► For more, visit Mother Jones
In 2019, Susan Bowlus got a text from a friend that caught her off guard. “I’ve been watching the coverage on the Golden State Killer,” her friend wrote, referring to the California serial killer who’d been arrested in 2018.
The killer’s name was Joseph DeAngelo, a cop-turned-criminal who’d broken into homes to rape and kill people during the 1970s and 1980s.
He was finally caught in Sacramento County, thanks to DNA evidence and a genealogy website. Soon, he’d be prosecuted.
“It’s so creepy and I feel weird asking you about this,” the friend continued, but “I remember you telling me about an assault you had.”
Forty years earlier, when Bowlus was 22, a man had entered her Sacramento-area house while she was sleeping and spent hours attacking and violating her. Police never identified him.
As she tuned in to the coverage of DeAngelo’s arrest, she grew unsettled: Other confirmed survivors were describing rapes that seemed eerily similar to what she’d experienced.
And DeAngelo had lived just a short drive away from her. Was it a coincidence?
Bowlus, who’d long yearned for some resolution to her case, reached out to the Sacramento County district attorney’s and sheriff’s offices, asking for the old crime report.
If DeAngelo were the culprit, it would be too late to participate in his trial, but she wanted to know one way or the other and hoped getting an answer would help her heal.
“It sounded like that bastard DeAngelo for sure,” retired Sacramento Sheriff’s Detective Richard Shelby, who searched for the Golden State Killer during the 1970s, told Mother Jones reporter Samantha Michales when she described Bowlus’ assault.
DeAngelo’s arrest and conviction made national headlines, framed as long-awaited justice for the dozens of people he raped.
He was sentenced in August 2020 to life without parole. “It’s just so nice to have closure and to know he’s in jail,” Jane Carson-Sandler, who survived a 1976 assault, told the Associated Press after DeAngelo’s arrest.
“The nightmare has ended,” Carol Daly, one of the original detectives working the case in Sacramento, said in a statement on behalf of another victim.
But Bowlus was not acknowledged as a survivor by local authorities, and her quest to learn more about her assault would morph into a nightmare all its own: Over four years, she had so much trouble getting records from the sheriff’s office that it began to feel deliberate: “Why were these people that were supposed to be helping me becoming my adversaries?” she asked.
Michaels’ new investigation into the story of one woman’s fight for closure and justice reveals that there’s more to the story of California’s notorious serial killer than you may know.
Read the full investigation here.
#GoldenStateKiller #TrueCrime #California
For more award-winning independent reporting, visit Mother Jones
