Village Homes is a planned residential development in Davis whose celebrated, community-oriented design became part of the investigation into an East Area Rapist attack in 1978. The same features that made the development notable—shared green space, pedestrian paths, and a layout unlike an ordinary subdivision—also shaped investigators’ questions about how the offender moved through the neighborhood and whether he had professional knowledge of its design.

Design and setting

Developed by Michael Corbett and his wife, Judy Corbett, Village Homes was organized around common green areas rather than conventional front-facing streets: the fronts of the houses faced shared open space, with community gardens and other green areas intended to encourage a sense of community. The streets were named after places in The Lord of the Rings. Many homes used passive solar design, and pedestrian bridges crossed open drainage swales. Construction was still underway during the 1978 attacks, including near the house later identified as a crime scene.

The layout also challenged standard expectations for subdivision planning. Some streets ended in long, narrow cul-de-sacs, which the city initially objected to. The Corbetts arranged for fire trucks to demonstrate that they could turn around, helping make the case for the design. This combination of shared outdoor space, winding routes, and unconventional street forms made Village Homes a much-discussed development, but also meant that its paths and sightlines differed from those of a typical neighborhood.

The 1978 attack and the traced route

The East Area Rapist attacked a house in Village Homes at about 3 a.m. on June 24, 1978. This was attack number thirty-six and the second of three attacks in Davis. The victim was a housewife whose husband was also present; their ten-year-old son was in the home. The offender searched the house, moved the victim, and stole seventeen rolls of pennies before leaving. The nearby construction and the development’s distinctive paths later became relevant to the effort to reconstruct his approach and departure.

The grounds offered a rare physical record of that movement. Michael Corbett had been raking a sandy area smooth each day. After the attack, he noticed a shoe impression in the freshly raked surface and followed the prints through the green area and around the victim’s house. The tracks formed a loop: they led toward the backyard and then away from the house. An initial responding officer reportedly regarded the route as an ordinary jogging path and doubted that the offender could have parked so far away. Corbett’s tracking helped preserve and interpret details that might otherwise have been discounted.

Paul Holes later used the prints and the layout to discuss how the offender might have used the development. The paths connected open space and residential areas, and the green common areas offered a route through the neighborhood. Holes characterized the design as unusually difficult to observe from outside and considered it advantageous to someone trying to enter, attack, and leave without being seen. That interpretation concerns opportunity and visibility; it does not establish that the design itself caused the crime.

The development as an investigative clue

Village Homes entered a wider inquiry into whether the offender’s work or interests might have involved development and land planning. Holes compared the attacks in Davis and Modesto, which occurred close together, with travel and construction-related details from the cases. He also discussed a diagram associated with the investigation. A friend with experience in development considered its drafting professional in quality, while a University of California, Davis landscape architect reportedly identified features in it that were distinctive to Village Homes.

Those observations prompted a possibility, not a conclusion: the offender may have visited the development, encountered its design features, and incorporated them into the diagram for work connected with a developer. Holes considered whether such evidence might indicate a person with a meaningful role in a development company. The book leaves that line of thought unresolved. Neither the map nor the architectural resemblance, on its own, identifies who made the diagram or proves that the offender worked in development.

A further connection between the Davis victims also remained open to interpretation. The victim in the Village Homes attack and the victim in the third Davis attack carpooled together, and their children attended the same nursery school. Holes described this as the only known connection between victims that he was aware of, while noting that it had not been fully explored. It was unknown whether the offender had seen them together or whether the timing and connection were coincidental.

Public landmark and crime-scene geography

Village Homes was already known well beyond Davis for its novel planning. Holes described visitors coming to study the development, which appeared on the cover of Sunset magazine. François Mitterrand visited by helicopter, and Betty Ford rode her bicycle through the area. Its reputation as an architectural experiment formed a striking contrast with its later role in the investigation: the same shared landscape admired by visitors became a route to examine through shoe prints and a possible clue to the offender’s knowledge.

For the case, Village Homes is therefore more than a location attached to one attack. Its paths and open spaces helped investigators reconstruct movement, while its distinctive design gave rise to a hypothesis about the offender’s possible access to professional planning knowledge. The physical traces provided a concrete route; the broader theory remained uncertain. That distinction—between what the tracks showed and what the setting might suggest—defines the development’s significance in the investigation.