Janelle Cruz’s murder in Irvine in May 1986 was the last crime in the documented sequence. She was eighteen years old. Her death was investigated by Irvine police, who had no reason, at that time, to connect it to the Sacramento cases of a decade earlier. The investigation continued without a resolution.
The communities affected by the crimes across this period — 1974 through 1986 — never had a shared moment of understanding that all of these cases were connected. The connection was established later, through DNA evidence developed in 2001. By the time the public understood that the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist, and the Original Night Stalker were the same person, the communities had lived for decades with their separate, incomplete understandings of the crimes that had occurred in them.
## Every Named Victim
The legal record of the case, as established through the June 2020 guilty plea, identifies thirteen murder victims across the crimes that Joseph James DeAngelo admitted to committing.
Claude Snelling was a journalism professor at the College of the Sequoias in Visalia. He was not an intended target of the attack on September 11, 1975 — the intruder in his home appeared to be attempting to abduct his sixteen-year-old daughter, Beth Hupp. Snelling confronted the intruder and was shot. He died of his wounds at a hospital. He was the first person killed in the sequence of crimes attributed to DeAngelo. Beth Hupp has spoken publicly about her father’s death in the context of the criminal proceedings, including at the 2020 sentencing hearing. She was sixteen years old when she watched her father intervene and was later told he had died.