The families of those people carried the cases for decades — the open files, the uninvestigated leads that led nowhere, the awareness that someone was responsible and still unidentified. Jennifer Carole was eight years old when her father was killed in 1980. She was forty-eight when DeAngelo entered his guilty plea in 2020. The forty years between those events were not a gap in the case record; they were her life.
## The Multi-Agency Investigation
The investigation of what would eventually be understood as a single connected case was, in practice, spread across multiple agencies operating with limited resources, imperfect communication systems, and the genuine uncertainty of whether cases in different jurisdictions were in fact related.
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department was the lead agency on the East Area Rapist cases in the late 1970s. The Sacramento Police Department, Rancho Cordova Police Department, and departments in the other affected communities contributed investigators and resources. The coordination required to manage a case spread across multiple jurisdictions in a period before digital records and real-time data sharing was imperfect. Agencies shared information, but the information-sharing systems of the 1970s were slower and less comprehensive than what later technology would make possible.
The Southern California murders, beginning in 1979, were investigated by the respective county sheriff’s departments and local police agencies in those areas. In the early 1980s, those agencies had no mechanism for routinely comparing their cases against the Sacramento records from the preceding years. The behavioral similarities between the Sacramento rapes and the Southern California murders were not established at the time; they required an investigator who was specifically looking for connections across cases and who had access to detailed information from multiple jurisdictions.