Victims voice relief after arrest in serial killing case

SACRAMENTO — Jane Carson-sandler’s morning in 1976 turned from innocence to terror when a masked man broke into her home and entered the bedroom where she lay snuggled with her 3-year-old son.

He confronted them with a butcher knife and shone a flashlight in her eyes before tying them up.

She said she was paralyzed by fear, afraid the man would kill them. When he untied her ankles, she knew he would rape her.

Before assaulting her, he moved her son from her side, but she doesn’t know where. After it was over, he put her son back in bed next to her.

Carson-sandler voiced relief after police arrested Joseph James Deangelo and identified him on Wednesday as the serial killer who committed a string of killings and rapes in the 1970s and ‘80s in California.

Carson-sandler, now 72, wants to face her attacker in person and ask how long he had been watching her and what he did with her son during the attack.

“I just wonder when he first saw me, how long he had been stalking me,” said Carsonsandler, who was in the Air Force reserves and studying to be a nurse at the time of the attack.

Carson-sandler was one of dozens of women raped by a man dubbed the East Area Rapist and the Golden State Killer, who police say killed at least 12 people and raped at least 45 in the 1970s and 1980s.

She was attacked in her home in the Sacramento suburb of Citrus Heights.

She and Bruce Harrington, whose brother and sister-in-law were killed in 1980 in Orange County, said Deangelo’s arrest will launch a healing process for victims that has been delayed for decades.

“It is time for the victims to begin to heal,” Harrington said at a news conference in Sacramento.

A DNA match led authorities to arrest Deangelo in connection with four killings in Sacramento and Ventura counties, officials said.

“I feel like I’m in the middle of a dream and I’m going to wake up and it’s not going to be true,” Carson-sandler said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It’s just so nice to have closure and to know he’s in jail.”

AP PHOTO BY RICH PEDRONCELLI Bruce Harrington discusses the arrest of Joseph James Deangelo on suspicion for a string of violent crimes in the 1970’s and 1980’s, including the murder of Harrington’s brother and sister in law, at a news conference Wednesday, April 25 in Sacramento.