I have not posted on this thread before and I have not read all 53 pages of posts on the case, so if I repeat anything that has already been mentioned, I apologize. Nevertheless, I have read a lot of material on this case. With that said, here is my two cents:
In my mind, there is no doubt that the East Area Rapist started off as the Visalia Ransacker. There are just too many similarities in the cases to be dismissed. Moreover, one of the keys to this case is that both the VR and the EAR took the time to plan their activities and conduct surveillance before those activities occurred. Once you accept that, you have to wonder where he got the time (and, incidentally, money) to do all that. I think there are only three conclusions you can come to: either the VR/EAR was independently wealthy, he was a student, or he had the kind of job that would give him plenty of time to carry out his attacks and conduct the related surveillance. I guess #1 is possible, but I would think unlikely. For some reason (maybe the paint evidence which indicates to me that he was a man who did his own manual work and did not pay for it to be done, plus the fact that he was a young guy) I get the feeling that the VR/EAR was not wealthy. #3 is impossible, I believe-I don’t think anybody could function at their job with the amount of extracurricular activities this dude was getting up to, particularly as the VR with his daylight burglaries. This leave us with #2, that he was a student. (In fact, generally the attacks of the EAR and certainly the VR seem to roughly coincide with the academic year.)
The one fact that has always struck me as peculiar about this case is the murder of Claude Snelling and the attempted abduction of his daughter. For the most part, the VR/EAR had a steady progression from burglar to rapist to serial killer, except for that one leapfrog on the road to notoriety where he quit being a mere creepy burglar and tried to kidnap Beth Snelling. That seems so out of character for that stage of his career. The only thing I can think of is that somehow he encountered one of the Snellings at college and (either out of desire for Beth or some animus towards Claude) decided to target them. Claude Snelling, of course, was a journalism professor at the College of the Sequoias in Visalia.
I think what happened is that after he almost got caught by the police officers on surveillance in Visalia the VR decided that he had to leave town (especially if the composite was anything close to how he actually looked) and moved his activities to Sacramento. I have no idea whether the police ever focused on any students who dropped out of or transferred out of Visalia colleges in 1975 (particularly the College of the Sequoias), but I would think that might be a useful strategy (although I am not sure how good the records might be after all this time). Just for laughs I started looking at publicly available photographs of students at the College of the Sequoias in 1975 and comparing them to the composite of the VR. I found two people who looked kind of like the picture, although it is difficult to be sure, particularly since they are wearing baseball hats, and some of it may be wishful thinking because you always dream of being the one who can crack the case. For obvious reasons, I am not going to mention any names, but anyone, certainly any police officer, could do what I did (and they would have access to more records and better pictures than I do).
I can’t imagine that they haven’t already done this though. But, one of the problems with this case is that all the law enforcement agencies involved initially always denied that their offender could have operated elsewhere: Sacramento did not believe that the EAR could be the VR, and similarly the Southern California cops did not think that the EAR could be the ONS until the DNA matched, so maybe they didn’t investigate the Visalia angle thoroughly.
Anyway, if I was a police officer, I would take a look at those college records.
