Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - Hunting the Bogeyman | 1. The Nightmare

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

Nicole is home alone when a masked man breaks in and sexually assaults her. She’s confident she can help police catch him. But things don’t go to plan. Binge all episodes of Hunting the Bogeyman ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Crimes on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access. From serial killer nurses to psychic scammers – The Binge is your home for true crime stories that pull you in and never let go. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. Hunting the Bogeyman is brought to you by Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence Productions. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit the Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page. Or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. The Binge. Feed your true crime obsession. The Binge. Listeners, this is Peter. I just want to let you know that this series includes stories about sexual assault and violence. Please use discretion when listening.

We all have our bedtime routine. There's the hygiene part. Maybe you'll lay out your clothes for the next day. Set your alarm, turn out the lights, put down your phone. But another part of the routine is safety. You're about to shut down your senses. It's the most vulnerable part of your life, and you do it every day. So you lock your doors at night.

Maybe you have an alarm system. There's a word for the thing we're protecting ourselves from in the middle of the night. The boogeyman. The boogeyman that we want to believe doesn't exist, and then you're confronted with the reality that they do. That's Sacramento prosecutor Keith Hill, who has seen his fair share of boogeymen. But none like this one. This boogeyman is truly the manifestation of a nightmare.

The boogeyman in this story, no one could find him for almost 30 years. To catch him required a groundbreaking forensic discovery and a badass detective who cracked one of the biggest murder cases in history. But the heart of this story is a courageous woman named Nicole. She not only survived this nightmare, she went after the bogeyman. And years later, she realized that what happened to her was only the beginning of this terrifying pattern. The man who attacked her went on to attack many others, and no one could find him. Every day I fantasized about him getting caught. Could he figure out where I live?

Is he somebody I know? Is he in my own community? Like, those types of things are really hard to live with for that many years. The first thing you need to know about Nicole is that she's a pretty fearless person. For most of her life, she wanted to find this guy and unmask him. But that's not where this story ends. I wanted to understand what happened to him and what made him be this monster. She wanted to meet him.

face to face. From Sony music entertainment and perfect cadence, you're listening to Hunting the Boogie Man. I'm Peter MacDonald. This is episode one, The Nightmare. I'd like to give you a brief overview of the series. What we know is this started in 1991 in Rohnert Park. Ronard Park, a small town north of San Francisco.

It's where Nicole Ernest Pate bought her first home when she was just 19 years old. It was a really cute place. I fell in love with it when I saw it. It was a two-story town home, and she lived there with her boyfriend, who was six years older. It was a rocky relationship, though, so when Nicole turned 21, she dumped him. When her ex moved out, he took her. took pretty much everything with him. All Nicole had left were her bed, a couch, some chairs, and a landline telephone that sat on her bedroom floor.

She also had a mortgage to pay all by herself. But for the first time in her life, she was single. She went out, had fun, and started casually dating her friend, Mark. The guy was, you know, kind of a bad boy. I mean, not bad boy, bad boy, and he kind of, you know, he was the first guy I'd ever dated who had tattoos. And my parents were mortified, mortified, that I was going out with a guy with tattoos. I'm like, oh, really? Are you mortified? Oh, this is fun. But she didn't want to invite Mark to move in with her.

She decided to put an ad in the local newspaper for a roommate. She got some calls right away. But I got this specific inquiry that stuck in my brain because it just sounded like an odd name. My name is Bob Smith. Really? Your name is Bob Smith. Interesting. And I just remembered his voice. His voice was quite flat and just monotone. And told him about the room, the rent, where it's located, yada, yada.

He told me that he was in the construction trade. And I believe he said he had kids. Might have said he was married. But he has to commute for work. And so he just needed a room. The guy asked when he could come over and see the place. Nicole said, well, she had to work on Friday and Saturday. Well, what about Sunday morning?

And I said, well, not too early because I'm sure I'll be out late on Saturday night. He said, okay. It was a plan. On Friday, Nicole went out with some friends. She got home late, got up early on Saturday. Back then, she was a hairdresser and spent all day on her feet. Then I came home from work, exhausted, and I took a bath. And she called her friends.

And I said, I'm not going out. I'm staying here. She pretty much canceled all her plans. and said she wasn't going to set a foot outside until she had to go back to work on Tuesday. I'm going to go watch TV. It was hot, so I put on this, it was a little green rope. That'll become important later. I didn't have anything on underneath.

So, I'm like, I'm not just going to go lay down on the couch. It's probably 8.30, this time I'm starting to get really sleepy. Nicole fell asleep on the couch in her living room. Across from her was a sliding glass door that led to her enclosed patio. The other townhomes had their patios in the back, but for some reason, Nicole's place was turned around. Her patio faced the parking lot, so she used her sliding glass door to come and go.

The only problem was she couldn't lock it when she was gone, but she figured she didn't have much to steal anyway. And she always locked it when she was home. Her friend, Mark, had even installed a motion sensor security light above it. When Nicole fell asleep on the couch that Saturday night, the TV was on. Her patio gate was closed, Her sliding glass door was locked, and her motion sensor light had a fresh bulb.

But at some point, after sunset, something woke her up. The TV was no longer on. And there was an arm around my neck. He had his hand over my mouth, and he had a glove on. I caught glimpse of a mask, ski mask. and I realized that he had a gun at my head. Is this a prank? And then he very quietly said,

don't move. I'm just here to rob you. He attempted to kind of lift me, and I knew my robe would come open, so I sort of shook my head, and he put me down, but he still had the gun on me the whole time. And then he walked me upstairs with my hands behind my back.

I will never forget the feeling, of being walked up the stairs. I will never forget that as long as I live, because that's when it hit me, oh shit, I'm in real trouble. What happened next is most people's worst nightmare. The masked man who invaded her home, sexually assaulted her for hours.

Nicole's life would never be the same. I thought about this crime every day in my life, and still do, and I always will. Estimates vary, but about 80% of the time, victims of rape know the person who attacked them. Nicole had no idea who the man was. Did not know his name, did not know what he looked like. Is he somebody I know? Is he in my own community?

It's a really, really weird, scary, strange way to walk around in life. And what I would sit and fantasize about was how I would be informed that he was caught. Every day. Never told people. Never discussed, never told my husband. I would fantasize about how good it would feel to not have to wonder who he was for the rest of my life and be scared for the rest of my life.

Last summer, Nicole and I met in person for the first time. She's now 55. Tall, confident. She's a lot of fun. She still lives in Sonoma County, but we met at a recording studio in nearby Marin. It was nothing fancy, behind a warehouse. But this place is famous.

Santana, Van Morrison, Jackson Brown. Too many legends to name had recorded there. And Nicole had heard of it. She was excited to be there. An old friendly dog greeted us when we came in. Aaron, the engineer, set us up at a little table in a soundproof room. Wow, I feel like all those, like, you know, popular people on the Internet. I did a podcast.

Oh, I can hear you. Okay, there we go. Okay. I grew up here in the 80s and 90s, and when I moved to it, was the land of, you know, hot tubs, peacocks, and rainbows. It was very kind of like rich hippies, kind of a place where no one really asked, what do you do for a living, and people were much more interested in what you believed in and who you were as a person.

When Nicole was 12, her parents went through an ugly divorce. Nicole and her older brother moved to Marin County with their mom. We had very ambitious parents, driven parents, very driven father. He's very good looking. he's very confident, he's very fit, he's very, you know, the cocky fighter pilot. You said he was part of Top Gun, I think. Yeah, he was, he'll correct me on it. It was the very first class of what they were developing.

He used to always make the joke never be afraid to fly with me because I'd try to kill myself in a plane for years and it never worked. When Nicole told me this, I thought, oh, she must have gotten her fearless confidence from her dad. But then she told me about her mom. My mother was a teacher, and she raised, me from a pretty young age, continually saying, become independent, never depend on a man, and be confidence in yourself as a woman, in all aspects of being a woman, by the way, and not letting society tell you that any part of being a woman is wrong or weak.

She was the most fierce person I've ever met. That's Saturday night when the masked man appeared in Nicole's house. She didn't hear him come in. The motion sensor light didn't come on, and all her doors were locked. So how did he get inside? The only thing that made sense was that he was already there when she got home from work that day. Hiding while she took a bath, listening while she called her friends to cancel her plans, and waiting for the moment when she fell asleep.

And I kept thinking he's just here to rob me. He's not going to do anything. My robe, my robe, my robe. Keep it closed. Keep it close. The man wore a ski mask, jacket, and gloves, and led Nicole upstairs. He hogtied me face down on the bed And then just left me there for a while And just rummaged around my house

He put duct tape over her mouth and eyes I kept thinking, is this really happening to me? I can't scream No one's going to hear me And if I do scream, he has a gun Is he going to shoot me? And he was rummaging around my house for a very long time So I kept thinking maybe he is just here to rob me

He's looking for something I don't have anything I mean like look at my house Like, there's nothing here. When Nicole could no longer move, see, or speak, the man began to talk. He had a very specific voice that I will never forget. He was very monotone, just like the caller was on Thursday, Bob Smith. What did he say to you?

He knew what car I drove. Like, he knew where I worked. He could describe, like, the parking lot to the salon where I worked. He knew what my pattern of behavior. was, I know exactly where you live, I know what your ex-boyfriend looks like, I know how tall he is, I can describe him to you, I can describe your friends that were at your house this week. Oh my gosh. The man would talk to her, then leave the room to rummage through her house. He was looking for a specific item, the very high-end video camera.

And he couldn't find it. This happened in 1991, by the way. The video camera belonged to Nicole's mom and was returned to her three weeks earlier. So it wasn't in my house. He was real angry. But somehow, he knew she'd had it. And that's when I really started to put the timeline together that he's been in my house before. He was looking for something else, too, her ATM guard.

When he found it in her purse, he asked for her PIN number. Nicole used her chin to point toward the foot of her bed, where the PIN number was written on a piece of paper. He was like, oh, you can see. So then he added a pillowcase and tied the pillowcase around. my head. Then he started to play sadistic games. He would go downstairs, be very, very quiet. And then he would say, again, he'd say, I'm going to leave. Then he'd come back and he said, no, I'm still here. And he could do that repeatedly. The man found Nicole's stereo, brought it into

the bedroom, and tuned it to an FM radio station. Our love songs, let's play these love songs. He untied Nicole's legs and raped her. Pet lovers. It's Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better with Jonathan Van Ness. My pets. They're my family. They mean the world to me. And I want to give them the absolute best life possible. That's why we switch to Ali. They make fresh, protein-packed meals with real human great ingredients. They're backed by vet nutritionists and crafted with culinary experts. My dogs are obsessed. Even my little Georgie, who's kind of a picky eater. is obsessed with meal time and his poop is so much more solid and predictable

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Mayor of Kingstown, new season now streaming on Paramount Plus. I'd already had multiple out-of-body experiences at this point, too, as a protective mechanism. And I was frustrated because I was floating below my ceiling, looking down at the bed, but I couldn't see his face.

It was torture. Then the man began cuddling with her, kissing her, and acting like he was her boyfriend. This person believes that I am his girlfriend somehow and has this warped fantasy. He really believes that in his head. He believes that I'm his girlfriend.

And that's when I was like, this is a psychopath. The man said he'd never done anything like this before, and he wouldn't ever do it again. Nicole was just so pretty. He said he was sorry. You're so kind and sweet, and I don't know why I've done this to you. And I've never done this before, and I'll never do this again. So I tried to kind of appease that a little bit.

He would start to let me talk. So I would say, why have you done this to me? Well, you know, you were just so beautiful and I just didn't think you would ever talk to me. And, you know, I didn't think you'd be this nice. And then he'd go, oh, by the way, if you talk about this at all, I'm going to shoot you. Then Nicole realized that this guy didn't break in after she fell asleep. He was there when she got home from work that day.

hiding somewhere in the house, maybe upstairs in the second bedroom. He'd heard her take a bath and call her friends. So good that you don't have any plans until Tuesday. I'm not leaving till then. I don't have any plans either. And all I could think of was my friend, Mark, please show up. Please just, you know, know that I'm not answering my phone. But the man had unplugged Nicole's phone and put it somewhere.

If Mark called, all he'd get was a busy signal. The man raped Nicole three times and then threatened to kill her. And then I thought, then how are they going to alert my parents? They're going to be told your daughter's been raped and murdered in her home, and she's got flies all over her body. I cannot have my parents suffer that. I don't care what he does to me at this point. I did not care.

You are not going to put my parents through that. Throughout the man's attack, Nicole remained remarkably self-possessed. She knew she'd be the only witness, and she began trying to collect as much evidence as possible. I was a hairstylist. I was used to touching people's hair and their face, you know, their heads, right? It's going to get a little bit graphic. I was hog-tied, and he was attempting to orally copulate me. And I grabbed his head, his face, and I pulled him up. And I was like, absolutely not. This is not, uh-uh.

And I fought him. Now that, I got his face. I'm going to feel it. How thick is his skin? Where's his hair line? And I started feeling his ears. Where are his ears? I identified him as someone who had relatively puck-marked skin, high cheekbones,

maybe Eastern European, definitely Caucasian, likely blonde hair, very thin, fine blonde hair. I got all of that in like two seconds. I had at the time a bladder infection, which for any woman who's had a bladder infection, you know how miserable they are. So I was like, I have to go to the bathroom. So he lets my feet go, but nothing else. So he walks me to the bathroom by my hair. Doesn't need to.

Didn't need to do that. Just felt like it. As I'm walking to the bathroom, there's a mirror to my left. It might where my sink is. So I take the opportunity. to look underneath the tape to see if I can catch his face. I never caught his face, but I saw his hair, and it was blonde. But I could also confirm that he was not heavy, but he was thin and soft.

Did you have any idea who this person might be? No, not a clue. I was thinking of any guy dated, gone out on a date with. Nothing. I had nothing. He resembled nobody I knew. But Nicole had a theory. The man seemed to know what he was doing.

She didn't think it was his first time. He's a very smart criminal. The cadence of his voice, the formality of the way he spoke, the way he was measured, and his gun. So you know how police officers, they have kind of a formal way of speaking? He's talking in that way. The whole night, he's talking like that. I thought he could be a police officer. The man pretended to leave, and then suddenly he was back and seemed to savor Nicole's fear.

She still couldn't see, she couldn't move, she couldn't really say anything through the duct tape. She said she was so exhausted, she even drifted off to sleep. The horror became weirdly disorienting. She had no idea how much time had passed. At some point, she just became sick of it. Her fear faded. Then she became angry, and she yelled through the tape for him to get the hell out. And then she heard the zipper of a bag.

He touched her again, freed her hands from behind her back, and bound them in front of her with duct tape. He gave her a butter knife. He said, let three songs go by before you cut yourself loose. I want to make sure I have time to get to the bank and get your money, and I don't want anything happening. I don't want you to follow me. He told me I will hear the scanner if you call the police and I will come back and shoot. before they get here, so don't call him. He was walking out my bedroom door,

and I could kind of hear him turn around towards me. He said, oh, by the way, you might want to start locking your doors from now on. Somebody might want to come in and try and hurt you. And then he marched out the door. She listened for the sound of his feet on the river rocks in her patio, then for the sound of his car engine, but she didn't hear anything. The third song ended. She ripped off all the deck tape and stood up.

I'm shaking. I'm in shock. My mom was a volunteer for the Rape Crisis Center, of all things. I remember her telling me things that you needed to do to preserve evidence. Don't press your teeth. Don't drink water. Certainly don't take a shower. She pulled on a pair of loose sweatpants and a sweatshirt. Then she found her clothes iron and held it up like a weapon. I have to figure out if he's still in the house. She tiptoed out of her bedroom and onto the landing.

She looked down into her living room and didn't see him. She pushed open the door of the second bedroom and turned on the light. Clear. Then she went down the stairs. Her living room, kitchen, half bathroom, all empty. He was gone. She turned on every light, locked every door. She found her phone on the living room floor.

She plugged it back in and called her mom. I don't know how she did it. As a mother of myself, I don't know how she did it. She was remarkably calm. She was very panicked, but she was calm and very instructional. It was like her operating system kicked in. And she said, I need you to hang up the phone and call 911 right now. And I was like, I'm not calling 911.

I told her why. And she said, sweetheart, I know that you feel that way. I need you to call 911. right now. And I was like, I'm not, I'm not calling the police. And she said, I'm on my way. You know, it's better than the one big thing? Two big things. Exactly. The new iPhone 17 pro on TELUS's five-year rate plan price lock. Yep, it's the most powerful iPhone ever, plus more peace of mind with your bill over five years. This is big. Get the new iPhone 17 Pro at tellus.com slash iPhone 17 Pro on select plans.

Conditions and exclusions apply. Get no frills, delivered. Shop the same in-store prices online and enjoy unlimited delivery with PC Express Pass. Get your first year for $2.50 a month. Learn more at pceexpress.ca. Nicole didn't want to call the cops because she thought the man who raped her might be a cop. He said if she reported the rape, he'd hear about it and be back for revenge. Nicole's mom must have driven over 100 miles an hour,

and when she turned on to the road in front of Nicole's townhome complex, she saw a police car on the side of the road. Two cops were in the middle of giving someone a speeding ticket. Nicole's mom stopped, jumped out, and screamed for them to help her. They jumped in their patrol car and followed her to Nicole's house. And that's how the police got there. I never called them. Nicole's mom came in first and gave Nicole a big hug. What the police did next was typical in a rape investigation.

Nicole gave them a statement. They began looking for evidence in her home. And the worst part was when Nicole went to the local hospital where they collected evidence of the rape from her body. It was the middle of the morning when she went back home to take a shower. Her mom went with her. The place was a mess. There was black black fingerprint dust everywhere. Police were everywhere. Nicole went upstairs to the bathroom, turned on the shower. She cried and shook as she scrubbed her skin and hair, and then she got dressed. She tossed some clothes and toiletries into a garbage bag to take to our moms and left. You can burn this house down. I don't care. I'm never, ever stepping foot back in this house again. Never.

A few days later, Nicole drove to the Ronert Park Police Station to meet with the investment. Investigators assigned to her case. She wondered if they had any leads. The crime was so horribly fresh in her mind. She could recall every detail right down to the shape of the man's face, sound of his voice, what he said to her, and his behavior. She gathered so much evidence without even being able to see him. Her ability to remember so many details of the rape was unusual. It's actually common for victims of sexual assault to have gaps in their memory, and recall it in a non-linear way, especially at first. It's part of the brain's normal defensive response to extreme psychophysical stress.

Nicole was different. She entered the Ronert Park Police Department, which doubles as the fire department, and sat down in a small room with two investigators, a woman and a man. Nicole was just 21 years old, but her mother always said she seemed ten years. years older. As she told them the story of what happened, though, she sensed they weren't exactly following along. They looked skeptical, which was when the female investigator said something that for Nicole was almost as much of a violation as the rape. She said, this sounds like some sort of, you know, movie plot. Like you made this up from a movie plot. I was in shock.

They didn't believe her. Nicole's ability to confidently say what had happened seemed to be working against her. They suspected she made it up, that the masked man, the rape, the gun, the silent break-in, that it was all fiction. This wasn't only a problem for Nicole. It put everyone who could become the man's next victim in danger.

Nicole didn't know it at the time, but the man's attack on her was the first. in a series of sexual assaults in Northern California, spanning nearly two decades. What she told the police was the first set of clues in the terrifying pattern. But if the police didn't believe Nicole, was anyone even looking for the pattern? Someone needed to connect the dots. Eventually, one of those people would be Paul Holes. A couple years before the pandemic, Cold Case Detective Paul Holes came up with an idea to solve

one of the biggest serial killer cases in history, the Golden State Killer. How he did it, we'll get to that later. All you need to know now is that Paul and a small team of investigators revolutionized detective work worldwide. Their innovation opened the door for thousands of unsolved violent crimes to finally be solved. One of those cases was this one. And it's also a history-making case because it's the first case ever

in which this revolutionary crime-solving tool was tested at trial. When Paul Holes first learned about the masked attacker who would become known by the moniker, the NorCal rapist, Paul was just 28 years old at the start of his storied career. It was 1996,

and Paul worked as a criminalist at the sheriff's crime lab in Contra Costa County, 50 miles from Rohnert Park. That Halloween, the rapist broke into a woman's home near the sheriff's office. The next morning, when Paul learned about it, he was very concerned. This is a serious offender. I thought there was a high probability that there would be related cases. If Paul could find those other cases, it would help him see the rapist's pattern,

anticipate his next move, find him wherever he lurked, because someone had to do something. Someone had to stop him. On this season of the binge, hunting the boogeyman, a serial predator remained on the loose. He is kind of the boogeyman in the night that you are truly afraid of. And no one could find him. A wolf in sheep's clothing. He could be in my fantasy football league. It would take an extraordinary innovation. to track him down.

This DNA technology is going to be pretty significant for these types of cases. And two decades later, a landmark forensic breakthrough. But the suspect wouldn't admit to a single thing. The why, the what, the why me, all of those things that I think most victims think about that will probably, you know, eat at me a bit until I get those answers. There's really only one source for that information

and it's him, right? It's him. Don't want to wait for that next episode? You don't have to. Unlock all episodes of hunting the boogeyman ad-free right now by subscribing to the binge podcast channel. It's easy, really. Search for The Binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page.

Not on Apple? Head to getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. As a subscriber, you'll get binge access to new stories on the first of every month. Check out the Binge channel page on Apple Podcasts, or getthebinge.com to learn more. Hunting the Bougueman is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence. It's hosted and reported by me, Peter MacDonald. From Perfect Catenes, I'm the executive producer.

From Sony Music Entertainment, the executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. The series was sound designed and mixed by Matt Gergel. We used music from audio network. The show's production manager was Sammy Allison. Our lawyer is Allison Sherry. Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rassick, and Jamie Myers. If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave a review.

It's the best way to support us. Thanks for listening.