Got to be full 100 here, I had never heard of this case until now. But what an extraordinary case it is.
Between 1976 and 1986 one man committed 12 murders, 45 rapes and over 100 house burglaries in the "East Area" between Sacramento and San Francisco, California. He was good. Wore a mask, struck at night, preyed on women who lived alone with a child (to make them more compliant I hypothesize), placed a plate and cup on the backs of his bound victims as his alert when he was ransacking their homes, moved around. When the law seemed to be getting close he'd up and move. Never got caught until today.
72 year-old Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer, Argh, why didn't we think of that before!, was arrested today at his trim middle class house outside Sacramento. The arrest was based on a match of his DNA to that found on the crime scenes, a forensic technology unknown to him in 1986. DeAngelo's wave of terror began when he became a police officer in Auburn in 1976. He was fired in 1979 when he did not contest administrative action to terminate him following his arrest for shoplifting. "Just left. Didn't want them to look deeper."
Between 1976 and 1986 one man committed 12 murders, 45 rapes and over 100 house burglaries in the "East Area" between Sacramento and San Francisco, California. He was good. Wore a mask, struck at night, preyed on women who lived alone with a child (to make them more compliant I hypothesize), placed a plate and cup on the backs of his bound victims as his alert when he was ransacking their homes, moved around. When the law seemed to be getting close he'd up and move. Never got caught until today.
72 year-old Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer, Argh, why didn't we think of that before!, was arrested today at his trim middle class house outside Sacramento. The arrest was based on a match of his DNA to that found on the crime scenes, a forensic technology unknown to him in 1986. DeAngelo's wave of terror began when he became a police officer in Auburn in 1976. He was fired in 1979 when he did not contest administrative action to terminate him following his arrest for shoplifting. "Just left. Didn't want them to look deeper."
