Original subtitles

Hi Cliff. My name is Michelle McNamara.

I'm a crime writer in Los Angeles. I am doing a series on unsolved crimes.

Hi, Kate, this is Michelle McNamara.

- Hey, it's Michelle. - Hi, Michelle.

I write a lot about unsolved cases. One that I am very fascinated with is

the East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker case.

I think it's very solvable.

There's a good likelihood that he is still alive and he's out there.

I think the narcotic pull for me is what I think of as the powerful absence

that haunts an unsolved crime.

Murderers lose their power the moment we know them.

We see their unkempt shirts,

the uncertain fear tightening their faces as they're led into a courtroom.

When I'm puzzling over the details of an unsolved crime,

I'm like a rat in a maze given a task. I mean that in the best possible way.

The world narrows, the search propels.

I felt in the truest sense of the word, gripped.

I had a murder habit and it was bad.

I would feed it for the rest of my life.

I'LL BE GONE IN THE DARK

So, what's in Herndon, Virginia ?

Herndon, Virginia is where my parents live, so I was back there for a week,

and while my daughter was visiting her grandparents,

I was in the basement struggling to get this afterword done, it was hard going.

'Cause I was also rereading the book.

And there were those moments when I would want to just like run upstairs

and go tell her something 'cause it felt like I was listening to her,

and then I'd be like, "Oh no, she's not here," you know.

So, it was a very, it was a very dark week.

- Yeah. Oh, I know. - For me.

That summer, I hunted the serial killer at night from my daughter's playroom.

I'd retreat to my makeshift workspace

and boot up my laptop in search of a man I'd never met,

who'd raped and murdered people I didn't know.

In 1977, the Golden State Killer, as I'd come to call him,

hadn't yet graduated to murder.

Long before he was known by the acronym "EAR/ONS,"

and even before he was known as the "Original Night Stalker,"

they called him the "East Area Rapist,"

who was attacking women and girls in their bedrooms

throughout Northern California.

This man is considered to have an extremely violent potential.

There isn't much that you can do except comply with his demands.

He always wore a mask.

The victims slept untroubled

until the flashlight's blaze forced open their eyes.

Sleepy minds lumbered, then raced.

A figure they couldn't see wielded the light.

But who ? And why ?

7 YEARS EARLIER

The other thing that's so interesting about this case I think about a lot is,

you know, serial killers are... oh dear.

This is awkward. Hi.

Why are you wearing a skirt as a dress ?

Oh my god. You are so funny.

Let's just start at the very beginning.

How did you first become interested in this particular case ?

So, this particular one, what's interesting is that I remember...

The great tragedy of this case to me is that it's not better known.

I wish Zodiac would get rid of his 15 minutes of fame

so that EAR/ONS could get a little heat, you know.

And so I was very shocked. I think it was just four or five years ago

that I happened to be home one night and one of the E ! shows was on.

And I thought you've got to be kidding me, I've never, what ?

I looked it up...

and Larry Crompton's book kind of got me.

That's been the last year kind of obsession.

Started with that book.

It was a Friday night. It was probably after 1:00, closer to 2:00.

We were awakened by a voice and a bright light in our face.

Then there he is with his ski mask,

and the only thing you can see is his silhouette.

Then he said, "Don't move or I'll kill you."

Welcome to Crime Scene, a podcast that examines real life crimes.

I'm Michelle McNamara of True Crime Diary.com.

The terror began on June 18, 1976,

when a masked man raped a young woman home alone

in middle class Rancho Cordova.

Larry Crompton is a retired lieutenant

of the Contra Costa Sheriff's Department.

He worked on the Rapist Task Force in the '70s.

Okay. All of these were suspects that we worked on and eliminated,

and some of them really, really did look good.

He recently published a book on the case.

"Sudden Terror" draws on police reports, victim interviews,

Crompton's notes, newspaper clippings.

What follows is my conversation with him.

So, to put together your book you mostly went through your files ?

Yeah, I had everything.

And I was there.

Present, Sergeant Larry Crompton, Sheriff's Office.

We're conducting an interview

for case file 7917426 that occurred on 6-11-79.

You talk about it in the book so well, sort of coming in and you felt him.

And I just wondered what that feeling was like.

It's just... It's hard to believe this...

but when I walked into the house, I had a feeling.

The hair on the back of my neck would just feel like it was standing up.

It was just the...

the fear that was in the victims and...

And listening to what they said you had a feeling that this is a mad man.

It wasn't anything that we had dealt with before.

He always wore a mask. Always wore gloves.

Talked through clenched teeth.

Set the houses up prior to the victim's arriving.

Unlocked doors and windows. Opened gates.

Okay. This is our backyard. This was the window right here.

It's on the far side of the house.

I came out here, I walked down here,

and then went this way to the front of the street.

And that's how I got out, right there.

And this is the back fence to get over.

If there was a man in the house, he would throw shoelaces on the bed,

and tell the woman to tie him up.

He would rummage and then he would come back with dishes.

He'd put dishes on the man's back and tell him,

"If I hear these dishes rattle, I'm gonna kill your wife."

And that was what he was putting into their minds...

that they were going to die

and that's what he did over and over and over.

2/2/78.

Twenty-three.

The attack happened on May 14th, 1977.

So, this was my first birthday after the attack.

That's the room it was in. There's my kitchen.

Boy, I have not looked at these pictures in a long time.

My job is to catch him and I didn't do that and...

I can't let it go.

Were normally the victims so relieved that they were alive that they...

Oh yes. Definitely.

Yeah, I wondered. I tried to put myself in that situation.

And to go into someone's home is screwing with them mentally, too.

- Yeah. That's scary. - Yeah.

I think the story of the victims, it has to be told.

I remember Michelle ultimately wanted to serve

helping to get this guy caught.

She looked at it from the hopeful optimistic humans

putting puzzles together, trying to get closure,

trying to make sense of violence and despair.

I mean, what drives me is the need to put a face

on an unknown killer.

And what I love is this intersection of sort of technology and crime solving

in that people can get sort of wheeled out of their house

for something they did in 1957 because of the internet, because of DNA.

I really get off on that. That is so amazing to me.

And I want to be a part of that.

Everyone has their cause, and this just feels like what I was born to do.

Pacific Northwest murders

I love digging for clues, I love putting things together.

I love the puzzling part of it. I love being wrong

because sometimes it proves

that you didn't know enough, and you learn new techniques.

I love every single aspect of it.

What led you to starting this blog ?

I always followed crime stories and that I was always a writer.

So, I really just, I started it on a lark really.

I started reading Michelle's blog, True Crime Diary,

basically on a recommendation.

And I was obsessed with it. Like she couldn't post enough.

And her stories and the way she told them made them so memorable.

You know, they all stuck with you.

Whatever light existed was blotted out.

The sound of hurried footsteps faded away.

It had that feeling of under the blanket with a flashlight at night.

I was kind of amazed at how quickly it caught on.

When people talk to me about finding that blog,

there's a real excitement, people were like, "I've read every single post."

It was like they were drug addicts or something.

About a year in, I started to realize I wasn't really in an echo chamber,

that people were kind of starting to read it and respond to it.

Most of the TV shows that would cover these stories were very cold

or really kind of exploitive.

You spent a bunch of time watching

a reenactment of a beautiful young actress

being attacked over and over while wearing lingerie.

Michelle's blog kind of changed, I think, the focus.

She personalized those people.

If you can remind people about the humanity at the other end of that gun,

this was a person with hopes and dreams, with family,

that could have done this, this, or this.

That's what Michelle did in her writing.

All right, here we go, folks. We've got Michelle McNamara.

She's a writer and a web sleuth.

She has taught college writing, worked as an editor, sold TV pilots,

and also consulted for Dateline.

She is a truth seeker is what she is.

Let's face it, you have a career. You have a life

because people are always gonna get murdered.

- You deal in the devil. - The murder biz.

She was a pioneer. She was somebody who was creating something new.

Yeah, nothing was like that in 2007.

Hi, Los Angeles. Patton Oswalt on Jonesy's Jukebox.

That was Ceremony by New Order.

I am sitting here with the lovely and intelligent Michelle McNamara, my wife,

who is the writer and creator of True Crime Diary.com.

I think this is one of the best written and creepiest crime blogs on the web...

- You're such a good husband. - It is. No, it's a good...

If this site was awful, I'd have to be lying all the time,

so... Michelle ?

You were telling me about something going on in the Northwest right now.

Yeah, I have a theory there is a serial killer operating in the Northwest

who is killing couples out camping. There's been about four or five cases

where there seems to be no motive, and they are both shot in the head.

I remember the Jenner case so clearly.

That was such a turning point for her because...

she became very fascinated with how crimes are investigated.

It's not easy to get to this beach.

You have to negotiate a tricky path down a rocky cliff.

On Wednesday, August 18,

a Sheriff's helicopter noticed two sleeping bags on Fish Head Beach.

Despite the noise and nearness of the helicopter,

the figures in the sleeping bags didn't move.

Lindsay and Jason had each been shot in the head at close range

with a .45 caliber Marlin rifle.

That is a creepy beach.

I showed you all that evidence, or all that footage. It's a very creepy beach.

The act of actually going to the crime scene and walking the case

made her go, "Oh, yeah, I can't just be clicking on the internet."

I have to go visit places and look at places.

It changed the way she wrote about it.

When did you make the shift, Michelle, from reading stuff and absorbing it

to thinking I can do something here,

I can start trying to connect dots that I might see that others have missed ?

There was this kind of national news

about a kidnapping that took place in Missouri.

This boy had been kidnapped from a bus stop.

And it immediately reminded me of a lesser known case that had happened

five years before that no one else was talking about,

but there were things that were interesting to me.

So, I posted that I think whoever took this boy, Ben Ownby,

probably also took this kid, Shawn Hornbeck.

And I posted it on a Wednesday.

That Friday, the police in St. Louis went to investigate a tip about

where Ben Ownby might be, and they knocked on the door,

and Shawn Hornbeck opened the door.

You mean a kid who'd been kidnapped years earlier answered the door ?

Right. And again, this was three days after I had posted

I think they're probably taken by the same person.

That was a big moment for me.

I could start to see where my head full of facts and details

could intersect with technology.

I had started to kind of use internet tools

to figure out that they seemed similar and that they might be connected.

It's got to be amazing when you find a new sort of clue.

When people describe like porn addiction or something.

- This is really weird. - I can't stop myself. Time disappears.

- All those things happen. - So, it's a genuine addiction.

- You are on board. - Yeah.

- Are you doing this now ? Currently ? - Every night. Until 2 in the morning.

I cannot remember the specific time we started talking about EAR/ONS

because every day, there was so many cases she was following up.

And then just organically, that became the thing that got narrowed down.

I looked at Michelle's blog, True Crime Diary.com,

and I was really intrigued.

So, she and I first met in 2011 to talk about some story ideas,

and she was so smart and so cool

and down to earth, and her shit was together.

Not only that, I really liked how she was unpretentious

in an obviously pretty pretentious city and business.

I remember she wore these clogs.

She had a backpack that she bought at Target.

And she just showed up in a flannel shirt and as like low key as possible.

So, we meet up, we go to this café. I think we met there like at 11

and probably didn't leave until about three o'clock in the afternoon.

Because she started telling me this story about this guy.

The case that is sort of the biggest case that I'm most obsessed with is,

the short version is basically he's the worst serial offender in modern history

that no one really knows about.

He raped over 50 women in California and killed 10 people.

And he's never been caught.

There's no one like him out there. There hasn't been before.

He is such a unique offender.

This guy was one of the most prolific, violent, brutal serial rapists,

and eventually a murderer, and I had never heard of him.

Like you'd heard of Zodiac Killer, you heard Son of Sam,

you hear of all these big, especially in the '70s and '80s, which seem to be

the most fertile period for these serial killer stories,

and I had never heard of him.

He would eat in the people's kitchens,

he would hide ligatures under cushions so that when he was attacking,

you suddenly would watch this man take a ligature under your cushion

that you didn't even know he had been in your house.

I'm drinking this Arnold Palmer that's 36 thousand ounces and I'm like

sipping on it and drinking it as she's telling me this story.

I needed to go to the bathroom badly because my bladder was about to burst,

but I couldn't. I couldn't. I just kept listening and listening and listening.

And that's how I knew it was a great story.

The challenge for any magazine editor, any reporter and writer is

sure, you have a person or you have a topic,

really interesting guy from a long time ago,

but there was nothing new to say yet.

What's fascinating to me about this case is that

it's rich with so many clues, and it really seems to me that it's just

time, energy, and curiosity. And that...

And frankly, it should be solved. It just should be.

When I was so gripped by Crompton's book,

I googled East Area Rapist, Original Night Stalker,

and this came up, this link to the A&E Cold Case Files message board.

For someone like me, again, it's like oh wow, look at all these...

Wow. Wait, who would spend, you know, all this time ?

Well, me I guess because it's a week later and I've read 20 thousand posts.

You know, certainly in this case, there was this community of people,

they all had different reasons for being involved in it.

Some of them were from Sacramento and remembered

and were still fearful and wanted to see it closed.

Others were more kind of just data mining, sleuth kind of people.

This was unique to me because I've never actually been part of this

sort of message board community before.

They throw around clues, you go down the rabbit hole gleefully

like oh there's just this unending thread of information that I can find.

EAR/ONS is an acronym for the East Area Rapist slash Original Night Stalker.

It's an awkward name befitting a man who crossed jurisdictions

and flummoxed law enforcement for decades.

What kind of man was he ?

My favourite true-crime blogger just wrote about the EAR.

I've been aware of Michelle for probably a few years,

as I was a fan of her True Crime Diary.

I'd read True Crime Diary in its entirety.

So, when she finally wrote about East Area Rapist, it was exciting.

I'm obsessed. It's not healthy. I know the strangest details about him.

I know his blood type. I know his penis size.

He vaulted fences. He escaped foot chases.

But I believe it's the rare moments when he was human

that will be his downfall in the end.

Her writing evoked the central hook for me, which was the mystery,

the question of who is behind this crime ?

She wasn't a ghoulish gore hound.

There was nothing tasteless about her writing. It struck just the right tone.

An impressive community of people has come together

at an A&E sponsored website. Unlike other unsolved mystery communities,

the EAR/ONS community's desire for justice feels strong and sincere.

She reached out to me privately, and we started corresponding,

and it was evident she was entrenched in this case. As was I.

I saw who seemed to be some of the kind of leaders on the board,

and I just began kind of personal messaging.

We started exchanging notes and developed a rapport pretty quickly.

We just built mutual trust

until we were just openly sharing our work with each other.

And that's when we discovered that a lot of it had intersected.

We kind of started exchanging ideas and theories and things like that,

and we just kind of forged a friendship,

a strange friendship over this strange 30-year-old case.

You're the best, Paul Haynes !

Hi, my name is Michelle. I'm a long-time lurker on the EAR/ONS board.

The case is of interest to me and you seem

really measured and thoughtful in your responses.

I wanted to know if you have any thoughts on something.

I spent an afternoon doing some research,

and I feel like I've stumbled upon a compelling suspect.

Hi Michelle, thanks for trusting me with this information.

I'm a Sacramento native and have been investigating this case for years.

Let's talk.

I traveled to Sacramento to meet a woman about whom I know very little,

including the spelling of her last name.

The social worker operates as a kind of gate keeper

between investigators and the board community.

This irks some posters who accuse her of hinting at confidential information

but then shutting down when asked to share.

She greeted me in the parking lot by waving her arms wildly overhead.

I liked her right away.

Well, we had been in communication. I knew she was flying into Sacramento.

And she was another civilian that was interested in the movement.

And we would drive around to the crime scenes.

I would take her to the areas. And so, we drove around for hours.

We're gonna go about five miles from here.

And I'm going to take you to the first crime scenes first.

Our language just immediately became about the case facts

and about what we knew and what this and what do you think of that.

It was a language that nobody else could've understood what we talke about

unless you had that experience or you were aware of the case.

I just don't think it's gonna be somebody that everybody thought,

oh, that's the East Area Rapist.

I think you're right because he wasn't caught.

I think it's gonna be somebody that they go, "Really ?"

Right. Right. Obviously, he didn't stand out at the time.

There's something about two women getting together

that have a common cause and a common goal, and, you know, we're crusaders,

we're warriors, we're on the path.

That was the beginning of a relationship.

We'll remain lifelong friends forever.

First, we're gonna head into Rancho Cordova

to his very early attacks, number one and number three.

Sacramento... When you were growing up,

did it seem to be a lot of people who worked...

- It was a cow town. - Oh, okay.

When you say a cow town, you mean that there was the out-outlying farms ?

Yeah, it was outlying farms and...

- There's still a lot of like... - It's still outlying.

It's interesting 'cause coming from LA,

you almost never see sort of big open empty spaces.

Driving around, it's like wow.

We're entering the Rancho Cordova realm.

And I'm gonna take you right into the heart of it all.

This is where the first crime occurs.

When you first are learning about the case,

you just want to get a feel for where did these things happen,

who were the players in this, and...

Can you tell anything more about this offender

by going into the places he was in ?

A few houses down on the right is number three.

Yeah, so these houses are close together. Yeah.

And I'll actually show you number one's house.

For Michelle, it's like I want to get in this guy's mind,

I want to go to these places, I want to try to understand

why this area and why so close together.

Was he from here ? This is his hot spot.

This is the house right here.

He cut the phone lines, and

raped her and left the scene.

This was in June, June 18th, 1976 was this attack.

And the attack we're going to was in August, August 29th, '76.

So, we're pulling up to attack number three right now.

- That's how close he was. -He had to be from around here.

A 12-year-old saw a masked man outside the window,

ran, and woke her mother up.

The mother ran to the kitchen and dialed the operator.

Moments later, EAR was standing in the doorway with a club and a gun,

naked from the waist down. He told the mother, "Freeze or I'll kill you."

The mother grabbed the gun band as he approached her.

He clubbed her until she lay on the floor.

A neighbor had seen EAR walking away with no pants on

but could not describe his face.

This is the second house in, and if we drive to the corner house

and if you just look on the fence line right here through,

this goes straight through to the number one attack in June of '76.

The neighbor also said that he was hearing for a couple months prior

people jumping over his fence.

It's my guess he was actually

looking at these houses long before he attacked.

It's amazing to me that any one person could get away with this many crimes.

And you can just see how they're just a stone's throw away from each other.

And right down the fence line.

But he wasn't walking on those kind of fences, was he ?

- He's said to have been walking them. - Oh, wow.

As Michelle was going up, doing drive arounds of Sacramento,

I saw her confidence growing.

It was really exciting to have someone who was...

you're in love with someone and they're doing something

and you can see how excited and energized they are about it,

and that makes you excited and energized.

I'm amazed I'm still funny. I'm amazed I'm still funny. Because I'm in love.

I'm in love. I'm in love. Yes, I am.

And there is nothing, nothing ends a comedian's career quicker

than regular sex and being in love. It's the worst thing on the planet.

My girlfriend is obsessed with true crime and serial killers too.

All she does all day, watches FBI Files, Forensics Files on TV.

The most graphic, disturbing, depressing shows.

I walk in the house every single day,

"The amount of semen found in the chest cavity led investigators..."

Oh my God !

She's like, "Shh, it's the semen cavity killer. I want see what's..."

When I met Michelle was on...

It was a show at the Largo. I think it was May 20th.

I had been doing "The King of Queens" for five years,

and I'd had a couple specials at that point.

But she wasn't that steeped in the comedy scene,

so she didn't know who I was.

This guy was funny. More than funny.

He was moody and startling, but hilarious.

He could move the crowd with the tiniest of expressions.

"Irish girls," he said, he knocked the microphone against his forehead,

"Irish girls are my kryptonite."

And then I was just sitting at the bar afterwards, and she was leaving,

and she literally tapped me and just went, "Irish women, nice."

And she was so fucking like steam roller gorgeous

that I was just stunned, and I ran, I literally ran down the street

and went like, "Hey !" And then the first word I ever said to her was,

"Hey !," screaming. And then she turned around, and I went,

"I'm not going to play any fucking games. I want your name and number

so I can take you on a date this weekend. Are you free ?"

And she went, "Yeah." I went, "Good, give me your number."

It was just the most awkward,

non-James Bond moment I could have had.

Take off my mask.

Our first date in LA they show movies at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

So, we went and watched an Italian film called "The Tenth Victim".

Really goofy Italian science fiction film.

I was too nervous to really do a lot of talking that night.

She did way more of the talking 'cause she just was...

And the more we talked I'm like, "Oh my God, she's so smart and so cool.

I'm gonna screw this up."

I remember I called her late at night 'cause I was up and I'm like,

"The Creature From the Black Lagoon is on."

She goes, "I'm watching it. It's one of my favorite movies."

That was one of the things we bonded over really early. We loved that.

We loved many of the same things.

Like "Creature From the Black Lagoon," tales of the grim and offbeat,

and good food.

I didn't like the way his comedian friends, including him,

seemed to tell jokes but never listen.

He thought I was thin skinned. For a while, it seemed it might not work.

But one night, he was saying goodbye to me,

and he won me over with an adorable Edward G. Robinson impression.

And I was doing that, "Meh, see. Look at the getaway sticks on that tomato."

Like chatting her up

but in that old kind of slang and she thought that was so hilarious.

I laughed and grabbed him.

"More," I said.

"Look at the keister on that hot number."

Couples have in-jokes with each other, and that became one of my...

It was just all that '30's gangster slang.

However you wanna say it. I can't, oh God.

I wouldn't let him go. After a while, we gave up and moved in together.

I made this custom desk for her that was in this kind of half-moon shape.

Like I wanted her to have like this command center.

I've never tired of the Robinson impression.

I've never tired of Patton.

Michelle knew that she was marrying a famous person,

and as much as lived a life that a lot of people might fantasize about,

none of that mattered to her. And I mean really.

She was a regular salt of the earth Midwestern gal.

And she didn't want to be anything else.

The whole being photographed and going to premieres and stuff.

That meant nothing to her.

Especially if you're someone who's thinking,

"I want to go home and write later, I want to get up tomorrow and write."

One of her favorite things in the world was to be in her room

under the covers with a fan reading.

- Do you want Patton alone ? - Do you want to leave ?

Yes, I do.

She went to the Oscars. She went to the Grammys.

We just always giggled about it. It was so different from how we grew up.

She usually would wear black and she would joke

that they would think she was like a PR person.

She was just an introvert, that's all.

She was really good at making herself a fly on the wall and inconspicuous.

I think it's one of the reasons she had incredible insight into people.

She listened, she watched, she didn't need to be the center of attention.

She didn't want to be.

I think she'd always been sort of singled out as

you're a terrific writer, and then she got to LA where

there's a gazillion people trying to do the same thing

and that was hard for her. She hadn't experienced

that degree of consistent rejection and failure and disappointment.

Her ultimate dream was always to write books or for the New Yorker.

She also really, really wanted a child.

Four years after we got married, our daughter was born.

Alice. Hi.

Hi.

It was so amazing.

Look at her...

Oh, Alice.

I think Alice was about two or three

when Michelle was meticulously, due diligence researching about EAR/ONS.

In Sacramento, the air is immediately better.

Struck by the big open spaces.

A little over half a million, or about half a million people,

but it feels, coming from Los Angeles, it feels so much smaller.

- How are you doing in here ? - I'm good.

I might have... okay, this is crazy, can I have one more latte ?

Of course. You got it.

- But this was really yummy. - Good.

When Michelle interviewed me,

we met for breakfast down at the Citizen Hotel in downtown Sacramento.

Talking about the attack is difficult,

but Michelle, she was so serious about the case.

She was just the easiest person to talk to.

So, I'm from suburban Chicago, so all of this is so foreign to me.

But I'm trying to get back into sort of the mindset.

A lot of people will say that

the E-A-R crimes, crime period,

was kind of the end of innocence for Sacramento.

We have the confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers.

It was built up being a commerce center,

and it became the state capital.

We had both Mather Field and McClellan Air Base.

So, military was a big aspect of the economy and the people who lived here.

Back in those days, you did know more of your neighbors,

people didn't lock all their doors or their cars necessarily all the time.

And terrible crime was just

not that common.

'70's Sacramento, being a cop was like a cop anywhere else.

It was pretty slow. And then June comes along,

and you got this pervert later known as the East Area Rapist.

I responded to a home invasion, a rape, in 1976, October 5th.

Jane Carson on Wood Parkway.

At the time, the East Area rape cases started, I was working Homicide.

And I think it was the fifth case I was called to the scene on,

which was Jane Carson.

I understand the feelings that you're going through and wondering

whether you did the right thing or whether you did the wrong thing,

and could you have done anything any differently ?

And I think you handled the situation very well.

Well, I had thought of kicking him, but it would have been useless

as my hands were tied and I was blindfolded and my child was with me.

When the husband left for work, the rapist was in their house and on her.

He knew down to the minute what was going on in Jane's house

and the neighborhood.

When I left there, I was convinced this probably wasn't just a routine rape.

In fact, I know it wasn't. And then I started digging in deeper.

In the meantime, we have a couple more rapes and at that point,

there's no question we had a serial rapist. He had a definite pattern.

When we realized that we first had a series going,

the sheriff did not want the media to be aware of it.

Because we didn't have anything.

Because of what was happening within the rapes,

he didn't want the word to get out to make fear in the community.

We just weren't ready to handle anything coming in

and we didn't have that many people working it.

This is attack number eight

and this victim was accosted outside of her house,

as she drove her car into the driveway.

She was taken into the backyard of her neighbor's house

and there were strips of cloth already laid out for ligatures.

Her ankles were tied with cord. She was blindfolded, gagged.

Jingling her car keys, the EAR said he'd be back in five minutes.

Car was reportedly found in the area with the dog locked in the trunk.

The media became aware of it. The Sheriff said,

"Please don't print anything, we're gonna catch this guy."

And then as time went on and we didn't catch the guy, the media said,

"Okay, we're gonna start printing."

That was when the whole community was brought in.

What happened right after number eight on 11/3/76,

the rape series came to light during this meeting on crime prevention.

There were 500 people in attendance.

You can use a simple alarm system.

Mount a bell device on the outside of your home.

String some wires to a power source, and then string the other set of wires

right to a nightstand and have a toggle switch there.

If you ever hear the glass breaking, reach over on your nightstand,

and flip the switch, the bell goes off on the outside.

Other than by word of mouth

where people might be talking about a neighbor that had been raped,

there wasn't a lot of information until this time.

On 11/4/76,

the first newspaper article on the EAR appears in the Sacramento Bee.

Warren Holloway was a reporter.

I put a little one paragraph note out to the detectives,

"Got a rape series going in the East Area."

And he walked out, he saw that. The next day on the newspaper

"East Area Rapist."

It just got picked up and there it was, "East Area Rapist."

Three weeks after attack number eight,

where it was announced there was a town hall meeting in Rancho Cordova,

of the 35 that attended, only one of those was a male.

Following two weeks later, "Publicity May Have Curtailed Rapist,"

is written in the Sacramento Bee. Then he has his tenth attack.

A lot of people don't realize this,

but six rapes in Sacramento out of the first ten,

six of them were teenagers. And two of them were 15 years old.

This one here is probably Christmas day.

So, it would be a week after it happened.

It was December 18th. There was a high school dance and I had a cold,

so at the last minute, I decided to stay at home.

My parents were going to a Christmas party, and my sister was at work.

My parents left probably around 6:30ish.

And I think I put a pizza in the oven.

I remember having my slippers on, and I decided to go play the piano.

I heard a noise,

but at 15 years old, you always hear noises in your house

when your parents aren't home. So, I didn't think much of it.

I stopped. I do remember stopping and listening and...

I didn't hear anything else, so I continued to play.

It wasn't very much longer, maybe a couple minutes, that I felt

a presence next to me,

and I looked up, and

then I felt a knife at my throat.

And then he told me in my ear,

"If you scream or move, I will put this knife through your throat.

And I'll be gone in the dark."

He moved me down the hallway, through the garage, and into the backyard.

Where I was left out in a...

on a picnic bench while he went back into the house,

and he told me he'd be watching me every 10 seconds.

He came back outside, and that is where he cut my clothes off.

He would bring me inside

and he would rape me, take me back outside,

inside, rape me again, back outside,

and then another time.

Yeah. So that was my first memory of that.

I think during that time though there wasn't a lot of feeling going on.

I was pretty numb and...

But what I do remember is he had moved the couch

very close to our fireplace.

But because I was blindfolded and couldn't see,

I thought he had caught our couch on fire.

And I think that was probably...

That was really scary, because I thought I was going to die.

And then he was gone.

I stopped playing the piano shortly after the attack.

It was difficult for me to play

because I always felt like there was somebody behind me.

It was just a few hours.

But it changed everything.

It had been a month since he last struck, but he has struck again.

This time it was a 15-year-old girl.

Again, it was in a Northeast Sacramento neighborhood.

Again, he knew she was alone,

forced his way in using a knife to threaten her,

and raped her repeatedly for several hours

and forced her to perform perverted sex acts.

The latest victim was younger than the others,

and the attack took place early in the evening

where the others took place between 11 at night and dawn.

But it definitely was the same rapist who eluded authorities for over a year.

When Michelle and I talked about this story,

it was one of those things you keep thinking about and keep thinking about.

Michelle had already done an incredible amount of research.

And I remember thinking, "Okay, we've got a few hurdles."

I have to pitch this to my editor-in-chief.

Everyone loves a story about a killer, but in order to get her interested,

I had to convince her that this story was relevant now

and that it was like a Los Angeles and a California story.

Michelle was an incredible, intrepid reporter.

And so, as we were sort of trying to put the pitch together,

she would go on her own and just research things.

You could be completely confident that she was going to come back

with something, something good,

and not just get the facts right but also be able

to have that relationship with that person she would need

that no one else could get to.

I pitched L.A. Magazine the EAR story,

and they're interested in doing it possibly, which would be amazing.

That would be, like, the kind of publicity that you can't buy.

I just think this story is so important to be told.

I just feel like he's smirking somewhere going, like,

"I don't have to pay for this ever."

If there's any way I could look at whatever you have

and I won't copy anything, I just look at it and take notes

and then give it back to you tomorrow,

at least then I can say I saw case files.

Can I let you while you're here look at some stuff ?

Because I've sworn confidentiality

that I would never release it out of my possession.

Right. So I can sit there...

You can sit there and go through them. I just can't let them leave my home.

How many pages are there all together like ?

- Probably four or five thousand. - Oh my god.

- Yeah, it's big. - Yeah.

It's all the rapes. It's all 50 rapes.

I should make a trade with you today.

You let me take this today and I'll let you take the cases today.

-And then we give them back. -And then we give them back.

I would do that, but we have to give them back.

I can't believe I'm doing this.

These underground trades,

the result of furtive alliances forged from a shared obsession

with a faceless serial killer were common.

Online sleuths, retired detectives, and active detectives,

everyone participated.

DUDE. I got my hands on 4,000 pages of police reports.

Case files of rapes 1-50. DYING.

The grandiose seeker in me

couldn't wait to insert the flash drive into my laptop back at my hotel.

At every stoplight I touched the top pocket in my backpack

to make sure the tiny rectangle was still there.

Once in my room, I immediately changed into the crisp white hotel bathrobe.

I lowered the shades and turned off my phone.

I dumped a bag of mini-bar gummy bears into a glass

and set it next to me on the bed where I sat cross legged in front of my laptop.

Ahead of me was a rare 24-hour stretch without interference or distraction.

No tiny hands, slicked with paint, asking to be washed.

No preoccupied hungry husband to inquire about dinner.

I inserted the flash drive.

My mind in mail sorter mode,

my index finger on the down arrow key.

I began to not so much read as devour.

Drainage ditches and cement lined canals

come up frequently in the police reports.

It's clear from the start,

from footprints, evidence, suspicious sightings,

and even bringing one victim down there,

that the East Area Rapist traveled this way, like a subterranean creature.

He was doing reconnaissance.

He was studying people.

Learning when they were home.

That means that women exist who,

because of change of schedule or luck, were never victims.

But they felt something terrifying brush against them.

Hours vanished, the gummy bears were gone.

I was jittery from sugar, hunger,

and spending too much time alone in the dark

absorbing a 50-chapter horror story.

Part of the thrill of the game for him I believe

was a kind of connect the dots puzzle he played with people.

You may not think you have something in common with your neighbor,

but you do.

Me.

Hi Michelle, just spoke with the LA Mag editor.

It's official. It's a green light.