She had gone to her parents' home to do laundry.
The factual basis identified her as Jane Doe Number One, also called Patricia Doe. The event was placed in Carmichael on September 4, 1976. It became Count Fourteen in the charged case: kidnapping for robbery. The public designation protected a name while the entry preserved a specific event and a specific charged offense.
I paused at the ordinary purpose of the visit. Laundry was not a symbol added by a writer. It was in the account. Before an offense acquired a count number, someone had been doing a necessary, unremarkable task. The later legal heading could describe the crime without carrying the full shape of the life around it.
The prosecution's account described the forced movement and robbery underlying that count, as well as sexual violence during the event. The chapter did not need to recreate the assault to show why the label mattered. Calling the count a rape conviction would have changed the stated offense. Calling the event only a kidnapping would have failed to convey the broader harm described in the factual basis. The formal category and the surrounding conduct had to be carried together.
That requirement applied across the resolution. The thirteen counts accompanying the murders were kidnapping to commit robbery. They were not a miscellaneous second list into which any serious act could be placed. The document gave each charged category its own meaning, even when a single event involved several forms of violence.
Elsewhere, an act could appear in the acknowledged history without being a charged count at all. Elizabeth Snelling's kidnapping accompanied the charged murder of her father. The attempted murder of Detective McGowen appeared as uncharged conduct. The distinction neither erased those events nor converted them into extra convictions under different names.
The sentencing memorandum offered a broader accounting. It reported that the defendant's admissions, including the charged and uncharged incidents, concerned violence against eighty-seven victims on fifty-three occasions in eleven counties. That was a different measure from twenty-six charged counts in a six-county prosecution. The two sets of numbers described different aspects of the same resolution; they did not contradict each other merely because their totals differed.
The memorandum was the prosecution's submission to the court. Its accounting made the scope of the admissions visible, but the document still had to be read in that role. It was not a jury's separate finding on every phrase. The plea and admission categories supplied the basis for the reported acknowledgment; the sentencing outcome would come afterward.
For the narrative, the change was substantial. The case now extended beyond the list by which it was easiest to remember. The father's death, the detective's survival, and the attack on a person protected by a Doe designation did not have to compete for a place under a single simplified total. Each had a position in the history the defendant admitted.
The same discipline kept me from inventing an explanation for every charging choice. A heading could establish that conduct was uncharged without explaining the entire legal reason for that treatment. The memorandum described how additional crimes were included in the account. It did not turn every unanswered procedural question into something a writer could resolve by intuition.
There was a human consequence to keeping the categories clear. Someone who survived did not become less affected because the public remembered the murder total. A family whose loss appeared within a charged count did not become a more important kind of family than those harmed by conduct acknowledged elsewhere. The legal framework organized responsibility. It was not a ranking of whose life had changed most.
By the end of the count list, I understood why the ending could not consist only of a sentence imposed on the defendant. The proceeding had gathered many years and many forms of harm. Its next stage would let people describe consequences in terms that a count number could not supply.
A public schedule set aside August 18 through August 20 for victim-impact statements, ahead of the sentencing date on August 21. The account was about to turn from the scope of DeAngelo's admissions to the lives that had continued after his acts. For that part, the available sources included the words of people speaking for themselves.