Concord is where the East Area Rapist’s attacks first moved into the East Bay, beginning on October 7, 1978. The book presents the city not only as a point on the case’s expanding map but as a residential landscape whose houses, yards, and lines of sight shaped the investigation’s questions about how the attacker chose his targets.

The First East Bay Attack

The first East Bay attack took place in Concord, ending the pause after the East Area Rapist’s Sacramento attacks and opening a spree that lasted nearly a year. In a later visit to the case, the narrator and Paul Holes drove from a nearby hotel to a quiet residential corner house. The short drive brought the regional history into close focus: the case’s first East Bay file concerned a particular home and a family whose ordinary life was recorded in a photograph taken about six weeks before the attack.

The photograph showed a couple with their one-year-old daughter celebrating her birthday. A polka-dotted hat and summer dress, a gift held up by her parents, and the child’s smile fixed the family in a domestic moment before the attack. On October 7, the husband awoke to find a masked figure looming over him. The book’s juxtaposition of the family photograph and the case file makes Concord’s first attack legible as both a turning point in the regional series and an intrusion into a specific household.

Residential Layout and Selection

The Concord scene leads into a wider analysis of the East Area Rapist’s preferences. Paul Holes notes that very few of the neighborhoods targeted had two-story houses. A single-story home could be assessed from outside window by window, while a second floor might give residents a view of someone moving through yards or jumping fences. In a two-story house, Holes observes, the routes upstairs and downstairs could also leave a person more easily cornered. These are investigative explanations of how architecture could affect observation, access, and escape; they do not establish that any single feature determined the choice of a particular Concord home.

Across the Sacramento reports, the attacker appears to have studied neighborhoods as well as individuals. He often moved through canals and drainage ditches, favored single-story homes near the corner and close to open space such as a field or park, and left signs of prowling or unlawful entry around potential victims’ homes. Missing small items and a rise in hang-up calls within a few blocks could precede an attack. The reports suggest a method of considering several possible victims and preparing options in advance. This broader pattern gives the Concord attack a spatial context, while remaining distinct from details established specifically about the corner house.

From Local Rumor to Public Alarm

The book also sets the East Bay shift against the earlier public response in Sacramento. After an October attack there, investigators asked local media not to publicize the crimes, hoping to keep the attacker within the area they were trying to monitor. In the absence of official information, rumors spread and were not publicly corrected. After two attacks in twenty-four hours, a November 3 crime-prevention meeting at Del Dayo Elementary School drew five hundred people; the following morning, The Sacramento Bee reported that a suspect was being sought in eight rapes, ending the press blackout.

By May 1977, fear in east Sacramento County had become visible in the built environment and in collective routines: neighborhood men patrolled in pickup trucks with CB radios, residents reinforced doors and windows, and orders for backyard floodlights rose from ten a month to six hundred. These details belong to the Sacramento stage, not to Concord itself. They show the atmosphere of public alarm that preceded the case’s movement into the East Bay, and clarify the difference between the earlier community response and the later investigation of Concord as the site of a new phase.