University of California, Davis

University of California, Davis, enters the account through a cluster of East Area Rapist attacks, the campus landscape around their locations, and a later investigative theory about the offender’s possible interest in land development. It is not presented as an institution involved in the crimes: its significance lies in the way its students, built environment, expertise, and surrounding facilities become pieces of a wider, unresolved investigation.

A student victim and an unusual location

The first of the three Davis attacks discussed in detail occurred at about 3:50 a.m. on June 7, 1978, two days after an attack in Modesto. The victim was a twenty-one-year-old University of California, Davis student studying textiles. She lived in an off-campus apartment building with multiple stories, a kind of dwelling that investigators considered exceptional in the known series. The offender entered her second-floor apartment through a sliding glass patio door. The account identifies the assault as an East Area Rapist attack, while noting that some circumstances appeared less typical than his established pattern.

The apartment complex had changed since the period of the crimes. Paul Holes, who had himself once lived there, showed Michelle McNamara the location and explained that the apartments were off-campus student housing, though they looked different from the way they had in the 1970s. Their present-day appearance could not simply reproduce the earlier setting; the site visit instead placed the old reports against a landscape altered over time. Holes also raised the possibility that the offender might have noticed a student and followed her home, rather than selecting the location through his more familiar pattern of neighborhood surveillance. He presented that as an interpretation, not an established account of how the victim was chosen.

Three attacks in a connected landscape

The Davis attacks were close together geographically and in time. The second described attack took place on June 24, 1978, around 3 a.m., a day after another attack in Modesto. Its victim was a thirty-two-year-old housewife whose husband and ten-year-old son were also in the home. Before leaving, the offender took seventeen rolls of pennies. The third Davis attack followed on July 6, at 2:40 a.m., involving a recently separated thirty-three-year-old woman. The account situates these events within a short run of attacks rather than treating the university-area case as an isolated occurrence.

Holes noted one possible connection between the victims of the second and third attacks: they carpooled together, and their children attended the same nursery school. He did not know whether the women knew that both had been attacked, and the files had not established whether the offender saw them together and selected them for that reason. Their shared routine could have mattered, or their victimization could have been coincidence. The account preserves that uncertainty rather than converting proximity into proof of a connection.

Paths, research grounds, and an airport

The investigation’s reconstruction of another Davis crime scene followed physical traces beyond the residential setting. Shoe prints associated with the case continued along a path beside an olive grove. The initial response had discounted the idea that the offender could have parked far away and walked to the attack site, but the prints continued down the path. During a later visit, Holes traced their direction through University of California, Davis property, with research buildings on one side and agricultural fields on the other. He had initially misread a reference in the file to Bee Biology; reconsidering where the prints ended led him to identify the nearby airport as a potentially important feature of the route.

That discovery raised questions about access, not answers about the offender. Holes said airport staff told him that people could arrive after hours, tie down an aircraft, leave, and return without the airport knowing who had been there. He connected that possibility to a separate circumstance from the Modesto case: a taxi driver had described taking a strange passenger to an area of new construction, about twenty-two hours before the Davis attack. The account offers these details as investigative leads. It does not establish that the offender used an aircraft, or that the taxi passenger and the offender were the same person.

Expertise and an unconfirmed development theory

University of California, Davis also appears as a source of relevant professional expertise. Holes described consulting a landscape architect from the university who identified features in a diagram found among the case materials as distinctive to Village Homes, an unusual development in Davis. The diagram’s symbols had also been assessed by a friend of Holes who worked in construction as resembling professional drafting. Together, those observations encouraged Holes and McNamara to consider whether the offender might have been involved in development or land planning, rather than having produced the diagram solely as a school exercise.

The theory remained conditional. Holes reasoned that work on a development could explain access to resources or influence that seemed at odds with the image suggested by some case evidence. He also considered whether the offender could have encountered design features at Village Homes and incorporated them into the diagram. Neither the landscape architect’s recognition of those features nor the diagram’s professional appearance identified its maker. The university’s role is therefore twofold but limited: a student victim connects it to the chronology of attacks, while a faculty-area expertise helps investigators examine a possible clue. Both connections enlarge the inquiry; neither resolves the offender’s identity or proves an institutional connection to him.