How’d you get like this?
*
One night, I’m talking to my three older siblings—Linda, Karen, and Lee—about our proximity to heinous crimes and mysterious deaths over the years.
We talk about our neighbors in Oakland who plunged to their death off an icy mountain road on Thanksgiving, 1972. Husband, wife, two children, a lone surviving son. A tragedy. Forty-nine years ago now. They’re buried across from our grandparents in a Jewish cemetery in Portland. Whenever I’m up there, I leave a stone on their graves, though I have no memory of them, just a memory of the story. “Mom said it was a mob hit or a murder-suicide,” Karen says and we all sort of agree: That was a thing Mom said. But looking online now, it seems like it was just a car accident.
“And then there was the serial killer who murdered everyone at the house next door to us in Capitola,” Lee says.
Wait. What?
And then the outlines of a vague memory start to filter in. This was that period when the greater Santa Cruz region was home to several working serial killers, the most notable being Ed Kemper, who had a brief resurgence of national interest a few years ago for his portrayal on the HBO show Mindhunter. But Kemper didn’t kill our neighbors. It was one of the other guys. My brother says this was when we had a vacation house on the river—which is actually Soquel Creek—before we moved into the painted houses that front the ocean, the houses you think of when you think of Capitola, if you ever do. We showed up one weekend and the house next door was taped off, cops and media everywhere, bodies pulled out in bags.
Just one of those things.
Not that I have any memory of this. Could have happened before I was born, in fact. Because when I go looking up the crime, it fits the description of a killing that happened in 1970—a year before I was born—plus one in 1972 and another in 1973. No one remembers our exact address and Lee only remembers that hippies or hitchhikers might have been involved, which, in context, doesn’t really help.
*
Lock the door, my mom says, unless you want the East Bay Rapist to break in.
It’s the mid-1970s and then the early 80s. We live in Walnut Creek, the kind of bedroom community in the Bay Area that, in a few decades, will become so expensive to live in that it’s hard to imagine a single mother of four, working as a journalist at the Contra Costa Times, could have ever afforded a house here, even back when she was married to our dad, who worked in TV news. But he’s long gone, a voice on the phone every few years. I know the Zodiac Killer as well as I know him.
But then the Zodiac is a more pressing concern.
I’m profoundly dyslexic, so when I try to write, it’s all symbols and letters and everything is backwards. Words for me are a jumble of angles and points. I see them one way in my head. I see them another way when I try to write them. The frustration is so profound, I find myself doing things I immediately regret. Cutting little hunks of flesh from my stomach. Peeling skin from my toes. Biting things and people I shouldn’t bite. One day, my mom is on the phone with someone and I hear her say, “It’s like he’s the Zodiac. Nothing makes sense when he writes. I don’t know what to do.”
But back to the East Bay Rapist.
You know him now as the Golden State Killer. Back then, he had several different names. The East Bay Rapist is what we called him in Contra Costa County. The East Area Rapist is what they called him up in Sacramento. Before that he was the Visalia Ransacker. Afterward, he became the Night Stalker, then the Original Night Stalker, after Richard Ramirez co-opted his nickname, then the Diamond Knot Killer, then the Golden State Killer, and, finally, Joseph James DeAngelo, currently incarcerated at North Kern State Prison.
In the summer of 1979, he hit twice in our neighborhood. First a 17-year-old girl on El Divisadero Drive. Then a 13-year-old girl on San Pedro Court. From our house on Cochise Court, you go down Quiet Place for four blocks, then turn left on San Carlos Drive, and the houses, they’re right there, the rows of Eichler homes. Modernist dream homes built in 1959. They were neighborhood curiosities in the 1970s because they were impossible to sell, what with their double front doors, low ceilings, and spooky courtyards that became inordinately expensive and desirable in the 21st century. We’re talking million-dollar single family homes on postage stamp lots. Never discount the inflated cost of nostalgia.
How many times had we rode bikes past those addresses? Trick-or-Treated? Walked alone at night after soccer practice? Hundreds. Thousands.
So we locked the doors.
*
I had some pretty specific fears as a child. Quicksand. Lock jaw. Disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle, likely while looking for the lost city of Atlantis. Getting cancer from eating raw cookie dough.
Being abducted like Steven Stayner.
You remember Steven Stayner. He was abducted in 1972 and then escaped in 1980 with little Timmy White, after White had likewise been kidnapped. They made that movie about him. I Know My First Name Is Steven. This all happened in Northern California at the same time all this other stuff was happening. I can still see the newspapers with Steven and Timmy on the front page. For weeks, months, eventually years, their story was told across all media, that one photo of Timmy draped over Steven Stayner’s shoulders appearing everywhere. What it must have been like to go from being completely hidden to totally seen.
All that, and yet, I had a pretty normal childhood, even if I thought Toll House was trying to kill me.
I did all the normal suburban things. Soccer on Saturdays. Riding bikes to the creek to catch crawdads. Sleepovers and RISK and Dungeons & Dragons and eggings and sitting on the shag-carpeted floor listening to records and tapes and talking about the things we’d be and do. Rearranging my sister’s spoon collection to see if she’d notice. Standing in front of the gelato shop pretending to be punk, wearing a t-shirt of a band I’d never heard.
But growing up in the Bay Area also meant that from a very young age, we’d take BART into Berkeley or the City and just wander around. You remember: Holding your breath when the train went under the Bay. Being yelled at by Ferlinghetti for spilling a waxy cup of Coke on the floor of City Lights. Pizza at Blondie’s. Rummaging through the bins at Rasputin’s. That was hella cool. Did our parents even know? Or care? I guess, intellectually, I assume they must have, but in my own home, the question of where we’d been or what we’d been doing was never asked by our mother, sick as she was with lupus and an as-yet-undiagnosed (and thus unmedicated) bipolar disorder, prone to her own ultimately self-destructive fits of petty violence – she was a slapper, a thrower, a breaker, a ripper, a stomper, a scream-until-the-dogs-shit-in-the-hallway-er. A woman so lonesome that our crowded house was perpetually filled with strange men for a night or two or five or a month or he became our stepfather and then he wasn’t.
Our neighbors were good and kind people, mostly. Even now, if I close my eyes, I can see them all standing in front of their homes, frozen in polyester relief. The Hayworths. The Halls. The Hobsons. The Dalanders. The Sorensens. The Goodsons. The Ostranders. The Browns. The O’Neils, until their house burned down. There were also the Saputos, whose son was such a bad motherfucker that the rumor was he’d kicked his parents out of their master bedroom and claimed it for himself, though I can’t imagine that was true. The Schags, whose son would get high and blare Van Halen out of his second story window, until even their Doberman would get tired of hearing side one of “Diver Down” and, presumably stoned to the tips of his pointed ears, would try to crawl out the window. You could almost predict the timing of it. “Oh, Pretty Woman” would start for the third time and then you’d look outside and that fucking dog was half-way out the window, a shirtless, stoned teen with feathered hair trying to corral him back in. Up the street were our married elementary school teachers, the Pates, who were just the nicest people you could imagine, the kind of elementary school teachers they make movies about, that instill a love of reading in you, who held hands even at school, who remembered you years later when you ran into them in a mall, long after you’d moved away, all Goth’d out, your teen years a bit of a challenge once you left Walnut Creek. There was a Stephen King-level sadistic bully who lived a few blocks away, but I guess he didn’t like to ride his Mongoose uphill because he never showed up on our block and primarily left his brand of domestic terrorism for the bike racks after school or Halloween or out front of McFarland’s candy and ice cream shoppe where he’d shake you down for your stash.
One of my favorite memories of childhood was watching the Big Game—the annual football tilt between Cal and Stanford—the year of The Play and seeing my neighbor, Mariet Ford, Cal’s star receiver, right in the middle of it all, lateraling the ball to Kevin Moen, who then trucked through the Stanford band to victory. The next day, Mariet was at his parents’ house, whooping it up with friends and family, and the neighborhood kids came out in force. A Nerf football was produced and for thirty minutes, we ran The Play over and over again, right there on the street. Some real Norman Rockwell Americana shit…but also a pretty good claim to proximity-of-athletic fame, so it was a story I told all the time growing up, or whenever that highlight would be played.
Until 1997, anyway, when Mariet Ford bludgeoned his pregnant wife and toddler son to death and then burned their bodies.
*
I’ve never been the victim of violence, apart from ill-advisedly choosing the wrong people to fight when I was a drunken frat boy. I haven’t been in a fight in about thirty years, though in that time I’ve learned how to shoot guns, how to spin a car out in a chase, how to turn my Crockpot into a bomb, how to clean blood from any surface you can imagine. My bookshelf looks like I’m a crazy person: The U.S. Army & Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Guide… Combat Leaders Field Guide (13th edition)…What’s Toxic, What’s Not…On Killing…Marine Force Recon…Cause of Death…The CIA World Factbook…The Anarchist’s Cookbook. On the page, I’ve killed more people than I can count. Men, women, children. Still, statistically speaking, at this point in my life, I’m probably in pretty good shape to avoid a dramatic fate. I’m nearly fifty. I’m not a drug addict. My riskiest behavior these days involves going to Target in the middle of a pandemic and glaring at people who can’t figure out how to cover their noses with their masks.
Well, that and being a full-time troll on my NextDoor, where I like to bait racists and conspiracy theorists. Because unlike when I was a kid, I don’t actually know my neighbors personally. I only know them by the compendium of their fears: White vans, brown people, 5G towers, mysterious forces stealing their Trump signs, socialism, immigrants, George Soros, people who don’t pick up after their dogs, short-term renters.
Don’t poke these people, my wife says. They know where you live!
What’s the worst that could happen?
*
It’s 2000 and my wife and I buy a house in a small town in the Coachella Valley, near Palm Springs. I’d gone to high school in Palm Springs after my mom moved us from the Bay Area so she could take a job as a gossip columnist at the local newspaper, which primarily meant she went to parties for a living and dated mid-level criminals—the kinds of guys who did Ponzi schemes, robbed banks, emptied out the bank accounts of old ladies, things like that—or retired mobsters, living out their golden years poolside, the bullet holes in their gut healed over but still, wow, those are some scars.
But before I make back to the Coachella Valley, my wife and I live for a few years in Las Vegas, which is a nice place to live if you’re a DJ or like to smoke in grocery stores. This was not a great period in our lives. I owned several shiny shirts and one long, leather duster, like I was Donnie Brasco. We spent a lot of time drinking in bars until the sun came up. We’d pull up to our condo as our neighbors were taking their kids to school. And even though it was Las Vegas, where everyone makes terrible choices, our neighbors still seemed to view us with real skepticism. Maybe they were right, because one morning we’re at a bar called Big Dogs with our friends, who are rolling on about thirty different substances, and who are having a conversation that primarily involves how they’ll outwit the cops having breakfast near us—it was the kind of bar that had a really good breakfast; it’s Vegas, just go with it—to make it to their cars and we both came to realize, at exactly the same moment: We need to get the fuck out of Las Vegas.
Our house is behind a gate on a giant manmade lake, which is our new, permanent speed. The community has an absurd name: Laguna De La Paz. It means “lagoon of peace.” Is that a thing? I don’t know. What I can tell you is that while our home is lovely, the community is infested with Norwegian roof rats and real estate agents. The roof rats operate through a network of fruit trees and low walls, traversing between houses like they’re on I-5. One day, your house is a tranquil haven far from the maddening world. The next, your attic and your walls are filled with rats. If you set up twenty traps around the perimeter of your house, you’d wake up in the morning with twenty dead rats, but you’d be no closer to eradicating the problem.
The real estate agents are just as insidious. Each morning, you’d see them pulling out of their garages, their smiling faces plastered on jaunty magnet signs affixed to the side of their cars. There’s a least five agents who live on our horse-shoe block, including this guy Paul. He’s actually my mom’s real estate agent. Got her into a nice house just down the street. Which is another story. His house backs up to the community pool, so we see him all the time. He’s one of those guys who solely wears clothing purchased from Tommy Bahama. Sits on his patio, smoking cigars, having drinks, playing yacht rock. He’s 61, tall, tanned, and perpetually in sandals. He leaves his garbage cans out too long, but whatever, we all have our issues, right? It’s not like it’s a capital offense…unlike on that one afternoon in the late summer when Paul murdered another real estate agent—a 33-year-old woman he worked with—in a house four homes over. It was supposed to be a murder-suicide, but Paul fucked that up and just managed to blow half his face-off, which happens more often than you might think.
Six months later, real estate agents were parading prospective buyers through Paul’s house and soon enough a nice new couple moved in, the garbage cans were brought up in proper order, and for a while, we sort of forgot about it all, everyone more interested in a somewhat notorious pop star who lived inside the gates. It was probably years before anyone even brought the killing up, likely not until a seventy-year-old woman in the house right next door to where the murder-suicide happened was bludgeoned to death by her seventy-three-year-old brother and his pal. Turns out it was both a murder and murder-for-hire. Or at least an accomplice for hire.
By then, we’d moved to a development with an even more ludicrous name. I’d tell you, but I still live there. All you need to know is that it is also on a giant manmade lake cut into the desert floor, but this time there’s also a golf course, and the name—inexplicably in Italian—reflects that. We bought our house as the development was being built, which lessoned the likelihood of the Norwegian roof rats, but increased the number of real estate agents for neighbors.
At this point, I was a seasoned crime writer, so I knew what to do.
I trolled through the Megan’s Law map.
Clear…except that five miles away, I see a guy I went to high school with. Sexual predator. Did time in a military prison. Had his medical license revoked. Playing in an 80s cover band now.
I checked all the crime stats.
Pretty good!
Even the family of mobsters who I grew up down the street from have all gone pretty straight, or died, or moved. I friend one guy on Facebook, just to check in on him. He’s doing great. Why, there’s hardly any organized crime in the desert anymore.
Well, save for the fact that a mile away from my new house is the home base of a notorious street gang cliqued up with the Mexican Mafia. I tell my wife not to drive down that street at night, or the day. Ever, really. She thinks I’m overreacting. And then one day the FBI raids the neighborhood and arrests a few dozen Sureno shot callers and it’s like the street doesn’t exist anymore. They could build Disneyland on that road and we’d never know.
So it’s a peaceful life, after all these years surrounded by all of my worst fears. Until one of our neighbors inside the gate is murdered by her boyfriend and is dumped on the golf course behind our house.
*
For a week after that initial conversation with my siblings, we continue to remind each other about all the terrible things that have happened to people in our sphere that we’ve sort of forgotten about. Murders, assaults, abductions, civil insurrection. Stories that my sister Linda and I were too young to be told about at the time, but that our older siblings Karen and Lee recall with surprising detail, in some cases fifty years later. (“Mom was pretty good in a riot,” Karen says.) Linda, in fact, is the only of us in the last ten years or so not to be a few degrees of separation from some kind of haunting murder…until a few days later, anyway, when Karen remembers she forgot to tell us two of her husband’s cousins was murdered last year. The killer was arraigned a few months ago. It’s going to be a death penalty case.
Slipped her mind. It was a busy year.
Maybe all families are like this?
Maybe all existence is lived in close proximity to the worst impulses of strangers.
Maybe because I spend more time calculating dreadful scenarios, putting them on paper, exploring the why and how and what and who, I’ve avoided being directly involved in anything terrible, but that’s likely hubris. You never know when you’ll be in the way of someone’s worst day.
The one thing I do know: I’m not the Zodiac.
Not that he’s ever been caught.
***
