didn’t flinch from evoking key elements of the horror and yet avoided lurid overindulgence in grisly details, as well as sidestepping self-righteous justice crusading or victim hagiography. What her words evoked was the intrigue, the curiosity, the compulsion to solve a puzzle and resolve the soul-chilling blank spots.
But there were parts of the story that Michelle had not completed. We laid out what she had finished. She had a nuance that one doesn’t normally encounter in true crime (except maybe in Capote—and when he was looking for a hook, he sometimes would just make it up). Michelle was writing a nonfiction book with a style that couldn’t be replicated. We thought about it and even took a brief stab. But it was fruitless. She had told this story in so many forms—in the chapters she had completed, in the story for Los Angeles magazine, and in her numerous blog posts— that there was enough material to fill in many of the gaps.
That being said, there were topics she would have definitely expanded on had she been able to complete the book. Many of those files or scribbled notes presented a lead she wanted to follow—or a red herring she might have disregarded. Where a friend’s bucket list might be littered with items like “Trip to Paris” and “Try skydiving,” Michelle’s included “Go to Modesto,” “Complete the reverse directory of Goleta residents,” and “Figure out way to submit DNA to 23andMe or Ancestry.com.”
*
BACK IN 2011, AFTER SHE POSTED HER FIRST STORY ON TRUE CRIME Diary about EAR-ONS (she hadn’t yet given him the Golden State Killer moniker), Michelle first became aware of Paul when he posted a link to her piece on the A&E Cold Case Files forum, which at that time was the only place where a dialogue about the case was taking place.
Michelle wrote him immediately.
“Hi!” she began. “You’re one of my favorite posters.” She proceeded to describe a rare surname she’d stumbled upon, whose few bearers shared some interesting geography. Maybe they were worth looking into.