On September 11, 1975, the pattern changed. Claude Snelling, a journalism professor at the College of the Sequoias, was awakened in his Visalia home and confronted an intruder who had his sixteen-year-old daughter, Beth. When Snelling intervened, he was shot. He died of his wounds. His daughter survived.
The Snelling killing introduced lethal violence to a case that had previously been understood as burglary. In December 1975, Detective William McGowen of the Visalia Police Department had a nighttime confrontation with someone he believed to be the Ransacker. The person fired at McGowen, wounding him, and escaped. The Visalia Ransacker crimes then stopped.
They stopped in Visalia because, investigators would eventually conclude, the person responsible had moved on. The same individual, authorities now believe, surfaced in the Sacramento area in 1976 and began a new and escalating series of crimes that would take years to connect to the Visalia events.
The East Area Rapist and the Sacramento Fear
The Sacramento metropolitan area in the mid-1970s was growing. Communities like Rancho Cordova, Carmichael, and Citrus Heights were developing as suburban extensions of the city, with new housing tracts occupied by young families, working couples, and individuals establishing themselves in what was then a rapidly expanding California economy.
In June 1976, a series of sexual assaults began in this area. The offender targeted residential homes at night, typically binding victims, threatening them, and making use of elaborate precautions that suggested familiarity with police procedures and an unusual degree of planning. The crimes were terrifying in their method: the offender sometimes made phone calls to victims before or after attacks, sometimes left items at scenes, sometimes appeared to have been watching the targeted households for extended periods before acting.