The Iron Horse Regional Trail is a roughly forty-mile path through central Contra Costa County, built over the former Southern Pacific Railroad right-of-way. In the account of an East Area Rapist attack in Danville, its quiet suburban corridor becomes part of the crime scene: bloodhounds traced the assailant’s escape along the tracks, and investigators returned to the trail to examine the route and nearby evidence. The place matters not only as a passage through the landscape, but as a surviving line that helped investigators reconstruct how the attacker moved between a residential yard and a possible getaway vehicle.

From Railroad to Regional Trail

The corridor was once a working railway through a broad valley near Mount Diablo. Beginning in 1891, the Southern Pacific Railroad carried passengers along a twenty-mile branch between San Ramon and a point just north of Concord. Freight service continued after passenger trains disappeared, carrying Bartlett pears, gravel, and sheep. The railroad’s route had become part of the local landscape: trains passed Murwood Elementary in Walnut Creek, where children at recess sometimes waved to the crews.

Suburban development changed the purpose of the line. The completion of Interstate 680 in 1964 made truck transport cheaper, while single-family homes, rather than the industrial hubs once anticipated, spread through central Contra Costa County. Train traffic dwindled until the railroad petitioned to abandon the route. The line closed in September 1978, nearly a century after the first track was laid.

For a time, the land remained an undecided strip: twenty feet wide, vacant, and running between neighborhoods. In Danville, a five-mile stretch lay beside larger lots and older homes. Fences along the backyards gave the corridor a boundary, but the disused right-of-way was largely overlooked. It was eventually paved and made pedestrian-friendly as part of the Iron Horse Regional Trail, used by walkers, cyclists, and horseback riders. The conversion preserved the railway’s linear route even as its function changed from hauling freight to providing a path through developed communities.

The Trail and the Danville Escape

That route acquired a different significance in the investigation of an East Area Rapist attack in Danville. Bloodhounds followed the suspect’s scent from the victim’s property south along the railroad tracks. Pita, one of the dogs, stopped about half a mile from where the tracking had begun, at the point where the tracks met a residential street. Two other bloodhounds, Betsey and Eli, were also brought in. Their handlers agreed that the dogs’ movements along fences and down side yards indicated extensive prowling in the area. They assessed that the attacker entered the backyard over its north-side fence, left over the southwest corner of the back fence, and continued south along the tracks, probably getting into a vehicle at the cross street.

The trail offered investigators a legible line through a scene otherwise scattered among backyards, fences, and streets. When Paul Holes later walked the route, he stopped beside the victim’s yard, where agave plants shielded the back of the fence. He identified the corner as the place the bloodhounds had tracked the attacker’s escape over the fence. The trail and the residential boundary were therefore not separate settings: together they marked a proposed path from the yard into the corridor.

Farther along, Holes stopped at an electrical pole near the place where the dogs had lost the scent and where investigators believed the attacker entered a vehicle. The trail made this point accessible for a later walk-through, allowing the investigation to relate the reports’ tracking evidence to identifiable features on the ground. But the reconstruction remained an inference from scent trails and scene details, not a directly observed departure.

Evidence, Limits, and Significance

Homework pages were found near the trail in the area where the scent was believed to have ended. Holes considered them potentially significant because three independent bloodhounds had indicated an escape south along the tracks, and because the scent’s endpoint was consistent with the distance from a target at which the East Area Rapist was known to park before approaching. He also noted that John Patty, a criminalist closely involved in the Contra Costa County cases, had collected the material, suggesting that it had seemed worth preserving. The other items found with the pages—a length of purple yarn and an illegible fragment of typed paper—led nowhere. The pages’ presence therefore raised a possibility rather than establishing that they belonged to the attacker.

The trail’s investigative value lies partly in this distinction between a route supported by multiple dogs and objects whose meaning remains uncertain. The handlers acknowledged that scent conditions can shift with time and changes in wind; the dogs’ indications were informative but not infallible. The homework material strengthened the interest in the corridor, yet did not resolve the identity of its owner or prove how it came to be there.

As a location, the Iron Horse Regional Trail holds two histories in the same narrow strip of land: the rise and abandonment of a railway as the valley suburbanized, and the later effort to reconstruct an attacker’s movement through that changed landscape. The unused tracks had once become an overlooked boundary behind homes; after their conversion into a public path, they also provided investigators with a continuous route to walk and test against the reports. In the Danville case, the trail’s most consequential feature was its connection between a backyard escape point and a possible vehicle pickup, a geographic clue that helped organize the search without making the remaining evidence certain.