"You can tell he's a very meticulous person," one Citrus Heights neighbor, Kevin Tapia, said after DeAngelo's arrest. "His house is always perfectly painted. His grass is always cut. He gets down around all the rocks on his lawn and is cutting to make sure it's just perfect."
Precision was important to DeAngelo, Tapia told the Bee — "to the point of having permanent markings on his driveway so he could be exact in parking his boat."
In contrast to his tidy home, several neighbors said, DeAngelo himself was prone to fits of rage and occasionally disturbing intrusions into their lives.
"This guy just had this anger that was just pouring out of him," Grant Gorman, who grew up in the house behind DeAngelo's, told the Bee. "He'd just be yelling at nothing in the backyard, pacing in circles."
These rages went back decades, Gorman said — to 1994, when DeAngelo left a voice mail threatening to "deliver a load of death" if the family's dog didn't stop barking.
Another neighbor, Eddy Verdon, told The Washington Post that three years ago he heard someone on his property, and opened his garage door to find DeAngelo mounting a bicycle to flee.
"I stared him down, and he looked at me nervously," Verdon said. "I never really interacted with him again. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea."
"We used to just call him 'Freak,' " Natalia Bedes-Correnti told the Bee. "He used to have these temper tantrums … usually because he couldn't find his keys."
But the portly grandfather had calmed down in the past few years, she said. He was even well liked by some neighbors.
Cory Harvey, who lived next door, told the Bee that DeAngelo helped pay to put a fence between their houses, and would always apologize when she overheard him cursing.