Crime spree spanned ten counties in 1970s, 1980s
For more than 30 years as investigators searched in vain to identity the enigmatic serial killer and rapist, Joseph James DeAngelo lived without a hint of suspicion, working in a warehouse and raising his family in a one-story stucco house with a three-car garage in a comfortable Sacramento suburb.
On Wednesday, the balding, jowly 72-year-old was behind bars, accused of killing 12 people and raping at least 45 women in a terrifying crime spree that spanned
10 counties from Sacramento to the Bay Area and Orange County in the 1970s and ’80s.
The man who climbed through windows in the middle of the night, who terrorized couples by demanding that one tie up the other, who stacked china plates or cups on husbands’ backs to scare them into paralysis while
he raped their wives in the next room has been called the East Area Rapist, the Golden State Killer, the Original Night Stalker, the Visalia Ransacker.
“He doesn’t even deserve a name like Golden State Killer,” said Jennifer Carole from Santa Cruz, who was 18 when her father, Lyman Smith, and stepmother, Charlene, were bludgeoned to death at their Ventura County home in 1980. “I want to call him toilet scum.”
Her 13-year-old brother found their bloody bodies hidden under the bedcovers. It was a horrific scene repeated up and down the state for a decade and haunted investigators for more than 40 years. It wasn’t until 2001 that DNA linked the cases at each end of the state. In the Bay Area, the suspect raped women in a dozen separate attacks in 1978 and 1979: two in San Jose, two in Concord, three in Danville, two in San Ramon, two in Walnut Creek and one in Fremont.
Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley said Wednesday that she has been connected to the Fremont case since 1978, when she was a volunteer at a local rape crisis center and counseled one of the suspect’s rape victims.
“A woman and her partner were asleep. They woke up to this (man) standing over them with a gun,” O’Malley told reporters. “He raped, robbed and followed the same M.O. that he had done so many times before.”
Authorities wouldn’t say what initially led them to DeAngelo, a Vietnam veteran and former police officer in the 1970s in Exeter and Auburn, where he was fired in 1979 after shoplifting a hammer. But investigators staked him out until they were able to pick up an item he discarded that contained his DNA, they said, and matched it with DNA from the crime scenes that had been logged into a database.
“Each of us knew the answer was — and is — always going to be in the DNA,” Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said Wednesday at a news conference packed with top prosecutors from around the state where the killer had struck. “We found the needle in the haystack, and it was right here in Sacramento.”
Never gave up
Although investigators across the state never gave up on the cold case, she said, they convened as a task force in June 2016, the 40th anniversary of the first crime. “The message was clear in 2016,” she said, “the magnitude of this case demanded that it be solved.”
So far, DeAngelo is charged with two counts of murder from crimes in Sacramento in the 1970s. His nearly 60 victims ranged in age from 13 to 41 and included women home alone, women at home with their children, and husbands and wives, according to the FBI. He often ransacked the homes and in the case of the Smith killings in Ventura County, he appeared to have eaten a meal and left dirty dishes in the sink, Carole said.
Schubert said she was 12 when the killings began in the Sacramento area and she lived near the cluster of crimes.
“It was a time of innocence here in 1976,” she said. “No one locked their doors. Kids rode their bikes to school. Parents let their kids play outside. For all of us who lived in this community during that time, it all changed.”
The memories, she said, “are very vivid.”
Indeed, outside DeAngelo’s house on Canyon Oak Drive, a street dotted with palm trees and short-cut lawns, TV trucks and residents from around the region gathered to see how this man lived undetected in their midst.
Anxiety and panic
One of them was Penny Ryan of nearby Rocklin, who was in elementary school when the attacks in Sacramento began, instilling anxiety and panic in every home.
“My dad bought a gun, he loaded it every night and he put it under the pillow,” she said.
One day, she said, her toddler brother was jumping on the bed when he got a hold of the gun and it went off, shooting their father in the back. He survived, but the traumatic event left a permanent mark on the family’s history.
“I can’t believe he was only 15 minutes away,” Ryan said.
Neighbors said DeAngelo had been living in the house since the early 1980s and reportedly worked for years as a foreman at a Pepsi warehouse.
Brigitte Peterson, who has lived down the street for 25 years, said her son played at DeAngelo’s house when his grandson visited, something unsettling in hindsight.
“He always looks irritated and wasn’t really nice. He had moments when he was in his front yard when he just got angry at himself yelling profanities or even people passing by,” she said. “It was a relief that he was
arrested.”
Megan Merz, a graduate student in criminal justice at Sacramento State, has spent the past year writing her thesis on the case. Standing across from DeAngelo’s house Wednesday afternoon, she said she was stunned to learn that “My entire life, he’s been here.”
A five-part documentary about the case, “Unmasking a Killer,” recently aired on HLN. Author Michelle McNamara, who died in her sleep in April 2016, wrote a best-selling true-crime book about the case, “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” that was published earlier this year. Authorities said Wednesday that while those stories brought more attention to the cases, they didn’t lead to DeAngelo’s arrest.
“This defendant has been able to live free in a nice suburb in Sacramento,” Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said Wednesday. “Our team will work to make sure he never gets out.”
‘They got him’
Carole, 56, heard the news of the arrest through a text message Wednesday morning from a friend. “They got him,” it said. “It’s happiness and horror,” said Carole, who lived with her mother and brothers when her father and stepmother were killed. She says she has been able to handle the tragedy, but she often calls police when she notices the least bit of suspicious behavior, even when a dog bark seems particularly unusual.
“Now we just have to find out if this narcissist is going to confess or if he will want a trial to get more attention,” she said. “That will be a shame for him to get more attention.”
In a twist of fate, she said, she attended Sacramento State for graduate school at the same time DeAngelo was living in the area.
“We could have been in the same Safeway,” she said. “That’s how creepy that is.”