Joseph DeAngelo's background did not resemble an empty space.
The prosecution's introduction followed the March 18 development with a short account of his life. He had grown up in Rancho Cordova and served in the military. He had worked as a police officer near Visalia during the period associated with the Ransacker, then as an officer in Auburn during the East Area Rapist series. The public record was giving the candidate a history that could be compared with the history of the case.
On my sheet, Rancho Cordova was already present for a different reason. Brian and Katie Maggiore had been killed there in 1978. The earlier East Area investigation also belonged to the Sacramento region. A place in someone's background could make that person worth examining; it could not establish what the person had done there. Plenty of lives touched the same places without touching the crimes.
The employment history was more unsettling. DeAngelo had worked for Exeter and Auburn, according to the prosecutors' later announcement. The role placed him within institutions people ordinarily approached for protection. The case emerging around him concerned the violation of that protection inside people's homes.
I did not need to invent a scene in a police station to feel the contradiction. The factual basis had already described an officer on the other side of an encounter: Detective William McGowen, injured when he tried to stop the Ransacker in December 1975. The later prosecution identified DeAngelo as the man who shot at him and escaped. A former officer's biography and another officer's attempt to apprehend an unidentified offender were now being read within the same case.
They had not been the same kind of knowledge at the time. McGowen's observations produced a sketch. The man under examination in 2018 had a name and an employment history. The later connection between them did not establish that McGowen had recognized an officer from another department during the earlier confrontation.
The introduction also listed a move to Southern California and a later return to Sacramento. Those broad movements gave investigators further circumstances to examine. The public account did not turn them into a day-by-day travel log, and a reader could not use them to place the candidate at every scene. The strongest part of the story was not that the biography seemed to fit. It was what would happen when investigators moved beyond that apparent fit.
Other people in the factual basis had retained memories of encounters in Visalia. The Snelling section described photo identifications in 2018 based on observations from 1975. Decades had passed between seeing someone and considering a photograph within the later inquiry. The material supplied the year of those identifications, without establishing their exact order relative to the March candidate development or the April arrest.
I kept them within the wider 2018 account. They enlarged the eventual evidentiary picture; they were not a missing scene I could insert wherever the suspense seemed to require one. The dated steps already carried a serious question. A person had emerged from a long investigation. Could the evidence from the crimes support the attention now directed at him?
More than a month separated March 18 from the comparison described on April 23. The public summary moves quickly across that interval. The interval itself is a reminder that a candidate's emergence was not the same event as the arrest. The named man still had to be examined against evidence that had outlasted many earlier possibilities.
The police employment ended in 1979, when DeAngelo was dismissed from Auburn. The crimes in the later record did not end then. That single chronological fact prevented the biography from becoming a convenient explanation with its own tidy conclusion. Whatever readers made of the uniform, its removal had not marked the end of the danger.
The next part of the history moved south and continued through years after that dismissal. It included a tennis appointment that brought friends to a home, a newly married couple, an anticipated return from hospital, and an eighteen-year-old whose death became the final murder count in the eventual complaint.
Those events had to stand beside the candidate's life, not disappear beneath it. Before the laboratory comparison would connect his name to several of their cases, the record had to let them be people again.