Close encounters

Like the author of this week’s cover story, I learned about the East Area Rapist, now known as the Golden State Killer, only recently. I was a toddler when he terrorized the Bay Area, where I grew up. And by the time I moved to the Sacramento suburbs, where he committed the bulk of his crimes, it had been 15 years since he’d struck that region.

However, in the mid-1980s, I vividly remember being worried about a different serial rapist/killer. He was known as the Night Stalker and was mostly active in Southern California, though he murdered people in Northern California, too. I was a latchkey kid back in those days and—due to newspaper and TV coverage of his crimes—remember having my guard up. Two events cemented my fears.

Once, while walking home from school, a classmate and I came upon a car parked conspicuously on a connector street fronted by fenced side yards that led into our neighborhood. We could see through the window a naked man holding a knife.

“Did you see that?” asked Sara, my friend.

“Shhh. Walk fast, and run if he gets out,” I instructed her.

I can’t remember the exact year, but I attended that school only for second, third and fourth grades, so I was somewhere between 8 and 10 years old. I never told my parents about it—probably because I didn’t want to talk about seeing a stranger’s junk.

The scariest encounter, though, was when a car tapped my bicycle as I was riding home from soccer practice. I’d sensed it getting close to me, but figured the driver was slowing down to pull into a driveway on the long residential street a few blocks from my house. After recovering from nearly eating asphalt, I realized it was intentional.

I got up onto the sidewalk and pedaled as fast as I could toward home. Around a corner I whipped and so did the car—following until I rode into the driveway of a classmate who was playing basketball outside with his older brother. Only then did I turn to see the driver, who peeled away in his powder-blue hatchback. I was so shaken that my mom called the police—who could do little without a license plate number.

I couldn’t help but think of that incident when young girls started disappearing from nearby cities. Amber Swartz-Garcia, 7, was kidnapped from Pinole in 1988; Michaela Garecht, 9, was abducted in Hayward that same year; and Ilene Misheloff, 13, vanished in 1989 from neighboring Dublin while walking from school to the local ice rink.

Then, in 1991, a girl at my high school in Livermore was raped and murdered during the last week of school. Jessica McHenry’s killer, Derick Moncada, was identified through DNA evidence 16 years later. That’s also how, decades after his capture, authorities linked the Night Stalker, aka Richard Ramirez, to the rape and murder of a San Francisco girl who, like me, was 9 years old in 1984. Likewise, it’s how law enforcement found the alleged Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo, who lived in a suburb of Sacramento, the epicenter of his long crime spree.

As for the other girls whose names I’ll never forget, they remain missing. I can’t help but wonder whether the monsters who took them live among us.