Original subtitles

[Dramatic stinger]

[Dark, intriguing music]

[Reporter] Convicted Golden State killer, Joseph DeAngelo,

was wheeled into court in Sacramento

for his final reckoning on Friday.

Are you capable of comprehending

the pain and anguish you have caused?

Judge Michael Bowman formally sentenced DeAngelo

to multiple life terms in prison.

He's not a feeble old man.

[Judge] He has and always will be, the sociopath in action.

[Sinister music]

[Retro music]

[Archive] For the last nine years,

Detective Carol Daly has counseled rape victims.

She is 37 and married.

Carol is currently assigned to the East Area Rapist case.

[Intriguing music]

My name is Carol Daly.

I became involved with the East Area Rapist

when it was case number five in Sacramento.

That time was the most overwhelming part

of my whole career.

My name is Richard Shelby,

and I was the first detective to work

on what I believe at the time to be the East Area Rapist.

I was with the Sacramento Sheriff's Department.

They got sent out one morning; 1976, October 5th.

Myself and Carol Daly responded to the scene

where a guy broke into the house.

Jane Carson's young son was at home with her in the bed.

Her husband had just left for work.

And the rapist come running down the hallway

and she thought it was her husband,

he had forgotten something.

Then her son was taken into another room and Jane was raped.

[Richard] He used shoestrings to tie her up

with really, really tight square knots.

So tight her hands were becoming discolored.

He kept using the words, "Shut up."

Just, "Shut up, shut up, shut up."

Repeated it probably a thousand times.

Then he went in the kitchen

and announced he was going to cook something to eat

and started browning the pans.

That's when he left.

The rapist in this case,

he knew right to the minute when the victim, Jane,

her husband was leaving for work.

I doubt if his car was even out of sight

and this guy was through the bedroom and assaulted her.

He had it planned out to the second.

[Investigative music]

We found them one a month starting in June.

June, July, August, September, October.

The MO was similar.

That's why we thought it was the fifth in the series.

When I made a bulletin for everybody,

I mentioned rapes occurring in the East Area.

The next day on the newspaper, 'East Area Rapist',

that's where it came from.

[Dramatic music]

[Tense, sinister music]

[Hilary] Sacramento was totally different

after the existence of the rapist.

[Tense music builds]

My name is Hilary Abramson, and I covered the East Area Rapist

for the Sacramento Union during the mid seventies.

I doubt anybody felt safe anywhere.

When you saw the sun go down,

you got this pit in your stomach.

Many women in the Concord area are close to panic,

afraid they'll be next.

Last night, my husband got his gun out

and put it under the bed.

- Really? - Mm-hmm.

There's quite a bit of fear there.

Oh, very definitely.

Everybody is extremely concerned.

It's a very uncomfortable feeling.

You're afraid to leave your home

with your children staying there.

[Hilary] There was fear in the community,

in the city and the county.

Wherever you went, that's all everyone talked about.

It was the only thing on anybody's mind.

We don't go to sleep very well at night.

We go around and lock everything up as tightly as we can.

And the last thing I think of when I'm going to bed

is I look at the doorway in my bedroom and I think

that he could be standing there

and I just wake up a lot at night.

I have never seen a city so gripped in fear

before that or since that.

[Dark music fades]

I was his 10th victim.

I had just turned 15.

It was one week before Christmas,

and my parents were going to a Christmas party.

My sister was at work,

and I was excited because I got the house to myself.

I popped a pizza in the oven,

and I went to go play the piano for the ten minutes

that it would take to cook.

[Piano plays]

[Carol] Through our investigations,

we believe that he canvassed the neighborhood

and the home enough that he knew who was home

and who was coming and going.

The rapist would make entry,

sometimes just through an unlocked door or a window.

Sometimes he went in ahead of time

and would unlock a back door.

[Sinister music]

While I was playing I heard a noise,

and I stopped, because it was a noise I had never heard before.

And I listened and it wasn't there anymore.

So I just figured I had imagined it, that it was nothing.

So I began to play again.

[Piano plays]

Within seconds, a masked man came behind me with a knife,

put it around my neck, and he told me that if I made a sound,

he would put the knife all the way through.

I froze.

The night really unfolded in sensations

more than it did in events.

The biggest sensation would be fear

and coming to grips that I was going to die.

[Carol] It's hard to imagine

the fear that all of these victims went through.

They knew any minute he was going to kill them

because he kept saying,

"I'll kill you, I'll kill you, I'll kill you."

[Muffled singing] 'Jesus loves me...'

I remember singing 'Jesus Loves Me' in my head

because he told me so many times he was going to kill me.

[Muffled singing over sinister music]

He actually bound my wrists and my ankles, I later found,

with my sister's shoelaces.

So he had been in my house for a while

and had removed her shoelaces from her shoes.

And then he cut off my clothes,

and I could hear him in the kitchen going through cupboards.

He kept saying, "Damn it," a lot.

He ate my pizza

because the timer went off to take the pizza out.

He could spend up to three hours at a time in a house.

just eating, terrorizing people.

I think he got a bigger kick out of that

than he did anything else.

[Dark music]

[Kris] And then he came to get me, and I'm blindfolded.

I can't see.

And he pushed me to my parents' bedroom,

where he raped me for the first time.

Mostly, what I heard him say is, "I'm going to kill you."

That was over and over.

The only other time that I remember him

saying anything to me was, "Boy, doesn't this feel good."

And I didn't answer, so he would say it again

until I said the answer that he wanted.

[Carol] The assaults were repetitive.

These were horrible assaults.

A lot of times they included sodomy, rape, oil copulation,

defiling; anything to humiliate the victim.

He left me there,

probably another ten, fifteen, twenty minutes.

I have no idea.

You know, time kind of stretched.

And then he came back and got me and this time,

pushed me into the family room

where he raped me for the second time.

And then out again,

I think he was probably going through the bedrooms,

brought me in again, raped me a third time.

[Dark, troubling music]

When he was done, he did not take me back outside this time.

I waited, and I thought I had been there for some time,

and it was very quiet.

And so I tried to move just a little bit.

He was right next to me, I couldn't hear him move.

I didn't hear him breathe until he was in my ear,

and I could feel the air shift.

And he said, "Don't move or I'll kill you."

[Carol] Then there was a long silence

out of fear if they moved.

But some of these victims got to the point where they felt

they would rather die than be assaulted by him again.

I stayed there and uh...

...stayed there.

And finally, even for a 15-year-old, you know,

there's a point where we break.

Like, enough is enough.

I've already told Jesus I'm coming.

I already know I'm going to die.

And this was my last, I guess, act of independence, right?

I... You're not going to decide when I die.

I'll decide.

So I moved again.

And luckily, he was gone.

I'm tied, hands, feet, hopped over to the phone,

and I sort of had to dial from the back because it was,

you know, I had to kind of reach back.

One of my best friends, Lori, lived across the street.

It's the only person I could think of.

And within seconds, their whole family was at my house.

The dad cut the ropes off of me

and the mom gave me a nice warm blanket to cover me.

I do remember how wonderful that blanket felt.

It felt like kindness.

It felt like love.

Like someone was taking care of me.

[Sombre music]

[Paige] Oral, sodomy, raped five times.

A 19-year-old.

A few days before that,

29-year-old woman raped four times and oral sodomy.

During this period, DeAngelo and his wife, Sharon Huddle,

are living in Auburn,

like half an hour drive away from Sacramento.

I really feel that for Joe DeAngelo,

the person, there's a huge amount of conflict in himself.

Look at who he's attacking.

They're the very families he grew up around.

These are working class people.

He wants authority.

He wants respect.

I believe the same things that are motivating him

to be in law enforcement,

are also what's motivating him to commit the crimes.

[Dark, powerful music]

I was 12 when the East Area Rapist began his spree

in Sacramento County.

You know, as a kid, I was scared.

My sister was a babysitter.

She was terrified to go out.

My mother slept with an ice pick.

My father bought a gun.

I wouldn't say that's why I became a prosecutor,

but I would say that it was kind of probably always

in the back of my mind that this case just,

it needed to be solved.

It changed the whole community at the time.

We went from a very, very quiet community

to people that wouldn't let their children ride bicycles

on the street anymore.

People changed their lives.

They were scared to death to go out.

He seems to be getting more aggressive

and more frequent in his attacks.

Yes, he does.

He's stepping it up because it's a game to him.

He's getting in the news media,

and the fear he's putting into women

is really gratifying to him.

He's a loner and always was a loner.

He's physically unattractive, and he was rejected by a woman

about the time he started.

[Bonnie] The East Area Rapist

was holding the Sacramento community hostage.

The newspaper began to number them.

'This is number 12.'

'This is number 15.'

'This is number 23.'

[Jim] When the East Area Rapist crimes spree was going,

my own wife was 22.

So yeah, I was very concerned.

So Joe, because of his police background,

he looked at all my windows and the way I had things set up

to make sure that I was secure.

He said, you're fine, you know.

So, yeah, we went through the house together, my house,

with the East Area Rapist, because I don't know it's him.

[Drill whirring over troubling music]

I put locks on my doors.

People was in just last week, yeah.

There's a lot of panic around this area.

I know what my wife would do.

She would do everything that she could

to prevent this individual from doing what he intends to do.

But that doesn't mean that I recommend that.

I'm not gonna recommend one way or the other.

I'm just telling you that's an individual decision

that has to be made.

Frankly, I hope somebody blows his head off.

[Tense music]

We actually had a citizen who shot somebody in their backyard

and the judge closed the case by saying there was so much fear

that this person was defending his family,

and he was exonerated.

[Jim] Now I look back,

I think Joe actually enjoyed terrorizing my kids.

And it was over the movies that he had had them watch.

He would choose the horror genre of movies.

Halloween was one.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

[Screaming]

He loved actually watching the scariness of the movie

and what it did to the children.

It scared the kids, and he seemed to enjoy that.

When I took this picture,

he's got my daughter in his lap, you know,

it's kind of a family cutie picture, you know,

and I don't know he's a bad guy.

[Sinister music]

These kids at the time were probably between six and ten,

you know, pretty young.

When the really bad parts came out, he would get more excited,

getting his teeth clenched

and then talking like really angrily.

Yeah, he liked seeing the kids get scared and terrorized.

[Tense country music]

[Bonnie] I lived in the areas

where most of his rapes were being committed.

I was 24 at the time

and not only was I blocks from this one

and then that one and then this one,

even when we moved to the next house after that one,

there were still rapes occurring in the area around me.

I felt particularly vulnerable.

I was alone all the time

with my husband traveling out of town for business.

But I was probably the safest person in Sacramento

because I might have recognized him; mask or no mask.

Of course, I never knew

Joe DeAngelo was the East Area Rapist.

[Intriguing music builds]

In one of the rapes, the victim said DeAngelo, the suspect,

was really upset and saying,

"I hate you, Bonnie," and kept repeating it.

I recall Joe mentioning

that he got his feelings hurt really bad by Bonnie.

We were out doing dirt bike riding or whatever,

and for some reason,

something would, he would bring it up, which is kind of odd,

because he's married to Sharon, my sister.

But you know, that was still stuck on his mind, you know,

that this love of his life broke his heart.

[Michael] If you read about people who are psychopaths,

rejection like that is critical.

It can be the spark that sets everything off.

[Interviewer] Why do you think that Joe DeAngelo said,

"I hate you, Bonnie," during that rape?

I would love to know the answer to that.

Other people have broken engagements

and not gone off humiliating women, raping women,

murdering women.

I hope and pray

that those attacks had nothing to do with me.

Well, we don't know,

we've got some description of several cars.

[Tense music]

[Carol] A task force was formed.

We had canvas teams, we had a SWAT team, we had canine teams.

There were about 44 of us on that task force.

From that point on, we responded to every break

so that we had continuity, we knew what we were looking for,

we knew the evidence that needed to be collected.

[Tense music]

It weighed heavily on everybody involved

with those investigations

that we were never able at that time, to identify who it was.

We had no closure for these people.

[Michael] It got to the point where he was committing

sometimes five, seven, eight rapes in a month,

sometimes three in a week.

I think it almost got beyond a law officer's ability

to deal with it.

[Carol] The amount of rapes was overwhelming.

At one point, we had two rapes in one night.

We went from one case to another case.

And it took a toll on, I think, all of the investigators.

Everybody's frustrated.

The officers in this department who are working on this case

are frustrated because there's just no evidence

to give any firm leads.

[Police chatter]

After he was arrested, they tracked, actually,

DeAngelo's police duty with all of the activity going on

with the East Area Rapist and the prowlings

and all the home canvassings and stuff.

And they suggest someone who never slept.

He'd work a double shift

or come off of duty, and then within a half hour,

you would see the activity going on.

[Carol] He wore gloves, he wore long sleeved clothes,

he wore a ski mask,

so there was never any trace evidence.

Blindfolding the victims and keeping them tied up.

We had so little to go on.

We had a shoe size.

And we had possible color of the eyes, and that varied.

So we had so little to go on.

This individual is probably in a panic,

and this panic is caused by his inadequate endowment.

[Carol] Some of the victims had reported he had a small penis.

That really became a very focal point of the investigation.

I mean, a lot of our tips came from girlfriends and wives

thinking, you know, maybe their husband was a suspect

because he was supposed to have been so abnormally small.

[Troubling music]

When Joseph DeAngelo was arrested

and booked into the Sacramento County Jail,

part of the booking process

and part of the investigative process

was to take photographs of him, including his penis,

which was consistent

with exactly what those women described.

It was described to me as infantile.

Obviously, this was something that deeply impacted him.

I think the psychology for DeAngelo was,

I need to prove something.

But how many women would he have to sexually assault and abuse,

and murder, will it take to make up for his pathology,

his mentality that he's insufficient as a man?

There are two things that are known about the rapist

currently terrorizing Sacramento.

One is he has never been caught in a home

where there was a man present.

The other is he's never been in a home

where there has been a big dog present.

[Dogs barking]

[Linda] We had just gotten the dog.

His name was Portia.

It was actually Friday the 13th, and my husband was home.

We had a nice dinner at home.

We watched a movie.

I think we went to bed after ten.

[Ominous music]

We're woken all of a sudden,

I hear a voice, and I have a flashlight in my face.

I couldn't see him at all.

I couldn't see his face, I couldn't see how tall he was.

All I could see was a flashlight in my face.

Linda O'Dell and her husband

were the first couple to be attacked.

It's just so cynically sinister

that after it was publicly announced,

'He hasn't attacked couples,' he started attacking couples.

[Michael] And now, all bets were off.

Even if you had a dog

or your husband was in the house with you,

that didn't mean you were safe at all, and in fact,

there was nobody that was safe in the entire city.

The ones that occurred at night were a flashlight in their eyes

as they were sleeping.

And of course, all they see is this shadowy figure

and he would have a gun.

Sometimes he had a knife.

[Richard] He was so thorough, so intensive.

In one case, there was a shotgun leaning against the wall,

and he told the male victim, "Go for it."

Well, the gun was unloaded.

He knew what was there.

I think I'm dreaming, I don't think I'm awake.

I'm like, 'What's going on?'

I didn't put it together that it could be the East Area Rapist.

And he said he wasn't going to hurt us.

He was just going to rob the house,

and then he was going to be gone.

But he kind of talked in this ruffled voice.

[Dark music]

He threw ties at me, and I think they were shoelaces.

And he ordered me to tie my husband up,

and I tied him real loosely.

He came over, tied me up, re-tied my husband tighter,

so we're like hog-tied now.

He's making all this noise in the kitchen,

he's going through drawers,

he's coming back in the bedroom.

He's asking where things are.

'Where's my purse?'

He also would be, like, talking to himself.

I could hear him mumbling.

We could hear the refrigerator opening.

He was drinking beer.

I remember one quote where he said,

"I'm gonna get some cheese now,"

and came back smelling of cheese.

Like, you could really, it's so palpable.

Then he would tell the man to lay on his stomach,

and he would put dishes on his back.

And he said, if I hear these dishes rattle,

I'm going to kill your wife.

[Richard] He had his own alarm system that way.

At least once, the guy rattling the dishes,

he has right there, a gun stuck in his ear.

DeAngelo was motivated by his need for power.

He wanted to feel like he was man enough.

And to do that, he had to feel like he was in control.

You were going to listen, you were going to watch,

and you were going to do nothing about it.

That almost echoes back from his childhood,

exactly what he did when he watched what happened

to his sister, and he did nothing about it.

He untied my ankles, and he said, "Come with me."

And had something poked in my back

as I was walking down the hallway.

And as I'm walking down the hallway and I'm thinking,

'Oh my God, I think I'm gonna be raped.'

I could hear him unzipping his pants

and then pulling my underpants, my pajama bottoms off.

He also had a knife that he had gotten.

It was a big knife, it wasn't like a small one.

It was like one of the big ones.

He told me if I didn't cooperate,

he was going to kill me.

So, during the rape, not only was he raping us,

I had this knife like to my throat.

I'm an athlete, I always thought this would never happen to me.

I can run, I can fight.

I'm strong.

But when you're in the middle of the night, and you're dazed,

and you're tied up, right away,

and then you're also worried about your partner,

I prayed throughout the rape.

I'm from a Catholic family.

I just prayed to God.

I said, 'Let me live. I want to live through this.'

And I kept saying, "Please don't hurt me.

Please don't hurt me."

I just wanted to live.

And you know, I could smell the beer smell.

I could smell him kind of being sweaty.

I mean, it's like everything kind of stops

and you notice everything.

[Troubling music]

The fear... was there for a long time.

Not knowing if we were both gonna live.

That was the worst ever.

I would say he had an insatiable desire for power and control.

His motivation was adrenaline and sexual gratification.

That's what Joseph DeAngelo was about,

was the thrill and the hunt

of being able to go into a complete stranger's home

and take control of that home.

[Sinister music]

[Distant sirens]

[Linda] I was new to California, twenty two,

just married in my first home with my new puppy

and my husband next to me.

I'm not that same person today.

I've had five German shepherds to try to feel safe

and I've never lived alone.

You have lived over seventy years carefree,

and the victims and the survivors

have had long lasting scars.

[Carol] After that attack, there was just disbelief.

I mean, how can he overcome two people?

When we were conducting the town hall meeting,

a gentleman stood up and said,

"I will never believe that a rapist could come into a home

and tie two people up and rape somebody

while a man was in the home."

Gotta protect your woman, right?

He said, "Oh, a man next to a woman, no one's gonna rape her."

This is never gonna happen to my family

because I will protect my wife.

He wouldn't believe it.

Two weeks later, they were the second couple

to be a victim of the East Area Rapist.

[Tense music builds]

[Hilary] We believe the rapist was at that town hall meeting.

I feel that they were followed home.

As I recall, he held a gun to the husband's head and said,

"You don't like this, do you?"

So, don't ever taunt Joseph DeAngelo,

because he will seek revenge

and that's exactly what happened to that couple.

That created even more fear.

When I got home from the hospital,

everybody was gone except my husband was there.

And we sat down and we went over what happened.

He told me that he threw my pajamas away.

And then he said, "I don't want to talk about it again."

Which now seems really cold.

Like, if we didn't talk about it, it was... it didn't happen.

But I wasn't okay.

I need to talk about it, but you don't want to talk about it.

And so, nobody talked about it.

[Sorrowful music]

The next morning after the rape occurred,

my dad instructed us very sternly

that we will never talk about this again.

And we never did.

Not another word to my parents, not a word from them to me.

My sister and I didn't talk about it.

We were expected to go on as life was normal.

'Nothing happened. You're okay.'

'It's over. Move on.'

And, you know, that didn't happen.

I had nightmares.

I still have nightmares.

It is still with me today.

If I could find a way to shut the memories out, I would.

Back then, all of society didn't really want to talk about it.

It's like you were being promiscuous.

You must have been wearing hot pants and no bra or...

you must have been out at nightclubs.

You didn't want to share it with anybody

because they judged you in a negative way.

Like, I would have to say,

"No, I was sleeping in my bed at home."

I hadn't done anything.

[Paige] I think there is a personal life of Joseph DeAngelo

that is at so much odds with the life of the criminal.

His wife, Sharon Huddle,

was a very strong believer in women's rights

and freedom of sexuality.

The complete opposite of what you see happening in the night

with Joe DeAngelo and his attacks on women.

And they had three children,

girls, and he raised his daughters to be very strong

and was very respectful of women's rights as a father.

So, it... it's a real mind game.

How to understand the many people who were Joseph DeAngelo,

because I do not believe there was just one.

[Sinister music]

I had the chance to listen to the audio tapes

of his police interrogation.

I heard the voices, the different voices.

How is there any shred of doubt

that this isn't an insane person?

This is not calculating.

If you wanted to make an insanity defense, he could have.

He prevented his lawyers from mounting one.

So, why go through a charade of a police interrogation

with the whimpering and not then claim insanity afterward?

[Dramatic stinger]

[Reporter] Some 18 months after his first attack,

the East Area Rapist has claimed victims 29 and 30.

Some 33 victims attributed to the East Area Rapist.

People complain that after all this time,

the police should have been able to catch the East Area Rapist.

But the problem is no one knows where

or when he'll strike again.

[Hilary] In 1978, I was in touch with Visalia police.

They had had ransacking of houses going on,

and the MO that the East Area Rapist showed

in burglaries, etc,

just seemed very much like who they were looking for.

I read boxes and boxes of paperwork,

and I remember distinctly

pulling out this whole bunch of papers

on this case called the Visalia Ransacker,

and I was like, 'What is this about?'

When I read it, it was clear to me

that there was probably a running debate.

Some detectives believed very strongly he was the same person.

Others were not so sure

because they didn't have physical evidence.

I interviewed Visalia police who were just so convinced

and so frustrated.

Certainly, they thought they could stop it right there

if this was the same guy.

They needed to know more about him.

And Sacramento just dug in.

They said, "No way, no way."

The descriptions do not fit at all.

In fact, one of the officers interviewed in this case,

McGowan, was the officer who was shot at by their suspect.

He describes the suspect as being, oh, five foot ten,

180 pounds or more,

describes him as having large, round shoulders,

a large rump, large legs.

This does not fit the description

of the East Area Rapist at all.

[Hilary] And that's where the two different sketches happened.

One had more meat in his bones.

The other one was more slender and taller.

And Sacramento said,

"No, they're not even the same height.

They're not the same weight." They wouldn't cooperate.

The sheriff said there was no similarities.

I don't know how you describe my response to that.

I suppose you should actually read the damn reports

from both sides and investigate them.

You might get a different opinion.

We knew it was one guy.

We knew it was the Ransacker.

When I stop and think about what happened in Sacramento

and the murders up and down the state,

that didn't have to happen...

[Interviewer] Do you think you could have caught DeAngelo

if you'd made those connections?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

We would have been right on him.

I would have saved a lot of lives, a lot of rapes.

They even put it in a paper that we were publicity seekers,

like we were Hicktown dumb investigators.

And when Joseph DeAngelo was arrested, they said,

"Oh, God, you're right."

It would have been years and years

of women escaping the biggest trauma.

And ultimately, you know, years later, deaths, murders.

Joseph D'Angelo confessed and admitted through his plea

that he was, in fact,

the individual who killed Claude Snelling,

that he was, in fact, the individual that shot at

and had tried to kill officer McGowan,

and ultimately, that he was, in fact, the Visalia Ransacker.

So why do you think Sacramento Sheriff's Office didn't listen?

Well, firstly, they had their head up their ass.

[John] I think Sacramento,

the sheriff did not want the people in the area

to think that the East Area Rapist is a murderer.

It'll panic them.

[Michael] But Sacramento had already experienced

at least two murders by Joe DeAngelo.

They just didn't know it yet.

I heard two shots from inside the house,

and they were real loud, so I wasn't sure what they were.

I, so I came out, and I heard the third shot

about halfway down the driveway.

[Michael] The majority of murders were...

I mean, it's hard to say this in some kind of perspective,

but they were a terrible tragedy.

A terrible tragedy.

The murders of Brian and Katie Maggiore

were not initially linked to the East Area Rapist,

in large part because it wasn't a rape.

I heard five shots, and I jumped and looked out the window,

and I saw a man run.

And the boy crossed the street, hollered,

"Get an ambulance, there's this body over there."

Brian and Katie were a very young couple, 20, 21 years old,

recently married.

Brian was a military police officer.

And they were out one evening taking a walk.

Now, keep in mind that at this time frame in 1978,

everybody in Sacramento is on high alert.

Everybody's terrified.

Everybody's wondering, 'Where is he?

Where is he going to hit next?'

And so the belief is that they encountered him somewhere

while he was probably out stalking

or looking for his next victim.

And some type of altercation occurred,

probably Brian trying to intervene.

[Michael] Clearly, DeAngelo felt they could identify him.

And like all his other murders so far,

he killed to stop them from doing that.

He shot the young man and stopped him instantly

and then chased his wife around the house.

She almost got away and got to a fence that was holding her in,

but the fence was locked.

And she tried to get it and was trying to get it open

when Joseph DeAngelo came up behind her

and shot her in the back of the head.

[Gunshot echoes]

I mean, it was as cold blooded as you could ever imagine.

[Sorrowful music]

The only similarities were that shoelaces were found

at the scene of the Maggiore murders.

And of course, DeAngelo used shoelaces

in almost all of his rapes.

But at the time, it was overlooked.

Joseph DeAngelo admitted to the murders in 2020.

It is the charge of murder of Katie Maggiore,

Murder in the First Degree.

How do you plead to that, sir?

Guilty.

[Dark music]

[Female on phone] Hello?

Hello?

[Heavy breathing on phone]

[Sinister whispers] I'll kill you.

I'm gonna kill you.

[Police chatter]

I'll kill you.

The East Area Rapist would call his victims back,

disguising his voice like he did at the rapes.

Some of the victims were given tape recorders

so they could record the calls coming in.

He really covered all the bases of tormenting a community.

[Phone crackling]

I'll kill...

[Phone crackling, voice cutting out]

Fucking whore.

[Tense music over phone crackling]

And he worked off the news meadia.

I think he was tantalizing law enforcement.

That was the way I looked at him.

It was like he was thumbing his nose at us.

'Catch me, catch me, if you can, you can't. Ha, ha, ha.'

DeAngelo taunted us all the time.

He felt so secure and so superior intellectually.

He would call up the switchboard and say,

"I'm the East Area Rapist. You guys can't catch me.

I'm going to strike tonight.

I got my next victim all picked out."

We had no idea if he was telling the truth or not.

[Phone Officer] Police department, Sam speaking.

[Joe DeAngelo] You're talking to the East Area Rapist.

You dumb fuckers,

I'm gonna fuck again tonight at their home.

[Richard] He'd send out poems, he'd call up and leave comments.

He'd leave taunting messages,

you know, he was just screwing with us.

[Hilary] He had to feel omnipotent.

He had to feel omnipotent.

And it seemed as if he was for a long time.

He wanted to prove to the world,

one, that he could get away with it,

but two, that he could outsmart everybody.

He taunted people.

He stalked me.

He knew I was working the case and at that time,

I was one of the primary investigators

on the whole thing.

In the middle of the night, I was deep asleep

and our youngest son who came in the bedroom,

he said he saw a man hanging upside down

on the roof of our house.

He shined the light across the bedroom once and was gone.

Had I known,

I would have shot that son of a bitch through the ceiling

then figured out how to justify it.

The suspect, known as the East Area Rapist,

has attacked at least 39 women.

[Intriguing music]

You go to 1979, and DeAngelo is still a policeman

at Auburn Police Department, about 30 miles from Sacramento.

But you wonder if he was self exploding at that time,

because he was caught shoplifting dog repellent,

and a hammer.

[Paige] It's the most bizarre shoplifting story.

He's lingering in a hardware store in Auburn.

In the back, where they have the pots

and the gardening stuff like that,

and he's acting very suspicious.

And so they start following him up an aisle and down an aisle

and then back out to the gardening center.

So they know something is up, they confront him,

and he starts telling one weird story after another.

He kind of fell apart and started saying different things

that made not a lot of sense.

He begins to wail, and apparently

he's using multiple different kind of voices.

[Jim] They said they had quite a struggle with him.

He did not want to go down for this.

I think they had to strap him down to a chair,

you know, and tie him down.

But at any rate, he got fired by the police department.

The big part of it was he wanted to kill his boss for firing him.

He was dead serious, and I remember telling him one thing.

"Joe, you can't kill your boss."

I said, "They'll never stop looking for you."

But that was his attitude.

And after that, seemingly, everything goes quiet.

The rapes just stop.

That was it.

No more rapes reported.

'Where is he?'

'Is he in jail for a petty theft or assault

or a fistfight at some bar?'

'Is he dead?'

I mean, 'Where is he?'

'What's he doing?'

I'm sure it was this way for every reporter

who was on this story.

'Where is he?'

'Who is he?'

'What is he doing?'

'Is he alive?'

Was always in the back of your mind.

There are very few reported cases where somebody

who was a long term offender just goes cold turkey and stops.

Law enforcement, they probably thought,

'Wow, that was the end

and he maybe got scared off and now he's stopped.'

But now we know he didn't stop.

He just moved.

[Reporter] Maybe the heat has gotten too much from him,

both from the police and from an aroused citizenry,

hoping perhaps he may have ceased his attacks

for the present, perhaps even moved on to another city.

As one city detective said...

Sure, we'd like to have caught him, but after all,

we have to remember our main job is preventing rapes.

So, if we've caused him to stop for a while,

well, maybe that's good.

[Michael] The last official rape of the East Area Rapist

occurred July 5th, 1979.

But there's evidence that there were more after that.

I don't doubt there's more crimes

that Joseph DeAngelo committed.

What I do know is that we charged him

with what we could prove.

[Michael] There's speculation that DeAngelo may have committed

as many as 50 additional rapes.

What we do know is when the rapes stopped in Sacramento,

he'd moved on to Santa Barbara and Southern California,

and things were about to get worse.

I can name many other serial killers that follow

the exact same escalation pattern as DeAngelo did,

starting with juvenile delinquency, shoplifting, theft,

getting into burglary, sexual assault.

After that, instead of committing murders

that were very defensive and reactive,

the next step is often intentional homicide.

The expectation was that it was inevitable

that if we don't get him soon, there is going to be murders.

And there was.

[Sinister music]

A whole new wave of murder and rape was about to begin.

They're bludgeoned to death with the log from the wood pile.

He's not going to leave any of his victims alive.

And that's when he saw dad and his stepmom dead.

More victims than the Zodiac and Jack the Ripper combined.

All I can tell you is it's him,

and they're shaking at the crime lab.

[Dark, intriguing music]