There was a man in the window.
The boy in the bed could see him, a head hanging over the eaves, the tassled top of a knit cap bobbing. And he could hear him, thudding on the roof.
Then came the sweep of a flashlight beam across his bedroom.
The terrified 4-year-old ran to his parents' bed.
It wasn't until morning that Inspector Richard Shelby woke to the story from his son.
Shelby was a lead detective on the East Area Rapist case. There was no question in his mind who had been on his roof. His Rancho Cordova home was in the heart of where the EAR _ as the police called him _ was operating; in fact, the rapist would later stage his 44th assault just four blocks away.
What Shelby didn't know was whether the rapist knew he lived in that house. Was he casing his next victim or targeting the detective trying to catch him?
It was May 1977, a month in which five attacks would be reported. The month the rapist began to openly taunt police.
"Tell those (expletive), those pigs," the EAR swore that month between clenched teeth in his 21st home invasion rape, "if I hear about this I'm going to go out tomorrow night and kill two people. People are going to die."
Another detective on the case, Carol Daly, was tasked with taking victim statements at the crime scene. After one attack, she arrived at a house and recognized the husband of the rape victim. Seven months earlier, he had stood up at a crowded community meeting to berate police for failing to catch the rapist.
With few exceptions, Daly interviewed every woman in Sacramento raped by the serial attacker. They told of two- and even three-hour nightmares in which couples were bound, threatened with maiming and death, the women repeatedly sexually assaulted.
Daly kept styled wigs at the ready so that when the predawn call came she could roll with composure.
Her way with rape victims instilled trust, made them feel safe despite their bathrobes, the crime not yet washed off their bodies, their wrists still raw and their homes filled with officers dusting for fingerprints and collecting evidence.
To Daly they confided the horrific details, every sexual position used, the size of his penis, his words, his smell. Her reports were exhaustive narrations of terror.
Then she took them to the hospital for the rape exam, and back home, or, if they were nauseated from the long night, through the drive-in for a breakfast sandwich.
With the 21st attack, the month the prowler appeared on Shelby's roof, he made it clear police were also his target.
The sheriff's department installed a floor mat at Daly's house wired to the city's police department.
Her kids tripped the alarm. The dogs tripped the alarm. After three days, Daly grew tired of rushing to the phone to stop city police before they swarmed her lawn, Code 3 with guns drawn. She asked for the alarm to be removed.
The East Area Rapist came uncomfortably close anyway. He raped a 15-year-old baby sitter a short walk from Daly's house, in an upscale river subdivision far from his usual territory.
Daly took that call too, comforted the terrified, embarrassed girl, drove her home for fresh clothes and to the hospital to be examined.
The sheriff's department came under immense pressure from angry citizens. The sheriff leaned on Daly, putting her out front at standing-room-only community forums to calm the public.
At first she urged women to lock their doors and, if they found themselves assaulted, to fight. "Don't be polite, ladies," she said.
Injure to incapacitate.
Later, Daly urged women against struggling. Comply with the rapist's demands, she said. He's too dangerous.
But Daly was not allowed to share all the details with the public _ such as his stalking patterns.
The sheriff held a closed-door briefing with media bosses in town, extracting an agreement to keep certain facts _ most facts _ out of the public eye. Imagination filled the void. A copycat rapist confessed he intended to cut off the nipples of his victims because he heard that was what the EAR did.
The terror fed into larger social and political tensions. An angry women's group marched against the politically vulnerable sheriff, demanding to know more, demanding the installation of a 911 emergency service. Spilling over to the Capitol lawn, they demanded tougher laws against rape. The cause was picked up by George Deukmejian, a Republican senator from Long Beach who parlayed anti-crime legislation to win election as attorney general, then governor. And a turf war broke out between the sheriff's department and Sacramento's first rape crisis center.
In the heart of the storm, Daly was frustrated _ and overwhelmed.
"Sometimes I ... cannot even imagine the fear, the long hours of waiting for the rapist to go away, the fight to get free," she would later say.
"Being blindfolded, bound tightly, fear running through your thoughts, stomachs on fire with fear and having to lie there for so long."
In bed at night, she closed her eyes and imagined opening them to the blinding flashlight of the East Area Rapist.
She woke each morning expecting her next call to be a homicide.
