The Case of the
ORIGINAL NIGHT STALKER
East area rapist
GOLDEN STATE KILLER
By Anne Penn
My name is Laurie
Murder On His Mind
Edition ii
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
To all of the victims and to
LYMAN JONES & VEONIA SMITH
who were my grandparents
Copyright 2017 by Anne Penn. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the author.
Printed in the United States of America
Final Cover Graphics Adjustments created by Tim
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.
We now know the name of the suspect responsible for all of the crimes that many have written and speculated about for 42 years. I will not change this publication because this story needed to be told the way it was. This story was my journey through the reality of having a family member or members be victims of murder. In these cases, this happened to be the work of a serial killer. There are so many countless people living with the murder of someone they loved everywhere. Many women are killed by a domestic partner. This is a sad fact. Their families have experienced the loss of a loved one by the hands of a murderer as well.
After I wrote this book I heard many stories from people on various Facebook pages, messages on boards and blogs. Those of us who have experienced the loss of a loved one to murder many times find out who took them away from us. Sometimes it takes the wheels of justice a very long time to put the perp in jail. Sometimes there are never any answers for the victims of violent crime. These cases, these murders, and this murderer almost passed into history without being identified, and without giving us answers. Because of DNA, even if we had not found the criminal soon he still would have been identified even after we collectively had passed into history. It was inevitable that this mans name would be found. Hopefully in the future waiting 42 years to find the creep will never happen again.
Hopefully men and women will also not be wrongly convicted or at least less often than in previous times in history. DNA will be the tool now and in the future that helps us know as in this case with a 100% DNA match that we have the right suspect in a cage.
I believe when you read through this story you will hear, and know how the world once was when this criminal started to terrorize. You will also be able to hear and read about his crimes, his MO and what it was like to struggle with the fact that the perpetrator lived free for so, so long. You will also hear, and maybe feel the frustration and the struggle with what it was like to have so many unanswered questions from everywhere for so long. Joseph James DeAngelo began his crimes as the Visalia Ransacker in 1973, morphed into the East Area Rapist from 1976-1979, and then was called the Original Night Stalker as he murdered until 1986.
The cases went cold in almost every jurisdiction over time. For long periods of time there was no cold case unit anywhere. The criminal thought he had been missed, he was free to come out of hiding as it were, to live without discovery or punishment. He thought he was home free. In approximately 1980 until about 1990 this man was not on anyones radar. He laid low. He became a family man who hid behind his family. Otherwise this creep was in plain sight all along. You will see one womans investigation into who this man is and where he was. I was right in my assessment of him and was right about where he would be found. We wait to hear all of the details that law enforcement will put together.
Thank you for reading this story.
Anne/Laurie
Praise for this book: Kevin M. Sullivan is the author of twelve books, a former investigative journalist for both print and online media, and is a recognized authority on serial sex killer, Ted Bundy.
Kevin says: I first heard about the East Area Rapist of Sacramento, CA in 2012 when I was doing research for a book about Richard Chase, better known as the Vampire of Sacramento.
I really didnt want to write about an unknown serial rapist and murderer. Such a book should be tackled by someone who has a great deal of interest; the kind of interest that would carry them through the monumental task of writing a book. That person is Anne. Anne Penn is not only an excellent researcher and story teller, but shes suffered a personal loss at the hands of the East Area Rapist: Her uncle, Lyman Robert Smith and his wife Charlene Smith, of Ventura County, CA, were murdered on March 13, 1980.
Without question, the living victims of murder will carry whats happened to their loved ones for the rest of their lives; and in some cases, family members will channel that negative energy into something positive, and thats what Penn has done with the publication of her book. The author, who has spent years researching and living with this case a case that covers numerous locations both in Northern and Southern California and spans some 13 years has produced a work (I own the Kindle edition with some 500 pages), that is both large and bursting with information about these rapes and murders.
Indeed, within these pages youll read about the Visalia Ransacker (1973-1976), Sacramentos East Area Rapist (1976-1979), and what is called the Original Night Stalker crimes (1979-1986), which is not to be confused with the crimes of another Night Stalker Richard Ramirez.
Keep in mind too, that as Penn was writing this book, the killer, Joseph DeAngelo, had not been apprehended, she made a number of credible assumptions about the perpetrator that, since his April 2018 arrest, have been proven to be correct!
I highly recommend this book to all those who want a detailed look at this now discovered killer and the crimes he committed, from a person who not only was emotionally wounded by the killer, but who is more than qualified to tell the strange tale from her own unique perspective
Kevin M. Sullivan, True Crime Author
Preface before the preface!
Here is the thing.
This is not a story told with beautiful prose or fantastic words where one has to stop to look up the meaning it is not a tale a fairytale that one can walk away from feeling lovely.
Sometimes stories that are real, raw stories can be told as in a conversation with real words and feelings, sometimes repeated as if to reconcile the story, to try to digest or comprehend things that are incomprehensible
This story is about something so brutal, so horrific one can find no words in the end, only silence that falls as we wait for answers. This story is about a man who went off the rails, one who used what he knew to protect us, in order to harm us. Not individually, but as a whole. He set out to make individual victims pay, and all of us as a society, our communities. He knew how to inflict pain and suffering on all of us.
I took this on to exorcise the beast, to shed light on the box carefully sealed in the darkest corners of my mind, to dust it off long ago covered, lid tightly sealed because what was in it, put there almost forty years ago was just too dark, too scary to touch.
Inside waited the details of murders of people loved by someone I loved as a father and friend, someone who meant a lot to me. Their loss was everyones loss. All of the murders were all of our losses.
