Casefile True Crime - Case 53: Bonus 1 – Interviews

Episode Date: June 15, 2017

EAR/ONS BONUS EPISODE #1 Interviews with Jane Carson-Sandler & Carol Daly Jane Carson-Sandler survived the brutal attack and rape of the East Area Rapist in the October of 1976. She is the fifth known survivor. She was in bed with her three-year-old son when they were attacked. Her attack had come off the back of around a month of hang up calls. These calls had escalated, and one time, Jane told the caller to stop, the voice then told her he was going to kill her husband. Police who were not linked to the Rapist investigation assured the family it sounded like a prank…

Jane Carson Sientler survived attack number 5 of the East Area Rapist in October 1976. She was in bed with her 3 year old son when they were attacked. Her attack had come off the back of a month of hang up phone calls. These calls had escalated and one time when Jane told the caller to stop. The caller told her he was going to kill her husband. Just prior to Jane's attack she reported a break in to police. She had found money footprints on the carpet under her son's window and upon further inspection of their house she realised inexpensive jewellery had been stolen.

Detectives who investigated were not the officers working in the East Area Rapist cases so they reassured her it seemed like the work of kids and the phone calls were probably just a prank. Jane had links to the medical field, the armed forces as well as the education system. Three sections of the community to come up again and again throughout the series. I actually graduated from nurses training in North New Jersey in 1967 and a year later moved down to Miami Beach where I was working in the emergency room and at that time I decided I didn't really have any money to travel and see the world so Vietnam War was going on at the time and I thought I liked very much to join the military and help the soldiers,

treat the soldiers and see the world so I joined the Air Force and I was sent to Travis Air Force Base for two years where I met my husband who was a pilot and then the two of us were transferred to the Philippines. I stayed there two years and he was sent to Thailand at that time. I got pregnant and at that time in the military they did not allow women to remain in the military if they were pregnant so I had to go home, come back home. I had my son and I joined the Air Force Reserve and became a flight nurse flying airbag missions back and forth from the Philippines to Hawaii back to the states carrying injured troops.

Then my husband was transferred to different bases that we ended up in Sacramento in Citrus Heights, California where we bought a nice little three bedroom, two bath home. My husband was stationed close by at McFlyland Air Force Base and I was doing my reserve duty at Travis Air Force Base and then I was also at that time going to school at California State University to get my Bachelor of Nursing degree, my BSN is they call it and this was the year that I was raped. My husband had left for work early one morning and prior to him leaving for work my three year old son came and got in bed with me to snuggle.

As soon as I heard the garage door close I saw this flashlight flashing down the hall and someone running and I yelled to my husband, what are you doing? What's the matter? What did you forget? That's when I looked up and there was this man with a ski mask on, black leather jacket, high top Converse sneakers holding a large butchering knife telling us to shut up or kill us. He then tied us up, gagged us, blindfolded us and then moved my son so I had absolutely

no idea where he put him or what happened to him and I think the reason I named my book Frozen in Fear because that was the emotion that was so overwhelming at that time was fear, fear of not knowing what he was there for, fear of not knowing where he put my son, is he going to kill us? I just had no idea so my heart was beating so fast it just about went through my chest and the minute he untied my ankles I knew that he wasn't there just to rob us. He was there to rape me but I didn't really remember or pay any attention to the rape because all I was concerned about was where is my son, what did he do with my son?

After he tied us up he started ripping sheets and he was very methodical on this. He just kept tearing, opening up my drawer, my dresser drawers and then ripping and tearing sheets. He just kept doing this and doing this and doing this and of course I'm thinking okay we're tied up what is he going to do with these sheets and I'm thinking in the back of my mind this is his ritual because he doesn't know what he's going to do, this is giving him time to contemplate his next move or is he going to hang us with the sheets that he's ripped.

I mean again, fear, fear, fear was the emotion, fear, what is next, what is he here for, what is he going to do and then even after the rape he stayed in the house for quite some time back and forth to the bedroom in the kitchen rattling the pots and pans, just not knowing what the end was going to be and when the end was going to be. So that was the horror of the whole scenario, that was the horror, this is not knowing. After the rape he just went into the kitchen and I think he made, I don't know what he was doing but he made a lot of noise with pots and pans and then he'd come back in the bedroom and threaten us again and say if we were to move or he'd come back and kill

us. Eventually I could see that it was getting light outside and I kind of scooted over on the bed and my son was actually back next to me so what a relief that was and eventually I was able to get my blindfold down and I woke up my son who had fallen asleep and we hobbled down the hall and the front door was locked with a chair propped up underneath it and then we were able to go around to the back sliding glass door and hobbled around to the front gate where I screamed and a neighbor came and took us both over to her home. At that time the police were called, my husband was called and they were male policemen and

I wasn't really very anxious to speak with them and then Carol Daly the detective showed up and she was my angel, my savior, she took me to the emergency room and stayed with me for a while but I had to sit in the emergency room for quite some time before they actually took me in for my examination and I did have a little, I mean I was such a wretch, I had a little, he actually scraped my chest with his knife so he didn't really cut me but he scraped me so I had blood on my chest, my hair was all matted and I was just, I was frightening really to look at but anyway Carol had to leave and I went into the examining room and at one minute I was sobbing and hysterically crying and the next minute I was and that

was because I was realizing what had just happened to me and to my son and then the next minute I was happy and laughing and thanking God that you know I can't believe what we've been through but we survived. So then was the examination by the doctor and I think the nurses thought I was crazy because of my, my emotions were so erratic going from crying to laughing then was the shot of penicillin which was very painful and then the morning after pill and I was alone, I didn't have anyone from a rape crisis center with me so it was a pretty harrowing experience and then getting home to my home, back home I hated it, I was afraid, the police

were there of course and the dogs searching everything and the next day my husband put an alarm system on our house and every night my husband and my son and I slept together and the whole town, the whole city of Sacramento eventually was in fear because after my rape they announced that there was a serial rapist loose in the Sacramento area and the helicopters would fly over at night with their spotlights looking for him and all the hardware stores were sold out of every type of, every type of security system you could imagine, locks and bolts and guns and so it was a pretty, it was a pretty crazy time. I did continue at school and my reserve work, I didn't get help right away but then eventually

I went to our rape crisis center in Sacramento and that was very healing for me because I got to meet other women that were raped and I realized that I wasn't going crazy because of all the emotions that I was experiencing. It's been, gosh, so it was 40 years ago when I was raped during that time, those 40 years I stayed in the military, I continued with my nursing, I actually retired in 1999 as a full colonel in the Air Force so I put a lot of attention into my work and I really can't say I dealt much with the rape, I just kind of buried that. Then about, I guess about six years ago I read the book, The Purpose Driven Life by

Rick Warren and realized that God had a purpose for me and I was to use what happened to me and pay it forward, help other women maybe get through whatever turmoil that they're experiencing. Back in 1976, you didn't talk about rape, I only told my mother and my best friend because I felt ashamed, felt guilty, I thought, gee, where did he see me, what was I wearing, we had those thoughts back then and it was a totally different time then because it's just not something that was discussed. I remember going to a meeting with some of the Air Force wives, they had a little coffee

and of course everyone at that time was talking about the East Area Rapist, every place you went because everybody was so afraid, he raped 50 women, nobody knew who was going to be exed where he was going to show up but none of these women knew anything about my rape and then they start with all these rumors, oh did you hear that he cut women's nipples off and he did this and he did that, which was not true but I just sat there and eyes wide open, mouth open thinking, oh my God, I wish I could say something, I wish I could say something but I couldn't, I was just ashamed, you just didn't talk about rape. So anyway, as far as what happened again at that time, it was a very difficult situation

for my husband, he didn't know how to respond and of course men didn't get any therapy back at that time, so all he knew to do was to secure the house, do what he could to protect us, there was just so much going on with never knowing if he was going to come back, the phone would ring and he'd hang up, the rapist would hang up and then I knew when the phone rang and there was nobody on the line, it was him, so the fear continued and then the following spring, this was in October when I was raped but the following spring and this goes on to about the fear continuing, my husband was out of town and it was a nice afternoon and my son was taking a snap so I went into our backyard, I just un-pied the top of the

bikini on and I just un-tied the top to get some sun on my back, so a little while when I was laying there pretty soon, these little pebbles were, I don't know where they came from, I didn't know where the wind wasn't blowing but they were on my back, this is weird what's going on here and then sure enough a few more pebbles were landing on my back and I just thought oh my gosh, it's him, it's the rapist, he's trying to get my attention, he's back, so anyway, I pulled up my top and I ran into the house and called the police and they of course knew that I was a survivor of the easterly rapist, they were over there in a few minutes, we rushed to the back of the fenced yard and they jumped over this huge fence and I followed

them and cut my hand and trying to find out who this perpetrator was and they finally found out that it was just some old man that lived back there in the orchard that was just trying to get my attention and so that was very, very frightening and here I had my cut on my hand, I probably could have used a stitch but I did not when I go back to the emergency room and that would have been traumatizing just to be back in the ER, I just never knew the next phone call, the next knock on the door, was he coming back, was he going to carry out a threat to kill us? You heard during the series that Detective Carol Daly began working in the easterly rapist

cases from the day of Jane's attack, Jane's crime scene was the first encounter that Carol had with any survivor of the rapist, Carol's life and career was changed that day, Carol went on to be an integral figure in the support and rehabilitation for survivors of rape, those committed by the easterly rapist as well as others. I was working homicide and solely homicide at the time, I did not come into the easterly rape cases until about the fifth rape and actually one of the first cases that I came to and I can use her name because she has written her book and you probably talked to her, it was Jane Carson, they kind of realized that they maybe had a series of rapes going

and they were much different than any other rape cases that they had been working, these were really horrific rapes and about the fifth case I come in as the investigator, lead investigator to work primarily and almost solely with the female victims until we could solve the case. I left my homicide duties and started working on the easterly rape cases. The Sheriff's Department at that time, you may already know this, but they kind of wanted to keep things quiet that they thought they had a series of rapes going and they thought if they put a group together who specialized in sex crimes that they would solve the case and arrest the guy and then they could make it known to the media and of course that didn't

happen, it wasn't solved and in the meantime the word got out through the community that there was a series of rape cases going that the Sheriff's Department was kind of hiding from the community and there was a lot of pressure put on the Sheriff at that time from, we had two local newspapers at that time, Sacramento Bee and the Sacramento Union and the editors put some pressure on the Sheriff and said you need to let the community know so he agreed that from that point on any rape that was attributed to the East Area Rapist, you know, they would be aware of it. In fact, the East Area Rapist title, the name that we gave this guy was actually a Sacramento

Bee reporter who had access within the Sheriff's Department, very, very trusted reporter that you could say anything to and tell him anything and he wouldn't print it unless he knew, you know, that we allowed it and his name was Warren Holloway and he happened to, you know, get wind of where the rapes were occurring and he said, oh, he said they're all East Area Rapes so then the East Area Rapist, that was how he got his name. First, I think it was like any other investigation, you get in there and you blame the facts and you work with the victims and try to do everything that you can to get as much information and then I did a lot of the follow-up investigation interviewing suspects and following leads

and things and it wasn't really until we were well into the series of cases that, yeah, emotionally it was draining but the most important thing throughout all of it was the victims, you know, how it affected us or how anybody felt about it was really secondary. The whole time investigating these cases was strictly about the victims and what we could do to help them and what we could do to solve the case. When you're interviewing a rape victim, it's very difficult because these rape victims went through terrible trauma because of the type of sexual assault and the repeated assaults that were committed on them during the course of the rapist being in the home and when you

talk to a victim, it's very embarrassing for them to say different things that he did to them and so just explaining to them that the reason that we need to know everything is that each act that he did would be a different felony such as you had the rape, you had sodomy, you had oral copulation, then you had the fondling, then you had the time up and, you know, on a couple of cases he moved them outside so essentially that could be kidnapping. So in explaining to them why we needed to know absolutely all of the details of what happened was because it stacked up the felonies and then when we arrested him we would have things to bargain with or the DA would have, you know, things to bargain

with and so I think the victims were, because they were so traumatized they were very willing to share with us everything and having done these investigations for years you have to be extremely sensitive, you have to be understanding, you have to let them cry, you have to let them vent, you have to let them be angry but none of it can be taken personally because you have to accept, you know, the feelings that they're going through. So after several of the rates, yeah, begin to be a little bit difficult and probably the reason it was the most difficult is because everybody was looking at it saying why haven't you solved this case and, you know, towards the end even our own officers in the department, we'd walk into

work and we'd be at the elevator and somebody walked by and they say, haven't you solved that case yet? And so there was pressure not only within the community, our victims, but even within our own group in law enforcement, the pressure to, you know, try to solve these cases. People were angry, you know, at what he was doing to the community but mostly, you know, what he was doing to all of the victims. It was extremely difficult for them, if you can imagine because the husband and the man in the home was always supposed to be the protector and when the rapists came in and would be shining a flashlight in their eyes and holding the gun on them and telling the man to roll over for the woman to tie

up his hands and his feet and then he would tie her up and then he would retie the male victim. There was just a total loss of control, total loss of being able to do anything. I firmly believe had anyone tried to act out or tried to resist that we probably would have had a homicide here in Sacramento earlier than the ones, you know, down south. It was extremely difficult in talking with the men and of course, you know, through all of these assaults that we had here in Sacramento County, probably only two of the couples ever stayed together, whether they were boyfriend, girlfriend or husband and wife. Some of them they said, well, the marriage was falling apart anyway, so they couldn't really put the blame there,

but it was difficult to recover. One of the fathers of the victim years later, I met him at a community event and he was still having trouble with the fact that he wasn't home and wasn't there to protect his daughter. And you know, when I tried to explain to them, it wouldn't have made any difference. These people did what they should have done. They complied and their lives were saved. And we know that even on one of our first race, there were two girls in the house and when one of them started to run, he hit her on the back of the head and knocked her to the ground and tied her up. So he had tendencies to be violent, you know, from the very first case on. And he was obsessed with the threats to kill. He wanted

to kill, I'm going to kill, I'm going to kill, I'll kill everybody in the house, do just as I say. And so when you're tied up and you're gagged and you're bound and you're blindfolded, and you can't see what's happening, the best thing, and we told the victims, they all did the best thing that they could have done in order to preserve their lives. We felt he was somebody that was very school, probably in place tactics. At one time, we thought he could have been military. We thought he could have been law enforcement. We had officers in agencies all around that were willing to come forward and, you know, make sure that they couldn't be a suspect. You know, at the time, we're doing saliva tests. I don't know if you're aware of

that. The saliva tests that were done to rule out whether he was a secretor or a non-secretor. And we knew that he was a non-secretor. So, I mean, we had people all over in law enforcement agencies. We had postal carriers. We had meter readers. We had FedEx. We had postal delivery. We would go to briefings and they would all line up and chew on God's cotton to be eliminated. And we knew that he was very astute to what we were doing. As soon as we would say, well, you know, there hasn't ever been, okay, at first, we said there's never been a male in the house. And shortly after that, you know, he did a right where there was a man in the house. From the very beginning, there had always been another person beside the victim in the house, you know, that

was tied up and secured. We felt that he really fed off on the news feed, you know, talking about things that he didn't do in the next, you know, it seemed like the next thing, next rate, he would just challenge us to say, ha, ha, I know what you're doing. And it would, it would be a challenge for him. So we, we know it was somebody who was watching the news very carefully. And we kind of felt that maybe he, you know, either had friends in law enforcement or he just knew an awful lot of what was going on. So we had two military bases here in Sacramento at the time, McClellan and major Air Force base. So we thought it could have been somebody, you know, in the military, could have been somebody in law enforcement or even in private security. And the

psychological profiles, I mean, it's just, you know, what they're doing, they're just looking at the behavior and sort of setting up a profile. But until you really know who it was and know what their background is, it's, it's, you know, it's very difficult to really say, here's the kind of person that we're looking for. When he left Sacramento, I continued with the task for a while and then we had, when we had no additional rates in Sacramento, he had moved on to surrounding jurisdictions. I mean, I knew without a doubt that he was going to kill. And every time we got a call, I had a fear that it was going to be a homicide case instead of a sexual assault case. And we had one case in Sacramento that they really feel was attributed to the sherry rapist. They

couldn't really prove it. It was a young couple out in Rancho Cordova. And they challenged him. He ended up killing both of them. It's the majority's case. But we didn't know at the time, you know, we couldn't tie, there was no way we could tie it in. And it's only tied in now through circumstantial evidence. But I really felt that he was getting more and more violent. He was making more and more threats. He was becoming more and more disturbed about everything. After we went a long period of time, without any rates, I asked to go back to the homicide detail, because I was, I was totally burnt out. And it's not just investigating the cases, but it's really the emotional support of the victims. And if you've done counseling or anything, or been around people that do counseling,

you know, it can take your toll and you need to get a break from it. So I asked to go back to homicide. And they said, Well, there's a lot of trauma there. And I said, Yeah, but you know, what we, our arrest rate was like 98% on our cases in homicide. So we, we brought finality, which a lot of people, you know, which you need in a case. And I think that's what, and well, I don't think I know, that's what all of these victims need. They need finality. They need to know who it was. And they need either a raster to know that he's dead, so that it can bring some peace into their lives. I talked with one of the victims here just a while back, her and her husband were together at the time of the rape. And they are still together, very strong people. And she said, We decided along

the way that the rape was not going to define us, that we knew who we were. And it was something that happened. And it's over. They were ones that chose not to talk to the media, they just wanted to get on with their lives. And they moved after the rape resettled and are doing great. So there's some positive, you know, in talking with some of the victims, Jane Carson wrote her book, and was able to get on with it. You know, Shelby wrote his book to try to, you know, get it off of his chest. And the different ones that have really tried to keep it out there in the public, the victims that have come forward, ever since the FBI put out their $50,000 reward, that's when really all of this escalated. We've probably had about 12 different news outlets that are doing

different stories here in the US on the East Area Rapist and the Golden State Killer, or the original Night Stalker, whatever, you know, they've given him three different names, but he is all the same person. And so there is a real concerted effort right now to try to get any information. But there was not anything that we did not try to do. You know, I've got three pages of things that we did throughout the investigation to try to identify this guy, very sophisticated things. You know, at the time, you have to think about at the time that the East Area Rapist was working, we did not have cell phones. Law enforcement officers had pagers on their belt where they would get a page, then they would have to go to a pay phone and they would call. We didn't have cameras in our

cars. We had police radios, but we didn't have computers or anything. And we didn't have computers when we worked a case, we came in and we typed it on a manual typewriter. So you have to, you know, kind of think back where we were at the time of these investigations, as opposed to all of the sophistication that they have now. You know, the Task Force, people who specialized in the East Area rape cases were the same people who responded every time because they knew what to look for. You know, they were a group of people that worked well together. And whether it was a canvas team, whether it was a police team that saturated in patrol in the area, whether it was the crime lab that responded, the investigators that responded. We had the same people who were responding all of

the time because they knew what to look for. And they knew what questions to ask. And it was very, very well organized. I think the community effect was the thing that stood out like no other case cases that I have ever worked. There were over 6,000 guns that were sold during that time. You know, people were making their homes a fortress because they were so afraid of this person. I've not ever seen so much fear in the community as there was at the time that the East Area rape case was working.