The format of victim impact testimony in California allows individuals to address the court directly, with broad latitude to describe the effects of the crime on their lives. The Golden State Killer case produced a volume and intensity of such testimony that was unusual even by the standards of high-profile California criminal proceedings.
Survivors of the sexual assaults from the 1970s, now in their sixties and seventies, described what those years had taken from them. The theme that emerged across many statements was duration: not a single traumatic event but a sustained alteration of who they were and how they moved through the world.
Jane Carson-Sandler, who was attacked in the Sacramento area in 1976, described flashbacks triggered by specific sensory inputs — helicopter sounds, which she associated with the police helicopter that flew over the neighborhood the night of her attack. More than forty years of association. She described the attack as resulting in an “effective life sentence” — an ongoing consequence that had no end.
Kris Pedretti’s statement was among the most comprehensive in describing the life effects of a single attack. She was fifteen years old in 1976. She described losing the person she had been — specifically, she described the loss of her identity as a happy, cheerful person, an identity she felt was taken from her by the attack. She switched high schools three times after the attack, unable to settle in a community. She experienced two marriages that did not last. She turned to substances as coping mechanisms. She did not seek therapy until after DeAngelo’s arrest, more than four decades after the attack.