1.

Around 9 p.m. on the chilly night of December 20, 2011, outside a strip mall in Placentia, California, James McGillivray lay down to go to sleep. Fifty-three years old, with a furrowed face, a graying beard, and disheveled, thinning hair, McGillivray was a familiar presence in the homeless community that lived along the Santa Ana River south of Los Angeles. That evening he’d been seen wandering around a liquor store. Now he settled onto a blanket spread out on a patch of sidewalk behind one of the mall’s exterior pillars, beneath the glimmer of fluorescent lamps. It was the last light McGillivray would ever see.

A wiry figure dressed in a dark hooded sweatshirt and gloves stood in the shadows of a nearby alleyway, watching and waiting. When McGillivray dozed off, the figure pounced. He pinned the homeless man down with a knee to the chest and unleashed a shocking barrage of violence. In the span of two minutes, he stabbed McGillivray 52 times in the upper torso and head. The assailant started out using one hand, then expertly passed the blade, a heavy-gauge Ka-Bar knife capable of piercing bone, to the other. Finally, he grasped the weapon with both hands and pounded away at his victim. After desperately flailing his arms and legs, McGillivray died within the first 40 seconds of the attack. The brutal murder was captured on grainy video by one of the shopping center’s surveillance cameras.

A week later it happened again, this time underneath an overpass in Anaheim, about five miles southwest of Placentia. The victim was Lloyd Middaugh, 42, a registered sex offender. Unable to find a job or a home, he lived in local shelters. On the evening of December 27, he called his mother, upset, she would later say, that he couldn’t secure a bed anywhere for the night. Then Middaugh, who was six-foot-four and weighed more than 300 pounds, roosted under the 91 freeway and read a book until he fell asleep.

When the killer approached, he paced around Middaugh, assessing the man’s enormous size. At the sound of footsteps, Middaugh awoke and stood up. The killer attacked from behind, stabbing his victim’s neck as Middaugh frantically tried to protect himself and pleaded for his life. When the confrontation ended, a full five minutes later, Middaugh was dead. He’d been stabbed 60 times, several of his ribs were broken, his neck and head were battered, and he had a gash on his right hand. An autopsy would show that the killer’s blade had sliced Middaugh’s thyroid gland and fractured his right temporal bone before penetrating his brain.

In hindsight it became obvious that the murders were linked. At the time, though, the idea was a hard sell among law-enforcement officials. Homeless people were frequent targets of random violence. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, between 1999 and 2010 there had been nearly 1,200 attacks nationwide, with California seeing the largest share (225) of any state. Still, Anaheim detective Daron Wyatt, a serious man with a thick mustache who spoke in a confident staccato, had a hunch that the back-to-back killings weren’t coincidental. The same kind of knife had been used in both murders, which were uncommonly vicious. What if McGillivray and Middaugh had died at the hands of one man at the start of a spree?

Wyatt approached his department’s top brass and laid out the case for why he thought the deaths were calculated—and why there might be more. His boss “kind of laughed at me,” Wyatt recalled, “because we hadn’t had a serial killer in Orange County in over 25 years.”