The biographical facts of DeAngelo’s life between 1974 and 2018 are, in several respects, strikingly parallel to those of Dennis Rader in Wichita during the same period: a former police officer with family and community embeddedness, a specific background in law enforcement that investigators’ behavioral profiles had pointed toward, and a daily life that gave no apparent indication to neighbors or family of the crimes attributed to him. The parallel is not causally meaningful — two different cases, two different sets of crimes — but it illustrates that the concealment of significant criminal history within a ordinary-appearing domestic life is not singular in the case record.
DeAngelo’s police background was significant in a specific investigative sense: investigators working the East Area Rapist cases in the late 1970s had built a behavioral profile that pointed toward someone with law enforcement knowledge or training. The attacker seemed to know how police responded to calls. He seemed to understand response times and the procedures officers used. He left scenes quickly and cleanly in ways that suggested operational awareness. This profile detail pointed investigators, across decades, toward a population of people with police backgrounds. The population was large, and without a way to narrow it further, the detail was useful but not decisive.
That he had been fired in 1979 — the same year that the East Area Rapist crimes appeared to have stopped in the Sacramento area and the same approximate period when the first of the Southern California murders began — was a detail that could be noted in retrospect. The termination from Auburn followed his arrest for petty theft, a crime seemingly incongruous with the profile of a serial offender who had operated without known arrest across multiple years. The circumstances of the firing, including the hammer and dog repellent he had taken, were described in press coverage after the 2018 arrest without a clear explanation from DeAngelo.