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The East Area Rapist: Inside the Crimes That Paralyzed Sacramento
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Golden State Killer's Sacramento reign of terror unfolds — fifty rapes, surgical preparation, and a jurisdictional failure that let a former police officer evade capture for years. This is how the East Area Rapist operated, and why no one could stop him.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A woman wakes in the dark. There's a flashlight beam cutting across her bedroom ceiling.
He didn't announce himself. He didn't need to.
Here's where the jurisdictional problem becomes concrete. Detectives from Visalia had been watching the East Area Rapist case develop.
By nineteen seventy-nine, the East Area Rapist had gone quiet in Northern California. No clear explanation.
While all of this was unfolding, and for decades after it stopped, Joseph James DeAngelo was living an ordinary suburban life. He worked as a police officer in Exeter, in the Central Valley, starting in May of nineteen seventy-three.
Michelle McNamara was a true crime writer and blogger who became obsessed with the Original Night Stalker. She called him IT, meaning the subject, and spent years compiling case material, building contacts in law enforcement, and writing a book she never finished.
The case moved toward a resolution that was both necessary and painful. DeAngelo pleaded guilty in June of twenty twenty.
The Golden State Killer case didn't just close a chapter. It opened a new methodology.
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