Suspect arrested in Golden State Killer case after decades

The string of attacks - attributed to someone alternately dubbed the Golden State Killer, Original Night Stalker and East Area Rapist - was horrifying for both the nature of the attacks and their grim sweep. Between 1976 and 1986, the FBI said, the attacker killed a dozen people and raped 45 people, attacking people who were as young as 13 and as old as 41.

Authorities had said they suspected the Golden State Killer may have either had a background or interest in law enforcement techniques. On Wednesday, police said DeAngelo fit that bill. He had served as a police officer in California between 1973 and 1979, Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones said, a period that overlapped with the beginning of the attacks.

The case, which involved one of one of the most prolific and elusive serial killers in modern American history, had remained an object of intense focus for many. In 2016, the the FBI made a renewed plea - complete with a $US50,000 reward - for help in finding what they called "the violent and elusive individual."

"Everyone was afraid," Special Agent Marcus Knutson, who was born and raised in Sacramento and was heading up the FBI's portion of the investigation, said in a 2016 statement. "We had people sleeping with shotguns, we had people purchasing dogs. People were concerned, and they had a right to be. This guy was terrorising the community. He did horrible things."

The Sacramento District Attorney had said a "major announcement" was coming in the case at noon Pacific time on Wednesday, following reports from several local news organizations reported that a man had finally been arrested in connection with the case.

Beginning in 1976, the Golden State Killer is believed to have raped dozens of women in their homes - meticulously planning his intrusions, sometimes ambushing entire families, and killing several of his victims toward the end of his spree, before vanishing in 1986. The attacker was also behind numerous residential burglaries in the state, the FBI said.

"He was young - anywhere from 18 to 30 - Caucasian, and athletic, capable of eluding capture by jumping roofs and vaulting tall fences," the crime writer Michelle McNamara wrote in a Los Angeles magazine profile of the old cases.

"To zero in on a victim he often entered the home beforehand when no one was there, learning the layout, studying family pictures, and memorising names," she wrote. "He disabled porch lights and unlocked windows. He emptied bullets from guns. He hid shoelaces or rope under cushions to use as ligatures.

"These manoeuvres gave him a crucial advantage because when you woke from a deep sleep to the blinding flashlight and ski-masked presence, he was always a stranger to you, but you were not to him."

Police first dubbed the man the East Area Rapist, as he would not begin killing until much later in his spree.

The first known attack took place in the middle of the night in the summer of 1976, when the man snuck into a home in east Sacramento County, raped a young woman and left.

He raped again a few weeks later, then again and again, dozens of times. After a year, two dozen women had been attacked and a sheriff's department spokesman told The Associated Press that some residents had started "sleeping in shifts," because the man would strike even if others were home.

His 44th victim was a 13-year-old girl in the Walnut Creek area in 1979, the Mercury News reported. He allegedly raped her at knifepoint while her father and sister slept down the hall, told her he'd kill her if she told anyone, and departed through the back yard, past her playhouse.

Police rebranded him the Original Night Stalker after he began to kill in 1978, Mettler wrote. He found a married couple walking their dog in the Sacramento Area, chased them and shot them to death.

Future killings would be much more meticulous, and spread from Sacramento to southern California.

On December 30, 1979, police in Goleta found a husband and wife dead in their house - one shot through the heart and one in the back of the head.

"As detectives processed the crime scene, they stepped around a turkey carcass wrapped in cellophane that had been discarded on the patio," McNamara wrote in Los Angeles Magazine. "The killer had opened the refrigerator and helped himself to [victim Robert] Offerman's leftover Christmas dinner."

Another couple were murdered in Ventura three months later, she wrote. Then yet another couple, in a gate community in Dana Point.

He left few clues, and only betrayed a few patterns as his violence escalated: he often ate from his victims' fridges; often took tokens from their personal belonging's, like class rings.

He usually tied up the men before he killed them and almost always raped the women.

Police did not even realise the East Area Rapist and Original Night Stalker were the same person until DNA tests linked all the crimes in the early 2000s, McNamara wrote.

By then, his spree was long over - the last victim being 18-year-old Janelle Cruz, bludgeoned to death in Irvine in 1986 - and the trail had gone cold.

Jane Carson-Sandler, who was sexually assaulted in California in 1976 by a man believed to be the so-called "East Area Rapist", said she received an email on Wednesday from a retired detective who worked on the case telling her they have identified the rapist and he's in custody.

"I have just been overjoyed, ecstatic. It's an emotional roller-coaster right now," Carson-Sandler, who now lives near Hilton Head, South Carolina, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

"I feel like I'm in the middle of a dream and I'm going to wake up and it's not going to be true. It's just so nice to have closure and to know he's in jail."

Carson-Sandler was attacked in her home in Citrus Heights. A home in that community belonging to a former police officer was being searched on Wednesday by FBI investigators and police from several agencies.

Sacramento County district attorney's spokeswoman Shelly Orio declined to comment before the news conference.

On Tuesday, the Australian reported that US authorities once looked into the possibility that the Golden State Killer fled to Victoria and became the state's infamous - but unidentified - Mr Cruel who also burglarised and killed people. Victoria Police ruled out the link.

In June 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a major re-investigation and offered a $US50,000 ($66,000) reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the Golden State Killer, described as a "prolific serial rapist and murderer".

The FBI said then that if the suspect was still alive, he would be between 60 and 75 years old, close to 6 feet tall, with blond or light brown hair and an athletic build. They said he might have an interest or training in military or law enforcement techniques and the use of firearms.

An exhaustive investigation into the identity of the serial killer was documented in a book called I'll Be Gone in the Dark, written by Michelle McNamara, who died in April 2016. The book was completed after her death by a journalist and researcher recruited by her husband, comedian Patton Oswalt, who posted a video on Wednesday saying: "I think you got him, Michelle".

Billy Jensen, one of the writers responsible for researching I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, posted a news clip on Twitter showing that DeAngelo was once a policeman outside of Sacramento and was fired after he was accused of shoplifting a can of dog repellent and a hammer at a drug store in 1979.

He chose not to fight for his job and hastily accepted his punishment without answering any of the city’s investigations, the article said.

Two months later, a suspect later believed to be the East Area Rapist stabbed a dog while prowling through a suburb.

Shelly Orio, a spokeswoman for the Sacramento County District Attorney's office, said only that there had been a "major development" when asked to confirm local media reports that there had been an arrest in the case.

The Sacramento district attorney, Anne Marie Schubert, and Sheriff Scott Jones will announce the development in the case at noon local time in Sacramento, Schubert's office said.

Washington Post, New York Times, Fairfax Media