1970s

The 1970s in the book are not simply a date range for the East Area Rapist’s crimes. They are the period in which a changing Sacramento, a rising climate of violence, and a predator’s patient study of ordinary neighborhoods converged. The decade’s houses, roads, canals, and habits of looking away become part of the account: not an excuse for the crimes, but the setting in which repeated warning signs could remain dispersed until fear itself changed how residents behaved.

Sacramento and a Changing Landscape

During the decade, Rancho Cordova still carried the marks of several earlier transformations. The American River separated its south-bank neighborhoods from the leafier suburbs to the north. The area had begun as a Mexican land grant of five thousand acres devoted to farming; after the 1848 gold discovery upriver, dredging left piles of river rock across the landscape. Later came vineyards, Mather Air Force Base, and, in 1953, Aerojet’s headquarters. Cold War employment brought residential growth: roads such as Zinfandel Drive and Riesling Way were paved and divided among modest, single-story tract houses, and many families had ties to the military or Aerojet. In the 1970s, children who lived elsewhere called the area Rancho Cambodia, a nickname that sits uneasily beside its neat subdivisions and planned streets.

That ordinary, settled appearance coexisted with local stories of danger and abrupt reversals. One remembered incident concerned an ice-cream seller near Cordova Meadows Elementary School: the long-haired man with a beard and mirrored aviator glasses who sold Popsicles to children was also dealing LSD and cocaine to other customers, and was eventually arrested. The episode was not an account of the East Area Rapist, but it reflects the book’s portrait of a decade in which reassuring appearances could conceal less visible realities.

The broader setting was violent as well. Crime statistics showed violent crime rising through the 1960s and 1970s, reaching a peak in 1980. Taxi Driver appeared in February 1976 and was widely regarded as an encapsulation of its bleak moment. Retired officers recalled 1968 to 1980 as an especially grim stretch. Sacramento’s reputation for flinty survival gave that atmosphere a local inflection: a city associated with people who had crossed rivers and mountain ranges to reach it was accustomed to hardship. The author’s point is not that the city suffered a single, undifferentiated plague, but that, amid many violent offenders, one predator stood out. When Sacramento natives heard that a serial rapist from their city was the subject of a book, none asked which one.

The Crimes and Their Setting

The East Area Rapist’s known California crimes extended across the 1970s and 1980s and ultimately included fifty sexual assaults and at least ten murders. The investigation described in the book faced the accumulated obstacles of a decades-old case: witnesses and victims had moved away, died, or continued with their lives; the crimes crossed jurisdictions in Northern and Southern California; and many old files lacked the advantages of DNA or modern laboratory analysis. The decade therefore appears both as lived time and as an evidentiary problem, its events scattered among records that could not initially be brought together.

In Sacramento, the physical layout of neighborhoods mattered to the pattern reconstructed from police reports. The offender favored single-story houses, often second from a corner and near an open field, park, or other greenbelt. Before an attack, nearby homes could be entered and small, inexpensive, sometimes personal belongings taken. Reports of hang-up calls rose sharply within a radius of four or five blocks. These repeated incidents suggested reconnaissance: the offender studied a neighborhood, watched people’s routines, and prepared options rather than choosing a target only at the last moment. The pattern makes the period’s ordinary residential landscape—yards, fences, side streets, and nearby open spaces—central to how the crimes were carried out.

The preference for single-story houses had a practical dimension. Investigator Paul Holes noted that a two-story home offered fewer routes between floors and might leave a person feeling cornered; from outside, a prowler could also more easily assess the interior of a one-story house by moving from window to window. A second-floor observer, meanwhile, might see someone moving through yards or jumping fences. In one investigation, a husband later recalled seeing a young man near a box-shaped, two-tone van shortly before the attack. The remembered image was uncertain, one fragment among many whose importance could only be reconsidered afterward. The case’s record preserves that uncertainty as part of the decade’s evidentiary legacy.

Public Awareness and Neighborhood Behavior

The reports trace a gradual change in what residents understood. During roughly the first dozen attacks, public awareness of a serial rapist was faint. As media coverage spread, neighborhood conversation and anxiety grew. About a year into the attacks, some victims recognized the danger as soon as a flashlight appeared and understood their experience through what they had heard about the East Area Rapist. The book describes a shift in neighbors’ inaction: what began as ignorance or inertia became a defensive retreat. People who noticed something might lock their doors, turn off their lights, and withdraw rather than call the police, hoping the offender would pass them by.

That retreat contrasts with the offender’s apparent attention to the neighborhood as a whole. Items stolen from one home could appear outside another; property taken from a nearby resident could be left at a later victim’s house. Pills or bullets taken from one victim were later found in a neighbor’s yard, while some victims shared surnames or occupations. The book interprets these links as a display of reach: people who might not otherwise have considered themselves connected were made part of a pattern by the offender’s movements and choices. The decade’s rising awareness therefore did not automatically produce mutual protection. Fear could make residents more alert to danger while also narrowing their attention to their own homes.

The book also connects that failure of attention to everyday misreadings. A scream might be dismissed as teenagers playing; a person jumping a fence might seem to be taking a shortcut; a late-night gunshot might be mistaken for a firecracker or a car backfiring. The consequences could arrive only later, when sirens replaced the sounds residents had explained away. This account does not assign responsibility for the crimes to neighbors. It shows instead how ordinary uncertainty and the wish to return to sleep could leave a warning unanswered.

A Period Revisited Through Evidence

The 1970s return in the book through retrospective work: police reports, witness recollections, crime-scene details, and the labor required to reconnect them. Michelle McNamara pursued even objects stolen from the period’s crime scenes. In one instance, she found a pair of cuff links taken in Stockton in 1977 through a vintage store’s website, then researched the likely age of the original owner through the rarity of boys’ names beginning with N. She also investigated a member of a 1972 Rio Americano High School water-polo team because a yearbook image suggested a possible physical trait of the offender. These inquiries did not necessarily identify him; they show how a period that had left incomplete files and uncertain memories had to be reconstructed from particulars.

That retrospective structure gives the decade two forms of consequence. In the original moment, separate prowling reports, missing objects, suspicious sightings, and calls did not always assemble into a clear picture for residents or investigators. Later, those same fragments could be compared across time and place, though their significance remained uncertain. The 1970s are thus presented as both the era of the crimes and the beginning of a long effort to understand their connections. Their lasting significance lies in that tension: the offender repeatedly studied neighborhoods, while the people living in them and the institutions investigating the crimes struggled to see the whole pattern before it was too late.