M I woke up to find the Golden State Killer at side of my bed..I was 13
Now she’ll see him sent to rot in prison
ARGARET Wardlow was just 13 when she was woken with a torch in her face by a man in a ski mask, black and white lumberjack shirt, jeans, boots and gloves.
At first, she thought it was a joke, but eventually realised the man she had been reading “every word” about in the local papers was now before her.
“He snarled at me several times in a harsh whisper, ‘This isn’t a joke’,” says Margaret, now aged 56. “Then, in my mind, bam, I knew it was him.”
For more than 40 years, former police officer Joseph DeAngelo terrified California. From Sacramento to Los Angeles, the sadistic predator violated peaceful communities with countless rapes and killings. He started in 1974 as a burglar, but escalated to rape and then murder. First known as the East Area Rapist, he ended up being hunted as the “Golden State Killer”.
Today, he is expected to plead guilty to 88 charges of murder and rape, to avoid the death penalty. The 74-year-old was facing a lethal injection if found guilty, but he is set to admit his crimes at a hearing where his victims will finally come face-to-face with the killer before he is left to die in prison.
Margaret, who is set to attend the Sacramento hearing, told how she had gone to sleep about 10pm on November 9, 1977, after dinner with her mother, Delores, at their neighbour’s house in the state capital.
The realisation about her attacker was confirmed when, bound and gagged, she heard him fetch kitchen crockery. For his attacks all had the same sickening hallmark.
He’d place a cup and saucer on his victim’s back before warning that he’d kill them if he heard a rattle during the attack.
I was mad, I was defiant, thinking what are you doing here and how dare you?
MARGARET WARDLOW ON THE GOLDEN STATE KILLER
For years, the warnings were just threats until, in 1979, he killed his first victims. Margaret adds: “I heard those plates rattling and him on the stairs. I deducted very simply, very quickly, very logically and very calmly what was going to happen.” But instead of being overawed by panic, Margaret said, because of what she knew about DeAngelo, her teen defiance took over. “I just calmly accepted it. It was almost like I had somebody here on my shoulder saying, ‘You’re going to
be raped. This is what’s going to happen, but you’re going to live. You’re going to survive. You’re going to be OK’.
“I knew he wasn’t going to hurt me or kill me as he was threatening the whole time. I was positive from how much I’d read how he operated.
“I was p **** d off. I was mad. I was defiant. I was thinking like, ‘Why are you here? What are you doing here? How dare you?’ I don’t remember fear.
“He wanted fear. I knew he wanted the power through this fear thing, but I wasn’t going to give him that.”
Margaret says the rape ordeal lasted 90 minutes before her attacker fled.
For 44 years, detectives were clueless as to who was breaking into dozens of houses. Hours before his attacks, he would slip into often unlocked properties to learn the layout, cutting phone lines, clearing potential exits and even emptying guns kept by owner’s bedsides. Husbands and boyfriends were of no concern.
In the aftermath and into adulthood, as her parents and family struggled to come to terms with her ordeal, the mum, who has a daughter aged 21, says it was her who provided the strength. “I think some women have this experience and it can ruin the rest of their life, but they identify so much with it that it infiltrates every aspect of their living and you don’t live your life,” she says. “I never let itdefineme.”
For decades Margaret thought her attacker would never be caught and her obsession with the case waned. She focused instead on raising her child and the family wine business, and now splits her time between Palm Springs and San Diego.
BUT in 2018, police supplied DeAngelo’s DNA to a genealogy website, which led to a relative being discovered. The ID of the serial rapist and killer was narrowed down to six men. And in April 2018, the ex-Navy veteran was charged with eight murders, on DNA evidence.
DeAngelo cannot be charged with his attack on Margaret, due to a statute of limitations on pre-2017 rape cases, but he is accused of 13 more kidnapping and abduction bids.
Margaret, who has waived her right to anonymity, is adamant she does not want him to be executed.
“It’s too easy,” she says. “I don’t want him to get the death penalty. I want to see him in prison fending for himself because he’s no longer a young man.
“He prides himself in being this top dog and kind of pushing people around you know, authoritarian and his neighbours were petrified of him.
“So if he’s going to try to pull that s*** in prison. It ain’t going to fly.”