Joseph James DeAngelo

Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. was born on November 8, 1945, in Bath, New York, to Kathleen "Kay" Louise DeGroat and Joseph James DeAngelo Sr, a sergeant in the United States Army. He was regularly beaten by both parents throughout his childhood. When he was a child, DeAngelo's family lived in West Germany where his father was stationed. There, DeAngelo says he was forced to witness the rape of one of his sisters by two airmen in a U.S. Air Force base warehouse.

Between 1959 and 1960, DeAngelo attended Mills Junior High School in Rancho Cordova, California. Beginning in 1961, he attended Folsom High School, from which he later received a GED certificate in 1964. He played on the school's junior varsity baseball team. According to prosecutors, DeAngelo committed burglaries, mail theft, and tortured and killed animals during his teenage years.

DeAngelo joined the United States Navy in September 1964 and served for 22 months during the Vietnam War as a damage controlman aboard the cruiser USS Canberra and the destroyer tender USS Piedmont. Beginning in August 1968, he attended Sierra College in Rocklin, California; he graduated with an associate degree in police science with honors. He enrolled at Sacramento State University in 1971, earning a bachelor's degree in criminal justice. DeAngelo later took postgraduate courses and additional police training at the College of the Sequoias in Visalia, and completed a 32-week police internship with the Roseville Police Department.

From May 1973 to August 1976, DeAngelo served as a burglary-unit police officer in Exeter, having relocated from Citrus Heights. He assisted in the search for himself as the Visalia Ransacker. He then worked in Auburn from August 1976 to July 1979. Nick Willick, who would later become Chief of Police, stated he was an unremarkable officer. DeAngelo also had a habit of standing too close to other officers and citizens, which made people uneasy and was potentially dangerous for himself as someone could have grabbed his gun. When Willick pointed this out to him and when other officers gave him basic policing advice, DeAngelo did not handle the criticism well and sulked. In July 1979, he was arrested for shoplifting a hammer and dog repellent. During the arrest he defecated himself, feigned a heart attack and fought store security. …

DNA evidence linked DeAngelo to eight murders in Goleta, Ventura, Dana Point, and Irvine; two other murders in Goleta, lacking DNA evidence, were linked by modus operandi. DeAngelo pleaded guilty to three other murders: two in Rancho Cordova and one in Visalia. He also committed more than 50 known rapes in the California counties of Sacramento, Contra Costa, Stanislaus, San Joaquin, Alameda, Santa Clara, and Yolo; and he was linked to hundreds of incidents of thefts, burglaries, vandalism, peeping, stalking, and prowling.

It was long suspected that the East Area Rapist used the community of Visalia as a training ground for his earliest crimes. Earlier Visalia crimes dating back as early as May 1973 and other sprees like that of the "Cordova Cat Burglar", during which he killed several dogs by blunt force, and the "Exeter Ransacker", as well as Visalia burglaries that took place after the shooting of Detective William McGowen (see below under "Shootings"), are now suspected to be linked also. Over a period of 20 months, DeAngelo is believed to have been responsible for one murder and around 120 burglaries.

In late April 2018, the Visalia chief of police stated that while there was no DNA linking DeAngelo to the Central Valley cases, his department had other evidence that played a role in the investigation; and he was "confident that the Visalia Ransacker has been captured". Though the statutes of limitations for the burglaries have each expired, DeAngelo was formally charged on August 13, 2018, with the first degree murder of Claude Snelling in 1975. In 2020, DeAngelo pleaded guilty to the Snelling murder.

The first recorded ransacking occurred on March 19, 1974, when a sum of $50 in coins was stolen from a piggy bank. Most of the Ransacker's activities involved breaking into houses, rifling through or vandalizing the owner's possessions, scattering women's underclothes and stealing a range of low-value items while often ignoring banknotes and higher-valued items in plain sight. The Ransacker would also often arrange or display items in the house. Items emptied included piggy banks and coin jars; and stolen items often included Blue Chip Stamps, foreign or historic coins, and personal items (such as single earrings, cuff-links, rings, or medallions) but also included six weapons and various types of ammunition. …

In December 1977, someone claiming to be the East Area Rapist sent a poem, "Excitement's Crave", to The Sacramento Bee, the Sacramento mayor's office, and television station KVIE. On December 11, a masked man eluded pursuit by law-enforcement personnel after alerting authorities by telephone that he would strike on Watt Avenue that night:

All those mortal's surviving birth Upon facing maturity, Take inventory of their worth To prevailing society. Choosing values becomes a task; Oneself must seek satisfaction. The selected route will unmask Character when plans take action. Accepting some work to perform At fixed pay, but promise for more, Is a recognized social norm, As is decorum, seeking lore. Achieving while others lifting Should be cause for deserving fame. Leisure tempts excitement seeking, What's right and expected seems tame. "Jessie James" has been seen by all, And "Son of Sam" has an author. Others now feel temptations call. Sacramento should make an offer. To make a movie of my life That will pay for my planned exile. Just now I'd like to add the wife Of a Mafia lord to my file. Your East Area Rapist And deserving pest. See you in the press or on T.V.

During the investigation in Danville of the 42nd attack, investigators discovered three sheets of notebook paper near where a suspicious vehicle had reportedly been parked. They believe the pages were dropped accidentally, perhaps by falling out of a bag. The first sheet appears to be a homework essay on General George Armstrong Custer.

The second sheet contains a journal-style entry describing a teacher who made students write lines, which the author found humiliating:

"Mad is the word, the word that reminds me of 6th grade. I hated that year ... I wish I had know what was going to be going on during my 6th-grade year, the last and worst year of elementary school. Mad is the word that remains in my head about my dreadful year as a 6th grader. My Madness was one that was caused by disapointments that hurt me very much. Dissapointments from my teacher, such as feild trips that were planed, then canncled. My 6th-grade teacher gave me a lot of dissapointments which made me very mad and made me built a state of hatred in my heart, no one ever let me down that hard before and I never hated anyone as much as I did him. …

Before officially connecting the Original Night Stalker to the East Area Rapist in 2001, some law-enforcement officials (particularly from the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department) sought to link the Goleta cases as well. The links were primarily due to similarities in modus operandi. One of the already-linked Original Night Stalker double murders occurred in Ventura, 40 miles (64 km) southeast of Goleta; and the remaining murders were committed in Orange County, an additional 90 miles (140 km) southeast. In 2001, several rapes in Contra Costa County believed to have been committed by the East Area Rapist were linked by DNA to the Smith, Harrington, Witthuhn, and Cruz murders. A decade later, DNA evidence indicated that the Domingo–Sanchez murders were also committed by the East Area Rapist (also identified as the Golden State Killer).

On June 15, 2016, the FBI released further information related to the crimes, including new composite sketches and crime details; a $50,000 reward was also announced. The initiative included a national database to support law enforcement's investigating of the crimes and to handle tips and information.

Identification of DeAngelo began in December 2017 by officials, led by detective Paul Holes and FBI lawyer Steve Kramer. They hit a roadblock when then District Attorney Tony Rackauckas rejected their request for a DNA sample, directing the Irvine PD to not release the sample. A pristine sample from the Smith murder was taken from a duplicate rape kit, something uniquely done by Ventura's medical examiner. Once they uploaded the killer's DNA profile from a Ventura County rape kit to the personal genomics website GEDmatch. The website identified 10 to 20 people who had the same great-great-great-grandparents as the Golden State Killer; a team of five investigators working with genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter used this list to construct a large family tree. From this tree, they established two suspects; one was ruled out by a relative's DNA test, leaving DeAngelo the main suspect.

Eventually, "through the use of genetic genealogy searching on GEDmatch, investigators identified distant relatives of DeAngelo—including family members directly related to his great-great-great-great grandfather dating back to the 1800s. Based on this information, investigators built about 25 different family trees. …

On the afternoon of April 24, 2018, Sacramento County Sheriff's deputies arrested DeAngelo in the side yard of his Sacramento home. He was charged with eight counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances. On May 10, the Santa Barbara County District Attorney's office charged DeAngelo with four additional counts of first-degree murder.

According to Sacramento County prosecutor Thien Ho, DeAngelo said the following to himself while alone in a police interrogation room after his arrest in April 2018: "I didn't have the strength to push him out. He made me. He went with me. It was like in my head, I mean, he's a part of me. I didn't want to do those things. I pushed Jerry out and had a happy life. I did all those things. I destroyed all their lives. So now I've got to pay the price." Prosecutors believe this was a tactic to manipulate police, or to establish an insanity defense. DeAngelo had admitted to using a similar tactic when he was arrested for shoplifting in 1979. Detectives ignored DeAngelo's initial requests to speak to an attorney, later citing a legal theory that this potential Miranda violation would be justified, with the understanding that prosecutors could not use the interview against the defendant in court.

DeAngelo could not be charged with rapes or burglaries, as the statute of limitations had expired for those offenses, but he was charged with 13 counts of murder and 13 counts of kidnapping. DeAngelo was arraigned in Sacramento on August 23, 2018. In November 2018, prosecutors from six involved counties collectively estimated that the case could cost taxpayers $20 million and last 10 years. At an April 10, 2019, court proceeding, prosecutors announced that they would seek the death penalty, and the judge ruled that cameras could be allowed inside the courtroom during the trial.

On March 4, 2020, DeAngelo offered to plead guilty if the death penalty was excluded as a possible sentence, which was not accepted at the time. On June 29, as part of a plea bargain to avoid the death penalty, DeAngelo pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first-degree murder and special circumstances (including murder committed during burglaries and rapes), as well as thirteen counts of kidnapping. …