Cold War

The Cold War enters the book as a local history of transformation. In Rancho Cordova, military and aerospace activity helped turn a landscape of farms, river rock, and vineyards into a residential town of paved, looping streets and modest single-story homes. Those neighborhoods later formed the setting for the East Area Rapist attacks, but the narrative distinguishes historical backdrop from cause: it describes how the town took shape, then how the attacker used its streets and houses.

A town remade

Rancho Cordova had passed through several distinct phases before the Cold War boom. The area began as a five-thousand-acre Mexican land grant devoted to farming. After the 1848 gold discovery upriver, gold dredges worked the area and left large piles of river rock. For a time, vineyards defined the landscape. Mather Air Force Base opened in 1918, but the book identifies the Cold War as the period that most changed the town.

In 1953, Aerojet, a manufacturer of rocket and missile propulsion, opened its headquarters in Rancho Cordova. The arrival brought a boom in housing for employees. Roads such as Zinfandel Drive and Riesling Way were paved and divided into modest, single-story tract homes. Military or Aerojet employment seemed to touch nearly every family. The town’s residential fabric was therefore tied to the era’s defense and aerospace economy, even as the houses themselves were ordinary and modest.

The landscape and its contrasts

Rancho Cordova sat on the south bank of the American River, which bisects the east side of Sacramento County. The river separated it from leafier, more genteel suburbs on the opposite bank. In the 1970s, children from elsewhere called the area Rancho Cambodia, a nickname that registers its distance, in local imagination, from those suburbs.

The remembered town was not defined by development alone. Summer days could mean wading in the river; trails through dense brush could lead to a homeless camp, and parts of the river were said to be haunted. In another corner of the decade, teenage girls watched boys work on their cars at Land Park, attended outdoor concerts in Oakland, or drove to the Sutterville Road levee to drink beer. These recollections place everyday leisure alongside unease and social marginality, rather than presenting the suburban boom as a simple story of prosperity.

A memory from Cordova Meadows Elementary School adds a sharper example of that double register. The ice-cream seller, recognizable by his long hair, beard, and mirrored aviator glasses, disappeared after it emerged that he was selling LSD and cocaine to another clientele. The recollection captures a recurring quality of the book’s 1970s Sacramento: an apparently familiar scene could conceal something threatening.

The built setting of the attacks

The East Area Rapist attacks began in Sacramento in 1976–1977, within the broader period shaped locally by Cold War development. The book’s account of the attacker’s methods emphasizes neighborhood form: he favored single-story houses, often the second home from a corner and near a greenbelt, open field, or park. Before an attack, nearby homes could show signs of prowling or illegal entry, small items might go missing, and hang-up calls increased within a radius of four or five blocks. These repeated signs suggest that he surveyed neighborhoods, learned residents’ routines, and kept several possible targets in consideration.

The practical features of a single-story home mattered to the attacker. Paul Holes explains that one could more readily assess what was happening inside by moving from window to window; a second-floor vantage point might also expose someone prowling or crossing yards. In a two-story home, the limited routes between floors could leave occupants more easily cornered. The housing type that multiplied during Rancho Cordova’s Cold War-era expansion thus appears in the book as part of the physical setting the offender exploited. The account does not establish that the era’s housing boom produced the attacks or that the homes were built for that purpose.

Other details show how the attacker used the spaces between houses. In one neighborhood, dogs tracked a route from the victim’s backyard over a fence and south along railroad tracks, where investigators believed the attacker may have entered a vehicle. Across the street from another home lay a large open field and a school; the neighboring house stood empty, and dogs tracked the attacker’s scent around a corner to the site of a pool under construction. These accounts make yards, fences, open ground, and routes of departure integral to the setting, not merely background scenery.

Public awareness and neighborhood fear

The book traces a change in public awareness as the attacks continued. At first, recognition that a serial rapist was at large was slight. As media coverage spread, residents became increasingly alert to the danger. By about a year into the attacks, victims described recognizing the East Area Rapist from what they had heard and responding according to circulating accounts of his behavior. In the wider community, some neighbors who noticed suspicious activity shut their doors, turned off the lights, and withdrew rather than calling police. The narrative describes a shift from unawareness or inertia toward a defensive, inward-looking response.

That change did not mean neighbors understood the connections the attacker was making. He moved objects between households: cigarettes taken from one victim appeared outside another home, and jewelry stolen from a neighbor turned up at a later victim’s house. Pills or bullets stolen from one victim were later found in a neighbor’s yard. The incidents linked people who might not otherwise have felt connected, turning ordinary proximity into part of the offender’s pattern. A convoy of squad cars racing past teenagers drinking on the levee on April 14, 1978, made that danger suddenly visible to witnesses who remembered never having seen anything like it before.

The period’s houses and streets therefore carry two histories in the book. They reflect a town expanded by Cold War military and aerospace employment, and they became the terrain across which a serial offender watched, approached, and escaped. The narrative’s significance lies in holding those histories together without conflating them: the development explains the setting, while the attacker’s choices and the community’s changing responses explain the pattern of threat.