On November 8, 1984, a 12-year-old Oakland, California, girl was accosted by a black intruder who invaded her home, brandished a pistol, and forced her to surrender a jewelry box belonging to her parents. That accomplished, the man bound and gagged his victim, jammed a pillow case over her head and brutally raped her; finished, he pressed a pillow over her face and shot her twice, leaving the girl for dead. In fact, she survived wounds to the head and neck, untying herself and phoning police, who found the house ransacked, a screen removed from the bedroom window where her attacker had entered.

Six weeks later, on December 23, relatives found Anna Evardo, 25, inside a closet of the family home, nude and bleeding profusely from three small-caliber bullet wounds. The slugs, recovered from her corpse, were matched against the bullets fired in the attack November 8. Neighbors described a black man seen leaving the Evardo home, and forensics experts recovered latent fingerprints that did not match surviving members of the family.

The killer struck again on January 24, 1985, police responding to reports of gunshots on Oakland's historic Bret Harte Boardwalk. They found a woman Iying wounded in a beauty shop, the doors and windows blocked by burglar bars. Firefighters managed to force an entry, and two victims were discovered inside. One, Marilyn Moore, had been killed in a closet at the rear of the shop; the survivor described their black assailant and the stolen car -- her own -- in which he fled. An all-points bulletin put officers on the trail of the car, but they lost their man when he fled on foot, vanishing into a crowded apartment complex.

A week later, on January 31, Doris Lee was found dead at her home, in the Oakland hills. Shot at close range with a small-caliber weapon, she had been shrouded by a blanket in death, as if her killer sought to conceal his crime.

On February 3, police informants came up with the address of suspect Anthony Wimberly, 23, a recent parolee. Wimberly's fingerprints matched those lifted from the December crime scene, and his first victim had no hesitation in picking him out of a lineup. Wimberly was further identified, by patrolmen and a surviving gunshot victim, as the perpetrator of the January 24 attack. Charged with three counts of murder, two counts of attempted murder and sundry other felonies, Wimberly was held without bond, prosecutors announcing their intention to seek the death penalty.