No Regrets

said she remembered that George’s last name sounded “foreign. He was like a very dark Italian. Me, I’m mulatto and he wasn’t as dark as me—but dark. His name might have been Rodriquez, but I’m not sure. Maybe it was Danny Rodriquez?”
    Lamphere and Nordlund went through their computer bank and all the FIRs (Field Investigation Reports filed by patrol officers) for the prior six months to see if there were any hits on “Danny Rodriquez.” They found no one matching the rapist’s description. They hadn’t really expected that they would; those who frequented the Exotica lived in a netherworld, moving in shadows and usuallyusing several aliases. They wondered if they would ever find the man who had savagely attacked Arden Lee.
    Pat Lamphere was surprised to receive a call from Roger Pomarleau. He said he had gone through some receipts and found the name “George Ayala” on them. “I might have a picture of him someplace,” he added. “I’ll look.”
    Since Roger Pomarleau had done his share of knocking young women around in the past, it seemed odd that he would try to help the police find his ex-bouncer. Perhaps he just wanted to make points against any future trouble he might have, but, whatever his motive, Pomarleau was the best informant they’d had thus far on the sadistic—and now vanished—George.
    Joyce Johnson, another Sexual Assault detective, who was working the night shift, ran the name “Ayala” on the computer. She found some hits on Mexican Ayalas, but they were all older or they were in the computer banks under “victim.”
    There was a growing sense of urgency in this so-far-fruitless investigation. Ayala was still free, and he might assault other women. His rage against them was far beyond anything most detectives had ever encountered. Expanding her computer search into Oregon and California, Joyce Johnson contacted Salem and Sacramento to see if their state’s computers had any listing for individuals named Ayala.
    Sacramento detectives reported on June 5 that they had two “George Ayalas” in their computer banks. One was a burglar out of Los Angeles, and the other had gotten into trouble in San Francisco for sex and narcotics offenses. One was twenty-one and the other twenty-eight. “We’re forwarding photos of both of them.”
    Arden Lee had finally recovered enough to speak withdetectives in some detail about what had happened to her. John Nordlund tape-recorded his interview with her while Lamphere stood by. Arden remembered standing in front of the Korea Tavern around midnight on the night of May 31-June 1. “I ran into this man named George,” she began. “I don’t know his last name, but Kim introduced us, and I said, ‘Oh, yeah,’ and we started talking, just gossip, and then he asked me if I wanted to come and have a drink with him. He said he’d just bought a new house and we could go there. He said it was still boarded up, but he had the lower floor fixed up.”
    “Did you have any fear of him at that time?” Nordlund asked.
    “Not when we were first walking up the street. A police car went by and he asked me if there were any warrants out for me, and I said, ‘No,’ and he said there were for him, but that’s about as much as he said then.”
    There was no point in telling Arden now that she had used very poor judgment in agreeing to walk off into the night with a man she barely knew. She had learned a terrible lesson, and even though it appeared that she was going to survive, what had happened to her would surely remain a devastating memory for all of her life.
    Arden recalled that she became suspicious of George. “I was frightened when George started walking up a path through thick shrubs,” she said. “They even shut out the streetlights, and it was very dark. It didn’t look like a house at all—at least not one someone could be living in. It had a ‘For Rent’ sign on it, and he’d told me that it belonged to him.
    “And then he started walking real fast ahead of me, and I said, ‘I’m not going. I don’t like it up here. I’m not going no further.’”
    George had turned around then, and she’d seen the rope in his hands. She’d been afraid before when she saw the dark bushes and the “For Rent” sign on the house that was supposed to belong to George, but now, seeing the looped rope, she was terrified.
    “I started screaming and running, but he tackled me and got the rope around my neck. He started choking me with it