SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Five years ago, Kris Pedretti was on a business trip in Los Angeles. She got a call from former Sacramento Undersheriff Carol Daly with a message: The man who had raped her as a 15-year-old inside her parents’ Carmichael home in 1976 had been arrested.
“I went into shock,” Pedretti said. “That trap door flew open and I was by myself and I’m in shock …
“And that was the day the healing began, but it was a really rough start, for sure.”
The suspect Sacramento sheriff’s deputies arrested that afternoon — April 23, 2018 — was Joseph James DeAngelo, a retired mechanic and former police officer.
He had been living a quiet existence in Citrus Heights while detectives literally spent decades searching for a man they knew as Sacramento’s East Area Rapist and, later, the Golden State Killer.
The arrest culminated in one of the largest legal cases in California history, one that ended in 2020 when he admitted to a crime spree that ran from the mid-1970s through 1986 and included at least 13 murders and 62 rapes and other crimes that terrorized residents the length of California.
Today, the 77-year-old former Auburn police officer is serving a series of life terms inside a California state prison where he will remain until he is dead.
Following his sentencing three years ago, DeAngelo was shipped to California State Prison-Corcoran, to serve out his time in protective custody. California prison officials now list his prison location as “not available,” saying that is done “for DeAngelo’s safety.”
Five years after his arrest, some of his victims view him as a pathetic old man who will not control the direction their lives have taken, even if the initial response to DeAngelo’s capture affected them deeply.
Survivors of DeAngelo’s reign of terror — and prosecutors who helped lock him away after DNA technology led to his capture — say the case has led to dramatic improvements in the way law enforcement interacts with crimes victims, and has led to dozens of convictions using the same “genetic genealogy” technique that finally caught him.
And some have bonded together to help victims of other crimes, offering assistance to other sexual assault survivors or advice on how to write a victim impact statement to be read in court.
But it hasn’t been easy.
‘We never spoke about it’
Pedretti said that after she was attacked she was told by her father never to talk about it, “and that was not an ask, that was a demand.”
“And me and my parents and my sister, we never spoke about it,” she said.
She ended up switching schools, losing friends and being introduced to drugs and alcohol, describing her life as “surviving day by day.”
“I really went inward,” she said. “I couldn’t think about him being out there.
“I couldn’t think about him, either he was in prison or he was dead. And that is how I managed to not be fearful. In fact, I was very reckless. I did not lock my doors. I didn’t do any of that. I went completely the other way, and I don’t know why.”
And then came the arrest, and the dredging up of the past.
“The first year was really rough,” Pedretti said. “After he was caught, I ended up having to quit my job because all I did was cry.”
The day after DeAngelo’s arrest, Pedretti recalls bringing 42 roses to then-Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert — one for every year that had passed since the attack inside her parents’ home a week before Christmas.
“I was just so grateful that she had never given up, because I had,” Pedretti said. “I didn’t care if he was ever caught or if he was dead. He was out of my life.
“And if he hadn’t been caught I wouldn’t be healing the way I’m healing now. And so I brought her 42 roses. She sat there at the table with me and I cried the whole time. And I said ‘thank you,’ and I left.”
The next step, attending DeAngelo’s arraignment, “was the most surreal experience ever” as victims gathered together before the court hearing that was held on the first floor of the Sacramento County Main Jail building.
“We were all in there, and it was the first time that I had seen other victims,” Pedretti said. “I’d never thought of another victim. I mean, you’re not supposed to talk about it, right?
“I didn’t know there were stories out there. And so I’m just looking around the room, like, ‘He was in her house, and her house and her house.’
“Like, just the overwhelming realization of how big this was and how evil he was and how many lives you’ve ruined and took was just mind-boggling to me.”
At one point early on, Pedretti said she wrote “a couple nasty letters” to DeAngelo in jail, but never heard back.
“I don’t know why I did it,” she said. “But it was therapeutic.”
‘Your dad’s killer. They caught him’
Jennifer Carole had a similar experience after DeAngelo was arrested.
Her father, attorney Lyman Smith, and his wife, Charlene Smith, were murdered inside their Ventura home in March 1980 by DeAngelo, who raped Charlene Smith and then bludgeoned both to death with a piece of firewood.
DNA recovered from Charlene’s Smith body eventually helped lead investigators to DeAngelo 38 years later.
Carole learned of the arrest after being awakened at her Santa Cruz home by a text message from a friend the day officials were to announce DeAngelo’s apprehension at a Sacramento news conference.
“My friend texted me and said, ‘They caught him,’” Carole said. “It was a text in the morning and I’m blurry eyed and completely out of it and said, ‘What are you talking about?’”
“They caught him, your dad’s killer, they caught him,” her friend replied.
By then, Carole had grown accustomed to safeguarding herself and her daughter from danger.
“I absolutely adapted my life knowing there was somebody out there,” she said. “I had bells on doors, an Oakland A’s mini-bat at my bed. My poor daughter has to take so much self-defense.”
But she wasn’t prepared for the fallout from the arrest.
Carole, a marketing vice president in Silicon Valley at the time, said the ensuing reaction and media firestorm led to her losing her job after being viewed as a “celebrity” for her TV interviews.
“It was in some ways the worst five years of my life,” Carole said. “I lost my job, my career fell apart.
“It all fell apart because of his arrest.”
‘Hi, I’m number one. I’m number 16’
Carole made it to DeAngelo’s second court appearance, encountering the same realization that had hit Pedretti.
“I didn’t know how many of us there would be,” Carole said. “I actually hadn’t really understood the scope of all his crimes at that time.
“We all met on a secret corner in Sacramento to walk to court together … and I got to meet Phyllis (Henneman), the person who was victim No. 1.
“And that’s how people were introducing themselves: ‘Hi, I’m number one.’ ‘I’m number 16.’
“I’m the Ventura murders, so I don’t have a number. … So when they’re introducing by number, I quickly got that that was the order of attack. But I couldn’t believe that that was just how we’re identifying right off the bat. It’s, it was crazy to me.”
Carole and Henneman sat together holding hands waiting for DeAngelo to be brought into the courtroom holding cell.
“And when he came out, I think we both kind of caught our breath because he was just an old man,” Carole said. ‘You build up a monster in your head, you think whoever does this, he has to be a monster, right? And he is, he’s still a monster. …
“This is an old fart, a fat fart at that point, who’s in the cell and looking pathetic.”
The day the hunt ended
Sacramento District Attorney Thien Ho was a homicide prosecutor in April 2018 when he saw his boss, Rod Norgaard, moving back and forth and whispering to Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Grippi.
“There was just this electric buzz in the air. … He’s running around, he’s huddling, he’s talking to our chief deputy,” Ho said.
Ho watched the two men go into Norgaard’s office, which shared a wall with his, and he went into his own office and pressed up to the wall. “So I put my ear up to the wall and I could overhear from the other side the two of them talking,” Ho said. “And one of them then says, ‘one in 16 septillion match to the EAR.’
“And in Sacramento County, ‘the EAR’ means one thing and one thing only, the East Area Rapist. And so at that point, I knew that they had caught the East Area Rapist.”
Longtime residents of the area know that the time of the East Area Rapist marked a period of fear that began in the Rancho Cordova area east of Sacramento in 1976, when the attacks began in the region.
People bought shotguns and rifles, placed baseball bats next to their nightstands. Many closed their windows and sliders at night, even during the heat of the summer.
“If you go out to Rancho Cordova where he started in the east area of the county, you’ll notice nearly every single house has metal bars on the windows, on the doors,” Ho said. “And it used to never be that way.
“You know, people would leave their doors unlocked, kids would be playing at night. I mean, you know how hot it gets in the summertime and you wait for that Delta breeze to come in, and you can imagine leaving your windows open so you feel that cool breeze come through.
“And it all stopped with Joseph DeAngelo and the East Area Rapist.”
Ho said he had never asked to be assigned to a case before, but had always told himself if a suspect in the East Area Rapist case was ever caught, he wanted in.
“So I decided one day about two or three weeks after the arrest, I walked into Rod’s office and I said to him very simply, ‘If you’re on Seal Team Six and they told you they found Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, you know what you say? You say, I want on that helicopter ride, Rod. I want on the helicopter ride.’
“He started smiling and laughing and I walked out, didn’t say another word.”
Hours later, Ho was assigned, along with Sacramento prosecutor Amy Holliday, to prosecute DeAngelo, a task that looked as though it might take years to complete.
Prosecutors were faced with the very real possibility that many witnesses, detectives and survivors of DeAngelo’s rampage would die off before he could be brought to trial, and the pandemic that hit in March 2020 derailed plans for a preliminary hearing that was expected to take as long as six months.
Then there was the problem of the statute of limitations.
Some of DeAngelo’s rape victims ran the risk of not having their cases charged because time had run out on filing.
Pedretti was one of those, and she and others who had begun bonding during the court proceedings decided that if there was going to be a plea bargain that allowed DeAngelo to escape the death penalty they wanted every crime included, charged or not.
“We asked Thien Ho if we could meet with him after one of the hearings, and we told him exactly what we wanted,” Pedretti said. “It’s one for all and all for one …
“Everybody wanted him to take responsibility for what he had done, whether there was a formal charge or not, because it didn’t take away that he didn’t do it. He just, you know, escaped the statute. But he still ruined so many lives.”
Prosecutors agreed, and DeAngelo’s public defenders worked out a deal for the case, which had to be moved to a ballroom at Sacramento State to accommodate hundreds of victims, survivors, reporters and others, to end with DeAngelo verbally taking responsibility for his crimes.
As Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman read each charge aloud, DeAngelo answered, “Guilty.” For each of the uncharged counts, he answered, “I admit.”
“Ultimately, you had to get him to take responsibility before those victims, which was very important to those victims,” Ho said. “And it was very important to us.”
She never gave up
Anne Marie Schubert grew up in Sacramento at the time of the East Area Rapist attacks, and knows how fearful the community was at the time.
“We changed our lives,” Schubert said. “My mom had an ice pick under her pillow.”
Decades after the attacks, she still hears stories from how people tried to protect themselves, the family that slept on their rooftop, the people who placed tarps in the hallways to hear if someone approached, the woman who went to bed under a pile of laundry to make it appear no one was home.
After Schubert was interviewed recently at a Carmichael cafe just blocks from the scene of some of DeAngelo’s attacks, financial planner Pat Barr looked up from his nearby table and volunteered that he had overheard her talking about the case.
The EAR had terrorized his family as a boy, tapping on the doors of their home at night, Barr said.
“The anxiety, it brings you back,” he said. “I was 12 again.”
As a prosecutor, Schubert had a long history of dealing with DNA evidence, including a ground-breaking case where she filed an arrest warrant in 2000 against the DNA of a “John Doe” rape suspect two days before the statute of limitations had expired.
That warrant eventually led to the conviction in 2020 of Mark Jeffrey Manteuffel in two Sacramento-area rapes from 1992 and 1994.
As Sacramento District Attorney, she championed the formation of a task force in 2016 dedicated to continuing the hunt for the East Area Rapist, and that group’s work led to Contra Costa County investigator Paul Holes deciding to use a public online genealogy site to compare to DNA left at a Golden State Killer crime scene.
The subsequent hit led to someone identified as a relative of the killer, and from there investigators built out a family tree of that individual until they found DeAngelo, who had lived in areas where the crimes took place and had a military and police background.
Since then, the technique has been used worldwide to convict suspects such as Manteuffel and NorCal Rapist Roy Charles Waller.
“Forty-three years, 650 investigators, 15 different law enforcement agencies, somewhere around $10 million,” Schubert said of the original GSK/EAR investigation. “Ten thousand people of interest, 300 people swabbed for DNA and zero people came up on that list.
“And then this genealogy tool comes along. Five people on that genealogy team, a couple hundred bucks and it was solved in 63 days. It’s pretty remarkable.”
Victims bonded helping others after conviction
Five years after the arrest, Pedretti and Carole find themselves working together and individually to help other victims.
Pedretti and other victims work through a Facebook group called “Sexual Assault Survivors, It’s Time to Tell your Story” that has 821 members and works to help victims worldwide.
She has spoken and offered training to law enforcement groups and victims seminars, and when she was interviewed recently was busy helping at a domestic violence conference in downtown Sacramento.
Carole, who now works in cybersecurity, helps with a support group Pedretti hosts in her backyard, and has been contacted for advice in writing victim impact statements like the searing speeches DeAngelo had to sit through during his court proceedings.
Did DeAngelo really stop?
But some questions still linger about DeAngelo, who began his trail of bizarre break-ins and murders in Tulare County in 1975 and is last known to have struck in May 1986 with the murder of Janelle Cruz in Irvine.
One is why he did it, something that may never be answered.
“How are monsters created?” Ho asked. “The question is a valid question, the one that everybody wants to know, and I’ll say this, I simply don’t know. I simply don’t know how a monster is created.”
The other question that is frequently asked is why DeAngelo stopped killing in 1986, or if he did.
“And when people ask me that question, what I would always say is, what makes you think he stopped in 1986?” Ho said. “I really can’t talk about anything else in terms of whether there is or isn’t an an investigation in regards to what he’s done.
“I honestly believe that he didn’t stop in 1986. That’s my personal opinion, that he didn’t stop. But, you know, proving that is much more difficult.”
