Citrus Heights is presented as one part of a borderland shared with Carmichael and Fair Oaks, where the East Area Rapist’s attacks formed an unusually dispersed pattern. The area’s significance lies not in a confirmed link to the offender’s home, but in how its geography helped shape a tentative geographic profile.

Setting and Attack Pattern

The book identifies the swath where Carmichael, Citrus Heights, and Fair Oaks meet as the portion of Sacramento County in which the East Area Rapist’s attacks were most spread out. It also showed the clearest buffer zone: a gap in the pattern that geographic profiling treats as potentially significant, rather than simply as an absence of activity.

Geographic Profiling

Paul examined attack locations by separating them into phases on a map, comparing the spread of each phase and asking whether a proposed anchor point or buffer zone held steady as the offender’s range expanded. He assumed the offender lived somewhere near the North Ridge Country Club. Under that hypothesis, attacks in the three-community area fell on alternating sides of the apparent buffer zone, a pattern that might reflect both a desire for a change of pace and avoidance of areas under increased surveillance.

Repeated mapping efforts suggested an anchor point near the intersection of Dewey Drive and Madison Avenue, at the boundary between Carmichael and Fair Oaks. The book presents this as a conclusion supported to some extent by a 1995 FBI study, not as an established residence. In that study, the fifth attack in a series was the one closest to the offender’s home in 24 percent of cases, compared with 18 percent for the first attack. In the proposed profile, the East Area Rapist’s fifth attack was the second closest to the suggested anchor point; attack seventeen was only marginally closer, by about 300 feet.

Significance and Limits

Citrus Heights therefore matters as part of a pattern-reading exercise: a broad, uneven distribution of attacks and a conspicuous buffer zone offered clues for estimating where the offender might have lived. Yet the proposed anchor point lay at the Carmichael–Fair Oaks boundary, and the evidence describes a geographic hypothesis rather than a confirmed address. The distinction preserves the uncertainty at the heart of profiling: mapped proximity can strengthen an inference without turning it into proof.