Yeardley:  Previously on chasing the Golden State Killer with Paul Holes. Paul walked us through the early East Area Rapist attacks and the questions investigators were trying to answer as the crimes moved from Visalia to the Sacramento area.

 In this episode, Paul takes us to Cordova Meadows, a neighborhood that becomes central to understanding the offender’s evolution.

Paul:  He leaves Exeter after he shoots Officer McGowen, he’s living in Auburn, but then he starts attacking as an East Area Rapist. And with that very first East Area Rapist attack, he attacks in this Cordova Meadows neighborhood.

Yeardley:  What may have looked random from the outside starts to hint at some similarities in Paul’s eyes. The houses, the streets, the fences, the backyards, all of them matter.

Paul:  Five of the first fifteen East Area Rapist attacks occurred in this neighborhood. This is the strongest cluster of attacks in the entirety of the Golden State Killer series.

Yeardley:  This is where the case becomes not just a list of crimes, but a map of behavior. And for Paul, understanding the geography means understanding how this offender moved around in the shadows, chose his victims, and stayed hidden.

Paul:  I spent a lot of time driving through this neighborhood going, “Why here?”

[music]

Yeardley:  Episode 3, Shadows in Cordova Meadows.

Paul:  Now that we know DeAngelo is the East Area Rapist, first thing I want to know is where was he living.

Yeardley:  When he was committing the Easter Area rapes.

Paul:  Committing the East Area Rapist cases? He’s living all the way up in Auburn, and he was working for Auburn PD when he becomes the East Area Rapist.

Yeardley:  And how far is Auburn from the area he’s terrorizing?

Paul:  So Auburn, I would say from downtown Sacramento, is about an hour drive northeast of Sacramento.

Yeardley:  Okay.

Paul:  And so he leaves Exeter after he shoots Officer McGowen. He’s living in Auburn, but then he starts attacking as the East Area Rapist. And with that very first East Area Rapist attack, he attacks in this Cordova Meadows neighborhood. And this is in Rancho Cordova, right off of Highway 50. And when we looked at DeAngelo’s past, what turns out he was living during high school in the neighborhood that’s just two blocks south of this location. And when it was announced that he had been arrested as the Golden State Killer case, a former high school buddy of his who was living in Texas at the time of the announcement of the arrest, called up Sac DA Investigator and said, “I was friends with Joe and we would burglarize houses in this very neighborhood.”

Yeardley:  Oh, my God.

Paul:  So, as a teenage boy, he’s breaking into houses where now as East Area Rapist, he’s coming back to start the East Area Rapist series. So, he’s going to the very neighborhood that he has immense familiarity with. Plus, Sergeant Ken Clark, who is a Sac sergeant, homicide, who had immense knowledge on the East Area Rapist attacks. He theorized, well, we must have some earlier fetish burglaries or something similar that was occurring in Sacramento.

 So, he worked with his records department, and they pulled out a bunch of burglaries. Ken went through them and found a whole series of cat burglaries in this very neighborhood from 1972-1973, somewhere in that time frame. And like one of the cases is one of the cases where the East Area Rapist attacked a teenage girl, this cat burglar had gone in there.

Yeardley:  Same house?

Paul:  Same house and same family that was living there. So, Ken’s pretty convinced this was DeAngelo committing these cat burglaries. And this is where earlier we’re talking about barriers to offense. Visalia Ransacker was going into unoccupied dwellings, except for when he tried to abduct Bess Snelling, but he’s going into unoccupied dwellings.

 The cat burglar is going into houses when they’re occupied. And the reason they’re known as cat burglars is because they are able to silently move through the house, because they don’t want to have the occupants wake up and see them.

 So this is a step up, and so if he’s the cat burglar, he’s actually comfortable going into occupied houses. But then later, when he becomes an Exeter cop, he’s starting out as just a fetish burg and not going into occupied houses. So, in some ways, it’s a step down, but it doesn’t eliminate those cat burglaries as being DeAngelo.

Yeardley:  Is that unusual that you’re going into occupied houses and then you sort of take a step back and go into unoccupied houses?

Paul:  I can’t say if it’s unusual or not, because this is probably the only offender in which there’s this extensive series in both realms if you were. Because there’s a significant number of these cat burglaries that Ken found. So, this is the only offender that I’m aware of where extensive series of both types of burglaries are occurring.

 I would say that in some ways, the cat burglaries are almost a training aspect for DeAngelo. And he’s getting comfortable moving through when he becomes a Visalia Ransacker. I think part of it is, now he’s got a full-time job, and when he can commit the burglaries, is going to be off shift, and oftentimes that may have prevented him from going in the middle of the night. So, speculation on my part.

Yeardley:  Paul, take us back to the neighborhood you told us about at the top of this episode.

Paul:  This Cordova Meadows neighborhood, five of the first 15 East Area Rapist attacks occurred in this neighborhood. This is the strongest cluster of attacks in the entirety of the Golden State Killer series absent Visalia Ransacker, which is just off the hook.

 So, there’s a reason why he’s attacking in this neighborhood. I spent a lot of time driving through this neighborhood going, “Why here?” Well, this neighborhood is nothing but single-story houses. The fencing in this neighborhood is like five feet tall. It’s not tall fences. We know the East Area Rapist loved to prowl through backyards. And the reason for the single-story type neighborhood is you don’t have witnesses on a second floor that can look into their neighbor’s backyard and see you wandering around prowling. So, in almost the entirety of the East Area Rapist series, all the attacks are occurring in similar type neighborhoods. Second, what is the problem with a two-story house?

Yeardley:  The fatal funnel going up the staircase, right?

Paul:  Exactly, because all the bedrooms are typically– And the victims are all going to be upstairs. And if somebody comes home or somebody enters in, he either has to go out the second-floor window or he has to go down that fatal funnel and be confronted by whoever’s coming up.

Yeardley:  Right. Or if they wake up while you enter from the ground floor and an occupant wakes up and they’re waiting for you at the top of the stairs, you’re a prime target.

Paul:  Yep.

Dave:  I think we should rename it “The Death Runway.”

Yeardley:  [Laughs] Okay, that’s fine.

Dan:  The red carpet of death.

[laughter]

Dave:  Well, you know, Yeardley and I down at the house in LA, we came up with kind of a safety plan if somebody were to break into the house. And that stairway was a big part of that plan.

Paul:  Sure.

Dave:  That’s all I’ll say.

Paul:  I remember talking to a woman who really was expressing concerns that her ex was going to come over. And not to get into too much specifics, but she did have firearms in the house. Two-story house, the instinct is to go into your kid’s room. And I was like, “Nope. You grab your gun, you post up at the top of the stairs, but be shielded if you will, and you just wait and you get on 911 if you suspect something and let the cops know that you’re in there with a gun. But if he’s going to come after you, he has to get up through those stairs and you now have him isolated in terms of his movements in case you do have to use fatal force.”

Dave:  Yeah, you don’t have to give warning shots. You got to give a warning shot, you’re like, what? No, you don’t. [Laughter]

Yeardley:  Did the suspect give you one before he shot you through the heart?

Dan:  That’s the thing is, like, it’s all up to what you articulate. You know, we’ve already said who breaks into an occupied dwelling. You’re not there just to steal some stuff. You’re there to interact with the people. And so, I have to assume that you have good intentions. No, sorry. You already broke the barrier. So, you get to answer any of my questions.

Paul:  So the other notable thing about this neighborhood is there’s no street lamps.

Yeardley:  Why is that?

Paul:  They didn’t build a neighborhood with no street lamps.

Yeardley:  What the? Do they have them now?

Paul:  Now, when you drive around, what is stunning is the number of bright security lights that have been installed definitely after the East Area Rapist, or probably during the East Area Rapist attacks, but there are no street lamps. So, this was like the perfect prowling neighborhood.

 And of course, with his familiarity from his high school years and possibly from the cat burglary years, he’s now going, “I am now a rapist. I’m going to sexually assault these women.” He is going to a familiar area.

 So, two of the early cases, and I’ve already talked about them, are the first and third attacks. And these are the two cases in which the East Area Rapist that shows up nude from the waist down. But it’s interesting is that the locations of these two cases, they’re only a couple houses apart. And these houses back up to other houses that are on a cul de sac. One of the houses that was in the rear cul de sac was vacant for most of the time leading up to these attacks.

 And then a renter moved into that house. That renter living in the house started to hear somebody jumping over his rear fence to get to the houses in which the victims houses were along. And he would come out and sometimes these fence boards, you know how they’re nailed in and they’d be pushed away as the guy jumps up over them. At one point, the renter is getting so sick of somebody using his backyard to get through like a shortcut, he ends up nailing his gate shut. And then the East Area Rapist comes. And I’m pretty sure it’s East Area Rapist kicks the gate open in the middle of the night, like, “How dare you try to block me from going through here?”

Yeardley:  Oh, my God.

[music]

Dave:  The layout of these neighborhoods, they’re not straight shot like laid out like a grid.

Paul:  Right.

Dave:  These blocks are curved. They have little offshoot courts and cul de sacs that go off of them. So, from a patrol standpoint, thinking about, okay, dispatch is putting out a call right now that there is just a home invasion, sexual assault that happened in this neighborhood. And you think about it from a patrol perspective going into that neighborhood, thinking, okay, there are time delay from suspect leaving to getting on the phone. Now I’ve got to expand this out to eight or nine blocks at least. And in these neighborhoods, a lot of the roads are curved.

 So, when we set up perimeters, we want to see as far in two or three directions as we can. And in these neighborhoods, in some cases, you’re looking down the street, but it bends 100 yards later and so you don’t have the same capabilities from a personnel standpoint to cover a true perimeter in this neighborhood because you have to have too many cops to look at all the intersections.

Paul:  Yeah, you don’t have line of sight.

Dave:  Exactly. It’s really challenging to set up any sort of perimeter in these neighborhoods.

Dan:  These streets are kind of L shaped and they’re parallel. If you think about an L stacked on top of another L. And as a K9 officer coming into an area and trying to set up a perimeter would be a nightmare in that neighborhood.

Paul:  And of course, with DeAngelo being in law enforcement, he most certainly probably has a pretty good understanding how the sheriff’s office is going to respond once the call comes in that there’s been an attack.

Dave:  Yeah. What it is, is you’re doing an area check. When you go into those types of call calls, patrol’s going to send one officer to the victim location, get as much information out as you can, but everybody else is kind of mobile in this neighborhood. And if you think about that, that means they’re just driving their cars around, which means if you’re on foot and you’re the suspect, there’s infinite hiding spots if you just stay off the concrete.

Paul:  Sure. One of the other notable things that I noticed about these houses is– some of these houses, they look fairly close together. And the windows are up high like the bedroom windows that are in the backyard area. And I noticed that if I jumped over the fence in between these two houses and just kept low, the people in either house would never be able to see me. Plus, nobody from the street, like, patrol would be able to see me. So, if he sees patrol in the distance, he just goes dunk over the fence and ducks down low and he’s completely hidden.

Dave:  Yep. I used to love these types of area checks. I didn’t have a Joseph DeAngelo in our jurisdiction, but it was always a challenge, like, I got to think like the criminal. So, there were times where you just kind of sit back, darked out, stay put, and just look for movement. And those are the times somebody thinks the coast is clear. They don’t see headlights or they don’t hear engines coming up and down the road and then they’re like, “It’s safe. I can poke my head out.” And you’re like, “Oh, there he is.” I got somebody who just came out of this yard mid-block of this street, and then everyone kind of shrinks it down.

Yeardley:  That’s cool.

Paul:  Yeah, that’s very cool. So, the East Area Rapist is now active, and he’s starting to attack. And it really isn’t after eight attacks until Sacramento authorities are going, “Oh, we have another predator in addition to these other rapists.” And press is starting to become aware of that this rapist is active in the Sacramento area.

Yeardley:  And just as a reminder to our listeners, we’re now in the middle of October 1976.

Paul:  Yes. So, by the time the seventh attack rolls around. You’re right, Yeardley, it’s in October of 1976. I pulled this attack out because it really shows a level of compulsion, and people think that dogs will scare away offenders. This did not work with DeAngelo. And in fact, I will tell you that there’s examples throughout the series where the owners, they would have a dog inside the house, and the victims would say, “That dog always barks at strange men, and that dog would just be sitting there quiet and hunkered down.” And I believe DeAngelo was doing some negative training ahead of time with some of these dogs. And ultimately, we know that DeAngelo was arrested. And what was he arrested for? Shoplifting, dog repellent and a hammer.

Yeardley:  And just to confirm, that arrest that you’re talking about, Paul, is the one that happened in 1979. DeAngelo was a few years into his stint as an Auburn police officer at the time, but that arrest was actually just for shoplifting, nothing else, right?

Paul:  Yes. So, is he coming up ahead of time? And when that dog comes at him, he sprays him, and he just gives that negative reinforcement.

Yeardley:  I see. So, then the dog would recognize DeAngelo again and be like, “I don’t mess with that guy.”

Paul:  Yeah, that dog is like, I don’t want any of that.

Dave:  Door’s open.

Yeardley:  Come on in.

Paul:  Yep. We know in Cordova Meadows, his high school friend that was committing burglary said at one point a dog lunged at DeAngelo and DeAngelo had like the equivalent of an M-80 firecracker, threw it under to the dog and killed the dog.

Yeardley:  What?

Paul:  And then we have another situation down in Santa Barbara where a German Shepherd was off leash and went behind a house and the owner of the dog hears a yelp and comes back and the dog has been slit up its abdomen.

Yeardley:  God damn, this guy.

Paul:  But with the seventh attack, you know, this is a really nice neighborhood that’s north of that Cordova Meadows, kind of northwest of that Cordova Meadows attack across the American river. There’s a 32-year-old mom living in the house and she’s with her 10-year-old son.

 Ten-year-old son has the family dog in his room and that dog just starts going crazy. So, he lets the dog out of the room. The dog runs to the rear sliding door and is just barking. So, the 10-year-old boy looks out and sees a masked man in the yard. So, he lets his dog out and the dog chases the man and he last sees the East Area Rapist get on top of the fence looking down at the dog while the dog is jumping up.

Yeardley:  This is the boy who sees this?

Paul:  The boy sees this. You know, this is a nice neighborhood. So of course, the neighbors are probably going, “Why is there a dog going crazy?” So, the boy goes and gets mom. They go to the phone in the kitchen to dial the operator and next thing they know, this masked man, East Area Rapist, is inside the house and he’s basically telling him, “Get this dog the hell away from me.” And he proceeds to bind up the mom and the 10-year-old boy.

 He puts the boy in his own bedroom on his bed, bound up and then goes out and cuts the clothing off the mom. And ends up in this particular case, while he’s starting the sexual assault process and she’s been rendered nude, he’s taking a knife and running it up and down her body. And so early psychologists that were consulted by investigators said he is fantasizing about killing.

 So, very early on, Sacramento is now recognizing, oh, this is a serious offender and if we don’t stop him, he’s going to escalate to homicide.

Dave:  That kind of dog alert and chaos in the middle of a suspect trying to commit a burglary, most suspects would ditch the attempt right there and move on or come back another night, but he’s not even deterred. He’s like, this is just a challenge now.

Paul:  This is the point that I make. You know, first I talked about, okay, you think the dogs are going to be a deterrent? Well, in this case, the dog was assessed by the East Area Rapist, by DeAngelo, and he ended up probably evaluating the current state of the neighborhood and was like, “Nope, I’m still going to do this.” But it also shows a level of compulsion. And in this particular case, she’s a very attractive, very well-built woman.

Yeardley:  This is the mom?

Paul:  This is the mom. As he’s sexually assaulting her, he’s engaging in some level of conversation and is telling her how beautiful she is. And so, it’s possible she’s somebody that he saw ahead of time. Now, her house happened to open up to open space. And it appears that he drove a vehicle and parked in this open space, kind of an off road, undeveloped area that at one point I think they were looking at possibly putting a freeway in, but they weren’t successful in doing that development. But she tries to engage in some psychology. It’s Jesus loves you. As soon as she would talk to him through clenched teeth, he would just go, “Shut up. Shut.” I mean, he typically would do that when the victims would try to engage with him verbally, it was, “Shut up, shut up.” He would not allow them to talk. And there is some thought that possibly he was concerned that maybe he would start feeling some empathy and didn’t want them to personalize themselves to him.

Yeardley:  I mean, that seems dead on to me. Of course, he doesn’t want to be drawn into any other scenario than the one he’s creating in that moment.

Paul:  Yeah. And if I remember correctly, at one point, I think she asks him about why he’s got the mask on. And in this case, he says, “Well, something happened to my face. I don’t want you to see it. No.” Now that we’ve actually caught who this is, he’s just lying. He’s feeding the information to the victim. And I’m going to circle back around to that tactic that DeAngelo used in a little bit.

[music]

 So, he carries out this compulsive attack. This attack occurred at 02:30 in the morning, spends about three hours with mom and the son. And the son, he would come in and flip the light on in his bedroom while the son is bound in his bed. But now with the light on in the bedroom, the son is looking at him. And through the ski mask he could see the offender’s eyes. And the son said, “No, he’s got blue eyes.” And I know we would debate this well, because we had victims give descriptions and it was dark eyes, light eyes, green eyes, it’s like, well, what is it? And here’s a 10-year-old boy, obviously traumatized, is he providing accurate information? Well, it turns out he did, DeAngelo has blue eyes.

Dave:  Good on that 10-year-old.

Paul:  Yeah. So, after committing that attack, the day goes by and then at 11 o’clock at night, we have another kind of attack. And this one I spent a lot of time on. This was a 19-year-old girl, in essence, that would go to her boyfriend’s house routinely. So, she establishes a life pattern. And then this night she goes to the boyfriend’s house, drives into this neighborhood, does a U-turn like she always does, and parks on the side of her house, which is a corner house.

 She’s got her family dog, older dog, in the vehicle with her. And she has some items on the front passenger seat that she turns around to gather up before going into the house. When she does that, her driver’s door is yanked open and she is literally pulled out of the car. She starts to struggle and this man puts a knife up to her side and she’s recognizing, “I got to comply.”

 The man is described as wearing a ski mask and having a trench coat on it. And it appears that he has some sort of dark stain on the ski mask, you know, like did he have a bloody nose or something? So, he pulls her away from her car, around the rear corner of her yard to a house where he binds her hands behind her back and then pulls her around the corner of the street two houses down and lays her down where he’s already pre-staged bindings on the ground. And the source of those bindings were the clothesline from her family’s backyard.

 So, he now gets her bound ankles, hands behind her back, and he’s standing over her and he’s got her keys. And she said he was just jingling the keys above her as if he were debating on what he wanted to do. And then ultimately, he abandons. He steals her car with the dog in the it, but only drives a few blocks. And I believe he drove to a location where he had parked his car or at least near enough to where now he could get to his car rapidly and as we now know, probably drive back home to Auburn.

Dan:  You kind of wonder why he aborted there. Like a neighbor’s light comes on, something startled him.

Paul:  And this is also where, instead of being inside a house, he’s now attacking outside the house. And so, there’s a level of experimentation, and I’ll kind of talk about how this pattern evolves over the next few cases. But at the same time, her brother and father, who were both at work, would typically come home right after she got home. So, he has been surveilling her and is going, “I can’t take her into her own house or even into her own backyard because family is coming home.” He knew what was going on. So, I literally had sat in my car where she used to park, and I’m looking around at the houses going, “Okay, where was East Area Rapist posted up to watch this victim? And why this victim?”

Yeardley:  And we never find out?

Paul:  No, but one of my last prime suspects had an association with this victim and I will talk about that.

Yeardley:  Okay.

Dave:  Yeah. Especially at night and between houses. Once you get beyond that front threshold of a building and you get into the little alleyway between the two houses, pitch black. Unless you got your little rolling spotlight as you roll by, you aren’t going to see anything.

Paul:  And we knew the East Area Rapist, he knew how to work the shadows. We would have witnesses. They’d be, like, out front. Just happened to see a man kind of walk past them. And then they would look, and that man is gone. They said like, “He just disappeared.” That’s East Area Rapist going, “Oh, shit, I just got seen,” and then he just poof, He’s up fence line, in bushes or behind trees. He is literally doing these disappearing acts.

Dan:  This is exactly how we are trained as police officers also. My FTO, my field training officer, also named Dan, great man. Very early in my training when we would approach a house for a domestic violence call, a dispute, whatever, unknown problem, didn’t matter. When, you park down the street and you don’t walk down the sidewalk or the street to the house, you walk in people’s yards, and you use the shadows as concealment.

Paul:  There you go. And here you have DeAngelo being a trained law enforcement officer who worked patrol and probably developed some of those same tactics.

Dan:  Yeah, 100%.

Paul:  Okay, so the very next case, and this is now East Area Rapist, or [unintelligible] EAR #9, happens few weeks later. Now we’re in November of 1976, and this is where he starts a pattern of three cases in a row where instead of going into a house in the middle of the night, he’s going into the house in the evening time and attacking teenage girls who have been left home alone. And with these cases, what he’s doing is instead of attacking them inside the house, in terms of actually sexually assaulting them in the house, he’s pulling them outside.

Yeardley:  To the backyard or something?

Paul:  To the backyard or similar. And this one is probably the most interesting based on some of the details I’m going to get into now, is that there’s a 16-year-old girl who’s home alone. Her parents had just left to go visit their son who had been hospitalized. So, the parents are out of the house.

 The girl is supposed to go out on a date with her boyfriend. I think she was in the middle of preparing herself a little dinner in the kitchen when she turns around and now there’s this masked man inside the house. He ends up proceeding to take her outside and gets her bound up and immobilized outside her house, goes back in, turns the TV off, puts the window screen that he had pried off back on, locks the front door and leaves and goes and grabs her.

 He then walks her about 200 yards down this concrete lined culvert to an opening that is isolated and he cuts her clothes off. Initially, when this case was reported, she did not disclose about the sexual assault. And then as an adult, when she was re-interviewed, she did disclose, “Yes, he did sexually assault me.”

 Parents come home, house is locked up, TV is off. They know their daughter’s supposed to be out on a date. They have no idea what has happened, so they just go about their normal routine. This case, the daughter being a victim isn’t found out until the neighbor sees this daughter who had now gotten out of her, at least her ankle bindings, running down the street crying and she was nude. And that’s how the parents found out their daughter was a victim of East Area Rapist.

 But think about what this offender is doing or what DeAngelo’s doing. He knew what was going to happen inside that house. How did he know that this is where he is doing some pretty sophisticated surveillance to get to those types of details. And I was starting to think, “Well, I know he’s going into some of these houses ahead of time. Is there a chance that he’s bugging the phones and is listening to conversations that way? Is he just kind of out listening through the windows or family just out on the porch talking?”

[music]

 One of the things that I found out about as I was talking to certain experts, this was an era when residential houses were starting to get these cordless phones and these cordless phones at this time, they weren’t encrypted, they were basically walkie talkies. And one expert told me, he goes, “Yeah, with those types of phones you get that old style FM radio, you crank the dial up past 108 and you can now tune in to all the phone conversations that are occurring in this neighborhood.” When I talk to groups, I think, well that sounds just kind of like “No way, that’s not happening.”

 Well, down in Santa Barbara, when this offender moves down to Santa Barbara, there’s a case in which a girl sees a masked man or hears a masked man trying to get into her bedroom window. She screams out, dad comes running, man is gone, he abandons. But out on the front curb is a hatchet and an FM radio. So that just further supported, you know. Somebody like DeAngelo would possibly take advantage of that. I don’t know if he had scanners in his vehicles.

Yeardley:  Like police scanners and stuff?

Paul:  Right, and I think you guys talked about having similar things with walkie talkies, listening to these phone conversations.

Dave:  Yeah, it was what, mid-90s and Dan and I were in junior college, early 1990s, 1990s something. And we used to be able to hear, we had little walkie talkies I believe, but we would be able to hear other people in the apartment complex, their conversations. I mean like you’re on the call yourself, pretty uncanny.

 But what I was noticing about this slide is I think when I think about the Golden State Killer at large is that these attacks are happening midnight, 2 o’clock in the morning. East Area Rapist victim #9, 05:30 in the afternoon, evening. I mean it’s November in California. I’m guessing it’s probably getting dark around then and he’s doing it when people are getting home from work.

Paul:  Sure. Yeah, that’s a good observation and he does three of these in a row. So, for whatever reason you have the 19-year-old girl that he’s pulling out of her car, so he’s attacking her in the open and now he’s pulling these victims like three in a row, teenage girls, out into the open. In this particular case, he’s possibly aware the parents are going to be coming back from visiting the son. I can’t spend much time with her inside the house.

Dave:  Right. Yeah, it’s interesting how many times he would have walked that culvert from where they ended up all the way to the house and really figuring out where’s a good spot that I have some privacy and people aren’t going to be able to see or hear.

Paul:  Right. And there’s another several cases that I haven’t selected in terms of like the presentation that I give, but there was two victims houses that were right around the corner from each other. There was like a park area that led to a school, but there was a similar type culvert between these two victims’ houses. And the first victim that he attacked between these two, she just happened to be at her parents’ house and she didn’t live there, but she brought her laundry to do her laundry at her parents’ house. Nothing planned, this was just– Nothing that anybody could observe ahead of time. And he attacks her and actually pulls her into her parents’ house and sexually assaults her. This is an example of an absolute victim of opportunity. And I believe he was in that culvert prowling and he sees her and he’s now assessing, “I think I can do this.”

Dave:  Yeah. Never know who’s walking around your neighborhood.

Yeardley:  Right. So, jumping ahead a little bit to the 14th attack, and this is now in March of 1977. This is an interesting case on multiple levels. First, this is the oldest victim in the entire series. She was 38 years old. Second is, where her house was located is the most geographically isolated of all the attacks up in Sacramento.

 In many of the attacks, he is doing multiple cases in the same neighborhood, pretty close together. This one is just absolutely away from all the others. So, there’s something that is drawing him out. And this may be a victim that he sees at a mall and follows her and has decided that she’s going to become a victim, that may be the reason for the isolation.

 But one of the oddities in this case is that after she’s been bound and she’s been blindfolded during the interactions he’s having with her, she feels him squeeze on her thumb and she just thought, that’s weird. What’s he doing? So, once he leaves and she’s able to get the blindfolds off, she looks at her thumb and it’s got blood on it and she has no bleeding injuries. So, he purposefully left blood on her thumb. It was sort of like, “Why do that?”

Yeardley:  Do you have a theory?

Dave:  It’s the squeeze of the thumb to let her know.

Paul:  He’s letting her know I’m doing this.

Yeardley:  It’s deliberate.

Paul:  Yeah. It was not just sort of a casual touching. So, this is where Ken Clark from Sac Sheriff and I, we talked about this and we go, “There’s something special about this victim to him.”

 Well, that is further emphasized that– she’s attacked in 1976, 24 years later, he calls her and he just says, “Remember when we played?”

Dan:  it’s so evil.

Paul:  It even gets more devious, because when he calls her is the day after the Sacramento Bee published the article of the DNA link I made between the East Area Rapist series and the homicides down in Southern California. So, now this article is saying “The East Area Rapists isn’t just rapist, he is a killer.” And he calls her up the next day to let her know he is still around. She had remarried, so her last name was different. She had moved all the way across town. And at the time, her listed phone number was under her new husband’s name.

Yeardley:  And even though the listed phone number was under her new husband’s name, it was not the same phone number she’d had back in 1977.

Paul:  That’s correct.

Yeardley:  So everything is different. Somehow, he’s tracking all that time.

Paul:  He has kept track of at least her. And I believe he’s probably kept track of other victims because there’s other victims that receive phone calls from him.

Yeardley:  Years later.

Paul:  Sometimes– Years later, but this one was the most extreme in terms of the amount of time that had passed.

Dave:  And the timing.

Paul:  Yes.

[music]

Yeardley: Coming up on Chasing the Golden State Killer with Paul Holes. The East Area Rapist changes his approach. The attacks become more technical, and a local town hall meeting may have placed one man directly in the offender’s path.

Paul:  In this article it says, “The East Air Rapist has never attacked while there was a man in the home.” So, he has already thought, “how can I attack with a man present but minimize risk to myself.”

Yeardley:  It sounds like this man was chosen because of the comment he made.

Paul:  Yes. So, this is showing that vindictive personality.

Yeardley:  That’s coming up on Chasing the Golden State Killer with Paul Holes.

 Small Town Dicks Presents Chasing the Golden State Killer with Paul Holes is an Audio 99 production. It’s written by Paul Holes and features Detective Dan, Detective Dave and me, Yeardley Smith. The series is produced by Jessica Halstead and Monika Scott. Executive produced by Ben Cornwell and me. Edited by Katie McMurran and Soren Begin with additional editing by Christina Bracamontes. Sound supervision by Logan Heftel. Design and social media by Andrew Polk. The theme music is composed by Logan Heftel.

 If you’d like to support the making of this podcast, please go to smalltowndicks.com/superfam and hit that little join button. Also, you can stream all episodes @smalltowndicks.com/goldenstatekiller. From all of us at Audio 99, thank you. Thank you for listening.

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