The timing of this, as documented in the available record, was 1981 — when Woody was twenty years old and had just graduated from college. This places his discovery of his father’s most notorious case in his early adulthood rather than in his childhood, which matters for how we understand the developmental weight the father’s criminal career had on the son. Charles had left in 1968, when Woody was seven. Charles had been tried and acquitted of the Alan Berg murder in 1970. Charles had been tried, convicted, and imprisoned for the Sam Degelia murder in 1973. He had been paroled in 1978. He had been arrested in connection with the Judge Wood murder in 1980 and was being tried for it in 1981 and 1982. The criminal career unfolded while Woody was growing up, but most of its specific details appear to have been unknown to Woody during the years they were happening.
What he grew up with was not knowledge of a hitman father. He grew up with an absent father whose absence was not explained by anything that made the absence easier to accept. The criminal career, when it became known to him in his early adulthood, was an explanation of a kind — it told him what his father had actually been doing during the years he was not there. Whether that explanation was clarifying or simply added a new layer of complexity to the original wound is something Woody has addressed only obliquely in his public statements.