The sound of “rattling knives” still causes Susan Bowlus to tear up, bringing to mind her brutal rape, even 40 years later.

Bowlus, 68, a Brooklyn-based portrait photographer, believes she is one of dozens of rape victims of Joseph DeAngelo Jr., now known as the Golden State Killer.

Now in prison, DeAngelo Jr., 80, committed a series of murders and scores of burglaries and sexual assaults across California between 1974 and 1986.

Bowlus claims she has been failed by Sacramento law enforcement, who she says have not provided her with all the pages and results of key scientific tests in a 1979 police report, despite repeated requests over the last five years.

“It was really like being raped again,” Bowlus told The Post. “Another rape victim, who was also trying to get her report, told me at the time ‘good luck getting through the blue line.’ “

DeAngelo is a suspect in at least 50 rapes in Sacramento and Tulare counties where law enforcement referred to him by turns as the Visalia Ransacker and the East Area Rapist in the 1970s and 1980s.

Bowlus says she’s convinced that law enforcement are still trying to downplay their own failure to catch DeAngelo when he was committing his worst crimes, and says they failed to warn potential victims in the neighborhoods where he had already struck.

DeAngelo, himself a cop in the ‘70s, was arrested in 2018 through DNA evidence left at his crime scenes, which matched with DNA voluntarily submitted by his family on a popular ancestry site. But he was never fully prosecuted for myriad rapes. The official list was created prior to DeAngelo’s 2018 arrest.  Though many others came forward, some attempting to get their records, not a single victim was added to the list, Bowlus told The Post.

He pleaded guilty to 13 counts of murder and rape in order to avoid the death penalty. He also agreed to admit guilt in a host of other crimes, many of which had passed the statute of limitations in the state. He is serving 13 consecutive life sentences at California State Prison in Corcoran.

Because she could only produce a partial report, Bowlus was initially denied funds from a fund set up by California’s Victim Compensation Board to help victims of DeAngelo’s crimes.

She sued the board in 2022 and won her case, but is still fighting to get her file in its entirety and to be officially counted among DeAngelo’s victims.

“I am haunted knowing it is not only me, but others whose records have been unlawfully kept from them, and whose cases are hidden from the public in order to protect a false narrative and darker truth in the Golden State Killer case,” Bowlus said.  

“When I prevailed in the Sacramento Superior Court, the California Department of Justice lost the argument that we can rely solely on law enforcement’s word.” 

Auburn Police Chief Ryan Cannan has denied there has been any cover-up over DeAngelo and said “there’s no police officer, no sheriffs that wants this type of person working with them.”

Many of the details that are in Bowlus’s report — the part that she finally received — match the East Area Rapist’s pattern of attacks.

Bowlus was 22 years old and a virgin at the time of her rape, which took place after midnight on September 25, 1979, and lasted more than four hours after her attacker broke into her home. At the time, Bowlus, was operating locomotives in the nearby Roseville Railroad Yards.

“She fell asleep and was woke (sic) up by the suspect who had his hand over her mouth,” reads the hand-written police report seen by The Post. “The suspect immediately, still with his hand over her mouth, rolled her over onto her stomach…. As the suspect rolled her over he threatened her saying, ‘Don’t say or do anything and you won’t get hurt.'”

After blindfolding Bowlus, he rolled up her T-shirt and removed her underwear. In addition to trying to penetrate her several times, at one point he told her “we’re going to do a 69” — a term she says she didn’t understand.

“He moved around so that she was facing him. He told her to ‘lick my d—k,'” the report continued “He then told her to put it into her mouth.”

Before he left, he went to the kitchen where Bowlus heard him “rattling” the knives. “At that point, I was certain he was going to kill me,” she said. “I was terrified.”

But when he returned, he tied her hands and legs, “leaving her in a hog-tied position,” according to the crime report. He also jerked the phone out of the wall so that she wouldn’t be able to call for help if she managed to untie herself. Many of those details were also reported in the other attacks attributed to the East Area Rapist. Bowlus also corroborated the recent revelation DeAngelo has a micropenis, calling it “insignificant” and “mushy.”

Bowlus received a partial and “heavily redacted” police report of her attack after DeAngelo’s sentencing in 2020. Later she received an anonymous “document dump” which included important pieces of evidence that seemed to tie DeAngelo to her rape.

Those included footprints collected outside her home in Citrus Heights, a suburb of Sacramento, which matched the prints and type of shoes worn by DeAngelo which were collected in other East Area Rape cases and at the homicide scenes.

Requests for comment from the Sacramento District Attorney’s office and the Sacramento Sheriff by The Post were not returned. 

Tony Reid, a private investigator who has been tracking DeAngelo’s crimes for years, has written about Bowlus’s case and provided expert testimony when she sued the state, in “12/26/75,” his 2022 book about DeAngelo. Reid claims law enforcement in Sacramento have not gone back through the forensic reports in old rape cases, which denies victims like Bowlus their due justice.

“That forensic evidence exists but Sacramento will not look because they’re afraid that the additional missed cases will make their prior investigations look worse,” Reid writes in the book.

The Sacramento County sheriff’s department “lied and told the public that the EAR [East Area Rapist] was gone,” writes Reid in his book. He was able to ascertain that DeAngelo lived in his house in Auburn at the time of her attack and  during his reign of terror until he moved to Citrus Heights in 1980, minutes from  Bowlus’s home.

“People were mad that he was running circles around the police and the press was constantly critical of their performance.”

Law enforcement knew that the East Area Rapist was committing crimes near Bowlus’s home because they linked him to the murder of Katie and Brian Maggiore on February 2, 1978. Police found clues at the crime scene in nearby Rancho Cordova where the couple was killed, including a shoelace tied in a particular way the East Area Rapist had used on his victims in the past. Bowlus’s home was less than nine miles away from the Maggiore residence.

Months before Bowlus’ rape, in July 1979, DeAngelo was arrested for shoplifting a hammer and can of dog repellent at a hardware store, and suspended from the Auburn Police Department, 20 miles north of Citrus Heights, where he had been an officer since 1976. He was eventually fired in October 1979, weeks after Bowlus’s rape, but both Reid and Bowlus say police didn’t do enough to investigate DeAngelo after the robbery.

Police also told Bowlus the East Area Rapist was not attacking in her area at the time of her rape, which Bowlus maintains is a lie. For one thing, police knew the East Area Rapist was likely a cop and that he was operating in the Citrus Heights area, because of a rape that took place in nearby Rancho Cordova six months before her attack which is attributed to him.

“DeAngelo frequently called the police in Visalia and Sacramento on the non-recorded phone lines (which he knew), and taunted that he was going to attack,” Reid writes, adding DeAngelo — who was married and raising a family at the time — often left “notes” for police with threats and clues, and even sent a poem to the Sacramento Bee signed by “Your East Area Rapist” in December 1977.

DeAngelo’s case recently gained renewed interest after the publication of “The People Vs. the Golden State Killer,” earlier this month. The book is written by Thien Ho, the deputy district attorney in Sacramento who led the prosecution against DeAngelo. After the book’s release, Ho announced he will run for Congress.

In his book, he writes that authorities threw away the DNA evidence from the East Area Rapist’s assaults after the statute of limitations ran out, and at one point had to rely on DeAngelo’s micropenis to connect him to multiple rapes. The police, who photographed DeAngelo’s genitalia told Ho the penis was “smaller than the circumference of a dime and its length is equal to the tip of your pinky.” Ho has also says that the East Area Rapist had left the area prior to Bowlus’s rape — an assertion made by law enforcement at the time that has since been prove false, said Bowlus.

In September, the Victim Compensation Board approved Bowlus’s applications. She received funding from the state for therapy, and also received $83,000 to cover her legal fees.

But she still doesn’t feel it’s enough. “It still haunts me as to what is in those records,” she said saying they could shed more light on what she sees as law enforcement’s failures in the investigation.