“Remember when we played”

“Remember when we played?” is the sentence at the center of a phone call placed on April 6, 2001, to a woman in east Sacramento. Spoken slowly by a voice she recognized immediately, the phrase invokes a past the passage does not explain. Its unsettling force lies in that gap: the caller offers familiarity, but the account supplies no shared memory to make the words innocent.

The Call and Its Setting

The call came two days after news linked the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker. A woman in her early sixties answered at a house on Thornwood Drive, where she had lived for nearly thirty years, although her last name had changed. The account gives no name for her in this moment and does not identify the caller. It records the voice as low and slow, then gives the sentence itself: “Remember when we played?”

The sequence makes the timing part of the expression’s meaning. The public announcement had brought the crimes back into view; the call carried that renewed attention into a survivor’s home. The words sound almost conversational, but, delivered by a voice she knew, they turn recollection into an intrusion. The passage leaves the past they refer to unstated rather than resolving the phrase into a clear explanation.

Voice, Recognition, and Uncertainty

Elsewhere, Kathy tells Paul Holes that her former husband, David, said after her attack that he thought he recognized the East Area Rapist’s voice but could not place it. That uncertain recognition stands in contrast to the woman on Thornwood Drive, who recognized the caller immediately. Together, the accounts show voice as both a possible clue and a source of unresolved knowledge: familiarity can be felt before it can be explained, and retrospective certainty is not available in every recollection.

The book also emphasizes how the aftermath of an attack can persist in survivors’ lives. Fiona stuttered after her attack, became intensely anxious about personal safety, and sometimes waited for Phillip before going to the bedroom at the back of the house. Those details concern Fiona, not the woman who received the call, but they situate the phrase within a wider account of violence whose consequences outlast the immediate crime. The sentence’s casual appeal to a shared past is therefore especially disquieting: it reaches into a life already shaped by an experience that cannot simply be left behind.

The Phrase in the Larger Account

The phrase’s significance depends on what it withholds. The passage does not explain what the caller means by “played,” nor does the available account establish the caller’s identity. Instead, it preserves the recipient’s immediate recognition and the words that followed it. That restraint keeps the reader close to the moment of contact without converting inference into confirmed fact.

The book’s later attention to how victims are represented adds another dimension to that restraint. Kathy objected to Larry Crompton’s unflattering portrayal of her response to the attack; Holes and a female colleague met with her after she contacted the Sheriff’s Office. Holes recalled that she was visibly shaken and barely made eye contact. These events do not explain the phone call, but they reinforce the importance of treating survivors’ accounts with care rather than imposing a single expected way to react. “Remember when we played?” remains powerful precisely because the sentence is brief, recognizable to its recipient, and unexplained to everyone else.