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From Ransacker to Killer: The Escalation That Took Forty Years to Explain
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
He began by stealing single earrings and eating ice cream in strangers' kitchens — then Claude Snelling stepped outside to protect his daughter, and everything changed. This episode traces how the Visalia Ransacker became the East Area Rapist and, finally, the Original Night Stalker.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A man was standing in his own yard in the middle of the night, protecting his daughter. That's all he was doing.
Before DeAngelo was a name anyone knew, he was a pattern. A strange, specific, unsettling pattern.
September eleven, nineteen seventy-five. Claude Snelling was a journalism professor at the College of the Sequoias.
Sacramento County, nineteen seventy-six. A series of rapes began in the eastern suburbs that would eventually reach across Contra Costa County and terrorize communities for three years.
By nineteen seventy-nine, the East Area Rapist had stopped. And then, in Southern California, murders began.
For four decades, this case accumulated evidence but no suspect. Crime writers and amateur investigators circled it.
April twenty eighteen. Retired investigator Paul Holes, who had spent the final years of his career pursuing this case, uploaded the crime scene DNA profile to GEDmatch.
On April twenty-fourth, twenty eighteen, law enforcement arrested DeAngelo at his home in Citrus Heights. He was seventy-two years old.
The GEDmatch approach didn't just solve this case. It opened a door that hadn't existed before.
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