He nudged her awake, whispering her name.
Kim Caldwell rolled over to find a man in a ski mask in her bed. He had a very large knife. He knew her name. He dragged her around by her ponytail, and as he raped her, he spoke as if she was his girlfriend. When he left, he pulled the covers up around her and tucked her back into bed.
Caldwell was furious. She bought a gun and spent hours driving back alleys hoping to catch the serial rapist. She hounded the San Diego police case detectives and she went public with her name in her quest to stop him.
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For well more than a year in the early 1990s, the assailant known as the “Pacific Beach Rapist” terrorized the community, entering homes and sexually assaulting seven women. Some, he woke as they slept.
San Diego police warned he was casing residences, waiting to enter when his target was alone — did so even with one victim who had five roommates. Neighbors gathered for meetings and formed walking patrols. One woman said she was having recurring nightmares because she lived near a victim and had decided to move.
Kenneth Bogard, photographed at San Diego Municipal Court on July 15, 1994.
(John McCutchen/The San Diego Union–Tribune)
When police arrested a suspect, his identity was a surprise — 36-year-old Kenneth Bogard, the face of popular local party band Dr. Chico’s Island Sounds.
A San Diego Superior Court jury convicted Bogard of rape and other charges. At his sentencing hearing in 1995, Bogard blamed his behavior on being “a sex addict.” Caldwell, who was by now the face of the case, watched a judge hand Bogard 96 years and eight months in prison. And with that, she was done with him.
“Done. We did it. He’s gone. He’s not getting out. I was finished. I went on with my life,” Caldwell recalled.
It was not to be. A battle to reduce population in California’s overcrowded prisons eventually led the state to institute what is called “elderly parole.” The most recent incarnation makes it available to incarcerated people who are over the age of 50 and have served at least 20 years of their sentence.
Bogard — who has served 29 years, less than a third of his original sentence — qualifies. Now 66, his first hearing was in 2019, but the parole hearing officers denied his bid and set his next hearing out five years. That hearing is Wednesday.
Kim Caldwell rented a place in Pacific Beach for the upcoming parole hearing.
(Ana Ramirez/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Caldwell, 63, will attend the hearing via video; most parole hearings are done that way since the pandemic. She could link in from her out-of-state home, but instead she’s rented a place in Pacific Beach, to be back in the area where it happened. She wants Bogard to see the ocean over her shoulder.
‘Thought I was going to die’
Helen Toma will be on video sitting next to Caldwell. Now 57, Toma was 26-year-old college student who had just come home from one of three part-time jobs when she was attacked.
She remembers waking up on a Monday night to a man in her hallway, wearing only a ski mask and red Converse shoes.
“It was May 10, 1993,” she said. “And I remember at one point I thought I was going to die. ... And I remember looking at the clock at 10:27 p.m. I’ll never forget it. Never.”
Toma, who asked to use her maiden name, moved out of her backyard home on Oliver Street the next day. She and Caldwell, it would turn out, lived on the same street.
The “Pacific Beach Rapist” wore a ski mask while attacking most of the seven victims from August 1992 through October 1993, opting the last time for a Zorro-style mask. He returned to the first victim a month later, carrying massage oil and saying he wanted to “treat” her, but she scared him off.
He usually entered through an open door or window. He told some of the women he’d been watching them, recounted where they had been. Sometimes, he spoke to them by name.
Caldwell, who worked for an airline, was attacked in August 1993. Then 32, she wanted to go public with her story, to warn women and to pressure law enforcement. She forced neighbors to open their meetings to the media. She also talked to the Union-Tribune, which like most media outlets, generally does not publish the name of a sex crime victim without their consent. Caldwell insisted her name be used or no interview would be granted. She wanted to challenge the notion she was somehow to blame.
“Why am I hiding? I didn’t do it. I was sleeping in my bed,” Caldwell said in an interview last month.
Toma struggled to move forward. She didn’t want anyone to know and was mortified to see Caldwell on TV. “I was really mad at her.” She later came to embrace the desire to speak out and recently decided she wanted her photo published to further her quest to keep Bogard in prison.
“I’m not afraid about showing my face anymore,” she said. “It’s not about me. It’s about letting other people know.”
Helen Toma, who is using her maiden name, decided to go public with her experience for the first time ahead of the upcoming parole hearing.
(Ana Ramirez/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
DNA use in court was still in its infancy in the early ‘90s, but it linked the crimes to Bogard, who’d already had arrests for taking videos from underneath women’s skirts and for public masturbation, including the time two college students spotted him standing naked outside their window.
Several victims of the “Pacific Beach Rapist” remembered those red Converse sneakers. Jurors saw Bogard wearing a pair in a Dr. Chico’s promotional video.
‘It’s just infuriating’
Toma said she knew Bogard would not be eligible for parole until the early 2040s, so when she got a letter in 2019 notifying her of an upcoming parole hearing, it came as “a complete shock.”
Caldwell said she sank onto her bed when she got the phone call in 2019.
“I was just cruising through my life. I was done (with him).” She said the notification turned her world “like an inverted pyramid turned on its point.”
She attended that hearing via speaker phone. Although he was denied release, she’s frustrated he could be back in front of a parole panel every three or five years.
“I just I don’t even — I’m speechless, really, because it’s just infuriating,” Caldwell said.
In 2014, a panel of three federal judges tasked with forcing California to reduce the population of its overcrowded prisons ordered the state to start considering parole for people aged 60 and older who had served at least 25 years of their sentence. Bogard soon became eligible and had his first parole hearing at age 61.
In 2021, state law changed to expand the eligibility requirements to inmates aged 50 or older who had served 20 years of their sentence. The list of those whose crimes make them ineligible for consideration is relatively small and includes those who face the death penalty, are serving life without the possibly of parole or who murdered a law enforcement officer.
According to data from the state’s Board of Parole Hearings, nearly 8,300 people had a parole hearing last year. About 3,400 of them — 42 percent — qualified because of elderly parole.
Getting a hearing is no guarantee for release. Last year, two-thirds of those who were eligible for elderly parole and had a hearing were not granted release. The year before, three-fourths of the elderly candidates were turned down at their hearings.
‘A very, very scary man’
Deputy District Attorney John Cross said he could not speak to the details of Bogard’s case prior to the upcoming hearing. Transcripts from Bogard’s hearing five years ago show that now-retired Deputy District Attorney Richard Sachs implored the hearing officers to keep Bogard in custody.
“You don’t go into someone’s home with a knife and compel forced sex on that person because you are a sex addict looking for a bigger thrill,” Sachs argued. “You do that because you are a mentally deranged criminal.”
“This man is a very, very scary man,” Sachs said. “He is a sexual psychopath.”
Kenneth Bogard, Dec. 15, 2011
(California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation)
The name of Bogard’s current attorney was not available. Five years ago, the attorney representing Bogard acknowledged her client would never be able to change the fact that he had committed “atrocious crimes” but said he could change what happens today and tomorrow.
At that 2019 hearing, she said that Bogard’s standardized assessment found him to be a “moderate risk,” that he had behaved well in prison, and that he had found religion.
Bogard told the parole hearing officers he had talked to the women softly and at that time of the assaults thought that he was “not really that bad a guy. I’m a nice guy even though I did this.”
“My brain was not thinking correctly,” he said.
Bogard, who is housed at a prison in Salinas Valley, offered apologies to several people but also to San Diego at large “for spreading fear throughout much of the city.”
The two hearing officers denied his bid for parole, finding he posed an unreasonable risk of danger to society or a threat to public safety.
They said he could have another parole hearing in five years. A few years later, Bogard asked that the hearing be moved up sooner. His request was denied.
