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A recital of the cases in the massive crime spree of EAR/ONS constructs a dossier of impulses. His crimes are sonar-like sounds, but what EAR was doing in between them is blank. A compendium of his crimes is good enough to convey to us the evil of the perpetrator, but we don’t really understand the context of each event. Such a compendium remains a series of clear, fleeting sounds amidst the static of his everyday life. Without context we lose insight into his unscripted character. As such we cannot truly appreciate his evil personality and grasp the nature of our quarry.
However, it is possible here to put together a chain of 3 events and sew them into one cohesive whole to induce a thesis worth considering.
EVENT 1
Incident 1
It begins on the night of May 16, 1977, on Haskell Avenue, Carmichael. A homeowner sees a prowler looking in his window. He pursues him outside and is amazed when he sees him vault over the fence using only one hand. He never saw a guy do that, and at 6.5 feet tall the homeowner can take a fence easily enough. This prowler was only about 5 foot 8 inches, but he just laid one hand on it and sprung over in one leap. The homeowner calls the sheriffs. Deputy Marlin Weinberger responds. While giving a description of this guy to Weinberger, the homeowner sees the prowler between two houses down the street opposite. He bolts after him and Weinberger follows. The suspect jumps a fence again onto Kimberly Hill Court. On the other side he dissolves into the shadows around the power station. Weinberger continues but loses the agile prowler in the dark shadows under the trees. Soon Weinberger emerges onto the main street of Locust Avenue. It is empty. A dark field is nearby.
Moments pass. The headlights of a small car come on up Locust Ave. near the apartment complex. The car comes toward Weinberger. The driver obviously wants to go to Manzanita Blvd, the main thoroughfare north/south in the Carmichael area. Weinberger thinks the perp is in the field in the shadows of more trees. He tries to flag the car down to ask the driver to shine his lights in the field. The driver hits the gas and the car swerves around him and rips to the right (south) down Manzanita. It was dark and blurry. Weinberger can’t tell if the car was 4 door or 2 door. It was small and red. It may have been a Datsun 510 or Toyota Corona.
Incident 2
Around 11:15 p.m. a “foreign sounding car” enters Sandbar Circle, a street of upper middle class houses in Del Dayo, a community 5 miles south of Locust Avenue off Manzanita/Fair Oaks Blvd. A resident hears it do a U-turn and leave the circle again. Soon dogs start barking, as if something is agitating them yard after yard.
Incident 3
After the Haskell Avenue Incident, deputy Weinberger and the homeowner who reported the prowler discover that the home next door had a jimmied door. It was a newly completed house but still empty and unoccupied. The door had been pried open and it had been entered. This instantly suggests the East Area Rapist’s MO for stalking neighborhoods. Somehow he learned which houses were new or unoccupied and broke in and used them as a base of operations for prowling the rest of the neighborhood unobserved. It seems certain EAR had been prowling Haskell Avenue.
Incident 4
At 1:36 a.m. the East Area Rapist strikes a home in Sandbar Circle, binding the husband and wife and then raping the wife. They describe him as “crazy.” EAR is careful as always. He didn’t wake the children or their grandfather. But in close quarters he is agitated and more vile than usual with his victims. He tells them he will not kill them, but he is going to kill his next couple. He wants that made clear to them. “Tell the pigs.” He curses the “pigs” over and over. That is the big thing on his mind— the “fucking pigs.” After giving them sheer hell until close to 4 a.m. he leaves.
Incident 5
Next morning a religious pamphlet “Four Spiritual Laws” is left on the door of the Haskell Avenue homeowner who had chased the prowler and called the cops. It was annotated in block letters. “ALLMOST GOT ME NEXT TIME YOU DIE.” The homeowner and especially his wife are freaked out about the events. In a few days he gets an alarm company out there to install an alarm and wire (only) the doors. They are installing it for most of the day. Part of the alarm system is in the attic.
After the alarm installer leaves, the family goes out for dinner and an event. They return. The attic entrance is in the ceiling of the utility room. The wife notices plaster dust on the washer and a screw on the floor. It was not there before. A bedroom window is now found open, the screen bent. Someone had entered the house. A closer inspection by sheriffs discovered a herringbone tennis shoe pattern on the top of the washing machine. This is a type of shoe often worn by EAR.
The 6 foot 5 260 pound homeowner puts it together. He waits up all night armed and ready to take on the intruder.
The implication of the above is disturbing, to say the least. But the truth of it was hard to accept at the time. EAR had never come back for revenge or sent a written communiqué terrorizing an intended victim. Yet in light of the totality of events today this does not seem to be a prank. The difference here is that EAR had never been chased off by a burly guy before nor by a cop. This was the closest it had come. This was the month of his greatest confidence. The month of his frenzy. Five victims would go down and certainly more had been prowled.
In positing that the intruder of the house was EAR, we must accept as unquestionable that he had been watching the house closely and knew of the alarm install. As soon as the family had left, he entered the house with the intent to disable this formidable obstacle. An alarm was one thing he had no experience with. Back then most homes didn’t have alarms.
The surmise is that he truly wanted to get even with this couple. When he growled and hissed into the ear of Victim 21 and her husband that the next couple would die he actually meant this couple. He intended to fulfill that threat quickly. His manhood or whatever had never been so challenged before. He intended to get even and the alarm was an obstacle that had to be dealt with . . . but he failed or they arrived back home too soon. He was certainly confident enough this month to be bold enough to seek this kind of hands-on stalking. If he is an evolution of the Cordova Cat, he had certainly added this personal touch before when in the mood.
If he was so bent on killing this couple out of revenge, why did he not try it again? Perhaps he was still waiting or the alarm posed too much of a hurdle. . .Or . . .
EVENT 2
Incident 6
Enter the next event. On May 28, 1977, EAR strikes far from the East Area and any BOLO for his car. The strike in on 4th Parkway, a small street by the cloverleaf in Highway 99, in south Sacramento. Apparently he jumped a low fence dividing the highway onramp from the community property. There is then a small cement canal on the other side. It is about 5 feet deep, with very, very steep sides. There is enough flat space between the fence and the canal to land safely. He crosses the narrow canal and hops a cyclone fence’s gate. He wanders across the street  and strikes the victim’s house nearby. When finished, he leaves, wanders back and jumps the gate again (the gate has a bar over the top making it the easiest place to grab hold and jump the cyclone fence), but the space between this cyclone fence and canal is very narrow here. It would be easy when coming down to lose footing and slide down the canal.
There is no evidence that EAR jumped the gate here except that the bloodhound traced his scent to this gate and not beyond. It is deduced at the time that he had parked on the onramp and was returning over the gate. A set of tire tracks had been found there. They matched a small car. Perhaps it was the same one Weinberger had seen tear out?
Incident 7
Largely unknown until recently, on May 30, 1977, around 11:47 a.m. a man appears at the now defunct American River Hospital in Carmichael. He has a shoulder injury. He presents I.D. in the form of a union card for Local 18 Warehousemans’s Union. He gives his age as 31 years old. He said he fell from the scaffolding at the Rice Grower’s Association in West Sacramento. He might have broken his shoulder. He needs treatment. As a “person of contact” he lists one of the managers at the Rice Grower’s Association. There is something odd about him. The upshot is the staff become suspicious that he is EAR. He “flees” and they inform the sheriffs. The ensuing investigation uncovered that this “suspicious” man had filled out the form with completely bogus information about himself:. address, phone number, everything.
Incident 8
However, investigators trace the I.D. card to the rightful owner. He lives on Robertson in the area where EAR had prowled and nearby had even struck No. 14. The rightful owner of the I.D. had thought he had lost his wallet. He didn’t think it was stolen because no credit cards had been charged. The rightful owner of the I.D. card did indeed work for the Rice Grower’s Association and was familiar with the name of the man used as the “next to contact in a case of an emergency.” But he never would have given him as a reference. He didn’t know him well. Investigators now talk to this man at the Rice Grower’s Association. Yes, he was acquainted with the man whose name was on the I.D., but he did not know him well. He can’t imagine he ever would have used him as a “next to contact.” Investigators discover there is no scaffolding at the association.
The Association is, incidentally, accessible from the nearby bike path. EAR liked to use bike paths.
EVENT 3
EAR does not strike the entire summer of 1977. Rather he is strangely absent after his most frenzied month. When he returns it is a couple of days after Labor Day, September, and he strikes in Stockton, about 30 minutes south of Sacramento.
Conclusion
The three Events above when put back to back give us a logical progression to explain the events of that late May and frustrating summer of 1977. Logic is not truth, of course. It is only a criterion. But this must come first to even crack away at truth— hypothesis and the testing of hypothesis. Let’s look at the theory at hand.
In jumping the gate after assaulting No 22, EAR came down and lost his footing in the very narrow area between the cyclone fence and steep canal. He injured his shoulder. Two days later he  realizes he needs help. He goes to American River Hospital.
Looking down to the gate, this angle reveals how the footing between the cyclone fence and lip of the canal is not flat or wide.
Back then it was not likely that a man could lie about his age by 10 years. Either EAR gave his right age or was within a few years of it. This older age fits much better with the level of EAR’s crimes. He had never worked for the Rice Grower’s Association, but in prowling the rightful I.D. owner’s house he had uncovered it and some names. He keeps the wallet and I.D. He now uses the fake I.D. He gives the contact name because this would get him through the first level of scrutiny. Curiously, this “suspicious” man had also said that he received his injury on May 28, the night of the attack on Victim 22. Due to the injury he is incapable of his usual aerobic neighborhood prowling. Therefore he is inactive during the summer of 1977.
Put all 3 EVENTS together and you might be able to explain why the Haskell Avenue couple were never hit. He couldn’t get around the alarm or a few days later he strikes Victim 22 and hurts himself in the canal thus rendering him incapable for the whole summer. By this time it is too late and he brushes off the event on Haskell Ave.
The chain of events are clearest between the Haskell Avenue Incident and the strike two hours later in Sandbar Circle where EAR is rancid and ranting about the “pigs”— Weinberger. The subsequent events at Haskell Ave. would suggest that when EAR told Victim 21 the next couple dies he specifically meant the Haskell Ave. couple. He had already intended to rape his wife and then kill them both . . .but events intervened.
In like rage he may have killed the Maggiores on February 2, 1978, only months later. The events outlined here reveal he had the rage to do so if he was challenged.
Epilogue
EAR returned to his comfort zones. He liked the easy location of Locust Avenue. Months later there are more prowling reports. Then in January 1978 a girl on Locust Ave. answers the doorbell. A nicely dressed man is there in a corduroy jacket, etc. He seems surprised someone was home. He has some lame excuse for disturbing her. This happens again at a later date. Only this time she does not answer. The man appears in her backyard. She flees the house. Within a short time, a week or more, Victims 29/30, two sisters, are raped around the corner on College View Way. Here for no known reason EAR gained entrance to the house by kicking in the front door. Was the rage brought on merely by returning to the area and passing the scene of his failure last May 1977?
There are some problems with the overall theory. Everything fits together logically except one thing. If EAR was the man at the hospital on the morning of May 30, why would he think he needs to hide his identity? No one had known EAR had fallen at the gate, if indeed he had. Why would he think the police would know that? Was their blood there and they hadn’t noticed, but EAR had feared they had found it? Did he make a loud retching sound when he hit and assumed neighbors had heard it and would have reported it? We don’t know. But a man saw fit to lie about his shoulder injury on May 30, and for 3 months there was no EAR.
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