From 1976 to 1986, one of the most violent serial criminals in American history
terrorized communities throughout California. He was little known, never caught, and
might still be out there. The author, along with several others, can’t stop working on
the case.
Michelle McNamara | Los Angeles | Feb 2013
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MISSING LINKS
On a sleepless night last July—one of dozens I’ve powered through during the months I’ve
spent tracking him down—I Googled a description of a pair of cuff links he stole in the midst of a
home invasion in Stockton in September 1977. At that time the Golden State Killer, as I’ve
recently come to call him, hadn’t yet graduated to murder. He was a serial rapist who was
attacking women in their bedrooms from Sacramento to San Ramon, targeting those who lived
in quiet upper-middle-class suburban neighborhoods. He was young—anywhere from 18 to
30—Caucasian, and athletic, capable of eluding capture by jumping roofs and vaulting tall
fences. He frequently wore a ski mask. He had either blue or hazel eyes and, some victims
reported, a high-pitched voice. He would rant to his victims about needing money, but he
frequently ignored cash, even when it was right in front of him.
But he didn’t leave empty-handed. He took items of personal value from those he had violated:
engraved wedding bands, driver’s licenses, souvenir coins. The cuff links he stole in Stockton
were a slightly unusual 1950s style and monogrammed with the first initial N. From my research
I knew that boys’ names beginning with this letter were rare, appearing only once in the top 100
names of the 1930s and ’40s, when the original owner was likely born. The cuff links were a
family heirloom belonging to the victim’s husband; they were distinct looking.
I hit the return key on my laptop, expecting nothing. Then a jolt of recognition: There they were,
a single image out of the hundreds loading on my laptop screen, the same style as sketched out
in the police file I had acquired, with the same initial. They were going for $8 at a vintage store
in a small town in Oregon. I bought them immediately, paying $40 for overnight delivery, and
went to wake my husband.
“I think I found him,” I said, a little punchy from lack of sleep. My husband, a professional
comedian, didn’t have to ask who “him” was. While we live in Los Feliz with our young daughter,
my online life has been taken over by unsolved murders—and with maybe someday solving one
of them—on a Web site I launched in 2006 called True Crime Diary. By day I’m a 42-year-old
stay-at-home mom with a sensible haircut and Goldfish crackers lining my purse. In the evening,
however, I’m something of a DIY detective. I delve into cold cases by scouring the Internet for
any digital crumbs authorities may have overlooked, then share my theories with the 8,000 or so
mystery buffs who visit my blog regularly. When my family goes to sleep, I start clicking,
combing through digitized phone books, school yearbooks, and Google Earth views of crime
scenes: a bottomless pit of potential leads for the laptop investigator who now exists in the
virtual world.
The Golden State Killer, though, has consumed me the most. In addition to 50 sexual assaults
in Northern California, he was responsible for ten sadistic murders in Southern California. Here
was a case that spanned a decade and ultimately changed DNA law in the state. Neither the
Zodiac Killer, who terrorized San Francisco in the late 1960s and early ’70s, nor the Night
Stalker, who had Southern Californians locking their windows in the ’80s, was as active. Yet the
Golden State Killer has little recognition; he didn’t even have a catchy name until I coined one.
His capture was too low to detect on any law enforcement agency’s list of priorities. If this
coldest of cases is to be cracked, it may well be due to the work of citizen sleuths like me (and a
handful of homicide detectives) who analyze and theorize, hoping to unearth that one clue that
turns all the dead ends into a trail—the one detail that will bring us face-to-face with the
psychopath who has occupied so many of our waking hours and our dreams.
THE M.O.
On October 1, 1979, on Queen Ann Lane in Goleta, a town near Santa Barbara, a terrified
woman lay facedown in her living room, her wrists tied behind her back, her feet bound at the
ankles. Her tennis shorts had been thrown over her head as a blindfold. She could hear him
rummaging around in the kitchen. It was 2:20 a.m.
“I’ll kill ’em, I’ll kill ’em, I’ll kill ’em,” he chanted to himself—like, as an investigator would later put
it, “a guy pumping himself up for an athletic endeavor.”
The woman managed to remove the bindings from her feet and escaped screaming out the front
door; in the chaos her live-in boyfriend, bound in the bedroom, was able to hop into the
backyard and roll behind an orange tree, just missing the frantic, searching beam of the
intruder’s flashlight. A witness caught a glimpse of the suspect fleeing the scene: a lean man in
a Pendleton shirt pedaling furiously away on a stolen silver Nishiki ten-speed.
After that botched attack, none of his victims would survive to describe him. Almost three
months later, on the morning of December 30, a half mile south of where the October attack
took place, Santa Barbara sheriff’s detectives responded to a call at the condominium of Dr.
Robert Offerman. A woman out front was crying. “There are two people dead inside,” she said.
The bodies were in the bedroom. Offerman’s girlfriend, psychologist Debra Alexandria Manning,
35, lay on the right side of the waterbed, nude and bound. Offerman, a 44-year-old osteopath,
was on his knees on the floor; in his left hand he clutched a length of white three-strand nylon
cord. The killer’s plan seemed to have gone awry. Offerman had been able to break free from
his bindings, raising the possibility that the killer might have ordered Manning to tie him up and
that she had bound him loosely on purpose.
As detectives processed the crime scene, they stepped around a turkey carcass wrapped in
cellophane that had been discarded on the patio. At some point, probably before he shot his
victims through the heart and the back of the head, the killer had opened the refrigerator and
helped himself to Offerman’s leftover Christmas dinner.
The forensics team noted what appeared to be the intruder’s signatures: the nylon twine, the pry
marks on the doors and windows, the tennis shoe impressions. Everything matched the pattern
of a man who had become known as the East Area Rapist, or EAR, a cat burglar whose middle-
of-the-night assaults paralyzed Sacramento and Contra Costa counties starting in 1976 and
ending after a thwarted attack on July 6, 1979. To zero in on a victim he often entered the home
beforehand when no one was there, learning the layout, studying family pictures, and
memorizing names. Victims received hang-up or disturbing phone calls before and after they
were attacked. He disabled porch lights and unlocked windows. He emptied bullets from guns.
He hid shoelaces or rope under cushions to use as ligatures. These maneuvers gave him a
crucial advantage because when you woke from a deep sleep to the blinding flashlight and ski-
masked presence, he was always a stranger to you, but you were not to him.
The Northern California detectives on the EAR Task Force had theorized he would snake his
way south. They worried he was escalating in violence. “That’s him, I know it,” thought Contra
Costa investigator Larry Crompton when he learned of the Goleta murders. The Santa Barbara
County sheriff’s office felt differently and was reluctant to make the connection, whether out of
disbelief or fear of bad publicity.
Three months after the Goleta murders, in March 1980, there was another double murder, this
time in Ventura, of Charlene and Lyman Smith. Keith and Patrice Harrington, who were living in
a gated community in Dana Point, were the next victims. Then came Manuela Witthuhn in
Irvine. The scenes echoed each other: The females were all slender beauties whose hands
were bound behind their backs, and circling each single-story house were tiny star impressions
from a pair of size 9 Adidas. The rapist had evolved into a serial killer, and the transformation
only seemed to hone his self-discipline. Murder seemed to satiate him more than rape did, and
longer periods of time passed between the crimes. Whereas before he seemed to bask in the
notoriety, now he took pains to hide any hint of a link between the murders, removing ligatures
from the scene, even staging one murder to look like a robbery.
By May 5, 1986, when 18-year-old Janelle Cruz was discovered raped and bludgeoned in her
home in Irvine, only the killer and a few alert investigators like Crompton knew that the East
Area Rapist was now the worst unidentified violent serial offender in modern American history.
After Cruz’s murder, the Golden State Killer stopped. Perhaps his impulses had subsided.
Perhaps, like everyone else in America, he’d followed the August 1985 capture of Richard
Ramirez, the Satan worshipper known as the Night Stalker, and the case building up against
this psychopath who, like himself, had bound, raped, and killed his way (13 murders in all)
across California. The name this unknown perpetrator was given by law enforcement—the
Original Night Stalker, or ONS—was derived from the nom de crime of Ramirez. And Crompton
found himself among an ever-dwindling cadre of detectives pushing against a growing
indifference, dedicating himself to a case that, for all practical purposes, had been abandoned.
MALIGNANT OBSESSION
The woman who sits across from me in a small office in east Sacramento is a stranger. But you
wouldn’t have known that from the conversational shorthand we use from the moment we meet,
our message board equivalent of Klingon.
“Dog beating robbery in ’74?” I ask.
The woman, I’ll call her the Social Worker, reties her thick ponytail and takes a sip from a can of
Rockstar. She’s in her late fifties, with large, penetrating green eyes and a smoky voice. She
had greeted me in the parking lot by waving her arms wildly overhead. I liked her right away.
“I don’t believe it’s related,” she says.
The ’74 robbery in Rancho Cordova we’re parsing was the kind of recently uncovered incident
that the two of us had connected through on the serial killer message board. There is only one
book about this killer, and it’s what sparked my interest in the case when I read it two years ago.
Sudden Terror was self-published in 2010 by the now-retired detective Larry Crompton. But I
was familiar with such details as the robbery—and thousands of others—because of the A&E
Cold Case Files message board. Yes, the basic-cable channel behind addictive reality-TV
series like Intervention and Hoarders hosts a board for the true-crime reenactment series that
was canceled in 2006 (and that I’ve never actually watched) and lives on as a hidden hive of
digital crime solving. After reading Crompton’s book one night, I Googled “East Area Rapist” and
“Original Night Stalker” to see what else was out there about him, and the board popped up. I
started off as a lurker, an outsider gleaning the insights of others who were obsessed. Before I
knew it, I had read all of the 20,000 posts about the Golden State Killer (known as EAR/ONS on
the site), spending hours there while my daughter was taking a nap and after my husband went
to bed. Given that serial killers are the subjects of a half dozen prime-time shows currently on
television, I am obviously not alone.
I found a spectrum of personality types on the message board, from paranoid cranks to the raw,
curious insomniacs driven by the same compulsion to piece together the puzzle as I am. Of the
dozens of people who regularly visited, a devoted few stood out. The Social Worker (like many
on the board, she prefers anonymity) operates as a kind of gatekeeper between Sacramento
investigators and the board. This irks some posters, who accuse her of hinting at confidential
information and then shutting down when asked to share. That she occasionally has new
information is not in dispute. A few months after I began corresponding with her in April 2011,
the Social Worker posted a drawing of a decal she said was seen on a suspicious vehicle near
the scene of one of the Sacramento rapes. “It is possibly from a naval base on North Island,”
she posted, “but unconfirmed and has no record. Is it familiar to anyone on the board? Hoping
we may find where it is from.”
Now, a year after I first e-mailed the Social Worker, she is giving me a tour of the killer’s early
stalking grounds. She navigates from the passenger side as I steer my rental car around the
modest ranch houses abutting Sacramento’s old Mather Air Force Base, where he was active in
the mid-1970s (it has since been converted into one of the city’s airports). She points out a
nearby duplex where he raped victim number 24, a 17-year-old girl whose boyfriend was tied to
the bed facedown, a metal lid and salt shaker placed on his back. If the items fell off, the rapist
had threatened, he would come back and shoot him in the head.
Afterward the Social Worker guides me through the leafy neighborhoods of Arden-Arcade and
Del Dayo, which the rapist also turned into crime scenes. These areas of east Sacramento he
preyed on were not built for excitement. I counted an entire block of unbroken beige. The
tamped-down cautiousness belies the terrible things that happened here. We turn onto Malaga
Way, where on August 29, 1976, the clanging of her wind chimes and the strong smell of
aftershave awakened a 12-year-old girl. A masked man stood at her bedroom window, prying
away the upper left corner of the screen with a knife.
“I lived here through the height of it,” the Social Worker says. She was a young mom then and
recalls how the terror reached a debilitating peak around rape number 15. An uneasy memory
from that period had nagged at her, and she reached out to a detective with the Sacramento
Sheriff’s Department to see whether it was all in her mind. It wasn’t. The detective confirmed
that before the rapist’s penchant for phoning victims had been publicized, the Social Worker had
filed three police reports about an obscene caller, a “stalker” who, she said, “knew everything
about me.” She now believes the caller was him.
“It’s a really dark place, thinking about this stuff,” she says while we’re parked on the side of a
roundabout, the American River flashing blue in the distance. The Social Worker confides that
she felt “spiritually” called upon to help solve the case. “But I’ve learned you’ve got to watch out,
to take care of yourself. Or it can consume you.”
Can? Haven’t we spent the last four hours—to say nothing of the last few years—consumed? In
the car we swapped leads we’ve pursued. Already I’d dedicated an entire afternoon to tracking
down every detail I could about a member of the 1972 Rio Americano High School water polo
team, because in the yearbook photo he appeared lean and to have big calves, maybe the
same big calves that the Golden State Killer’s earlier victims had identified. The Social Worker
once dined with someone she regarded as a potential suspect and then bagged his water bottle
to test his DNA.
My own obsession with unsolved murders began on the evening of August 1, 1984, when a
neighbor of mine in Oak Park, Illinois, where I grew up, was found murdered. We knew Kathleen
Lombardo’s family from our parish church. She was out for a jog when she was dragged into an
alley. Neighbors reported seeing a man in a yellow tank top and headband watching Kathleen
intently as she jogged. He cut her throat.
Several days after the killing, without telling anyone, I walked the block and a half north from our
house to the spot where Kathleen had been attacked. I was 14, a cheerleader in Tretorn
sneakers whose crime experience began and ended with Nancy Drew. On the ground I saw
pieces of Kathleen’s shattered Walkman. I picked them up. Kathleen Lombardo’s murderer was
never caught.
What gripped me that summer before I started high school wasn’t fear or titillation but the
specter of that question mark where the killer’s face should be. When you commit murder and
remain anonymous, your identity is a wound that lingers on the victim, the neighborhood, and in
the worst cases, a nation. For digital sleuths, a killer who remains a question mark holds more
menace than a Charles Manson or a Richard Ramirez. However twisted the grins of those
killers, however wild the eyes, we can at least stare solidly at them, knowing that evil has a
shape and an expression and can be locked behind bars. Until we put a face on a psychopath
like the Golden State Killer, he will continue to hold sway over us—he will remain a powerful
cipher who triumphs by being just out of reach.
WHAT'S IN A NAME?
One of the uncomfortable truths about tracking and catching serial killers is, marketing matters.
Ever since Jack the Ripper terrorized the slums of 19th-century London, serial killers who thrive
on public reaction seem to instinctively know this and sometimes devise their own monikers.
The Zodiac Killer, for instance, announced himself in a letter to the editor in the San Francisco
Examiner in 1969. David Berkowitz, the Yonkers, New York, postal clerk who murdered six
people in their cars at random, came up with his tabloid sobriquet, Son of Sam, in a letter to the
New York Police Department, claiming a dog by that name had urged him to kill. Cousins
Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, together known as the Hillside Strangler, chillingly
described where they disposed of bodies and the method in which they dispatched ten young
women around northeast Los Angeles over a four-month period in the late ’70s. Most recently
L.A. Weekly crime writer Christine Pelisek used the name Grim Sleeper to describe a man who
is believed to be responsible for at least ten murders in South L.A., starting in 1985 with a 13-
year break between the final two murders. (A suspect has been arrested, and his list of victims
is far from settled.)
A handle that perfectly crystallizes the creepiness, menace, and horror of the perpetrator and
what he or she has done can’t help but captivate the public’s imagination. A grisly pathological
signature left at crime scenes will have the same effect. Either will put added pressure on
politicians and police departments to apprehend the killer as long as he remains at large, even if
he retires from murder and mayhem. And it will linger with the popular culture long after the
perpetrator has been caught, with tales retold in best-selling books and feature films. But he
benefited from not having a name people knew.
The moniker law enforcement bestowed on the Golden State Killer—EAR/ONS—was an
unwieldy and forgettable attempt to merge two identities. Sacramento police came up with “East
Area Rapist” because the early sexual assaults began in the eastern parts of the city. During a
meeting in the late ’90s of several Southern California law enforcement agencies, Larry Pool, an
investigator with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, and other authorities would realize
that this man’s m.o. predated that of Ramirez. The unidentified serial killer they sought was the
“Original Night Stalker,” a name that stuck by default, much to Pool’s chagrin. When in 2001,
DNA tests showed that the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker were the same
person, the killer became EAR/ONS for short.
Google “Son of Sam” and you’ll get more than a million hits. On Amazon you can take your pick
of eight books about Berkowitz. By comparison, a Google search of EAR/ONS yields barely
more than 11,000 mentions, and one of the top hits on Amazon is Jean Campbell’s Getting
Started Stringing Beads, which happens to contain a mention of clip-on earrings. On the same
page is Crompton’s sole text on the killer, which I’ve found to be an unvarnished, unfiltered
avalanche of case details, full of 1970s political incorrectness and strangely moving in its
depiction of one matter-of-fact cop’s rueful regret.
I came up with the name “Golden State Killer” for this article because his numerous crimes
spanned California, confounding authorities throughout several jurisdictions. Also, at the very
least, this ID is more memorable.
I’ve studied the Golden State Killer’s face, drawn from composite sketches made decades ago,
more than my own husband’s. There is no single accurate rendering of him, but a few
features—his lantern jaw and prominent nose—are consistent. His hair, hanging over his ears to
his collar, seems so ’70s that I can almost hear Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “What’s Your Name.” I know
his blood type (A positive, nonsecretor). I know his penis size (conspicuously small). I know that
he was built like a runner or a swimmer.
He liked to “bomb” a neighborhood, as one investigator put it, sometimes targeting houses just
yards from one another. He was nervous and fidgety yet brazen. Once, he walked away from a
crime scene without his pants on, and when a dog chased him into a backyard, he waited
patiently until he was sure the dog wouldn’t bite and then reentered the house. He paused in the
middle of one rape to go to the kitchen and eat apple pie. Sometimes after he violated
someone, the bound, blindfolded victim would later recall hearing him in another room of the
house, sobbing. Once, a victim remembered hearing him cry out over and over again: Mummy.
Mummy. Mummy. Another woman said he told her that news reports of his crimes “scares my
mommy.”
He relished keeping his victims off balance well after the initial attack. He issued incriminating
taunts (“I’ll kill you like I did some people in Bakersfield”) and allegedly sent a typewritten poem
titled “Excitement’s Crave” to Sacramento news outlets, comparing himself to Jesse James and
Son of Sam. He harassed his victims by phone. One brief, whispery threat was recorded by
authorities through a tapped phone line: “I’m going to kill you.”
A COLD CASE HEATS UP
After 48 hours of anticipation, I received the package containing the cuff links. I ripped open the
box, tore through the bubble wrap, and examined the sealed Ziploc bag with the cuff links
inside. I suddenly felt anxious. If a speck of biological evidence clung to these shiny gold pieces,
I risked destroying what might be key evidence with one fingerprint. I didn’t open the bag.
The best thing to do, I knew, was to turn the cuff links over to an authority on the killer. I already
had an interview set up with Larry Pool, the Orange County sheriff’s detective who was widely
recognized as the “face of the case.” I decided if I felt the interview was going well, I’d hand over
the plastic bag with the cuff links.
The problem was, of the handful of officials who remained focused on the Golden State Killer,
Pool intimidated me the most. He’d been described as “inaccessible” and “a little remote.” I
knew he’d been working on the case for the past 15 years. He’d been instrumental, along with
Golden State victim Keith Harrington’s attorney brother, Bruce, in getting Proposition 69
passed—the DNA Fingerprint, Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act, which in 2004
established an all-felon DNA database in California. Thanks to their efforts, the California
Department of Justice now has the second-largest working DNA data bank in the country.
Pool and Bruce Harrington felt that by expanding the DNA database they’d surely net Golden
State. The disappointment, it was suggested to me, was sharp. I imagined Pool as a steely,
impassive cop locked away in a dimly lit room, the walls plastered with composites of the killer.
Instead a pleasant, somewhat formal 51-year-old man in wire-rim glasses and a red-checkered
shirt greets me in the small lobby of the FBI’s Orange County Regional Computer Forensics
Laboratory (Pool is still the Orange County Sheriff’s Department’s case agent for the killer but
works in computer forensics now). We sit across from each other at a long table inside a glass-
paneled conference room. He is the duty officer for the lab today, and when colleagues
occasionally poke their heads in, he responds with a clipped “copy that.”
I find him to be a thoughtful, measured speaker, the kind of person whose stoic exterior masks a
certain generosity and a belief that hours spent listening—even to a civilian crime
enthusiast—may be time well spent. “When I took this on, I was still relatively fresh, if you will,”
says Pool. “I got excited about people, like a ski-mask rapist in prison who matched the
description. In the first year, five or six times I got really excited. In the second year, four or five
times.” But now, after investigating, by his count, 8,000 suspects and spending years of
performing triage on urgent tips from fellow police and a public who are convinced their suspect
is the Original Night Stalker, Pool’s attitude is muted and deliberate. When he comes across a
particularly promising suspect, his curt response is always “Gotta eliminate him.”
Even the composite sketch that hangs above Pool’s desk is matter-of-fact: It shows the suspect
in a ski mask. “Is it of any value?” Pool says. “No. But we know he looked like that.” A new FBI
profile is being generated, he tells me, and it will diverge from earlier theories about the killer.
Pool’s theories have similarly evolved. In part from talking to criminal profilers who “understand
how these people are wired better than I do,” Pool no longer views the Golden State Killer as a
sort of superhero villain, a ballsy egomaniacal force in peak physical condition. “He’s a small
guy, diminished, and he does everything he can to get the upper hand at the beginning and to
keep it,” he says. “To intimidate and terrorize people because he doesn’t want to confront them
physically.”
The new FBI profile is part of the investigation’s reboot. In addition, Pool tells me the FBI has
provided its assessment on some crucial issues. The agency agrees with what many of the task
force investigators have long contended—that the suspect likely got his start two years earlier
and 200 miles farther south than was first believed, in Visalia, a farming town in the Central
Valley. Beginning in April 1974, Visalia experienced an unusual series of ransackings in four
residential neighborhoods. The Visalia Ransacker preferred personal effects like piggy banks,
photographs, and wedding rings, leaving behind more valuable items.
Then on September 11, 1975, the 16-year-old daughter of Claude Snelling, a journalism
professor at College of the Sequoias, was awakened by a man’s hand covering her nose and
mouth. “You’re coming with me. Don’t scream or I’ll stab you,” the ski-masked intruder
whispered. He led her out the back door. Snelling, alerted by the noise, ran onto the patio. “Hey,
what are you doing?” he shouted. “Where are you taking my daughter?”
The intruder didn’t reply. He raised a .38-caliber handgun and shot Snelling in the chest,
mortally wounding him, and then kicked the daughter three times in the face before running
away. He was a white male, about five feet ten, with “angry” eyes, the daughter reported to
police.
A stolen gun strongly pointed to the Visalia Ransacker. On December 10 detective Bill
McGowen startled the Ransacker outside a house he’d targeted three times before, and a
chase ensued. When McGowen fired a warning shot, the ski-masked suspect raised his hands
in surrender.
“Hey, OK, don’t hurt me,” he said in a squeaky voice, reaching with one hand to peel off his
mask. But it was a mime trick; with his other hand he fired a shot at McGowen. The bullet
shattered McGowen’s flashlight, sending shards into his eyes. The Ransacker jumped a fence
and escaped. The plundering in Visalia stopped. Months later the East Area Rapist attacks in
Sacramento began.
Pool tells me the FBI ran an actuarial study and concluded last year that there’s an 85 percent
chance the Golden State Killer is still alive.
I peg Pool as someone who prioritizes procedure and would accuse me of overstepping with my
impulsive cuff links purchase. But I take a chance at the end of our conversation and reach into
my backpack for the Ziploc bag. I nudge the cuff links across the conference table. He takes the
bag and examines it carefully.
“For me?” he asks, stone faced.
“Yes,” I say and begin to explain why I bought them.
I catch the slightest hint of a smile. “You’ve made me very happy,” he says. “In fact, I think I love
you.”
A few days later Pool ascertains that the cuff links are not the same pair after all. But it doesn’t
matter, as he has a more promising lead, one in which he needs the public’s help. It turns out
that having such a far-reaching, complicated case has its rewards: The many jurisdictions
means there are multiple property rooms to go back to in search of old evidence, to dig through
for clues stored years ago and forgotten.
That’s exactly what Paul Holes, the chief of the Contra Costa Crime Lab who helped develop
the DNA profile, was looking for in his property room, and he found it in a sealed bag marked
“collected at railroad tracks”—a clue overlooked and ignored. After all, it was a parking ticket
that eventually revealed Berkowitz was the Son of Sam.
In his office Pool taps at his computer keyboard, calling up an image that can’t load fast enough.
It shocks me how quickly I lean in, primed to memorize everything I see. I realize how hungry I
am for new information about the bogeyman who’s wormed his way into every corridor of my
brain.
A faded, hand-drawn map pops up on the screen. Hand drawn, the police believe, by the
Golden State Killer.
BACK TO THE BOARD
One of the more compelling online sleuths I’ve met through the message board is a 30-year-old
guy from South Florida whom I call the Kid. He has a bachelor’s degree in multimedia studies
and, he’s hinted, a somewhat troubled home life. He holds what he vaguely describes as “a
McJob,” but the message board is a full-time endeavor. Details matter to him. He’s smart,
meticulous, and occasionally brusque. He’s also, in my opinion, the case’s greatest amateur
hope. He first got my attention when he made the point that if you trace the linear distance from
the Irvine pizza place—where shortly before her murder Janelle Cruz got a cashier job—to her
house, and then from her house to Manuela Witthuhn’s house (the Golden State Killer’s other
Irvine victim), you get an almost perfect equilateral triangle. It’s not a large area, covering a
couple of miles at most. Somewhere in that triangle, the Kid theorized, lived the killer.
“You’re one of my favorite posters,” I wrote the Kid one day, and a correspondence began. Like
Deadheads trading concert tapes, he sends me a PDF of the 1983 Orange County telephone
directory; I send him a criminal record he’s looking for. We run down information on each other’s
favorite suspects.
“Too tall,” I write. The killer was between five feet eight and five feet ten.
“Hirsute,” the Kid comments. (The killer was not.)
We both agree geography is key. There are only so many white males born between, say, 1943
and 1959 who lived or worked in Sacramento, Santa Barbara County, and Orange County from
1976 to 1986. Of those locations, most followers of the case agree that Sacramento, where the
killer officially started his crime spree (unless it was indeed Visalia), is the ripest area to mine for
clues, beginning with the rapes.
I message the Kid about a possible suspect I’d uncovered. The man has an address history in
Sacramento, Goleta, and Orange County. I had found a photo of his car that he’d posted online.
The vanity license plate interested me—it alluded to building model aircraft, a hobby that some
had speculated the killer might be into. Now in his fifties, the man would be about the right age. I
all but had him in handcuffs.
“Haven’t done anything with that name in a while,” the Kid writes back politely. Included in his
message is the image of a dour nerd in a sweater vest, my suspect’s sophomore-year picture,
which the Kid already had on file. “Not in my top tier,” he writes. I am chastened—and
impressed.
While I share the Kid’s passion, I don’t have his skills. He’s an exceptional data miner. By his
calculation he’s spent 4,000 hours scouring everything from old directories to yearbooks to
online data aggregators in order to compile what he calls “the Master List.” When I first saw the
list, its thoroughness left me agape. It is a 118-page document with some 2,000 names and
information, including dates of birth, address histories, criminal records, and even photos when
available. There’s an index, footnotes. There are notations under some names (“dedicated
cycling advocate”) that seem nonsensical unless you know, as we do, far too much about a
possibly dead serial killer who was last active when Ronald Reagan was president.
The truth is, even the Kid is a little fuzzy on his motivation. “It’s the unidentified nature of EAR
that intrigues me more than anything else,” he writes me. “For no particular noble or tidy reason,
I want to know who EAR/ONS is.”
“At some point I’ll have to walk away from all this and move on with my life,” he says. Which is
why he opts for the monthly billing cycle rather than the annual service on Ancestry.com.
“I hope to hell I’m not still doing this a year from now,” he had written me—a year and a half
ago.
Not everyone admires the board sleuths or their efforts. One agitator came on recently to fume
about what he characterized as wanna-be cops with a twisted, pathetic obsession. He accused
the board of being populated by untrained meddlers with an unhealthy interest in rape and
murder.
“WALTER MITTY DETECTIVE,” he wrote.
By then I was convinced one of the Mittys was probably going to solve this thing.
THE NOTEBOOK
Trails. building. A lake. It looks like a rough map of a planned community; in fact, that’s what
Pool and other investigators believe it is.
The notebook pages were collected at the scene of a rape in Danville, in Contra Costa County,
in December 1978 by a now-deceased criminalist. The Golden State Killer, who was then
known as the East Area Rapist, was definitely the offender. Shoe prints and two independent
bloodhounds established his exit route, a trail that led from the victim’s house to some nearby
railroad tracks.
The paperwork, which is referred to as “the homework evidence,” was collected at the location
where the trail stopped abruptly, indicating the rapist got into a vehicle. Investigators believe he
dropped the pages unintentionally, perhaps while rooting around in a bag or opening his car
door. They are on standard college-rule paper, three-hole punch, ripped from a notebook but
with the spring binding intact. The first page appears to be a homework assignment on General
Custer (“General George Armstrong Custer, a man well admired but a man hated very much by
many who served him”).
The second page has the feeling of a journal entry or therapy exercise, an angry, resentful
screed about the author’s memories of sixth grade. “Mad is the word,” it begins. The author
recalls how he got in trouble in school and his teacher made him write sentences over and over
again, a humiliating experience. “I never hated anyone as much as I did him,” the author writes
of the unnamed teacher.
The third page is the hand-drawn map. Investigators examined the unusual markings on the
land area and figured out they represented a change of grade and elevation for drainage
purposes. Roofing is also an apparent interest: The two symbols on the bottom right are
standard indicators showing left- and right-side elevations of a house, suggesting rooflines.
Further analysis led investigators to believe the mapmaker possibly dabbled in landscape
architecture, civil engineering, or land-use planning. They’ve tried unsuccessfully to find the
area depicted on the map. Pool believes the drawing resembles Golden State’s preferred attack
neighborhood, and that it’s a fantasy.
On the back of the map, amid a series of doodles and girls’ names, is the word punishment
scrawled hard in black pen with the letter p written backward. Right above the word punishment,
in faint handwriting, are the words “Come from Snelling.” At least that’s what Pool believes. It’s
the last name of the man murdered in Visalia.
Pool and fellow investigator Holes are allowing me to publish this piece of evidence for the first
time, to accompany this article, in the hopes that it will jog someone’s memory—not unlike what
happened when a man recognized his brother’s extreme ideology in a manifesto released to the
media by police, which led authorities to the Unabomber.
I need to locate the area represented by the map, analyze the handwriting, and research the
references it contains. On the night I review the notebook, I have two thoughts: One, what a
promising lead this is for the case. And two, is this ever going to end?
NEW WORLD
I’ve always been a restless, jittery sleeper, prone to waking with a start. One night I’d fallen
asleep after reading the Original Night Stalker police files. The bedroom door creaked open. I
heard footsteps in the dark. Without thinking, I grabbed the lamp on my nightstand, leaped from
bed, and lunged at the figure in the room. It was my husband. When we discussed the incident
later, what was curious to us both is that I didn’t scream. In fact, I didn’t even swing the lamp. I
just asked a question: “Who are you?”
It was the only question I had anymore.
The world has changed for the Golden State Killer in ways he could never have predicted. We
know from the tennis shoe impressions under windows and how, for example, he knew exactly
when one victim would be home alone even though her husband had just changed shifts the
day before, that he was a voyeur at a time when physically standing in front of a window was
the only way to stalk. But if he’s alive, he’s growing old in a world where every day more and
more windows are opening around him—on computers, on smart phones, in DNA labs.
He couldn’t have predicted that one day we’d be able to identify people by a single skin cell or
that a quarter of a century after his last known crime, a stranger in Florida—who’s never been to
Sacramento and wasn’t born when the rapes began—could painstakingly cycle through a dozen
public records aggregators, narrowing down the possibilities, zeroing in on his name.
The Kid’s list reminded me of something he and I had connected over from the beginning. What
drew us to this mystery, we both agreed, was that it can be solved. Technology has made that
possible. I may not have what it takes to do so, but someone out there does.
I wonder at times if I need to step back. It’s not easy. Several months after our first meeting,
Pool tells me he’s decided to retire from the sheriff’s department and pursue a career in the
private sector. He will remain on the Golden State Killer investigation, however, describing the
case as “my great unfinished business.” He’s not the only veteran cop who refuses to give up.
During a family trip to Portland, I took a train trip an hour south to meet Larry Crompton, the
man whose book sparked my interest in this case, at a museum café in Salem. He hasn’t
actively worked on the investigation since the ’70s, and he retired from the Contra Costa
Sheriff’s Department in 1998. But the toll the experience took on his life is still evident. “I was
supposed to catch him. And I didn’t,” he says. “I have to live with that.”
I think of the tag line from the movie Zodiac: “There’s more than one way to lose your life to a
killer.”
Crompton is dressed in a dark blue cotton shirt and has the stiff, rugged posture of a retired cop
turned rancher. He often pauses to find the kindest way to say something. He expended great
effort trying to warn his colleagues about the East Area Rapist: that he was going to return and
attack the other teenage girl in Walnut Creek (he did), that he’d moved to Southern California
and started killing couples (did that, too).
In return for his efforts Crompton endured frustration and heartbreak, though he’s too polite to
say that directly. He recalls the damaged lives of the victims after the attacks, how many of the
husbands were riddled with guilt that they didn’t do more to fight back. The two of us sit long
enough for a distracted waitress to serve me five iced tea refills. At one point Crompton turns his
head and mutters to no one in particular, “I just want to catch him before I die.”
“If he were caught and you got to ask him one question,” I ask, “what would it be?”
He thinks for a beat and smiles mischievously. “Remember me?”
Then, becoming serious, he says, “What’d I miss?”
STOLEN LIVES
The police files depict in clinical prose the ordinariness of the victims’ lives in the moments
before the attacks—a single mom watching the last minutes of The Tonight Show in bed, a
teenager sticking a frozen pizza in the oven and setting the timer.
The Golden State Killer was a destroyer of all that was familiar and comforting to his victims.
Sex was secondary to instilling terror. It’s no accident that one of his signature threats was “I’ll
be gone in the dark.” He wasn’t a mere rapist. He was a phantom who kept his victims
perpetually frightened with the threat that he lurked, ligatures in hand, around every corner of
their unassuming tract houses.
One victim never went back inside the house where the crime took place. Another rape survivor,
victim No. 5, told me she came to despise her house. She had to stop skiing because of her
attacker’s ski mask. “And his black tennis shoes,” she said. “I’ll never forget them.” A former
nurse, she now volunteers as a rape crisis counselor. “I’ve forgiven him. He was such a heavy
burden on me for so long.”
Mad appeared to be his favorite word. Is it still? Or is he no longer the masked intruder working
the bedroom screen with a screwdriver but the father in the button-down cardigan checking the
locks on his back door?
In “Excitement’s Crave,” the poem he allegedly wrote, the Golden State Killer alludes to going
underground. “Sacramento should make an offer. / To make a movie of my life / That will pay for
my planned exile.” My bet is he’s enjoying a comfortable exile, leading an unremarkable life
among the unsuspecting. A suburban dad passing unnoticed behind the hedge wall.
The other night when I couldn’t sleep again, I opened my laptop, positioning it so as not to wake
my husband. I began studying Flickr, scrolling through Goleta Little League team photos from
1978. I couldn’t pull myself away from studying the men in the back rows, the assistant coaches,
the young dads, searching their faces for who among them might have been hiding in plain
sight, for the everyman with a baseball cap and a twisted glint in his eye.
In the past, when people have asked whether it worries me that the killer may still be out there,
I’ve waved dismissively, pointing out that he’d be much older now—62, if I had to guess. “He
can’t hurt me,” I say, not realizing that in every sleepless hour, in every minute spent hunting
him and not cuddling my daughter, he already has.
terrorized communities throughout California. He was little known, never caught, and
might still be out there. The author, along with several others, can’t stop working on
the case.
Michelle McNamara | Los Angeles | Feb 2013
--
MISSING LINKS
On a sleepless night last July—one of dozens I’ve powered through during the months I’ve
spent tracking him down—I Googled a description of a pair of cuff links he stole in the midst of a
home invasion in Stockton in September 1977. At that time the Golden State Killer, as I’ve
recently come to call him, hadn’t yet graduated to murder. He was a serial rapist who was
attacking women in their bedrooms from Sacramento to San Ramon, targeting those who lived
in quiet upper-middle-class suburban neighborhoods. He was young—anywhere from 18 to
30—Caucasian, and athletic, capable of eluding capture by jumping roofs and vaulting tall
fences. He frequently wore a ski mask. He had either blue or hazel eyes and, some victims
reported, a high-pitched voice. He would rant to his victims about needing money, but he
frequently ignored cash, even when it was right in front of him.
But he didn’t leave empty-handed. He took items of personal value from those he had violated:
engraved wedding bands, driver’s licenses, souvenir coins. The cuff links he stole in Stockton
were a slightly unusual 1950s style and monogrammed with the first initial N. From my research
I knew that boys’ names beginning with this letter were rare, appearing only once in the top 100
names of the 1930s and ’40s, when the original owner was likely born. The cuff links were a
family heirloom belonging to the victim’s husband; they were distinct looking.
I hit the return key on my laptop, expecting nothing. Then a jolt of recognition: There they were,
a single image out of the hundreds loading on my laptop screen, the same style as sketched out
in the police file I had acquired, with the same initial. They were going for $8 at a vintage store
in a small town in Oregon. I bought them immediately, paying $40 for overnight delivery, and
went to wake my husband.
“I think I found him,” I said, a little punchy from lack of sleep. My husband, a professional
comedian, didn’t have to ask who “him” was. While we live in Los Feliz with our young daughter,
my online life has been taken over by unsolved murders—and with maybe someday solving one
of them—on a Web site I launched in 2006 called True Crime Diary. By day I’m a 42-year-old
stay-at-home mom with a sensible haircut and Goldfish crackers lining my purse. In the evening,
however, I’m something of a DIY detective. I delve into cold cases by scouring the Internet for
any digital crumbs authorities may have overlooked, then share my theories with the 8,000 or so
mystery buffs who visit my blog regularly. When my family goes to sleep, I start clicking,
combing through digitized phone books, school yearbooks, and Google Earth views of crime
scenes: a bottomless pit of potential leads for the laptop investigator who now exists in the
virtual world.
The Golden State Killer, though, has consumed me the most. In addition to 50 sexual assaults
in Northern California, he was responsible for ten sadistic murders in Southern California. Here
was a case that spanned a decade and ultimately changed DNA law in the state. Neither the
Zodiac Killer, who terrorized San Francisco in the late 1960s and early ’70s, nor the Night
Stalker, who had Southern Californians locking their windows in the ’80s, was as active. Yet the
Golden State Killer has little recognition; he didn’t even have a catchy name until I coined one.
His capture was too low to detect on any law enforcement agency’s list of priorities. If this
coldest of cases is to be cracked, it may well be due to the work of citizen sleuths like me (and a
handful of homicide detectives) who analyze and theorize, hoping to unearth that one clue that
turns all the dead ends into a trail—the one detail that will bring us face-to-face with the
psychopath who has occupied so many of our waking hours and our dreams.
THE M.O.
On October 1, 1979, on Queen Ann Lane in Goleta, a town near Santa Barbara, a terrified
woman lay facedown in her living room, her wrists tied behind her back, her feet bound at the
ankles. Her tennis shorts had been thrown over her head as a blindfold. She could hear him
rummaging around in the kitchen. It was 2:20 a.m.
“I’ll kill ’em, I’ll kill ’em, I’ll kill ’em,” he chanted to himself—like, as an investigator would later put
it, “a guy pumping himself up for an athletic endeavor.”
The woman managed to remove the bindings from her feet and escaped screaming out the front
door; in the chaos her live-in boyfriend, bound in the bedroom, was able to hop into the
backyard and roll behind an orange tree, just missing the frantic, searching beam of the
intruder’s flashlight. A witness caught a glimpse of the suspect fleeing the scene: a lean man in
a Pendleton shirt pedaling furiously away on a stolen silver Nishiki ten-speed.
After that botched attack, none of his victims would survive to describe him. Almost three
months later, on the morning of December 30, a half mile south of where the October attack
took place, Santa Barbara sheriff’s detectives responded to a call at the condominium of Dr.
Robert Offerman. A woman out front was crying. “There are two people dead inside,” she said.
The bodies were in the bedroom. Offerman’s girlfriend, psychologist Debra Alexandria Manning,
35, lay on the right side of the waterbed, nude and bound. Offerman, a 44-year-old osteopath,
was on his knees on the floor; in his left hand he clutched a length of white three-strand nylon
cord. The killer’s plan seemed to have gone awry. Offerman had been able to break free from
his bindings, raising the possibility that the killer might have ordered Manning to tie him up and
that she had bound him loosely on purpose.
As detectives processed the crime scene, they stepped around a turkey carcass wrapped in
cellophane that had been discarded on the patio. At some point, probably before he shot his
victims through the heart and the back of the head, the killer had opened the refrigerator and
helped himself to Offerman’s leftover Christmas dinner.
The forensics team noted what appeared to be the intruder’s signatures: the nylon twine, the pry
marks on the doors and windows, the tennis shoe impressions. Everything matched the pattern
of a man who had become known as the East Area Rapist, or EAR, a cat burglar whose middle-
of-the-night assaults paralyzed Sacramento and Contra Costa counties starting in 1976 and
ending after a thwarted attack on July 6, 1979. To zero in on a victim he often entered the home
beforehand when no one was there, learning the layout, studying family pictures, and
memorizing names. Victims received hang-up or disturbing phone calls before and after they
were attacked. He disabled porch lights and unlocked windows. He emptied bullets from guns.
He hid shoelaces or rope under cushions to use as ligatures. These maneuvers gave him a
crucial advantage because when you woke from a deep sleep to the blinding flashlight and ski-
masked presence, he was always a stranger to you, but you were not to him.
The Northern California detectives on the EAR Task Force had theorized he would snake his
way south. They worried he was escalating in violence. “That’s him, I know it,” thought Contra
Costa investigator Larry Crompton when he learned of the Goleta murders. The Santa Barbara
County sheriff’s office felt differently and was reluctant to make the connection, whether out of
disbelief or fear of bad publicity.
Three months after the Goleta murders, in March 1980, there was another double murder, this
time in Ventura, of Charlene and Lyman Smith. Keith and Patrice Harrington, who were living in
a gated community in Dana Point, were the next victims. Then came Manuela Witthuhn in
Irvine. The scenes echoed each other: The females were all slender beauties whose hands
were bound behind their backs, and circling each single-story house were tiny star impressions
from a pair of size 9 Adidas. The rapist had evolved into a serial killer, and the transformation
only seemed to hone his self-discipline. Murder seemed to satiate him more than rape did, and
longer periods of time passed between the crimes. Whereas before he seemed to bask in the
notoriety, now he took pains to hide any hint of a link between the murders, removing ligatures
from the scene, even staging one murder to look like a robbery.
By May 5, 1986, when 18-year-old Janelle Cruz was discovered raped and bludgeoned in her
home in Irvine, only the killer and a few alert investigators like Crompton knew that the East
Area Rapist was now the worst unidentified violent serial offender in modern American history.
After Cruz’s murder, the Golden State Killer stopped. Perhaps his impulses had subsided.
Perhaps, like everyone else in America, he’d followed the August 1985 capture of Richard
Ramirez, the Satan worshipper known as the Night Stalker, and the case building up against
this psychopath who, like himself, had bound, raped, and killed his way (13 murders in all)
across California. The name this unknown perpetrator was given by law enforcement—the
Original Night Stalker, or ONS—was derived from the nom de crime of Ramirez. And Crompton
found himself among an ever-dwindling cadre of detectives pushing against a growing
indifference, dedicating himself to a case that, for all practical purposes, had been abandoned.
MALIGNANT OBSESSION
The woman who sits across from me in a small office in east Sacramento is a stranger. But you
wouldn’t have known that from the conversational shorthand we use from the moment we meet,
our message board equivalent of Klingon.
“Dog beating robbery in ’74?” I ask.
The woman, I’ll call her the Social Worker, reties her thick ponytail and takes a sip from a can of
Rockstar. She’s in her late fifties, with large, penetrating green eyes and a smoky voice. She
had greeted me in the parking lot by waving her arms wildly overhead. I liked her right away.
“I don’t believe it’s related,” she says.
The ’74 robbery in Rancho Cordova we’re parsing was the kind of recently uncovered incident
that the two of us had connected through on the serial killer message board. There is only one
book about this killer, and it’s what sparked my interest in the case when I read it two years ago.
Sudden Terror was self-published in 2010 by the now-retired detective Larry Crompton. But I
was familiar with such details as the robbery—and thousands of others—because of the A&E
Cold Case Files message board. Yes, the basic-cable channel behind addictive reality-TV
series like Intervention and Hoarders hosts a board for the true-crime reenactment series that
was canceled in 2006 (and that I’ve never actually watched) and lives on as a hidden hive of
digital crime solving. After reading Crompton’s book one night, I Googled “East Area Rapist” and
“Original Night Stalker” to see what else was out there about him, and the board popped up. I
started off as a lurker, an outsider gleaning the insights of others who were obsessed. Before I
knew it, I had read all of the 20,000 posts about the Golden State Killer (known as EAR/ONS on
the site), spending hours there while my daughter was taking a nap and after my husband went
to bed. Given that serial killers are the subjects of a half dozen prime-time shows currently on
television, I am obviously not alone.
I found a spectrum of personality types on the message board, from paranoid cranks to the raw,
curious insomniacs driven by the same compulsion to piece together the puzzle as I am. Of the
dozens of people who regularly visited, a devoted few stood out. The Social Worker (like many
on the board, she prefers anonymity) operates as a kind of gatekeeper between Sacramento
investigators and the board. This irks some posters, who accuse her of hinting at confidential
information and then shutting down when asked to share. That she occasionally has new
information is not in dispute. A few months after I began corresponding with her in April 2011,
the Social Worker posted a drawing of a decal she said was seen on a suspicious vehicle near
the scene of one of the Sacramento rapes. “It is possibly from a naval base on North Island,”
she posted, “but unconfirmed and has no record. Is it familiar to anyone on the board? Hoping
we may find where it is from.”
Now, a year after I first e-mailed the Social Worker, she is giving me a tour of the killer’s early
stalking grounds. She navigates from the passenger side as I steer my rental car around the
modest ranch houses abutting Sacramento’s old Mather Air Force Base, where he was active in
the mid-1970s (it has since been converted into one of the city’s airports). She points out a
nearby duplex where he raped victim number 24, a 17-year-old girl whose boyfriend was tied to
the bed facedown, a metal lid and salt shaker placed on his back. If the items fell off, the rapist
had threatened, he would come back and shoot him in the head.
Afterward the Social Worker guides me through the leafy neighborhoods of Arden-Arcade and
Del Dayo, which the rapist also turned into crime scenes. These areas of east Sacramento he
preyed on were not built for excitement. I counted an entire block of unbroken beige. The
tamped-down cautiousness belies the terrible things that happened here. We turn onto Malaga
Way, where on August 29, 1976, the clanging of her wind chimes and the strong smell of
aftershave awakened a 12-year-old girl. A masked man stood at her bedroom window, prying
away the upper left corner of the screen with a knife.
“I lived here through the height of it,” the Social Worker says. She was a young mom then and
recalls how the terror reached a debilitating peak around rape number 15. An uneasy memory
from that period had nagged at her, and she reached out to a detective with the Sacramento
Sheriff’s Department to see whether it was all in her mind. It wasn’t. The detective confirmed
that before the rapist’s penchant for phoning victims had been publicized, the Social Worker had
filed three police reports about an obscene caller, a “stalker” who, she said, “knew everything
about me.” She now believes the caller was him.
“It’s a really dark place, thinking about this stuff,” she says while we’re parked on the side of a
roundabout, the American River flashing blue in the distance. The Social Worker confides that
she felt “spiritually” called upon to help solve the case. “But I’ve learned you’ve got to watch out,
to take care of yourself. Or it can consume you.”
Can? Haven’t we spent the last four hours—to say nothing of the last few years—consumed? In
the car we swapped leads we’ve pursued. Already I’d dedicated an entire afternoon to tracking
down every detail I could about a member of the 1972 Rio Americano High School water polo
team, because in the yearbook photo he appeared lean and to have big calves, maybe the
same big calves that the Golden State Killer’s earlier victims had identified. The Social Worker
once dined with someone she regarded as a potential suspect and then bagged his water bottle
to test his DNA.
My own obsession with unsolved murders began on the evening of August 1, 1984, when a
neighbor of mine in Oak Park, Illinois, where I grew up, was found murdered. We knew Kathleen
Lombardo’s family from our parish church. She was out for a jog when she was dragged into an
alley. Neighbors reported seeing a man in a yellow tank top and headband watching Kathleen
intently as she jogged. He cut her throat.
Several days after the killing, without telling anyone, I walked the block and a half north from our
house to the spot where Kathleen had been attacked. I was 14, a cheerleader in Tretorn
sneakers whose crime experience began and ended with Nancy Drew. On the ground I saw
pieces of Kathleen’s shattered Walkman. I picked them up. Kathleen Lombardo’s murderer was
never caught.
What gripped me that summer before I started high school wasn’t fear or titillation but the
specter of that question mark where the killer’s face should be. When you commit murder and
remain anonymous, your identity is a wound that lingers on the victim, the neighborhood, and in
the worst cases, a nation. For digital sleuths, a killer who remains a question mark holds more
menace than a Charles Manson or a Richard Ramirez. However twisted the grins of those
killers, however wild the eyes, we can at least stare solidly at them, knowing that evil has a
shape and an expression and can be locked behind bars. Until we put a face on a psychopath
like the Golden State Killer, he will continue to hold sway over us—he will remain a powerful
cipher who triumphs by being just out of reach.
WHAT'S IN A NAME?
One of the uncomfortable truths about tracking and catching serial killers is, marketing matters.
Ever since Jack the Ripper terrorized the slums of 19th-century London, serial killers who thrive
on public reaction seem to instinctively know this and sometimes devise their own monikers.
The Zodiac Killer, for instance, announced himself in a letter to the editor in the San Francisco
Examiner in 1969. David Berkowitz, the Yonkers, New York, postal clerk who murdered six
people in their cars at random, came up with his tabloid sobriquet, Son of Sam, in a letter to the
New York Police Department, claiming a dog by that name had urged him to kill. Cousins
Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, together known as the Hillside Strangler, chillingly
described where they disposed of bodies and the method in which they dispatched ten young
women around northeast Los Angeles over a four-month period in the late ’70s. Most recently
L.A. Weekly crime writer Christine Pelisek used the name Grim Sleeper to describe a man who
is believed to be responsible for at least ten murders in South L.A., starting in 1985 with a 13-
year break between the final two murders. (A suspect has been arrested, and his list of victims
is far from settled.)
A handle that perfectly crystallizes the creepiness, menace, and horror of the perpetrator and
what he or she has done can’t help but captivate the public’s imagination. A grisly pathological
signature left at crime scenes will have the same effect. Either will put added pressure on
politicians and police departments to apprehend the killer as long as he remains at large, even if
he retires from murder and mayhem. And it will linger with the popular culture long after the
perpetrator has been caught, with tales retold in best-selling books and feature films. But he
benefited from not having a name people knew.
The moniker law enforcement bestowed on the Golden State Killer—EAR/ONS—was an
unwieldy and forgettable attempt to merge two identities. Sacramento police came up with “East
Area Rapist” because the early sexual assaults began in the eastern parts of the city. During a
meeting in the late ’90s of several Southern California law enforcement agencies, Larry Pool, an
investigator with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, and other authorities would realize
that this man’s m.o. predated that of Ramirez. The unidentified serial killer they sought was the
“Original Night Stalker,” a name that stuck by default, much to Pool’s chagrin. When in 2001,
DNA tests showed that the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker were the same
person, the killer became EAR/ONS for short.
Google “Son of Sam” and you’ll get more than a million hits. On Amazon you can take your pick
of eight books about Berkowitz. By comparison, a Google search of EAR/ONS yields barely
more than 11,000 mentions, and one of the top hits on Amazon is Jean Campbell’s Getting
Started Stringing Beads, which happens to contain a mention of clip-on earrings. On the same
page is Crompton’s sole text on the killer, which I’ve found to be an unvarnished, unfiltered
avalanche of case details, full of 1970s political incorrectness and strangely moving in its
depiction of one matter-of-fact cop’s rueful regret.
I came up with the name “Golden State Killer” for this article because his numerous crimes
spanned California, confounding authorities throughout several jurisdictions. Also, at the very
least, this ID is more memorable.
I’ve studied the Golden State Killer’s face, drawn from composite sketches made decades ago,
more than my own husband’s. There is no single accurate rendering of him, but a few
features—his lantern jaw and prominent nose—are consistent. His hair, hanging over his ears to
his collar, seems so ’70s that I can almost hear Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “What’s Your Name.” I know
his blood type (A positive, nonsecretor). I know his penis size (conspicuously small). I know that
he was built like a runner or a swimmer.
He liked to “bomb” a neighborhood, as one investigator put it, sometimes targeting houses just
yards from one another. He was nervous and fidgety yet brazen. Once, he walked away from a
crime scene without his pants on, and when a dog chased him into a backyard, he waited
patiently until he was sure the dog wouldn’t bite and then reentered the house. He paused in the
middle of one rape to go to the kitchen and eat apple pie. Sometimes after he violated
someone, the bound, blindfolded victim would later recall hearing him in another room of the
house, sobbing. Once, a victim remembered hearing him cry out over and over again: Mummy.
Mummy. Mummy. Another woman said he told her that news reports of his crimes “scares my
mommy.”
He relished keeping his victims off balance well after the initial attack. He issued incriminating
taunts (“I’ll kill you like I did some people in Bakersfield”) and allegedly sent a typewritten poem
titled “Excitement’s Crave” to Sacramento news outlets, comparing himself to Jesse James and
Son of Sam. He harassed his victims by phone. One brief, whispery threat was recorded by
authorities through a tapped phone line: “I’m going to kill you.”
A COLD CASE HEATS UP
After 48 hours of anticipation, I received the package containing the cuff links. I ripped open the
box, tore through the bubble wrap, and examined the sealed Ziploc bag with the cuff links
inside. I suddenly felt anxious. If a speck of biological evidence clung to these shiny gold pieces,
I risked destroying what might be key evidence with one fingerprint. I didn’t open the bag.
The best thing to do, I knew, was to turn the cuff links over to an authority on the killer. I already
had an interview set up with Larry Pool, the Orange County sheriff’s detective who was widely
recognized as the “face of the case.” I decided if I felt the interview was going well, I’d hand over
the plastic bag with the cuff links.
The problem was, of the handful of officials who remained focused on the Golden State Killer,
Pool intimidated me the most. He’d been described as “inaccessible” and “a little remote.” I
knew he’d been working on the case for the past 15 years. He’d been instrumental, along with
Golden State victim Keith Harrington’s attorney brother, Bruce, in getting Proposition 69
passed—the DNA Fingerprint, Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act, which in 2004
established an all-felon DNA database in California. Thanks to their efforts, the California
Department of Justice now has the second-largest working DNA data bank in the country.
Pool and Bruce Harrington felt that by expanding the DNA database they’d surely net Golden
State. The disappointment, it was suggested to me, was sharp. I imagined Pool as a steely,
impassive cop locked away in a dimly lit room, the walls plastered with composites of the killer.
Instead a pleasant, somewhat formal 51-year-old man in wire-rim glasses and a red-checkered
shirt greets me in the small lobby of the FBI’s Orange County Regional Computer Forensics
Laboratory (Pool is still the Orange County Sheriff’s Department’s case agent for the killer but
works in computer forensics now). We sit across from each other at a long table inside a glass-
paneled conference room. He is the duty officer for the lab today, and when colleagues
occasionally poke their heads in, he responds with a clipped “copy that.”
I find him to be a thoughtful, measured speaker, the kind of person whose stoic exterior masks a
certain generosity and a belief that hours spent listening—even to a civilian crime
enthusiast—may be time well spent. “When I took this on, I was still relatively fresh, if you will,”
says Pool. “I got excited about people, like a ski-mask rapist in prison who matched the
description. In the first year, five or six times I got really excited. In the second year, four or five
times.” But now, after investigating, by his count, 8,000 suspects and spending years of
performing triage on urgent tips from fellow police and a public who are convinced their suspect
is the Original Night Stalker, Pool’s attitude is muted and deliberate. When he comes across a
particularly promising suspect, his curt response is always “Gotta eliminate him.”
Even the composite sketch that hangs above Pool’s desk is matter-of-fact: It shows the suspect
in a ski mask. “Is it of any value?” Pool says. “No. But we know he looked like that.” A new FBI
profile is being generated, he tells me, and it will diverge from earlier theories about the killer.
Pool’s theories have similarly evolved. In part from talking to criminal profilers who “understand
how these people are wired better than I do,” Pool no longer views the Golden State Killer as a
sort of superhero villain, a ballsy egomaniacal force in peak physical condition. “He’s a small
guy, diminished, and he does everything he can to get the upper hand at the beginning and to
keep it,” he says. “To intimidate and terrorize people because he doesn’t want to confront them
physically.”
The new FBI profile is part of the investigation’s reboot. In addition, Pool tells me the FBI has
provided its assessment on some crucial issues. The agency agrees with what many of the task
force investigators have long contended—that the suspect likely got his start two years earlier
and 200 miles farther south than was first believed, in Visalia, a farming town in the Central
Valley. Beginning in April 1974, Visalia experienced an unusual series of ransackings in four
residential neighborhoods. The Visalia Ransacker preferred personal effects like piggy banks,
photographs, and wedding rings, leaving behind more valuable items.
Then on September 11, 1975, the 16-year-old daughter of Claude Snelling, a journalism
professor at College of the Sequoias, was awakened by a man’s hand covering her nose and
mouth. “You’re coming with me. Don’t scream or I’ll stab you,” the ski-masked intruder
whispered. He led her out the back door. Snelling, alerted by the noise, ran onto the patio. “Hey,
what are you doing?” he shouted. “Where are you taking my daughter?”
The intruder didn’t reply. He raised a .38-caliber handgun and shot Snelling in the chest,
mortally wounding him, and then kicked the daughter three times in the face before running
away. He was a white male, about five feet ten, with “angry” eyes, the daughter reported to
police.
A stolen gun strongly pointed to the Visalia Ransacker. On December 10 detective Bill
McGowen startled the Ransacker outside a house he’d targeted three times before, and a
chase ensued. When McGowen fired a warning shot, the ski-masked suspect raised his hands
in surrender.
“Hey, OK, don’t hurt me,” he said in a squeaky voice, reaching with one hand to peel off his
mask. But it was a mime trick; with his other hand he fired a shot at McGowen. The bullet
shattered McGowen’s flashlight, sending shards into his eyes. The Ransacker jumped a fence
and escaped. The plundering in Visalia stopped. Months later the East Area Rapist attacks in
Sacramento began.
Pool tells me the FBI ran an actuarial study and concluded last year that there’s an 85 percent
chance the Golden State Killer is still alive.
I peg Pool as someone who prioritizes procedure and would accuse me of overstepping with my
impulsive cuff links purchase. But I take a chance at the end of our conversation and reach into
my backpack for the Ziploc bag. I nudge the cuff links across the conference table. He takes the
bag and examines it carefully.
“For me?” he asks, stone faced.
“Yes,” I say and begin to explain why I bought them.
I catch the slightest hint of a smile. “You’ve made me very happy,” he says. “In fact, I think I love
you.”
A few days later Pool ascertains that the cuff links are not the same pair after all. But it doesn’t
matter, as he has a more promising lead, one in which he needs the public’s help. It turns out
that having such a far-reaching, complicated case has its rewards: The many jurisdictions
means there are multiple property rooms to go back to in search of old evidence, to dig through
for clues stored years ago and forgotten.
That’s exactly what Paul Holes, the chief of the Contra Costa Crime Lab who helped develop
the DNA profile, was looking for in his property room, and he found it in a sealed bag marked
“collected at railroad tracks”—a clue overlooked and ignored. After all, it was a parking ticket
that eventually revealed Berkowitz was the Son of Sam.
In his office Pool taps at his computer keyboard, calling up an image that can’t load fast enough.
It shocks me how quickly I lean in, primed to memorize everything I see. I realize how hungry I
am for new information about the bogeyman who’s wormed his way into every corridor of my
brain.
A faded, hand-drawn map pops up on the screen. Hand drawn, the police believe, by the
Golden State Killer.
BACK TO THE BOARD
One of the more compelling online sleuths I’ve met through the message board is a 30-year-old
guy from South Florida whom I call the Kid. He has a bachelor’s degree in multimedia studies
and, he’s hinted, a somewhat troubled home life. He holds what he vaguely describes as “a
McJob,” but the message board is a full-time endeavor. Details matter to him. He’s smart,
meticulous, and occasionally brusque. He’s also, in my opinion, the case’s greatest amateur
hope. He first got my attention when he made the point that if you trace the linear distance from
the Irvine pizza place—where shortly before her murder Janelle Cruz got a cashier job—to her
house, and then from her house to Manuela Witthuhn’s house (the Golden State Killer’s other
Irvine victim), you get an almost perfect equilateral triangle. It’s not a large area, covering a
couple of miles at most. Somewhere in that triangle, the Kid theorized, lived the killer.
“You’re one of my favorite posters,” I wrote the Kid one day, and a correspondence began. Like
Deadheads trading concert tapes, he sends me a PDF of the 1983 Orange County telephone
directory; I send him a criminal record he’s looking for. We run down information on each other’s
favorite suspects.
“Too tall,” I write. The killer was between five feet eight and five feet ten.
“Hirsute,” the Kid comments. (The killer was not.)
We both agree geography is key. There are only so many white males born between, say, 1943
and 1959 who lived or worked in Sacramento, Santa Barbara County, and Orange County from
1976 to 1986. Of those locations, most followers of the case agree that Sacramento, where the
killer officially started his crime spree (unless it was indeed Visalia), is the ripest area to mine for
clues, beginning with the rapes.
I message the Kid about a possible suspect I’d uncovered. The man has an address history in
Sacramento, Goleta, and Orange County. I had found a photo of his car that he’d posted online.
The vanity license plate interested me—it alluded to building model aircraft, a hobby that some
had speculated the killer might be into. Now in his fifties, the man would be about the right age. I
all but had him in handcuffs.
“Haven’t done anything with that name in a while,” the Kid writes back politely. Included in his
message is the image of a dour nerd in a sweater vest, my suspect’s sophomore-year picture,
which the Kid already had on file. “Not in my top tier,” he writes. I am chastened—and
impressed.
While I share the Kid’s passion, I don’t have his skills. He’s an exceptional data miner. By his
calculation he’s spent 4,000 hours scouring everything from old directories to yearbooks to
online data aggregators in order to compile what he calls “the Master List.” When I first saw the
list, its thoroughness left me agape. It is a 118-page document with some 2,000 names and
information, including dates of birth, address histories, criminal records, and even photos when
available. There’s an index, footnotes. There are notations under some names (“dedicated
cycling advocate”) that seem nonsensical unless you know, as we do, far too much about a
possibly dead serial killer who was last active when Ronald Reagan was president.
The truth is, even the Kid is a little fuzzy on his motivation. “It’s the unidentified nature of EAR
that intrigues me more than anything else,” he writes me. “For no particular noble or tidy reason,
I want to know who EAR/ONS is.”
“At some point I’ll have to walk away from all this and move on with my life,” he says. Which is
why he opts for the monthly billing cycle rather than the annual service on Ancestry.com.
“I hope to hell I’m not still doing this a year from now,” he had written me—a year and a half
ago.
Not everyone admires the board sleuths or their efforts. One agitator came on recently to fume
about what he characterized as wanna-be cops with a twisted, pathetic obsession. He accused
the board of being populated by untrained meddlers with an unhealthy interest in rape and
murder.
“WALTER MITTY DETECTIVE,” he wrote.
By then I was convinced one of the Mittys was probably going to solve this thing.
THE NOTEBOOK
Trails. building. A lake. It looks like a rough map of a planned community; in fact, that’s what
Pool and other investigators believe it is.
The notebook pages were collected at the scene of a rape in Danville, in Contra Costa County,
in December 1978 by a now-deceased criminalist. The Golden State Killer, who was then
known as the East Area Rapist, was definitely the offender. Shoe prints and two independent
bloodhounds established his exit route, a trail that led from the victim’s house to some nearby
railroad tracks.
The paperwork, which is referred to as “the homework evidence,” was collected at the location
where the trail stopped abruptly, indicating the rapist got into a vehicle. Investigators believe he
dropped the pages unintentionally, perhaps while rooting around in a bag or opening his car
door. They are on standard college-rule paper, three-hole punch, ripped from a notebook but
with the spring binding intact. The first page appears to be a homework assignment on General
Custer (“General George Armstrong Custer, a man well admired but a man hated very much by
many who served him”).
The second page has the feeling of a journal entry or therapy exercise, an angry, resentful
screed about the author’s memories of sixth grade. “Mad is the word,” it begins. The author
recalls how he got in trouble in school and his teacher made him write sentences over and over
again, a humiliating experience. “I never hated anyone as much as I did him,” the author writes
of the unnamed teacher.
The third page is the hand-drawn map. Investigators examined the unusual markings on the
land area and figured out they represented a change of grade and elevation for drainage
purposes. Roofing is also an apparent interest: The two symbols on the bottom right are
standard indicators showing left- and right-side elevations of a house, suggesting rooflines.
Further analysis led investigators to believe the mapmaker possibly dabbled in landscape
architecture, civil engineering, or land-use planning. They’ve tried unsuccessfully to find the
area depicted on the map. Pool believes the drawing resembles Golden State’s preferred attack
neighborhood, and that it’s a fantasy.
On the back of the map, amid a series of doodles and girls’ names, is the word punishment
scrawled hard in black pen with the letter p written backward. Right above the word punishment,
in faint handwriting, are the words “Come from Snelling.” At least that’s what Pool believes. It’s
the last name of the man murdered in Visalia.
Pool and fellow investigator Holes are allowing me to publish this piece of evidence for the first
time, to accompany this article, in the hopes that it will jog someone’s memory—not unlike what
happened when a man recognized his brother’s extreme ideology in a manifesto released to the
media by police, which led authorities to the Unabomber.
I need to locate the area represented by the map, analyze the handwriting, and research the
references it contains. On the night I review the notebook, I have two thoughts: One, what a
promising lead this is for the case. And two, is this ever going to end?
NEW WORLD
I’ve always been a restless, jittery sleeper, prone to waking with a start. One night I’d fallen
asleep after reading the Original Night Stalker police files. The bedroom door creaked open. I
heard footsteps in the dark. Without thinking, I grabbed the lamp on my nightstand, leaped from
bed, and lunged at the figure in the room. It was my husband. When we discussed the incident
later, what was curious to us both is that I didn’t scream. In fact, I didn’t even swing the lamp. I
just asked a question: “Who are you?”
It was the only question I had anymore.
The world has changed for the Golden State Killer in ways he could never have predicted. We
know from the tennis shoe impressions under windows and how, for example, he knew exactly
when one victim would be home alone even though her husband had just changed shifts the
day before, that he was a voyeur at a time when physically standing in front of a window was
the only way to stalk. But if he’s alive, he’s growing old in a world where every day more and
more windows are opening around him—on computers, on smart phones, in DNA labs.
He couldn’t have predicted that one day we’d be able to identify people by a single skin cell or
that a quarter of a century after his last known crime, a stranger in Florida—who’s never been to
Sacramento and wasn’t born when the rapes began—could painstakingly cycle through a dozen
public records aggregators, narrowing down the possibilities, zeroing in on his name.
The Kid’s list reminded me of something he and I had connected over from the beginning. What
drew us to this mystery, we both agreed, was that it can be solved. Technology has made that
possible. I may not have what it takes to do so, but someone out there does.
I wonder at times if I need to step back. It’s not easy. Several months after our first meeting,
Pool tells me he’s decided to retire from the sheriff’s department and pursue a career in the
private sector. He will remain on the Golden State Killer investigation, however, describing the
case as “my great unfinished business.” He’s not the only veteran cop who refuses to give up.
During a family trip to Portland, I took a train trip an hour south to meet Larry Crompton, the
man whose book sparked my interest in this case, at a museum café in Salem. He hasn’t
actively worked on the investigation since the ’70s, and he retired from the Contra Costa
Sheriff’s Department in 1998. But the toll the experience took on his life is still evident. “I was
supposed to catch him. And I didn’t,” he says. “I have to live with that.”
I think of the tag line from the movie Zodiac: “There’s more than one way to lose your life to a
killer.”
Crompton is dressed in a dark blue cotton shirt and has the stiff, rugged posture of a retired cop
turned rancher. He often pauses to find the kindest way to say something. He expended great
effort trying to warn his colleagues about the East Area Rapist: that he was going to return and
attack the other teenage girl in Walnut Creek (he did), that he’d moved to Southern California
and started killing couples (did that, too).
In return for his efforts Crompton endured frustration and heartbreak, though he’s too polite to
say that directly. He recalls the damaged lives of the victims after the attacks, how many of the
husbands were riddled with guilt that they didn’t do more to fight back. The two of us sit long
enough for a distracted waitress to serve me five iced tea refills. At one point Crompton turns his
head and mutters to no one in particular, “I just want to catch him before I die.”
“If he were caught and you got to ask him one question,” I ask, “what would it be?”
He thinks for a beat and smiles mischievously. “Remember me?”
Then, becoming serious, he says, “What’d I miss?”
STOLEN LIVES
The police files depict in clinical prose the ordinariness of the victims’ lives in the moments
before the attacks—a single mom watching the last minutes of The Tonight Show in bed, a
teenager sticking a frozen pizza in the oven and setting the timer.
The Golden State Killer was a destroyer of all that was familiar and comforting to his victims.
Sex was secondary to instilling terror. It’s no accident that one of his signature threats was “I’ll
be gone in the dark.” He wasn’t a mere rapist. He was a phantom who kept his victims
perpetually frightened with the threat that he lurked, ligatures in hand, around every corner of
their unassuming tract houses.
One victim never went back inside the house where the crime took place. Another rape survivor,
victim No. 5, told me she came to despise her house. She had to stop skiing because of her
attacker’s ski mask. “And his black tennis shoes,” she said. “I’ll never forget them.” A former
nurse, she now volunteers as a rape crisis counselor. “I’ve forgiven him. He was such a heavy
burden on me for so long.”
Mad appeared to be his favorite word. Is it still? Or is he no longer the masked intruder working
the bedroom screen with a screwdriver but the father in the button-down cardigan checking the
locks on his back door?
In “Excitement’s Crave,” the poem he allegedly wrote, the Golden State Killer alludes to going
underground. “Sacramento should make an offer. / To make a movie of my life / That will pay for
my planned exile.” My bet is he’s enjoying a comfortable exile, leading an unremarkable life
among the unsuspecting. A suburban dad passing unnoticed behind the hedge wall.
The other night when I couldn’t sleep again, I opened my laptop, positioning it so as not to wake
my husband. I began studying Flickr, scrolling through Goleta Little League team photos from
1978. I couldn’t pull myself away from studying the men in the back rows, the assistant coaches,
the young dads, searching their faces for who among them might have been hiding in plain
sight, for the everyman with a baseball cap and a twisted glint in his eye.
In the past, when people have asked whether it worries me that the killer may still be out there,
I’ve waved dismissively, pointing out that he’d be much older now—62, if I had to guess. “He
can’t hurt me,” I say, not realizing that in every sleepless hour, in every minute spent hunting
him and not cuddling my daughter, he already has.
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