Suspected serial killer was obsessed with lawn care
‘Golden State Killer’ suspect also had a foul mouth, neighbors say.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The California grandfather suspected of killing a dozen people and raping more than 50 women lived a quiet life as a warehouse worker and a suburban homeowner obsessed with lawn care, neighbors and acquaintances said.
Joseph DeAngelo, a former police officer whose law enforcement career ended after he was busted for shoplifting in 1979, had a modest three-bedroom home in the Sacramento suburb of Citrus Heights. He graduated from nearby Folsom High School, served in the Navy during the Vietnam War and worked for 27 years at a cavernous supermarket distribution warehouse.
Now 72, he has been accused of being the Golden State Killer who terrorized suburban neighborhoods in a spate of brutal rapes and slayings in the 1970s and ’80s. The case baffled investigators for decades.
Sierra Creech, 17, said she was friends with DeAngelo’s granddaughter and spent almost every weekend for six months at his home. DeAngelo wasn’t around much and told her he was always at work. The girls, who were 8 or 9 at the time, were supervised by DeAngelo’s daughter.
“Nothing was odd. Everything was normal. He was just nice,” Creech said. She has not seen the family in nine years, she said, because the girl’s mother prohibited their friendship after they cut each other’s hair.
Her mother, Candace Creech, said she was spooked to learn that the man who used to pick up and drop off her daughter was accused of such heinous crimes.
“Scares me to death,” Candace Creech said.
DeAngelo was charged Wednesday with eight counts of murder in three counties after being linked to the crimes with DNA. Authorities said other charges could be filed.
Most of the attacks, predominantly sex assaults but also two slayings, occurred in the three years he was an Auburn police officer in the Sierra foothills outside Sacramento.
The attacks on sleeping women — and sometimes their partners — in middle and upper-middle-class subdivisions east of the state Capitol shattered the security of an area where people didn’t lock their doors and children played outside until dark.
Sales of locks surged. Lights burned all night. There was even talk of vigilantes patrolling streets.
Betsy Reamer remembers looking out the front window of her Danville, Calif., home in 1979 when she saw something startling out of the corner of her eye: A masked man on a bicycle, coming down a hill on the street outside.
She called police, who responded within minutes and asked her for a detailed description of what she saw.
For the next two years, until the family moved, she was nervous letting her children play outside. She frequently double-checked that she’d locked the doors and every window before she went to sleep at night.
“It just reinforced the fear — and it was never the same,” she said.
After she learned that DeAngelo had been arrested, she dreamed about what she saw all those years ago. “I had flashbacks — nightmares — last night thinking back to that moment,” she said.
Neighbor Natalia BedesCorrenti said the suspect appeared to be a “nice old grandpa” who lived with an adult daughter and granddaughter. But he also had penchant for cussing loudly when he was frustrated.
“He liked the F word a lot,” Bedes-Correnti said.