As more information comes out on the cat burglar and home invasion artist who operated in Rancho Cordova and the East Area over 1972-1973 and perhaps later, it becomes increasingly clear this guy had some issues beyond your normal burglar. As I begin to put it into sequence on Q Files, I thought I would highlight just one here.
Collectively, I have placed all this home invasion, ransacking, and cat burglary under the heading of the “Cordova Cat.” There are enough distinctions to differentiate, as the SSD does, between the crime sprees to label one The Cat Burglar and the other the Cordova Meadows Burglar, but there is also enough to suggest they are one and the same perpetrator who shifted his MO due to circumstances.
The “Cat Burglar” was an oddball, but he was an oddball whose MO was slightly different from the Cordova Meadows Burglar because technically speaking only the “Cat Burglar” was a cat burglar. The victims have to be in the house in the wee hours for the burglar to be considered a “cat burglar.” As such, he didn’t ransack. He didn’t pull the plug on the forced air furnace. But he said stupid stuff just like EAR did. When a homeowner awoke and sat up in bed, seeing him standing by the dresser in her bedroom, all he said was: “I took a dollar from your dresser.” The suspect in the Maggiore Double Murder (believed to be EAR) when seen lurking in a homeowner’s bushes, said: “Oh, I guess I’m trespassing.” The Cordova Meadows Burglar entered a house when no one was home. As such he could afford to ransack and pull the plug on air furnaces (to maintain silence ostensibly). He also hated little dogs and killed a terrier and little poodle by blunt force.
But both (if they were not the same) were odd, and among a number of similar oddities with EAR is the oddity of stalking a community from afar. The most notable time EAR was known to have done this was in the case of Victim No 11. He stole her car and drove it quite far away from Glenville Circle to Great Falls Way, implying this is where he had started his night prowling earlier and somewhere nearby had parked his own car. If you know the area, these two locations are far apart.
The Cat Burglar apparently did that on occasion as well. In his Birdcage area strikes (3 in one night), he walks south (apparently) on Primrose, crosses Madison Avenue, walks through a golf course (dark at night, of course) and then on a pathway (probably a golf cart pathway) connecting to the apartments south of the course (Fairway 2 Ave or Pineridge) dumps the purses, wallets, whatever he had rifled through. This is a long walk with stolen goods, and right back to an apartment building. EAR parked by the apartments on Great Falls Way. He had done that at other stalking locations, most recently revealed the apartments on Locust Ave. while stalking Haskell Avenue.
This is just another unusual specific clue within a greater corpus of a similar MO that links the Cordova Cat to EAR. The cat burglaries of that night, of course, were all within a block of houses that EAR would hit in the neighborhood a few years later.
As I now finish with the EAR-ONS section overhaul on Q Files, I prepare to put in order as much as I can of the Cordova Cat, the arguments dividing between two burglars, and those arguments supporting a single perpetrator; and, of course, how this links to EAR.
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Since 1990 Gian J. Quasar has investigated a broad range of mysterious subjects, from strange disappearances to serial murders, earning in that time the unique distinction of being likened to “the real life Kolchak.” However, he is much more at home with being called The Quester or Q Man. “He’s bloody eccentric, an historian with no qualifications who sticks his nose into affairs and gets results.” He is the author of several books, one of which inspired a Resolution in Congress.