Cordova Cat

CORDOVA CAT SERIES

•Between early 2016, and Ken Clark's posting of the information on the Cordova Cat and Cordova Meadows series on February 2, 2018, multiple people reached out to him regarding the Visalia Ransacker and Exeter. 

•Visalia PD Sgt. Vaughan asked the cold case investigators at Visalia PD and the Tulare County Sheriff's Office to help look for VR suspects in Exeter. He also contacted Richard Shelby, and asked him for assistance. Both Visalia PD and Shelby contacted Ken Clark, and directly shared the new information with him.

•Inspector Shelby also reminded Ken Clark about a Rancho Cordova burglary series Shelby investigated in 1973, and his opinion that the EAR was in Rancho Cordova until early 1973, and returned in mid-1976: 

My opinions are based not only on  the known EAR assaults and current research  but  the fact I was  the swing shift patrol sergeant for Rancho  Cordova from 1973 until 1976.  

In very early 1973  there were a number of  residential burglaries in  the East area of Sacramento County which included Rancho Cordova. To be precise the exact same locations and sometimes houses where the EAR assaults were to occur later. A large number of those burglaries were the exact same MO as the VR burglaries yet to occur.

What cannot be ignored is the absolute fact the VR's MO for committing burglaries was very much in operation here in early 1973. Beyond that we have yet to determine. 

•Meanwhile, Orange County Investigator Larry Pool shared the Exeter information directly with the EAR Task Force via Paul Holes—who refused to read it.

•Direct phone, email, and post messages to Sacramento detectives Ken Clark and Paige Kneeland went unanswered. 

•Months later, the Task Force held a press conference and launched a website with a reward for the identification of the EAR/ONS that did not include Tulare County as a possible offender location. Task Force member Holes gave multiple interviews stating that the VR had been eliminated as being the same offender, and should not be pursued as a potential lead. The Task Force was not only ignoring multiple original and cold case investigators, it failed to follow its own written plan. 

•In 2013, a Criminal Investigative Analysis of the EAR/ONS was completed by FBI Supervisory Special Agent Julia A. Cowley. SSA Cowley advised that it was likely that the EAR/ONS was also the Visalia Ransacker (despite the fact that she was not given the key pages identifying the Maggiore murder weapon as a Miroku, or the Smith & Wesson Super Vel match between McGowen and Offerman/Manning). 

•Cowley offered investigators a very specific investigative plan:

•Paul Holes and the other Task Force members ignored almost every single piece of Cowley's investigative advice:

-There was no mention of anything related to Tulare County. 

FBI SA Marcus Knutson said:

The case started in 1976 with the rape of a female in the Rancho Cordova- Carmichael area of Sacramento.

-The map did not contain many of the towns or locations for the known EAR/ONS attacks;

-The map labeled the homicides in Goleta, Ventura, Dana Point, and Irvine as "Los Angeles" despite being in Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Orange Counties—with no LA offenses. Similarly, the area described as "San Francisco" was actually the east bay, and cities like Walnut Creek, Concord, Fremont, Danville, San Ramon, and San Jose were unmarked or impossible to read:

-The Task Force did not invite members of law enforcement from S. California or Visalia, leaving 11 homicides unrepresented at the press conference. Journalists were unable to ask questions about the specifics of those critical cases;

-The press release overemphasized composites as a means of identification; and

-They did not release the detailed list of stolen items that were known to have been in the possession of the offender.

•$50,000 was an exceedingly small reward for someone who would be charged with 13 counts of murder in the first degree. It seemed impossible that anyone who didn't already know about the crimes would learn enough to suddenly suspect someone and turn them in—especially since the Task Force was throwning Visalia tips directly into the garbage can. 

•After the press conference in June, 2016, Paul Holes went out of his way to tell television and podcast audiences that a VR link had been eliminated, despite personal knowledge of the forensic balistic matches between Snelling/Maggiore and McGowen/Offerman/Manning, and the findings of the FBI's own Task Force investigation in 2013. He was 100% certain that his incorrect opinion was proven fact.

•Suddenly, in November of 2017 a split appeared between Paul Holes' recent statements, and information being pursued by Ken Clark. This was documented in a November 18, 2017 email from Richard Shelby:

There is much I could say that would be encouraging...and then again most of it I am  not at liberty to talk about. Best let Clark blow his own horn since he is finding and refining the information. 

•Ken Clark was going through old SSD reports and documenting the 1972-73 burglaries Shelby had been talking about for 40 years. The timing was a mystery. Why, after years of ignoring the VR was Clark working so hard to find an earlier matching series in Rancho Cordova?

•The answer to Clark's sudden interest seemed to be the secret DNA geneology work being done by FBI attorney Steve Kramer, Paul Holes (who was not assigned to the case), and volunteer geneologist, Barbara Rae-Venter. Paul Holes explained Sacramento's involvement in his book:

(In November 2017) I met with Anne Marie Schubert and her staff at the Sacramento County DA's office to brief them about what Kramer and I were up to. She gave the nod for Lieutenant Kirk Campbell and Investigative Assistant Monica Czajkowski to assist with the genealogy work. Kramer brought in Melissa Parisot, an analyst from his office.

•Barbara Rae-Venter confirmed the same information in her book, but places the formation of the Sacramento group as early as October 2017, because they were already in place with some training by November 18, 2017, when they started building family trees. Rae-Venter says that she discovered DeAngelo around February 18, 2018, and immediately ran into a road block named Paul Holes:

It was a heady time for Paul Holes, but also a tricky one. There is something that happens when an IGG search gets closer and closer to the subject of the search—what I call the temptation to chase bad rabbits.

This phenomenon is sometimes called confirmation bias—trying to make the facts fit a preconceived conclusion. The temptation is to focus in on that one person without making sure that they fit all the criteria in the profile that you have developed for your suspect—criteria such as their estimated ethnic background from their DNA, their relationship to the suspect, their estimated age, and any known physical characteristics either from witnesses or from the DNA. When you succumb to confirmation bias, you also potentially are ignoring solid leads.

Or perhaps someone who is a potential suspect checks some of the boxes in the profile you created for your suspect but not all of them. That, too, can lead you to play a hunch. But that is not what you are supposed to be doing in an IGG case. In such a search, there is no room for hunches, only identification of potential suspects based on the DNA. 

Paul Holes followed a hunch when he seized on one of the names on our nine-man list as a potential suspect. Research showed that the man Holes focused on had owned property in Citrus Heights—the scene of many of the rapes. This man had also worked in the real estate business. He had a connection to Los Angeles, the scene of one of the Golden State Killer’s crimes, and he fit the age range we had established for our killer. 

All of that squared with the theory Paul had developed—that because so many of the Golden State Killer’s crimes occurred near new housing developments, the killer might have been connected to the housing or real estate industries. Paul focused on this man and became convinced he was the killer. But there was a problem. While Paul’s preferred suspect did fit the profile he had assembled, he did not fit with what the DNA was telling us.

Based on the DNA, Paul’s choice for a suspect could not be the killer. I told Paul about this finding, but he responded that the admixture could be wrong, and he refused to allow the admixture report alone to rule out his man as a suspect. After all, he argued, his suspect checked so many other boxes in his profile of the Golden State Killer. 

Paul had worked on the Golden State Killer case for a long, long time, and being this close to finding him, and especially so close to his own retirement, had to feel to him as if his man was right there, within his grasp, and all he had to do was reach out and grab him. No matter what I told him, I was not able to shake Paul off his hunch. 

Even before Paul had focused on his chosen suspect, though, what turned out to be a potentially crucial piece of information had emerged. This information was in an old newspaper article discovered by Sacramento County investigative assistant Monica Czajkowski, the member of Team Justice who was digging up documents relating to the nine men on our list:

To me, there was no denying the arrows were pointing to Joseph DeAngelo. Paul Holes, however, remained convinced that his Citrus Heights property owner was the best suspect. Paul managed to locate a woman who was closely related to his suspect. Paul’s idea was to contact this close relative and ask her to take a DNA test. 

When I learned this, I quickly sent an email to Paul and Steve suggesting that if we were going to DNA-test anyone, we should surreptitiously test one of the DeAngelo brothers. “John and Joseph [DeAngelo] are second cousins to our MyHeritage match, and first cousins twice removed from our FamilyTreeDNA match,” I wrote in my March 22, 2018, email. “They live in California and have an Italian grandparent (Samuel DeAngelo 1882–1942). Joseph was the former police officer arrested for shoplifting. Any chance [the East Area Rapist] would have used dog repellant and a hammer [the items DeAngelo stole]? Odd things for a police officer to be shoplifting.” 

Paul responded that he still planned to focus on his preferred suspect. Steve shared with me that Paul believed it was unlikely that someone who was a police officer could have committed the heinous crimes attributed to the GSK. So Paul went ahead with his plan. He contacted the close relative to his suspect, and she agreed to take a DNA test. 

The woman’s DNA did not match the Golden State Killer’s crime-scene DNA at the close level of her relationship to Paul’s suspect. Paul’s hunch had been wrong.

Rae-Venter, Barbara. I Know Who You Are: How an Amateur DNA Sleuth Unmasked the Golden State Killer and Changed Crime Fighting Forever.

•Meanwhilte, on February 2, 2018, SSD Detective Ken Clark published an interactive website to solicit public information on the still unsolved East Area Rapist series. The site was published on the Sacramento County map tool, ARCGIS, and revealed details of the Maggiore homicides as well as new information about two precursor series: "The Cordova Cat Burglar" and "The Cordova Meadows Ransacker." Clark described this work to a podcast after DeAngelo's arrest:

So, one of the big questions we had was: Did the offenders start in Visalia and then move up here, and then go back down to southern California… or, was it some other combination of geography that he had done so we were concerned that maybe he had previously been here in Sacramento. 

We also wanted to make sure that Visalia was…was not just a similar crime versus being directly linked because we didn’t have DNA between those cases. So, what I did was went back through and tried to figure out what reports I could examine from the era when he was operating in Visalia—and also before that period of time to determine what he was doing geographically in regards to the Sacramento area. 

There were some report issues—there were regularly purging reports and I got into basically the first I had access to that was not purged was 1973. And so I read the reports from 1973 and I saw the emergence in early 73… I mean immediately after the new year, of an offender who came to be known as the Cordova Meadows Burglar and then ultimately was linked as well to a series of burglaries that were called the Cordova Cat Burglar series...and the MO of the offender was strikingly similar to the ransacker and also had a relationship with the East Area Rapist and and those crimes.

It, it definitely showed me that that it appeared or it appeared that the offender had begun here in Sacramento had gone down to Visalia and then come back here again for the East Area Rapist series. And we did notice that, around the late spring and early summer of 1973, he disappears from the record in Sacramento. And, that is around the time that there’s rumblings of him in Visalia which would be consistent with DeAngelo’s application process and the events he had going on with the Exeter Police Department. 

IMAGES FROM THE SACRAMENTO SHERIFF'S ARCGIS PAGE:

•A couple of the burglar's dog murders were covered by "The Grapevine"--a local paper in Rancho Cordova:

•In addition to posting about these burglaries, Ken Clark also tried to unwind SSD's lie about the "two suspects" in Maggiore. He explained how they had known it was the EAR since the first minute of the investigation, yet intentionally put out misinformation about two cleared men for 40 years (See Maggiore page).

•Barbara Rae-Venter made her own final determination that it was DeAngelo on February 18th, but it appears that the team in Sacramento building family trees from the first cousins twice removed (provided by FamilyTreeDNA in November) already suspected DeAngelo—especially since Shelby messaged that Clark had changed his mind about the VR connection back in November, 2017.

•Although Clark did not make any reference to the VR in his post, everyone with knowledge of the case immediately recognized that he had posted a matching series of burglaries that ended a year before the VR cases started. That also ended up pointing to Clark's knowledge of DeAngelo prior to making the webpage. Clark's stopping point for the Cat series matched the date that DeAngelo started at Exeter PD—in May of 1973.

•When Clark made his original post he was unaware that there had been a split between Visalia PD, and The Tulare County Sheriff's Office (TCSO). Clark was communicating directly with Detective Cummings at Visalia PD, and he wanted the VR identified, and matched to the EAR so that the Snelling and McGowen cases could be solved and prosecuted. However, TCSO and the Tulare DA, Tim Ward, did not. 

•In November, 2017 the TCSO cold case unit had issued a local TV/newspaper and FB blast asserting that Oscar Clifton was the VR—and the murderer of Armour, Snelling, and Richmond. TCSO sent intimidating letters to Oscar's adult children, and showed up unannounced at the home of his first wife and son to question them about the entire 1974-75 series. 

•The Clifton family had been living in Las Vegas until the spring of 1975, and Visalia PD had conclusively eliminated Oscar as the VR in January of 1976, based upon alibi, physical description, McGowen ID, and Clifton's severe limp.

•TCSO's public claims put Ken Clark in a difficult position. TCSO conclusively stated that the evidence showed that one man was the VR, shot McGowen, and killed Jennifer Armour, Claude Snelling, and Donna Richmond. TCSO had done so planning to pin it all on Oscar Clifton, a dead man who could not defend himself, or face a jury—the police trick of stacking bodies on bodies.

•Ken Clark knew that the EAR was a cop from Exeter, and that the Maggiores and Snelling were both killed by the VR stolen Miroku. TCSO had just publicly said that same offender had also killed Jennifer and Donna in Exeter. How could they prosecute DeAngelo as the VR without overturning Oscar's conviction? Apparently, TCSO and Tulare DA Tim Ward decided to hide DeAngelo's connections to Tulare County until they could figure it all out. 

ARCGIS Update - March 21, 2018

•To kill the Tulare County/VR connection, on March 21, 2018, Ken Clark amended his original post:

•There was no mystery about why Ken Clark was trying to add the October 1975 case back in as an EAR attack. That was an old SSD trick—they’d used it on Sgt. Vaughan. The Sacramento Union reported it on July 23, 1978:

"Descriptions from an October 1975 EAR attack and a Ransacker outing in January 1976 are totally different," Miller said.

•Since there was no January, 1976 VR activity, Miller was comparing a different Visalia burglar with a rapist that was not the EAR. So, the fact that those two other unrelated offenders didn't share the same physical description was meaningless—but in 1978 it sounded like a good faith examination of the evidence, and both the press, and the citizens of Sacramento believed it.

•The October 21, 1975 rape was listed as a possible MO matched EAR case in 1976, but it was dropped in February, 1977 after DeAngelo had committed more attacks, and both his physical description and MO were clearly defined. Bill Miller knew that the attacker was not the EAR when he lied about it in 1978, just as Ken Clark did in 2018. They were not mistaken or confused, they were intentionally covering up the VR/EAR connection.

•The victims in the October 21, 1975 attack described the man as African American, short, and "very slim." None of the other details matched the EAR—the outfit (including no gloves), binding, statements, weapons, and sexual assaults were all different. There was no completed rape, and no forensic evidence. The only thing that suggested a connection to the EAR was the neighborhood. 

•It was not as if home invasion rapes were unusual in Sacramento in 1974-75:

•As Ken Clark intended, readers pointed to the “New Information” posted on March 21st as proof that the VR could not be the EAR--because some of the incidents Clark added conflicted with known VR activity. 

•Technically it was all still possible. The VR could have been in Sacramento on the 15th-19th, burglarized a Visalia house on the evening of the 20th, driven back to Sacramento for the early morning attack on the 21st, and the burglaries on the 22nd, and been back in Visalia for the four burglaries on the night of the 24th. Possible, but not likely—and that seemed to be the point of Clark’s new post—proof that the EAR and the VR were not the same offender. 

•Although there has been a lot of shifting information about exactly when the EAR Task Force had DeAngelo’s name (November-February 18th), there is no disagreement about the fact that on March 21, 2018, when the update was posted, DeAngelo was DNA identified, and under active surveillance. 

•Ken Clark's update post did not help the prosecution of DeAngelo for killing the Maggiores—quite the opposite. The Maggiore charges were entirely circumstantial, and the warrant affidavits relied heavily upon the common “explosive violence” shown when DeAngelo was cornered by Rodney Miller, Claude Snelling, Bill McGowen, and Brian Maggiore. Offering evidence that the EAR was always in Sacramento, and offering evidence aganst a VR connection blew holes in the prosecution’s own case.

•DA Schubert, DA Ward, and Paul Holes simply planned to help DA Ward cover up DeAngelo’s crimes in Tulare County. 

•DA Ward had been resisting public pressure to reopen Oscar Clifton's conviction for more than two years, and he was hoping to hide all evidence that connected DeAngleo to Tulare County—especially Exeter. 

•Paul Holes had made multiple public statements that he knew, for certain, that the VR was not the EAR, and he did not want the embarrassment of poor investigative conclusions just when he was finalizing the deal for his new Oxygen show.  Holes also knew that Larry Pool had given him the evidence of a connection to Exeter in early 2016, and he had refused to even read it—let alone help. His story that the case "could not have been solved" without conducting warrantless searches of private DNA files was a giant lie. 

•DA Schubert knew that the Sacramento Sheriff  had hidden direct forensic evidence connecting the Snelling and Maggiore homicides, and ignored multiple public and private warnings from Visalia PD in 1977-78. She also knew that SSD had ignored information from Visalia PD about a possible Exeter connection in 2016-18. Schubert did not want Sacramento blamed for failing to stop DeAngelo.

The proof of the attempted coverup is overwhelming:

1. Schubert's initial press release deleted Claude Snelling’s murder, and had no reference to Visalia, the VR, or Exeter. It was signed the same day as the warrant affidavits which not only included Snelling, McGowen, and Exeter, but relied heavily upon them to arrest DeAngelo, and search his home in Citrus Heights.

2. At the press conference, Schubert made no mention of Tulare County, and said:

Let me first by saying this the answer has always been in Sacramento…

It became personal for many of us, for me, here. In Sacramento County, in June of 1976. I grew up in the East area of Sacramento near the cluster where these crimes began. 

Today, we found the needle in the haystack, and it was right here in Sacramento.

•That story was easy to sell to the public and major press because nobody from Visalia PD or the Tulare DA’s office attended the event. It should have just been nothing but Sgt. Vaughan running back and forth in front of the cameras yelling “I told you so.” 

•Ward later offered an excuse on the “Paper Trail” podcast:

I won't forget the date, and you know in April when Ann-Marie Schubert, the Sacramento DA called me… and, she told me that they just made an arrest, and that there is gonna be a press conference on it…I applaud her and commend her...but we weren't a part of the case

•Obviously any normal DA would want to take a victory lap at a national on-camera PR event. The Alameda County DA was there for one uncharged 1979 EAR rape case (no kidnapping) in Fremont. 

•Ward told a slightly different version at a campaign event for Schubert, he said:

When Anne Marie called me, I told her that we weren’t ready and just don’t mention anything about Visalia yet. We’re not ready. But when Tony Rankauckas blurted out the part about the Visalia Ransacker it was like, okay…  here we go.

3. The Snelling homicide charges weren’t filed with the other 12 homicides from Sacramento, Ventura, Santa Barbara, and Orange counties at the time of DeAngelo’s arrest. All of the facts used to support the charges had been fully laid out in the warrant affidavits, and explicitly tied to DeAngelo to support the Maggiore charges—so there was no evidentiary reason for the delay. The evidence that the VR was responsible for Snelling and McGowen was carefully collected and documented by Vaughan’s team, and CalDOJ in 1975. There was no new evidence or information specific to DeAngelo other than his work and residence in Exeter. 

4. DA Ward didn’t file a criminal complaint against DeAngelo until August 13, 2018—four months after all of the other kidnapping and homicides were filed.

5. Multiple news stories including the Sacramento Bee, and New York Times stated that the first murder was the Maggiores in 1978, and that DeAngelo had committed 12 (not 13) homicides. That’s the information they were given by law enforcement and the DAs. Someone specifically told them that Snelling was not a DeAngelo case, and they didn’t dig into it. 

6. The HBO special interviewed Beth Snelling, and filmed footage to tell her story, but they cut it. They never mentioned Exeter, despite DeAngelo living and working there for over three years. Additionally, the show included multiple statements that repeated the known lie that DeAngelo’s first murder was in 1978. The first episode didn’t air until June 28, 2020, so it wasn’t an oversight, or uncertainty.

7. Other than a tiny clip of Rankauckas saying “Visalia Ransacker” the 2 hour episode of 20/20 that aired on October 30, 2020, after the plea hearing, made zero reference to Tulare County, not one word. It was as if DeAngelo just dropped out of the sky into Rancho Cordova in June, 1976. 

•DA Ward’s motives for trying to hide DeAngelo’s crimes in Tulare County are obvious. Tulare County Sheriff's Department cold case team had just gone on a media tour claiming that the same person killed Jennifer Armour and Donna Richmond. They had refused Sgt. Vaughan’s in-person request to open both cases to help identify the VR/EAR. This was just a few months before DeAngelo’s arrest, and again Vaughan was correct—he told TCSO that the VR had lived in Exeter, and committed two homicides there, and he was sent out of the meeting with a hard “no.” 

•There was also Oscar Clifton: his 38 years in prison; the TSCO and DA misconduct that led to that; $2,000,000 owed to Oscar’s family under CA law; failing to supervise an active duty Exeter PD officer; and being blamed for hiding it, and allowing DeAngelo to go on a rape/murder spree. 

•Ken Clark and Anne Marie Schubert trying to cover up DeAngelo's cases was really a full circle moment. In 2003 Michael Bowker wrote in Sacramento Magazine about the initial coverup of the EAR cases by SSD in 1976:

The rapist’s first known attack in the Sacramento area occurred at 4 a.m. on June 18, 1976 on Paseo Drive in Rancho Cordova. At the time, it was considered an isolated incident by law enforcement. Rapes certainly weren't new to the Sacramento area; dozens were reported every year. The only unusual aspect of this one was that the rapist, who wore a ski mask, struck in a single-family residence rather than an apartment or the proverbial dark alley. The community wasn't immediately alerted to the incident; law enforcement hoped the rapist would soon be caught. 

By September 1976, however, rumors began to circulate throughout Sacramento that a brazen serial rapist was at work in the East Area—one who broke into the houses of middle and upper-income single women and raped them in their beds in the middle of the night. The city stirred uneasily, especially the residents on the east side. The odd thing was, none of the rumors could be confirmed. There was nothing about the assaults in the newspapers or on the radio or television. It was confusing. What residents didn't know was that the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department had already attributed four brutal rapes in the East Area to one man, but had asked the city's news media to sit on the story until they caught him. The media complied—a move they later admitted was a mistake. 

The East Area Rapist continued to strike, off Winding Way in Carmichael, and near Madison and Manzanita avenues in Citrus Heights. By October 1976, concern in the East Area had grown to such a point that sheriff's deputies held a series of unpublicized, informal meetings to reassure residents. More than 300 worried people showed up. The overwhelmed deputies admitted to the crowd that seven rapes, all committed by the same man, had been reported in the East Area since June. Residents expressed shock and outrage that they hadn’t been told. The media stuck to their pledge not to run the story until the rapist struck in the Del Dayo neighborhood, near the home of an editor of one of the city's newspapers. As a magazine reporter for the now-defunct New West Magazine later wrote: "At that point, important people began ringing important phones.” Suddenly, the media dam broke and the East Area Rapist became front-page headlines, and the lead story on the 11 o'clock news. Sacromentans responded with near hysteria. 

As the Sacramento Bee reported in November, 1976:

Publicity about the rapes was minimized because the sheriff’s department feared widespread panic would result, and because they hoped to entrap the rapist.

The pattern is clear:

-SSD intentionally covered for DeAngelo in 1976; 

-They did it again when Visalia PD made the case connections in 1977 and 1978; 

-Again when the Maggiores were killed in 1978;

-And when DeAngelo kept offending in Sacramento in 1978 and 1979; and 

-They tried to hide his crimes in Tulare County.

•How many additional DeAngelo attacks, homicides, and wrongful convictions does law enforcement know about or suspect? 

•Why didn't they ask for a proffer in exchange for the plea deal? 

•Why won't they release DeAngelo's interview?