The clatter of “rattling knives” still sends a chill through Susan Bowlus; it recalls the horrible night she was brutally raped more than four decades ago.
At 68, the Brooklyn portraitist believes she is among the dozens of women who fell victim to Joseph DeAngelo Jr., the serial killer now known as the Golden State Killer.
DeAngelo, 80, was convicted in 2020 for 13 murders and rapes committed across California from 1974 to 1986 and is serving 13 consecutive life terms at the California State Prison in Corcoran.
Bowlus has spent five years chasing the police files on her 1979 assault, only to find Sacramento law enforcement had withheld key scientific reports. “It was really like being raped again,” she told The Post, recalling a fellow victim’s warning that “good luck getting through the blue line.”
The Police Department once referred to DeAngelo alternately as the Visalia Ransacker and the East Area Rapist, but early investigations failed to connect him to the dozens of rapes in Sacramento and Tulare counties.
A former cop, DeAngelo was finally apprehended in 2018 when DNA from his crime scenes matched the DNA voluntarily uploaded by a family member on an ancestry website. He avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty to 13 counts of murder and rape, admitting guilt to a host of additional offenses that had long passed the statute of limitations.
Because Bowlus could only produce a partially redacted report, she was initially denied funding from California’s Victim Compensation Board—a fund intended to help victims of DeAngelo’s crimes. She sued the board in 2022, won, but continues to battle for the complete file and official recognition as one of DeAngelo’s victims.
“I am haunted knowing it is not only me, but others whose records have been unlawfully kept from them, and whose cases are hidden from the public in order to protect a false narrative and darker truth in the Golden State Killer case,” she said.
Bowlus’s testimony matches the modus operandi of the East Area Rapist, who is believed to have used a blindfold, rolled victims over, and forced them into positions she described as very violent. In the case of Bowlus, the attacker entered her Citrus Heights home after midnight, held her in a hog‑tied position, and left her a terrified, unable‑to‑call‑for‑help. The attacker also let his knives “rattle” in the kitchen, a sound that left Bowlus certain he would kill her.
Survivors and advocates, including private investigator Tony Reid—who detailed the case in his 2022 book “12/26/75”—believe Sacramento police have repeatedly avoided re‑examining older forensic reports because doing so would expose further missed connections to DeAngelo’s crimes. Reid writes that the sheriff’s department “lied and told the public that the EAR [East Area Rapist] was gone,” and that DeAngelo’s proximity to Bowlus’s neighborhood was known after the 1978 Maggiore murders linked him to a geographic area only nine miles away.
The department had already warned of DeAngelo’s presence. The same individual who had been a patrol officer in Auburn was suspended in July 1979 for shoplifting, fired in October of that year, yet police ignored potential red flags. In fact, the East Area Rapist had left a poem signed “Your East Area Rapist” in the Sacramento Bee in 1977, full of the sort of taunting forensic notes that later turned out to be valuable evidence.
DeAngelo’s case received a new wave of attention after Thien Ho, the former Deputy District Attorney who built the prosecution, published “The People Vs. the Golden State Killer.” Ho, who plans to run for Congress, revealed police had destroyed DNA evidence after the statute of limitations expired, and had relied on the tiny—“smaller than the circumference of a dime” and “as long as the tip of a pinky”—genital measurements to make the final connection.
The Victim Compensation Board granted Bowlus financial aid in September, covering therapy and legal fees totaling $83,000. Yet she continues to feel the burden of incomplete records, convinced that the missing data could shine a brighter light on the shortcomings of the investigation.
In short, Susan Bowlus’s ordeal illustrates how law enforcement, despite public access to the “rattling knives” of their own long‑held files, has let many victims languish in uncertainty. Her fight to obtain a full, unredacted report highlights the broader issue of accountability for those who once believed they could outwit the system.
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