I'll Be Gone in the Dark Read online

  My schooltime crushes ranged wildly in physical and personality type, but I can say with confidence that they all shared one thing—they sat in front of me in class. Other people are able to develop feelings for people sitting next to them or behind them, but not me. That requires connecting with someone too directly, sometimes even craning your neck to make full eye contact. Too real. I loved nothing more than the back of a boy’s head. I could project endlessly on the blank slate of a kid’s slouched back. He could be sitting there with his mouth half-open or picking his nose, and I’d never know.

  For a dreamy projectionist like me, Danny Olis was perfect. I don’t recall thinking he was unhappy, but I also can’t picture his smile. He was self-possessed for a little kid, and slightly solemn, as if he knew something the rest of us gap-toothed fairy-tale believers would eventually find out. He was the Sam Shepard of our first-grade class. I’d been gifted with a stuffed Curious George when I was born, and something about Danny’s round, elfin face and big ears reminded me of my George doll. I fell asleep clutching him to my cheek every night. My love for Danny was big news in our house. Sifting through my old stuff during a move once, I came across a card Beanie had written me during her freshmen year at the University of Iowa. “Dear Mish, I miss you. How’s Danny Olis?”

  I switched to the local public school, William Beye Elementary, for fourth grade. My best friends, the Van sisters, who’d saved me from loneliness by moving in across the street, went there. I wanted to be with them. I wanted to wear whatever I liked. After a while, I mostly forgot about Danny Olis. My Curious George disappeared, along with my other childhood things.

  One night in my junior year of high school, a friend was helping me prepare for a big party I was throwing while my parents were out of town. She’d been hanging out the last few months with some boys from Fenwick, the local all-boys Catholic high school, and asked if a few of them could come to the party. Sure, I said. Actually, she told me tentatively, she was sort of dating one of them.

  “Just kind of,” she said.

  “That’s great,” I said. “What’s his name?”

  “Danny Olis.”

  My eyes widened and I half guffawed, half shrieked. I steadied myself and took a breath, the way you do when you’re about to share a big secret.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” I said, “but I had the biggest crush on Danny Olis in grade school.”

  My friend nodded.

  “It started in music class because the teacher made you hold hands,” she said. My confused expression prompted her to continue.

  “He told me,” she said.

  I recalled nothing about holding hands and music class. And he knew? In my memory I was the quiet girl who sat in the back, faithfully but discreetly observing every swivel and dip of his head. Now it seemed my fixation had been about as subtle as a telenovela. I was mortified.

  “Well, he’s very mysterious,” I told her, a little irritated.

  She shrugged. “Not to me,” she said.

  That night teenagers with Solo cups spilled onto my lawn and into the street. I drank too much gin and ducked and weaved through the throngs of unfamiliar people in my house. Boys I’d dated were there, and boys I would date. Someone played “Suspicious Minds” by the Fine Young Cannibals on repeat.

  All night I was acutely aware of a quiet, sandy-haired boy standing in the corner of the kitchen near the refrigerator. His hair now covered his ears. His face had lost its roundness and was more drawn, but through quick glimpses I could see the steady, cryptic expression remained. All night I avoided him. I never looked him in the eye. Despite the gin, I was still the girl in the back of the classroom, watchful, never watched.

  * * *

  TWENTY-SIX YEARS LATER, ONE AFTERNOON IN MAY, I WAS PREPARING to close my laptop when the familiar ring announced a new e-mail. I glanced at my inbox. I’m an inconsistent e-mail correspondent, and sometimes, I’m a little ashamed to admit, it takes me several days or longer to respond. The name in my inbox took a moment to register: Dan Olis. I clicked on the message hesitantly.

  Dan, who was now an engineer living in Denver, explained that he had been forwarded a profile of me that ran in the Notre Dame alumni magazine. The article, “Sleuth,” reported that I was the author of a website, True Crime Diary, that attempts to solve cold-case homicides. The writer asked the origin of my obsession with unsolved murders and quoted my reply: “This all started when I was 14. A neighbor of mine was brutally murdered. Very strange case. She was jogging, close to her house. [The police] never solved it. Everyone in the neighborhood was gripped with fear and then moved on. But I never could. I had to figure out how it happened.”

  That was the sound-bite version. Another version is as follows. On the evening of August 1, 1984, I’m basking in the hermetically sealed freedom of our house’s renovated third-floor attic bedroom. Every kid in my family spent part of their teenage years up there. It’s my turn. My father hated the attic because it was a firetrap, but for me, a fourteen-year-old tsunami of emotions who signed her journal entries “Michelle, the Writer,” it’s a glorious escape. The carpet is deep orange shag, the ceilings slanted. There’s a bookcase built into the wall that swings open to a secret storage nook. Best of all is the enormous wooden desk that takes up half the room. I have a turntable, a typewriter, and a small window that overlooks my neighbor’s tiled roof. I have a place to dream. In a few weeks I’ll start high school.

  At the same time, three-tenths of a mile away, Kathleen Lombardo, twenty-four, is jogging with her Walkman along Pleasant Street. It’s a hot night. Neighbors out on their porch watch Kathleen go by about nine forty-five p.m. She has minutes to live.

  I remember hearing someone walk upstairs to the second floor—my sister Maureen, I think—and a murmured conversation, an intake of breath, and then my mother’s footsteps going quickly to the window. We knew the Lombardo family from St. Edmund’s. Word trickled out quickly. Her killer had dragged her into the mouth of the alley between Euclid and Wesley. He cut her throat.

  I had no particular interest in crime aside from reading the occasional Nancy Drew book growing up. Yet two days after the killing, without telling anyone, I walked to the spot near our house where Kathleen had been attacked. On the ground I saw pieces of her shattered Walkman. I picked them up. I felt no fear, just an electric curiosity, a current of such unexpected, searching force that I can recall every detail about the moment—the smell of newly cut grass, the chipped brown paint on the garage door. What gripped me was the specter of that question mark where the killer’s face should be. The hollow gap of his identity seemed violently powerful to me.

  Unsolved murders became an obsession. I was a hoarder of ominous and puzzling details. I developed a Pavlovian response to the word “mystery.” My library record was a bibliography of the macabre and true. When I meet people and hear where they’re from I orient them in my mind by the nearest unsolved crime. Tell me you went to Miami University of Ohio, and every time I see you I’ll think of Ron Tammen, the wrestler and bassist in the school jazz band who walked out of his dorm room on April 19, 1953—his radio playing, the light on, his psychology book open—and vanished, never to be seen again. Mention you’re from Yorktown, Virginia, and I’ll forever connect you with the Colonial Parkway, the ribbon of road snaking along the York River where four couples either disappeared or were murdered between 1986 and 1989.

  In my midthirties, I finally embraced my fascination and, thanks to the advent of Internet technology, my DIY detective website, True Crime Diary, was born.

  “Why are you so interested in crime?” people ask me, and I always go back to that moment in the alley, the shards of a dead girl’s Walkman in my hands.

  I need to see his face.

  He loses his power when we know his face.

  Kathleen Lombardo’s murder was never solved.

  I would write about her case now and again, and mention it in interviews. I even called the Oak Park Police to fa
ct-check some things. The only real lead was that witnesses reported seeing an African American man in a yellow tank top and headband watching Kathleen intently as she jogged. The police debunked a rumor I remember, that witnesses had seen the killer exit the El train and begin following Kathleen. The rumor’s intent was obvious: the murderer had slipped in among us from somewhere else.

  The Oak Park cops gave me the distinct impression that the case was a dead end. And that’s where I thought it stood, until that day when Dan Olis’s name appeared in my inbox. Dan had copied another person on his e-mail to me: Terry Keating. I vaguely recognized the name as a boy a year above us at St. Edmund’s. Dan and Terry, it turns out, are first cousins. They were reaching out to me because they, too, were haunted by Kathleen Lombardo’s murder, but for different, and far more personal, reasons. In his e-mail Dan said hello, how are you, then got right to the point.

  “Did you know that some nice St. Edmund’s boys found Kathleen?” he wrote.

  The experience had been gruesome and rattling for the kids. They spoke of it often, Dan wrote, mostly because they were angry—the well-known, accepted theory of what happened to Kathleen that night was wrong, in their opinion. They felt they knew the identity of her killer.

  In fact, they had encountered him that night.

  * * *

  TERRY AND DAN ARE NOT ONLY COUSINS; THEY SHARED A HOUSE growing up. Dan’s family lived on the first floor; Terry’s, on the second; and their grandmother, on the third. Terry and I survey the back of the old place from the alley.

  “How many people would that be?” I ask Terry. The house is about three thousand square feet at most.

  “Eleven kids, five adults,” he says.

  Just a year apart, Dan and Terry were, and remain, close.

  “That summer was a real transition time for us,” Terry says. “Sometimes we stole beers and got drunk. Other times we messed around like when we were kids.”

  He gestures at the slab of concrete that abuts the garage in the backyard.

  “I remember we were playing hockey, or maybe basketball, that night.” The group comprised Terry, Danny, Danny’s younger brother, Tom, and two grade-school friends, Mike and Darren. It was a little before ten p.m. Someone suggested they head down the alley to the White Hen, a small convenience store on Euclid, about a block and a half away. They went to the White Hen all the time, sometimes three or four times a day, for a Kit Kat or a Coke.

  Terry and I head north from the house. He spent so much time in this alley as a kid, he can spot all the little ways it’s changed.

  “It was darker at night back then,” he says. “Like a cave almost. The branches would stick out and hang down more.”

  An unfamiliar tree in a neighbor’s backyard draws his attention. “Bamboo,” he says. “Can you believe it?”

  About fifty feet from where the alley intersects with Pleasant Street, Terry stops. A gaggle of preteen and teen boys shooting the shit, as Terry recalls them doing, can be raucous. They distracted themselves with goofball antics. This spot haunts him. Looking straight ahead you can see the mouth of the alley across the street.

  “If we’d been paying attention, we might have seen her run by,” he says. “We might have seen him grab her.”

  We cross the street to the alcove behind 143 South Wesley Avenue. The five boys were walking together in a straight line. Danny was on his right, Terry remembers. He puts a hand on the fence near the garage and rattles it.

  “I think this is the same fence, but it was painted red then,” Terry says.

  He thought he glimpsed a rolled-up rug near the garbage cans. Kathleen’s legs were very pale, and in the dark Terry mistook them for a light-colored carpet. Then Danny, who was closest to her, shouted.

  “That’s a body!”

  Terry and I stare at the spot alongside the garage where Kathleen lay on her back. It was clear immediately that her throat had been slashed. Blood pooled around her feet. There was a terrible smell. Probably her stomach gases, Terry guesses now. Darren, a “delicate kid,” as Terry describes him, walked slowly backward to the opposite garage with his hands on top of his head, bugging out. Tom took off toward the nearest back door, yelling for help.

  The next moment is where the accepted narrative of Kathleen Lombardo’s murder diverges from Terry and Dan’s memory. They remember that Kathleen still had vital signs but died in the minutes between their discovery of her and the arrival of a swarm of police. They remember the detectives telling them they must have just walked up on the guy.

  They remember a man emerging from the alley almost simultaneously as they discovered Kathleen’s body. He was tall and appeared to be of Indian descent. He wore a linen shirt opened to his navel, shorts, and sandals.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked. Terry says the man never looked in the direction of the body.

  “Someone’s hurt. We need to call the police,” Mike shouted at the man. The man shook his head.

  “I don’t have a phone,” he said.

  The chaos of the scene obscures the next sequence of events. Terry remembers the patrol car pulling up, driven by a skeptical uniformed cop with a mustache who asked sarcastically where the body was. He remembers the change in tone and urgent radio for help when the cop saw Kathleen. He remembers the cop’s partner, a younger guy, maybe even a trainee, leaning against the side of the car, retching.

  He remembers Darren against the garage, his hands still to his head, rocking back and forth. And then a siege of lights and sirens, the likes of which Terry had never seen before or since.

  Seven years later, Terry happened to carpool to a concert with a guy named Tom McBride, who lived a few doors down from the murder scene. Terry and Tom had been enemies as kids, in the way you are when you don’t know each other and go to different schools. Tom, Terry says, was a “public,” as the Catholic kids called them. But Terry discovered that Tom was actually a really good guy. They gabbed all night.

  “Weren’t you one of the kids that found that body?” Tom asked.

  Terry said he was. Tom’s eyes narrowed.

  “I always thought someone in the neighborhood did it.”

  An image came back to Terry, the man in the open linen shirt, the strange way he wouldn’t look at Kathleen’s body. The way he’d asked them what was going on here, when it was clear something horrible was.

  Terry’s stomach tightened.

  “What did he look like?” Terry asked.

  Tom described him. Tall. From India. A real creep.

  “He was right there when we found her!” Terry said.

  Tom’s color drained. He couldn’t believe it. He remembered clearly that, in the clamor after the discovery of the body, the neighbor, who appeared freshly showered and was dressed in a robe, came out his back door to survey the police cars. He’d turned to Tom and his family, who were out on their back porch.

  “Did he say anything?” Terry asked.

  Tom nodded.

  “What’s going on here?” the neighbor said.

  * * *

  THEY NEVER CAUGHT HER KILLER. AND THOSE PIECES OF HER SHATTERED Walkman that I picked up at her crime scene are jangling around in my head thirty years later as I steer my rental car onto Capitol Avenue in Sacramento. I take it east, out of town, until it turns into Folsom Boulevard. I stay on Folsom, past Sac State and the Sutter Center for Psychiatry, past the empty lots of scrub and scattered oak trees. Running parallel on my right is the Gold Line, a light-rail transit system that runs from downtown to Folsom, twenty-five miles east. The route is historic. The tracks were once used for the Sacramento Valley Railroad, built in 1856, the first steam railroad to connect the city with the mining camps in the Sierras. Crossing Bradshaw Road, I spot signs reading PAWN and 6 POCKET SPORTS BAR. Across the road are petroleum storage tanks behind a rusty chain-link fence. I’m at my destination. Where it all started: the city of Rancho Cordova.

  Sacramento, 1976–1977

  IN THE SEVENTIES, KIDS WHO DIDN’T
LIVE HERE CALLED IT RANCHO Cambodia. The American River bisects the east side of Sacramento County, and Rancho Cordova, on the south bank, is cut off from the leafier, more genteel suburbs on the other side of the river. The area began as a Mexican land grant of five thousand acres for farming. In 1848, after James W. Marshall, thirty-five miles upriver, glimpsed glittering metal flakes in a water-wheel drain and declared “I have found it,” the gold dredges descended on Rancho Cordova, leaving huge piles of river rock behind. For a while, it was a vineyard. Mather Air Force Base opened in 1918. But it was the Cold War that really changed Rancho Cordova. In 1953 Aerojet, the rocket and missile-propulsion manufacturer, opened its headquarters here, and with it came a boom in residential housing for its employees, the town’s twisty roads (Zinfandel Drive, Riesling Way) suddenly paved and neatly divided into modest single-story tract houses. Everyone’s family seemed associated with the military or Aerojet.

  A rougher element lurked. A man who grew up on La Gloria Way in the midseventies remembers the day the ice cream man who worked around Cordova Meadows Elementary School disappeared. Turns out the guy with the long hair, big beard, and mirrored aviator glasses who had been selling the kids Popsicles was selling LSD and cocaine to a different set of clientele, and he was hauled away by the cops. Stories of growing up in Sacramento in the seventies are often bait-and-switches like this, a tangle of sweet and scary, small-town postcards with foreboding on the back.

  On hot summer days, we waded in the American River, a woman recalls; then another memory, this one of running along the trails by the river and coming upon a homeless camp in the dense brush. Parts of the river were said to be haunted. A group of teenage girls hung out at Land Park and watched shirtless boys wax their cars; they went to Days on the Green in Oakland, that era’s Lollapalooza, to see the Eagles or Peter Frampton or Jethro Tull. They drove up to the Sutterville Road levee and drank beer. They were on the levee drinking the night of April 14, 1978, when a convoy of squad cars, sirens blaring, flew past them on the road below. The convoy was endless. “Never saw anything like it before, or since,” one of the teenagers, now a fifty-two-year-old woman, said. The East Area Rapist, or EAR—the man I would come to call the Golden State Killer—had struck again.