For Chrisanta Drive Residents, a Siege of Fear Is Finally Lifted

For a week most of the residents in the 24000 block of Chrisanta Drive in Mission Viejo slept with their doors locked, their porch lights on and their windows closed in the midst of an unyielding heat wave.

The Night Stalker had already broken into one of the homes on Chrisanta Drive before dawn last Sunday, firing three shots into the head of Bill Carns, 29, and raping his girlfriend. Carns’ neighbors were determined they would not be the Stalker’s next victim.

Guardian Angels in white T-shirts and red berets walked the street and an increasing number of Orange County sheriff’s patrol cars cruised the neighborhood. Gene Griffith loaded his short-barreled pump shotgun and propped it up against his bed, and John Cox filled his .357 Magnum with birdshot and shoved it under his mattress.

Rex and Carol Perkins ordered new locks and slept with their bedroom door bolted shut. Jeff Karp, 19, checked the lock on his bedroom window and shoved furniture, including a bean bag chair, against the door to his room.

Many of the residents on Chrisanta Drive saw themselves as prisoners in their own homes. And they were not freed until Saturday morning, when the man authorities believe taught them how to live in fear was finally behind bars.

A young boy on a bicycle braked on Cox’s driveway. “Did ya hear?” he said. “They got him.” Cox cupped his hand aside his mouth and shouted to the man raking his lawn next door. “Hey, Darryl,” he hollered. “Did you hear? Now we can leave our windows open.”

Penny Miller’s neighbor peered over the fence bordering her side yard. “Hey, Penny,” he said. “They got the guy.” Miller pressed her hand against her chest and breathed an exaggerated sigh of relief. “Phew,” she said. “Now we can sleep at night.”

Grace Yoo, 18, and her sister, Alice, 17, jumped and squealed with delight. “They got him?” Grace said. “So radical! Now I can sleep.” With the windows open. Without the wood their parents used to brace the sliding panels.

But no, Larry Credit wasn’t scared. He stood away from the pool table in the garage of his home two doors from the house where Carns was shot and said, “I haven’t worried about it. I don’t have anybody here for him to rape.” He kept the windows open at night and he wouldn’t think of buying a gun. “I’d be afraid to shoot somebody.”

Griffith wasn’t scared, either. “I just kept my shotgun closer to the bed,” he said. “Somebody come in here, I’d have blown ‘em away.”

The people who live on Chrisanta Drive didn’t know each other before last Sunday. But the stalker changed all that. They gathered at Cox’s home on Wednesday and organized a Neighborhood Watch group. They exchanged names, addresses, telephone and license-plate numbers. They pledged to watch one another’s houses.

“We haven’t been so friendly before this,” Carol Perkins said. “We’ll be a little more sociable now. Not so aloof.”

Friday night was the worst for Karp. His mother invited a Guardian Angel to spend the night and keep an eye on the place. “He was crazy,” Karp said, mimicking the visitor lurking around the house and darting from side to side. “He was really going for a while, shining his flashlight all over the place. I said, ‘Why don’t you sit down and watch some TV?’ He said, ‘I can’t. I gotta listen for sounds.’ ”

Karp fled to a nearby party and returned about 5:30 a.m. to find his Guardian Angel watching television. “He said, ‘There’s only so much a guy can do. It gets boring after a while,’ ” Karp recalled.

G. W. Reedy, a spry 86-year-old inventor from El Toro, walked Chrisanta Drive on Saturday afternoon, demonstrating his “I-got-the-patent-pending” rape and burglar alarms. The hand-held rape alarm sells for $12 and sent an impressive “BeeeeeeeeEEEPPP!” resounding through the neighborhood. The burglar alarm, consisting of a bell, six-volt battery and light switch in a foot-long wooden box, goes for $45 and has a more “rrrrriiiiIIINNNGGGG!” sound to it.

Cox, an amiable sort, said he was going to order some of the rape alarms, which, if attached to the door, can serve as burglar alarms, as well. “Isn’t that something?” he said. “You can alarm your whole house for $12.”

Elsa Sorel pressed against the ornate iron security gate outside the front door to her home on Chrisanta Drive, where she and her husband have lived for 11 years. The gate and the bars on the window were installed long before the Stalker, she said.

“People here say, ‘I’m gonna lock in tonight.’ We always lock in the house,” she said. “I’m from Belgium, where there is an old saying: You can’t learn tricks to an old monkey. I am old. I know the tricks.”