It’s a nasty word. No one likes it. Not just the concept. The word itself. We’re immunized to murder. We watch murder mysteries. We read ‘Who dunnits.’ Murder is the ultimate crime. Those who seek out killers are glorified. There is never a murder mystery where the killer does not become the hunted. Murder is thus contrasted with the vanquishing of those who are guilty. It is acceptable for us to watch and join the hunters as they try and unravel the greatest crime and bring retribution  . . .But rape. . . No one watches the “Late Night Rape Theater.”  Murder OK. The actors get up after the director shouts “cut!” Crime and punishment intermixed with a crafty whodunnit is great. After all, no one really died. But rape . . . it’s too personal.

     But I do not think people realize how personal it is. It does, in fact, involve us all. Biology will always win. When one of our own species turns predator, he has attacked our own family. Let me give an example. The Montagus and the Capulets have become notorious as feuding families. Yet all it took was one Montagu to fall in love with one Capulet and the product of that union would have been descendants of both the feuding families. Those two inimical bloodlines would be inseparably fused. Marriage comes much easier to most of us than to Montagus and Capulets. It’s a simple example, but it captures the truth of biology.

     A detective inspector investigating the rape of a 16 year old girl may not know it, but he may be investigating a crime done against his own future great-grandchildren’s grandmother. He has no way of knowing if this girl will one day marry his son, or if her child will marry one of his grandchildren.

     When someone turns predator and attacks our women it is an attack upon us all. It is an insult and an indignity on us all. You may think these victims are completely unconnected to you, but years from now your family line will connect with theirs. Some descendant of yours will elbow his sibling and in a hushed voice say: “Do you know what was done to grandma?”

     Please keep this in mind as you read the files on the East Area Rapist.

     One of our species has turned predator and has become nothing but an intelligent primate with only one goal in mind— hunt, conquer. People who commit murders and rapes, and any act of indignity upon another human being, are fundamentally arrogant. The East Area Rapist, better known by the unwieldy police moniker as The EAR, was both rapist and murderer. But until he turned murderer he was less rapist and more of a sexual terrorist. He made a tactical game of stalking a neighborhood and then selecting a house and his future victim. He committed every act of indignity upon his victims, both psychological and physical. He was not “just a rapist.” He was the supreme predator. He didn’t hunt in the wilds. He didn’t hunt the strip, the migrants, the homeless. He prowled the average middle class neighborhood. He was so young when he began in 1976 that he is still with us and not even 60 years old yet. He is officially the Number 1 Serial Offender in the history of California, and there is and has been no prime suspect. I have called him the real life Michael Myers, and I mean it. He was unstoppable and unnatural.

   This section of The Quester Files is devoted to rooting him out. I will not be graphic within the case files, but it is impossible to avoid the 4 letter word rape. It has to be used, and it cannot be cleaned up. It is like that old Star Trek episode where 2 planets tried to make war anodyne in order to avoid physical destruction. The erstwhile hero of that series had to remind them that war cannot be cleaned up. It has to be avoided. Rape cannot be cleaned up. It has to be stopped.