By Claire Booth
The nation has been riveted
lately with the arrest of a suspect in the case of the Golden State Killer, who
raped and murdered his way through California forty years ago and then
disappeared more completely than almost any other serial killer in history.
But the rest of the country’s got
nothing on the Sacramento area. This is where he started, breaking into homes
and raping women. Known then as the East Area Rapist, he eventually upped his game
by deliberately choosing houses where a man was home as well. In all, he was
suspected in 27 rapes and five additional attempts here from 1976 to 1979.
If you lived in the eastern
suburbs of Sacramento during that time, you have a story. Fathers kept baseball
bats by the side of the bed. Families slept together in the living room,
thinking it was safer. Gun sales skyrocketed. Children weren’t allowed outside.
Each story is personal, not abstract. The fears were well-founded, and present
night after night. The monster could quite literally be at your door.
And it turned out he was that close. Joseph DeAngelo lived mere
miles from the scenes of the first reported rapes. The 72-year-old was arrested
on suspicion of murder April 25 after law enforcement traced DNA left at crime
scenes to a familial match in a database. And Sacramento reeled. The alleged
killer lived here quietly for decades.
And so a whole lot of us – including me – turned out on Wednesday to hear more
about the only major book to be published on the case: Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone In The Dark: One Woman’s
Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer.
The event was held at ground zero
– the Barnes & Noble only miles from where DeAngelo lived in the suburb of
Citrus Heights. More than 450 people packed the place. I got in line at 4:30
p.m. for the 7 o’clock event. The prime chair seating was long gone, but I
ended up with a semi-good standing spot.
As everyone who’s paid even a bit
of attention to all this knows, McNamara died in 2016, before she was able to
finish I’ll Be Gone In The Dark. Her
widower, comedian Patton Oswalt, has been on a publicity tour for the book,
which was doing pretty darn well when it was released in February. (I’ve
started calling this time period B.A. for “before arrest.”) Then DeAngelo was
arrested. And now in the A.A. (after arrest) time period, the book and anything
associated with the case has gone through the stratosphere.

“I’m a clown speaking on behalf
of a crime fighter,” he said. “I can’t even begin to list what she’d be doing
right now.”
I think she’d absolutely be
following the DNA aspect of the case. Because, wow. This has such huge
implications. A Contra Costa sheriff’s investigator created a fake profile on
an open access DNA website called GEDmatch and uploaded the suspect’s DNA
profile, which came from bodily fluids left at multiple crime scenes. (This is
very different from well-known sites like Ancestry.com and 23andMe, which
require an actual saliva sample and not just a on-paper profile, to help ensure
fake profiles aren’t created.) There was enough of a familial match in the
GEDmatch database for authorities to start tracing a family tree. That
eventually led to DeAngelo.
The people who spoke Wednesday
night were all clearly for using this kind of investigation to solve crimes.
One person blithely dismissed privacy concerns. “Do you think people who feel
that way will cause problems?”
“I think there will be some push
back,” Haynes said, but within five years he thinks it will become standard.
Okay. Having that opinion is one thing, but then he said this: “Who wants to be
on that side, waving the flag for privacy and defending a monster like this?”
This is where I pause to catch my
breath at the staggering incongruity and conceit of that statement. Being for
privacy means you’re defending a rapist/murderer? Um, no. And one more time –
hell, no. One does not equal the other. Haynes flat out demonized anyone with a
legitimate concern about where this kind of genomic access is headed. This is
pretty much brand new legal territory, and no one is served well by such
blanket, inflammatory statements.
We’ll all be hearing a lot more
on the DNA issue as DeAngelo’s charges proceed to trial, because I guarantee it
will be litigated for years. As will the rest of the case. The crimes DeAngelo
is charged with make him eligible for the death penalty, although no decision
on that has been officially reached. Capital cases in California typically take
years to reach a verdict, and this one has the added complication of involving
four different counties and four different elected district attorneys with high
stakes in where the case is tried and who takes the lead.
DeAngelo is charged with 12
murders. He is not charged with any of the fifty rapes attributed to the East
Area Rapist. This was another subject many in Wednesday’s crowd were eager to
address. In the 1970s, when the rapist began his serial attacks, the statute of
limitations on those kinds of crimes was fairly short. This was, which Oswalt
pointed out and I agree with, a generational thing. Those kinds of assaults
were not treated as seriously as they are today. Now they’re considered quite
serious, and there’s the recognition that technology continues to evolve and
could one day crack a case that was unsolvable before (much like DNA has
already done).
Haynes said he thought the
statute of limitations on rape would change or be done away with in the next 10
years. I wish he’d had the right information, because time limits on rape cases
have already been wiped from the books in California. The new law went into
effect Jan. 1, 2017, for rapes that occur after that date, or any such crime
that occurred before that date where the previous 10-year statute of
limitations hadn’t expired. It would’ve been great for the overflow crowd hanging
on his every word to have learned the correct information that night.
Afterward, people lined up for
signed copies, still talking about the surrealness of a suspect being found
almost within walking distance of the bookstore. One woman said she’d read the
book at night and was scared by it. Then DeAngelo was arrested. “Then I was
more scared knowing he had lived a mile from me my whole life.”
Have questions about this case? Let me know
in the comments, on Twitter @clairebooth10, or on my Facebook page, and I’ll answer them next week.
2 comments:
The privacy / enforcement debate is a touchy subject and deserves more thought than what Paul Haynes appears to have given it.
It's rare for serial killers to stop unless they are caught (possibly for a different offense) or die. Did they offer any insights as to why this guy just stopped?
Dana, that is such a good question. Why did he stop? I'll definitely get into that in my post this Sunday.
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