1960s

The 1960s appear in the book as a decade of mounting social strain and institutional change: violent crime was rising, Vietnam was reshaping the draft, and police agencies faced a shrinking pool of available young workers. The period also marks the start of Richard Shelby’s long career in law enforcement, linking national pressures to the local investigations that would unfold in Sacramento.

War, the Draft, and Hiring

Vietnam was becoming a major news story as the monthly draft rose from 3,000 in February 1965 to 33,000 by October. Protests spread across the country and grew more raucous, while available young men became harder to recruit. The book presents these conditions as part of the background to the sheriff’s department’s decision to hire Shelby, a relatively unusual candidate at the time. Shelby had joined the air force more than a decade earlier, thirteen days after his seventeenth birthday, and completed his service. He held a college degree in criminal justice and was married. Although he lacked the required finger length under the existing rules, he could type faster than the sheriff’s secretary; the department changed the rules, and he began work on August 1, 1966. He remained for twenty-seven years, making his hiring a lasting institutional consequence of a period when qualified applicants were scarce.

Rising Crime and a Bleaker Public Climate

The decade sits within a longer national increase in violent crime. The book describes crime rates as rising steadily through the 1960s and 1970s before peaking in 1980. Retired officers from Sacramento and elsewhere remembered 1968 to 1980 as a particularly grim period. This account places the later East Area Rapist cases within a broad climate of increasing violence, without treating the decade alone as their cause. The cultural atmosphere of the 1970s carried that bleakness into popular film as well: Taxi Driver appeared in February 1976 and was widely regarded as an encapsulation of its time. The book contrasts this wider sense of danger with Sacramento’s reputation for flinty survival instincts, rooted in its history as a city reached by pioneers crossing rivers and snowy mountain ranges.

From Secrecy to Public Alarm

In the later serial-rape investigation, officials initially sought to limit publicity. After Jane Carson’s attack in October, the Sheriff’s Department asked local press not to report the crimes, hoping to keep the suspect on Sacramento’s east side, where investigators believed they could contain and catch him. Richard Shelby, Carol Daly, and their colleagues pursued leads quietly, checking with parole and probation officers and looking into people whose jobs brought them into neighborhoods, including delivery workers, janitors, and carpet layers. They left business cards at homes and followed up on tips, while investigators tested whether Jane could identify suspects by voice. The blackout did not stop information from circulating; it left room for rumors to mutate. False stories that the attacker was mutilating women’s breasts spread without public correction. After the East Area Rapist attacked twice within twenty-four hours, public attention intensified. On November 3, five hundred people attended a crime-prevention meeting at Del Dayo Elementary School, where Shelby and Daly struggled to answer heated questions. The next morning, The Sacramento Bee published a report identifying a suspect in eight rapes, ending the press blackout.

Fear Becomes Part of Daily Life

By May 1977, fear had acquired visible, practical forms. Three hundred neighborhood men patrolled east Sacramento County in pickup trucks equipped with CB radios. Residents installed wrought-iron bars and hard acrylic panels, while deadbolts were back-ordered. Meter readers repeatedly displayed identification and announced themselves in yards; monthly orders for backyard floodlights jumped from ten to six hundred. These changes show how the crime crisis reached beyond investigations into the routines and design of ordinary life. The book also tracks the changing meaning of public awareness: early attacks drew little notice, but media coverage and neighborhood discussion gradually produced paranoia. Later, some residents who saw troubling activity retreated indoors rather than calling police, imagining that the danger might turn toward them. In this chronology, the 1960s are the opening of a longer arc: a decade of rising violence and strained recruitment precedes a later crisis in which fear reshapes both police work and community behavior.