The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department and multiple city police departments coordinated their responses. Task forces were created. Tips were followed. Composite sketches were distributed. The offender’s vehicle — variously described as a van or truck in some accounts — was sought. None of this produced an arrest.
When the attacks appeared to stop in the Sacramento area around 1979, the community’s response was a mixture of relief and unresolved fear. Nobody knew whether the person responsible had moved on, died, been incarcerated for another offense, or simply stopped. The cases remained open, unsolved, without an explanation. The community had endured the period of the crimes without understanding why they happened or who was responsible, and the ending of the visible crisis did not resolve those questions.
In Ventura County, in Orange County, in Santa Barbara County, a different community experience was unfolding in the early 1980s. The murders attributed to DeAngelo in those jurisdictions struck residents of middle-class coastal and suburban communities — communities that, again, were not expecting to be the location of the kinds of crimes that were occurring.
The Harrington murders in Dana Point in August 1980, the Smith murders in Ventura in March 1980, the Witthuhn murder in Irvine in February 1981, the murders of Cheri Domingo and Gregory Sanchez in Goleta in July 1981 — these cases were investigated by their respective county agencies and received local media coverage as individual events. The connection between them was not publicly established at the time. Families and communities in those areas experienced the murders as isolated tragedies rather than as part of a pattern that also connected to the Sacramento rapes.