East Area Memories: Living with the Golden State Killer
Welcome to the first issue of Soriano’s Comment. I will get into the whys I am doing this later. Right now, I am going to jump in deep and write about rape.
Last week — at least in my news world — rape knocked away most everything else. First came the news that the “Golden State Killer,” known to Sacramentans as the East Area Rapist, was captured 40+ years after his first known attack. The perp is a former cop named Joseph DeAngelo. Without a lot of work by the late Michelle McNamara, he might still be free. McNamara made sense of the case, found connections that eluded others, and gave life to something that only those who grew up during the East Area Rapist’s terror remembered.
When the East Area Rapist hit my Sacramento neighborhood — Glenbrook, a suburb of the suburb College Greens — I was a kid. My little brother and I needed a lot of things explained to us. Our parents needed to tell us why we now had to lock the doors. They needed to tell us why we had to tell them if we saw a strange man in the neighborhood. They needed to tell us why they were so suddenly scared. They needed to tell us why dad and his friends were rolling out in the middle of the night, four or five men with crowbars and baseball bats patrolling the neighborhood for pervs. They needed to tell us why there were bells on the windows. They need to tell us why our cats had to sleep outside. They needed to tell us why, when we went to the bathroom in the middle of the night, we needed to walk only on the exposed strip of carpet next to the wall and not the newspaper covering the floor. They needed to tell us why mommy had a new gun. They needed to tell us what rape was.
The Summer of Sam is what Spike Lee called the summer when the Son of Sam terrorized New York City. In College Greens, our summer of ’77 didn’t have a name. We were just scared. It was January 18, 1977 when the East Area Rapist first hit our neighborhood (first that we know), his eleventh attack (that we know of). We were told of his arrival in an article buried in the Sacramento Bee entitled “Glenbrook Housewife is Raped.” My mom saw the piece, cut it out, and put it on the refrigerator door.
One month later, he returned to my neighborhood. Blocks away from my girlfriend’s house, a “youth” startled a “lurker” who shot the kid and ran. On May 3rd, he hit Glenbrook again. This time, he had a name, the East Area Rapist. This time, he tied up both the husband and wife, raped the woman, and, afterward, taunted them for two hours. This time, when my mom saw the article in the paper, she didn’t clip it and put it on the fridge. This time, she grabbed my dad, went to the gun store, and bought a nickel-plated .38, the Smith & Wesson Saturday Night Special. They went to a gun range and she sprained her wrist learning how to shoot. This time, she and my dad sat us on the floor in front of their bed and explained what rape was and why we had to put newspaper on the hallway floor at night. They showed us how the newspaper made noise when you walked on it and you could hear the noise from my parent’s bedroom. They told us that if we walked on the newspaper mom might mistake us for the East Area Rapist and kill us. She was taught to shoot low.
Summer of 1977, the East Area Rapist hit my neighborhood three more times (that year he raped 18 women in Sacramento, that we know of). His last attack in Glenbrook/College Greens was on November 10. It happened on La Riviera Drive, a ten-minute bike ride from my home, just before Bert’s Pizza and the 7–11 where we got Slushies. This time he raped a 13-year old girl named Margaret. Margaret was the youngest the 27th woman raped by the former cop DeAngelo (that we know of).
Margaret lived on the college end of La Riviera in a condominium. We lived in off the middle-point of the street, by the park and river access. Because she lived on the west side, Margaret went to a different elementary school than we did. Though we were all thrown together at Kit Carson Jr. High, it was a new school year at a new school for all of us. The beginning of September to November 9 was too short a period for us Hubert Bancroft schoolers to make friends with the Thomas Jefferson kids. November 10, Margaret was raped and probably taken out of school for a while.
In 8th grade, toward the end of the school year, Death Ryder and Bay said that they met this cool girl and we all needed to hang out. We rode our bikes to the condo where she lived with her mom, picked her up and went looking for a hot tub to crash. We found an apartment complex with a short fence, hopped it, crashed the tub, and smoked shitty pot. Stoned, we rode to the College Glen Little League diamonds and tossed old PVC pipes onto the freeway. Margaret was as enthusiastic as the rest of us.
For about a month or two, Margaret was part of our gang (read Little Rascals, not Crips). We’d hang out late at night doing shit we weren’t supposed to do, hurting no one “except ourselves” (Ha!). It was kids escaping boredom and frustration and hormones and, for Margaret, maybe something more. We all knew that the East Area Rapist raped her — whispers between us — but we didn’t ask, and she didn’t tell. No matter, she was cool, she was funny, she was wild, she was one of us. Then she moved away.
Former cop Joseph DeAngelo first raped (that we know) in 1976 and wasn’t caught until 42 years later. He is now in jail. If the police and District Attorney don’t fuck up, that is where he will stay. Bill Cosby first raped in 1965 (that we know). It took more than 50 years to finally nail him. As the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino tells it, the first public allegations against Cosby ran in the New York Post in 2000. Five years later, names and faces were attached to the accusations. The most public was Andrea Constand. She brought a civil suit against Cosby in 2005, a case covered by the entertainment press.
Constand settled with Cosby and the entertainment press went back to Branjolena and other nonsense. However, the women who Cosby raped would not let his crimes die. These women were attacked by Cosby and his fans, ignored by his colleagues and the press. They were called whores, lairs, and gold-diggers. Still more women stepped out of silence, and with them came more, and more, and more, and more. In 2017, Cosby was finally brought to trial. There was a hung jury. He was tried again and this time he was found guilty of three charges of rape.
There’s been a lot of comment that the 2018 Cosby verdict is a result of #MeToo. It took the public seeing the sleaze of Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, and other celebrities to understand that — gasp — famous men often use power for bad things, and that when a woman says that she was raped chances are she was raped. While #MeToo might have contributed to Cosby’s conviction, let’s not ignore the obvious: Cosby was found guilty because women would not let the case die. For years, they told the truth and when more women came forward women supported them. These women did not listen to their critics or the cynics. Cosby was judged guilty of rape because women persisted.
Through this struggle, women were very clear that Cosby’s crime wasn’t just rape. They focused on his abuse of power. They exposed his power over women. His use of patriarchal privilege and celebrity, as well as his manipulation of trust, to drug and then rape. After the rape, Cosby his power as “America’s dad” and as a public moralist to silence and defame those that he raped. When women started to speak, he used his power to shut them up, with either threats or payoffs or connections. He used his power to lie. He assaulted women, while berating “filthy” comedians (see Trump’s derision of Michelle Wolf). He drugged the women he raped, while campaigning against drugs. When these women’s truth triumph over Cosby’s fame and false standing, he used the power of his fortune. Women continued to stand up.
It’s a good bet that the East Area Rapist, former cop Joseph DeAngelo, will die in a cage. I do not have the same faith that Bill Cosby will spend a day in prison. He has enough money to drag this thing out for a long time. However, he will be fought. His power is greatly diminished, but only because people, because women fought back.
For people who felt the fear of the Summer of ’77, the arrest of the East Area Rapist is a big deal. Beyond that, the East Area Rapist is a cold case story finally solved. We await a trial (or not), his jailing, and his death. That’s it. We know and have always known that the perp is a villain. Former cop DeAngelo is a rapist is a rapist is a rapist is a rapist. Until last week, Bill Cosby was much more than that. Cosby can no longer hide behind America’s dad, Fat Albert, Pudding Pops, Jell-O, the stories of riding your bike and play — all the fantasy of childhood that contributed to his power are gone. For now, and forever, he is the Rapist Bill Cosby. That is huge.
This was first published in my email newsletter, Soriano’s Comment, №1, on April 30, 2018. You can subscribe to the Comment here.
