Interstate 680

Interstate 680 is the geographic spine of the East Area Rapist’s later East Bay attack pattern in the book’s account. The highway’s proximity to many of those attacks becomes evidence for a contrast with his earlier activity around Sacramento—and a basis for Paul Holes’s cautious hypothesis about how the offender’s life circumstances may have changed.

Route and Geographic Setting

Interstate 680 runs for seventy miles north to south through central Contra Costa County. In the East Bay, many of the East Area Rapist’s attacks occurred close to it; half were within a mile or less of an exit. The freeway therefore appears not merely as a line on a map but as a recurring spatial reference for the distribution of the crimes.

The Pattern on the Map

A professionally prepared geographic-profile map represented East Bay cases as small red circles, almost all just east of Interstate 680. The tight alignment stood out against the Sacramento pattern, where the East Area Rapist crisscrossed but remained within the northeastern and eastern suburbs. Paul Holes described the Sacramento behavior as that of a marauder expanding outward from an anchor point; farther south, the pattern looked more like commuting up and down the freeway corridor.

Holes’s Hypothesis and Narrative Role

Holes suggested that a change in the offender’s life circumstances might explain the shift. He considered it possible that the offender still lived in Sacramento, commuted for work, and took advantage of being outside his jurisdiction to attack. The account presents this as an inference, not an established fact. Interstate 680 gives the hypothesis a visible geographic form: a line of attacks that suggests movement between areas, while leaving the identity of the traveler and the reason for the journey unresolved.