In December 1975, a detective came close enough to confront the man later identified in the prosecution's account as the Visalia Ransacker.
The encounter did not end in an arrest.
The factual basis placed Detective William McGowen in an effort to apprehend the offender after the Snelling murder. On December 10, he encountered a man during that effort. The document described the man shooting at him, striking his flashlight and causing injuries, then escaping. McGowen's observations contributed to a composite sketch.
The account left an injured officer and an offender still beyond apprehension. It also left information. A direct encounter could fail to produce custody while producing observations that remained part of the history.
The later document identified the man in the encounter as DeAngelo. That retrospective identity did not belong automatically to the earlier officer's knowledge. The name at the top of the eventual prosecution could make the encounter look like a missed answer plainly written in front of everyone. In its historical position, it was an encounter with a person who escaped.
I placed the incident between the Snelling murder and the later years. The change in the chronology was immediate. The long unresolved period could no longer be mistaken for uninterrupted distance between investigators and the offender. There had been contact. There had been an attempt to stop him. There had been a surviving witness to the confrontation.
The passage of time did not turn those facts into an arrest.
Years later, the public appeal would ask for an identity across a much wider history. By then the case carried different local names and material from different places. An early encounter in Visalia remained part of the eventual account, while the question had grown beyond the scope of that encounter.
This was the history behind the renewed campaign in June 2016. The campaign's national reach offered another way to bring information toward the investigation. The later prosecution introduction also described a step directed inside the participating institutions: Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert convened the involved counties and asked for more resources.
The meeting took place within months of the appeal, according to that account. It represented a commitment sought before the later identification had been achieved. The request was consequential precisely because the answer was not yet available to justify it afterward.
In an FBI-hosted interview associated with the appeal, Sacramento Sheriff's Sergeant Paul Belli described retired investigators who still worked to identify a useful suspect. He also spoke about the effects continuing within families. The case had outlasted careers without ending those contributions. Belli hoped the reward would bring the appeal to people who might otherwise pass it by and encourage someone with information to respond. That was his stated hope for the campaign, not proof that a reward-generated tip eventually produced the arrest.
The renewed work therefore began with more than a famous mystery. It began with a history of attempts, consequences, and evidence whose full value had not yet become an identified defendant. The old material was not empty simply because the case remained unresolved.
The resources requested in 2016 would appear in the later account before a new proposal in the fall of 2017. The order was important. A commitment to continue preceded the approach that would eventually help produce a candidate. Looking backward from success could make the commitment feel obvious; in the chronology, it had been made while uncertainty remained.
The next development would join an investigative idea with material preserved from a particular crime. To understand why that material mattered, I had to return to Ventura and to two dates separated by three days.
One date belonged to the time Lyman and Charlene Smith were last known alive. The other belonged to the discovery of their deaths. Decades later, evidence associated with their case would reenter the search in a new role.