The creepy dude next door...

Serial murderer's profile in today's LA Times

The photo of Joseph James DeAngelo pollutes the cover of the LA Times today.  Pollutes my kitchen table.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-golden-state-killer-profile-20180427-story.html

Creepy old dude with teeny eyes, bald, fat, white t-shirt, thin mouth turned down at each corner.  Kind of saying "duh."  His booking mug.

Yesterday the only thing I read on the front page was "Decades-Old Hunt Leads to Ex-Cop: Task force arrests 72-year-old linked to series of 1970s and 80s rapes, killings."

Today his mug leers at me from the front page, and I read all of two stories: the profile of him and how they finally found him.  He served in the Navy, including 22 months off the coast of North Vietnam.  (Is that what poisoned his brain? But nobody else on his ship turned into a serial killer.  Maybe it was events in his childhood...)

The worst part of the report (other than the bare facts) was finding out that:

• his sister sobbed when contacted by a reporter.  
• he had a wife, an attorney, from whom he was separated.  Married in 1973. 
• three daughters, one an ER doctor, another a grad student at UC Davis.  
• 6 weeks after he killed a couple in Dana Point, "his first daughter, Misha Louise, was born."

He masqueraded as normal, while killing 12 people and raping 46 or more women from Orange County to Santa Barbara to the East Bay of SF to Sacramento.

I lived in Orange County, the East Bay, LA County.  I was married in 1972.  I have three daughters, a sister, brother who was in the Navy.  DeAngelo is my age plus two years.

Clearly there are creeps all around us.  Perhaps we interact with a murderer or rapist every day.

Perhaps one of them is my father, brother, uncle.  I know my brothers and husband are decent people, but as the circle of male relations widens, who knows?  

What do we really know about anyone?

That's what makes this news story so creepy.  

"I'm pretty much in shock," [his sister] said. "I'm in disbelief. It's difficult to think about." Thompson said she hopes that police are wrong about her brother, whom she regarded as "the kindest, gentlest man with his children."

That's what makes this news story so creepy.  Sadism and sexual violence are all around us, even in our own homes.

What happened in that household of two parents and three daughters?  

How do you carry on after learning that your father is a monster?

Thank you to Sarah Parvini, Joe Mozingo, Richard Winton, and Joseph Serna for their reporting on this killer who managed to live as the guy next door for fifty years.