Winter 1994
Detective John Lucas of the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office sits at his desk on his lunch break, eating a Jack in the Box fried chicken sandwich with curly fries. As he dips a cluster of fries in ketchup and pops them into his mouth, his phone rings, the red light flashing with an incoming call.
He swallows the bite and answers, “Detective Lucas.”
“John, this is Tracy from the front desk,” a familiar voice says. “We’ve got a woman on the line from Colorado who wants to know about unsolved murders from 1980.”
“Nineteen eighty?” he says, quickly doing the math in his head. “That was fourteen years ago.”
“You were around back then, weren’t you?” Tracy asks. “Would you mind talking to her?”
Lucas consents and takes a sip of root beer before the call is transferred. Most of the time, calls like this turn out to be wild-goose chases. But Lucas tells himself to have an open mind.
“Detective Lucas,” he says when the call is put through. “How may I help you?”
The woman identifies herself as Kathi Spiars from Glenwood Springs, Colorado, and says she’s spent the past few months calling every law enforcement agency within a hundred miles of Oakland to ask about unsolved murder cases from 1980.
“Most of the officers haven’t taken me seriously,” she admits. “I hope you will.”
“I’m listening,” Lucas says, eyeing his sandwich and wishing he’d been able to finish it before taking the call. He’s been starving all morning.
The woman on the phone says that she met a man in October 1980 and fell in love with him. He was very mysterious, she says, claiming he’d been in the CIA and was on the run.
Lucas almost rolls his eyes. This is a wild-goose chase, he thinks.
The woman goes on to tell him that although they were married for twelve years, their whole relationship was built on lies. It turns out she didn’t even know his real name. She explains that the man’s real name is Eric Wright, and he was a former sheriff’s lieutenant in Alameda County who faked his death and ran out on his wife and child, plus an ex-wife and two other kids.
“Did you talk to the ex-wives?” Lucas asks.
“Not yet.”
“Did you talk to the Alameda County sheriff’s office he used to work for?”
“They said they’d look into it,” she says, “but I’m afraid they think I’m just some jaded woman with an ax to grind.”
Detective Lucas can’t blame them. He knows from experience that investigators are constantly overwhelmed, juggling cases and trying to find evidence—real, hard evidence. A detective has to look past the conspiracy theories to find facts. And some woman calling from several states away who’s mad at her ex-husband is exactly the kind of time waster you have to tune out sometimes.
His stomach growls. The sooner he can end the call, the sooner he can go back to his sandwich. But there’s no sense in being rude. The least he can do is listen to her and try to get off the phone without hurting her feelings.
“What exactly are you hoping I can do for you?” Lucas says as politely as possible.
“Honestly,” she says, “I think he killed someone. I want to know about any unsolved murders from around that time. I was blind to who he really was for years, but now I see him clearly. I just have a hunch that he’s done something really bad.”
Lucas takes a deep breath and fills his cheeks with air before blowing it out. He explains that what she’s asking isn’t as easy as it might seem. The truth is that crimes—including murders—go unsolved all the time.
“What you have is a murder suspect and no crime to go with him,” Lucas says. “That’s not normally how we do things. Usually it’s the other way around—we have the crime and we look for suspects. We can’t simply go back through every unsolved murder from around that time and add him to the suspect list,” Lucas explains. “That’s not how it works. I’m sorry. We just need more to go on than a hunch that he did something bad.”
She’s quiet for a moment and then says, “I understand.” He can tell by her tone that she’s disappointed. He’s just another person in law enforcement who isn’t taking her seriously. Once again, she’s getting nowhere. “It’s just,” she starts, “this guy was so mysterious. I’m telling you, he’s hiding something. He faked his own death. He changed his name. He hid gold bars in the toilet. He—”
Detective Lucas sits up in his chair. “What did you say?”
“Yeah,” she says. “He faked his own death. There—”
“No, no. About the gold. What did you say?”
The woman says that Eric Wright—a.k.a. Steve Marcum—used to hide unmarked gold bars in their toilet tank because he was afraid the house might burn down and he wanted the precious metals to be safely submerged in water.
“I’m telling you, nothing about this guy was normal,” she says, and when there’s no reply from the officer, she asks, “Did we get cut off?”
But Lucas is there, lost in thought. At the mention of gold, his heart rate picked up and began galloping.
He remembers divers going into the canal outside Tracy to find a body that two fishermen spotted in the aqueduct. The scene is as clear to him as if he saw it yesterday. He might have forgotten a lot of faces, names, and facts in his two decades on the force, but he remembers all the dead bodies. You don’t forget those.
This one was weighed down with a heavy chain, which kept the corpse submerged but able to drift slowly down current, making it difficult to determine where it had been dumped into the aqueduct. The body was in the water for weeks, its chest bloated with gas, the hands and feet swollen and wrinkled. The man’s skin was pale white in some places, greenish black in others, and chunks of flesh were torn away where the chain had rubbed against the body, leaving gray gouges in the muscle. The smell was so rank, it was difficult not to vomit.
The body was decomposed enough that the medical examiner found the cause of death inconclusive.
But the police were able to identify the body—a man whose gold went missing after his death.
“Ms. Spiars,” Detective Lucas says, “can you give me a phone number where I can reach you? I want to check on something and get back to you.”
After he hangs up the phone, Lucas hurries out of his office, leaving the remainder of his chicken sandwich uneaten on his desk.