SACRAMENTO, Calif. _ The day after Christmas in 1975, Donna Jo Richmond, 14, was expected home before dark.
She had left her house in Exeter _ the Central Valley town between Fresno and Bakersfield _ earlier that afternoon, wearing new clothes she'd received as holiday gifts and riding her bike to feed some farm animals and visit friends.
But as the sun sank and the valley fog thickened, she had not returned and her mother grew concerned.
Richmond's family went looking for her, but all they found was more worry and her bicycle, damaged and abandoned, in a neighbor's orange grove. Underneath it was a handyman's invoice book with a name inside that pointed to a suspect: Oscar Archie Clifton.
Police knew Clifton, then 35, a carpenter and painter, with a decade-old conviction for assault and attempted rape, who lived nearby. Just after midnight, they arrested him for kidnapping. Hours later, a farm worker found Richmond dead in another grove a few miles away. She had been strangled and stabbed and was naked from the waist down.
The charges against Clifton were upped to murder, and a year later, he was convicted of abducting, attempting to rape and killing Richmond. He died in prison in 2013 while serving a life sentence, but maintained his innocence during his decades of incarceration.
Recently, Joesph DeAngelo Jr., was arrested at this home in Citrus Heights on suspicion of being the East Area Rapist (aka the Golden State Killer), thought to be responsible for more than 50 rapes and a dozen murders throughout California. Authorities also believe he is responsible for a series of burglaries and Peeping Tom incidents in Tulare County, credited to the Visalia Ransacker.
DeAngelo worked in Exeter, near Visalia, as a police officer at the time Richmond was murdered. Now, as authorities examine cases that could be connected with DeAngelo, Clifton's quick arrest, problems with the evidence used against him and a yearslong effort by a private investigator have raised a troubling question: Did Clifton serve life in prison for a crime committed by the Golden State Killer?
"He was innocent," said Tony Reid, a Los Angeles lawyer and detective who has extensively examined the case and documented his findings on the podcast 12-26-75. "Wrongful convictions are ... difficult to decipher because there are half-truths and lies. (But) the truth speaks for itself. The evidence speaks for itself."
Richmond's body was found close to the site of another vicious crime that local police were struggling to solve at the time.
In November 1974, about a year before Richmond was killed and a year-and-a-half after DeAngelo began working in the area, Jennifer Armour, 15, was found dead, drowned in a canal with her bra knotted around one wrist as if her hands had been bound with it.
Unlike Richmond, whose family was established in the area (her father worked in the county assessor's office), Armour was new in town. Her parents were recently divorced, said her brother Rob Armour, and the family was "falling apart."
Armour's dad was a Coast Guard officer and her mother had stayed home. Now, their mom was struggling to support three kids. Jenny started "ditching school" and running with a tough crowd of boys who lived nearby, Armour said.
The night she vanished, she was walking to the Visalia Kmart to meet friends and go to the Cowhide Football Game, an annual rivalry match between the two local high schools. Like Richmond, she never made it home.
Armour was found more than a week later in the Friant-Kern Canal, two miles north of where Richmond's body would be discovered along the same man-made waterway.
Rob Armour, then 13, remembers officers coming to his door with a leather necklace he had made for his sixth-grade girlfriend, then given to Jenny when the girl broke up with him. Police asked him to identify it.
"It was like on TV," he said. "You just know why they are there before they say anything."
He and his brother were taken to the station and questioned, then left to walk home alone, he remembers.
Police initially looked at the young men Jenny hung out with as suspects, Armour said. But no arrests were ever made, and over the decades, the case was largely forgotten. Armour and his family didn't talk about it, he said.
But last November, cold case detectives with the Tulare County Sheriff's Office unexpectedly put out a public call for information attempting to link Clifton to the Armour killing.
In a press release from Nov. 16, the department wrote: "Tulare County Sheriff's Cold Case detectives are asking the public to think back to the mid-1970s for information about a man who was convicted of murdering an Exeter teen, Donna Richmond. ... Her killer, Oscar Clifton, may have murdered a Visalia girl the year before, said Detective Dwayne Johnson. 'There are similarities in the cases,' he said. 'Both girls were blonde and blue-eyed and their bodies were discovered south of Woodlake and north of Exeter about a year apart.'"
Police re-interviewed the Clifton family, apparently also trying to connect Oscar Clifton to the Ransacker case, said Clifton's daughter Annette O'Hara.
"They asked, 'Did he leave at night at odd hours and come back at odd hours?'" she said. "They were simply trying to close the Jennifer Armour case and say the person who killed those two girls was the Visalia Ransacker."
Rob Armour, who lives in Visalia, said he was taken off guard by the police's press release. He said he believes the initial investigation of Jenny's case was rudimentary, and the push to link it Clifton now "too convenient," especially since Clifton is dead.
"I think (Clifton) got a bum deal," Armour said. "There's just too much that says 'no' to Clifton and points to DeAngelo."
