When I think back about when I was working, because that was 17 years in homicide, the
thing that bothered me the most was when I retired.
Retirement was fine; it was leaving the cases I didn’t solve.
And there’s a lot of them that I still think about.
Maybe not in great detail, but I can remember some of the names and the times and the victims.
But it seems like a left a whole job undone not solving all those cases.
We had this double murder of Brian and Katie Maggiore and Brian was a sergeant at Mather
Air Force Base nearby where they had lived.
At the time we had a series, not a series, but several double murders and I was thinking
of some legitimate motive.
Some … we’re going to find out what happened here pretty soon, because these people were
walking their dog in a residential area and they were accosted about 9 o’clock in the
evening by a gunman.
And something just seemed totally out of sorts.
Was it going to be a robbery?
Did they interrupt another crime being committed?
And hadn’t thought about the East Area Rapist at that particular time we got there.
But what had happened anyway, Brian and Katie were walking their dog, confronted by a gunman.
They were chased into a backyard off of the street, through another back yard, because
of the fence between the two yards had blown down because of recent wind storms.
The gunman caught up with Brian and killed him at the dead end of this back yard.
Katie was able to run towards the other side of the house, but she tripped in a flower
bed and the gunman caught up and shot her.
Both were taken to hospitals right away where they both succumbed to their injuries.
As we continue to work that, we developed a lot of witnesses.
We had many sightings of an individual running.
What seemed to me most consistent about all the ones we had were a brown jacket, waist
length, maybe leather, maybe another kind of material.
Some describe a stain on the back, some had the stripes on the shoulders and others maybe
a dragon emblem.
That seemed to be pretty consistent of a white male and in fact one of the witnesses actually
saw this person running and had a gun in their back pocket.
But the most startling was when we were canvassing, a neighbor said they saw the person running
and was wearing a ski mask.
At the time, this was when the East Area Rapist series was really peaking and that was one
of his devices he used was the ski mask.
Further examining the scene in the back yard where the shootings took place, we found a
shoelace that appeared to have just been taken out of the wrapper, but it was tied in a double
loop to use like handcuffs or a restraint.
This was also something the East Area Rapist used.
So this kind of threw a whole different light on this rape series.
We have the rape series, do we also have now a violent criminal who is killing people?
I see several scenarios, though.
He got killed.
He’s in custody somewhere where they don’t enter into a DNA database, or he’s simply
got older and just quit.
I have no idea.
But he’s got to be one of the most prolific criminals when you think of the other murder
cases that are connected and all of the rape cases and God know what else we don’t know
about.