Happy May
April was an eventful month, I got my new car, enjoyed a fabulous kayaking trip and like the rest of the world, was stunned by the arrest of the Golden State Killer. I've devoted this entire newsletter to the GSK because, well it's long. As you read my long personal account below, you will see why I don't work on serial killers often and avoid it when I can. You'll also see why I enjoy personal readings and love life questions, ha!
East Area Rapist- Golden State Killer - Original Night Stalker
I have a creepy connection to this killer by chance and circumstance and so I found it remarkable that his arrest was announced on my birthday. The flood of relief washed over me in such a powerful way that I realized just how much energetic stress was lurking in my psyche. Joseph James DeAngelo is called by three different nicknames but I most strongly connect to him as EAR and that's what I will call him. I have carefully chosen the photo above because it weakens and disempowers him in my mind.
It started in 1980 with the murder of Lyman and Charlene Smith in my hometown of Ventura, California. I was in high school and had no inkling I would one day become a psychic detective or that fate would lead me to work on the elusive monster some 26 years in the future. The murder rattled me deeply because these things just didn't happen in Ventura and my best friend lived on the same street as the Smiths. I frequented the neighborhood and spent the night at her house on occasion, so the violent bludgeoning of an adult couple, asleep in their bed, just up the street, by a mysterious nighttime intruder was shocking and frightening. It was the beginning of the end of my innocent world view. The assailant was never caught but later tied in to a string of other unsolved California murders through DNA evidence.
Our paths came precariously close again years later when I married my husband, Steve who was born and raised in Citrus Heights, CA. We took many road trips to Citrus Heights to visit his family and I was never comfortable there but couldn't exactly explain why. As we now know, the EAR lived and worked in Citrus Heights for the past 27 years in a Save Mart distribution center (this piece of the puzzle will prove important later). After Steve and I divorced, I intentionally and apparently, intuitively, avoided the area.
In 2007, though, I was asked to work on a case in Sacramento. For confidentiality reasons, I can't tell you what I was working on but midway through my tour of the crime scene I started picking up impressions of a crime that didn't fit the current crime scene. A detective on site was puzzled briefly but soon recognized my description as that of the East Area Rapist. This detective had been working on the elusive rapist for years and was fascinated by my sudden psychic shift to his most frustrating and prolific attacker. The enthusiastic detective then took me to one of his crime scenes and that's when I came to experience the energy of the East Area Rapist directly.
Creepy doesn't begin to describe his energy but sadistic is close. I've seen a lot in my career and nothing has frightened me as much as this guy, to the point of refusing to work on him after I fled Sacramento. One other case has left me feeling as distressed, and I'll get to that in a minute. Most homicides have to do with revenge or greed or some other personal motive. Serial killers terrorize their victims for sport and Joseph James DeAngelo was in to traumatize people. This intention became quite clear to me as I paced the room in which he began his ritual of abuse. I will never forget the tightly controlled, ritualistic and seemingly calm outward manner in which he worked, masking a wild and barely contained mania within. This insight was disturbing enough but it was actually his voice that did me in. I could hear his high-pitched voice in my head and described it to detectives. As soon as I mentioned his weird menacing voice, they decided to play a recording of EAR threatening a victim on her voice machine to see if it matched. My hair stood on end. My skin crawled. I literally wanted to scream and that was it. Done. I went home and refused to work on him again. I felt paranoid and unsafe like he could be lurking anywhere. I had trouble sleeping for days and It took years to get that voice back out of my head.
I'd like to say the story ends there I'm just not sure. A few of you Sensing Murder fans may remember my work on the Patricia Neufeld case and I have even received some emails reminding me. On Sensing Murder, producers set up the cases and Laurie Campbell and I walked in completely blind. We never knew what we were walking into and as I worked the cold case from 1978 in Garden Grove, California, I began to realize we had a serial killer involved. You can watch a snippet of it here but it's not the entire episode.
In that show, Laurie and I both felt the killer had entered the home through a sliding door during the day while Patricia was babysitting two young children. I felt that he had stalked Patricia for some time before the actual attack. What's really interesting is that I picked up on a grocery store or seeing her in the grocery store and him choosing a "housewife" type of victim. I became so ill during the filming of the show I had to escape into the backyard to recover from the intense pain on top of my head, nausea and the fear in my heart. I could barely handle being in the house and no other Sensing Murder case affected me as strongly as this did. The horror I was feeling was familiar. Patricia had been bludgeoned with a bowling pin found in her son's room. Her killer wore a mask and wanted to terrorize her. Laurie described him rifling through and fondling her personal things. I cried when I realized that her 10-year-old son was the one to come home and find his mom murdered.
The detectives decided I was describing Gerald Parker also known as the "bedroom basher" and flew to San Quinten to question him. I had described a white male wearing a mask and how she could only see the whites of his eyes, which was terrifying. The detectives thought I might have gotten confused on race and believed I was describing Parker. I remember them handing me a stack of suspect photos while my head was still pounding. I quickly shuffled through them, uninterested in all until stopping on the photo of Parker. I told them that he was a serial killer. I didn't know if he was their serial killer but he was indeed a dangerous man. Parker has now denied the murder of Patricia Neufeld three times, while confessing to several others. "That one is not mine" I believe were his exact words.
In retrospect, the similarities in mine and Laurie's readings with the East Area Rapist's modus operandi are numerous and I've been told that DeAngelo's parents lived in the area at the time. Many of our impressions are in line with EAR and even the grocery store comment was compelling, even though he wasn't working there at the time. I hope the cold case detectives are looking at Joseph DeAngelo in the Neufeld case and maybe, just maybe her family can finally receive the long awaited justice they deserve and I can close this distressing chapter once and for all. Having this monster behind bars was an incredible birthday gift a long time in coming.
SSE/IRVA Conference
APP Conference
Hope to see you there.
Love
Pam
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