## The Communities That Were Changed
To understand what the crimes attributed to Joseph DeAngelo cost, it is necessary to spend time with the communities where those crimes occurred — not as backdrops or settings but as places with their own histories and social textures that were altered by what happened in them.
The Sacramento metropolitan area in the mid-1970s was in the middle of a significant demographic expansion. The post-World War II development of California’s Central Valley had produced a ring of suburban communities around Sacramento — Rancho Cordova, Carmichael, Citrus Heights, Fair Oaks, Orangevale — that were growing quickly, attracting young families, working couples, and single people who wanted affordable housing within commuting distance of the state capital’s employment base.
These were not anonymous places. They were communities where neighbors recognized each other’s cars, where parents knew whose children belonged to which house on the street, where the rhythms of school schedules and weekend recreation created a familiar landscape. The houses were modest by later standards — single-story ranch homes on quarter-acre lots, built in the 1950s and 1960s, with backyards that connected to other backyards and sliding glass doors that many residents did not habitually lock.
The East Area Rapist chose these communities deliberately. The choice reflected — investigators believed, based on the operational consistency across cases — advance knowledge of which neighborhoods offered particular combinations of accessibility, predictable absence patterns, and the physical layouts that allowed approach and departure without obvious visibility. Whether this knowledge came from a specific background in the area or from methodical scouting before crimes is something the case record does not definitively establish for every attack.