Margaret Wardlow remembers being woken up with a flashlight in her face and a man with leather gloves standing over her bed. He told her to turn over and began to tie her up. At first, she thought it was some kind of joke, but then she thought: “This must be the East Area Rapist.”

It was Nov. 10, 1977. The East Area Rapist, later known as the Golden State Killer, had been a frightening specter for more than a year. Before his attack on her, he was believed to have raped 26 women in the Sacramento area. He would go on to rape many more women across California and kill at least 12 people, in crimes that detectives were later able to connect. Using DNA evidence, investigators linked the crimes to Joseph James DeAngelo, now 72, and arrested him in Sacramento on Tuesday.

Wardlow was 13 when the East Area Rapist attacked her, but she said she knew all about him from reading newspaper accounts and watching TV. “I felt like I had a bit of dossier about him, which was really lucky,” she said. “Not very many people have that before a rape.”

That night, she and her mother had gone over to a neighbor’s house to have dinner and listen to a new record. They hadn’t locked their door because they had an 80-pound golden retriever at home, and they felt generally safe in their area, Wardlow said.

It was a school night for her, so she went to bed early when they got home. It was about 2:30 a.m. when Wardlow woke up to find the man with leather gloves standing over her bed. He had gone into her mother’s room and stacked plates on her back, threatening to kill her and her daughter if he heard the plates fall — something he did in other attacks.

“I absolutely understood that he got off on control by fear,” Wardlow said. “I just wanted to make him not get what he wanted, which was to see me fearful.” She stayed calm throughout the attack, she said.

He tied her ankles and her hands so tightly that blood vessels popped out on her wrists, then blindfolded her, and asked her if she had had sex before. She told him no. “He had a brief period of anal sex with me and then went in and out of the room,” she said.

“I had this strong feeling of what are you doing here? We have nothing here for you,” she said. “Maybe it was a kid’s reaction to this stuff, but I just kept thinking, why are you here?”

Wardlow remembers that her mom started screaming at some point. Wardlow was able to get her ankles untied and ran up the stairs, where she locked herself in the bathroom. Her mom came upstairs too, and they called the police. The attacker had fled the scene.

She said that she became discouraged relatively quickly when he wasn’t caught and continued on his violent spree, but that she didn’t want the attack to take over her life.

“I’ve never shed a single tear over this whole thing,” she said. “It wasn’t like I tried to forget it, but it didn’t play into my life.” She followed the case on and off, but wasn’t keeping close track.

Wardlow now splits her time between Palm Springs and San Diego, and has a 19-year-old daughter.

She was in San Diego on the night of DeAngelo’s arrest. When she got back from a movie and dinner with her husband, she noticed she missed two calls from a number with a Sacramento area code. It was a retired detective whom she’d never met but who knew about her rape. He told her that the man believed to be the East Area Rapist was in custody.

“I was literally like kicking my husband, saying, ‘They’ve got him, they’ve got him,’” she said. “I barely slept that night because I was so ecstatic.”

Wardlow says she plans to follow the trial and maybe travel to Sacramento for some of it. “I think justice will take its course now,” she said.

Sophie Haigney is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sophie.haigney@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SophieHaigney