Arrest made in state’s decades-old cold case
Twelve killed and 45 raped between 1976-86
The case involved one of one of the most prolific and elusive serial killers in modern American history.
The string of attacks in California — attributed to someone alternately dubbed the Golden State Killer, Original Night Stalker and East Area Rapist — was horrifying for both the nature of the attacks and their grim sweep. Between 1976 and 1986, the FBI said, the attacker killed a dozen people and raped 45. The youngest victim was 13 years old.
“Everyone was afraid,” Special Agent Marcus Knutson, who was born and raised in Sacramento and was heading up the FBI’s portion of the investigation, said in 2016 when a reward was announced. “We had people sleeping with shotguns, we had people purchasing dogs. People were concerned, and they had a right to be. This guy was terrorizing the community. He did horrible things.”
Wednesday, more than 40 years after the so-called “Golden State Killer” began to terrorize Californians, authorities said that they had arrested a suspect: a 72-yearold former police officer.
Police said DNA evidence helped lead them to Joseph James DeAngelo, who had been living in Citrus Heights, a city outside Sacramento. They did not elaborate on what the DNA evidence was or how it was obtained.
“The magnitude of this case demanded that it be solved,” Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said at a news conference. “We found the needle in the haystack, and it was right here in Sacramento.”
Sacramento County court records showed that DeAngelo was booked into jail early Wednesday morning on four counts of murder in Sacramento and Ventura counties.
Authorities had said they suspected the Golden State Killer may have either had a background or interest in law enforcement techniques. Police said DeAngelo fit that bill. He had served as a police officer in California between 1973 and 1979, Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones said, a period that overlapped with the beginning of the attacks.
He was fired from the Auburn police department in 1979 after he was arrested for stealing a can of dog repellent and a hammer from a drugstore, according to Auburn Journal articles from the time.
Despite an outpouring of thousands of tips over the years, his name had not been on authorities’ radar before last week, Schubert said.
“The answer was always going to be in the DNA,” she said.
Beginning in 1976, the Golden State Killer is believed to have raped dozens of women in their homes — meticulously planning his intrusions, sometimes ambushing entire families, and killing several of his victims toward the end of his spree, before vanishing in 1986.
Since his disappearance, investigators and amateur detectives have searched for the man across the United States and inquired as far away as Australia.
“He was young — anywhere from 18 to 30 — Caucasian, and athletic, capable of eluding capture by jumping roofs and vaulting tall fences,” the crime writer Michelle McNamara wrote in a Los Angeles magazine profile of the old cases.
“To zero in on a victim he often entered the home beforehand when no one was there, learning the layout, studying family pictures, and memorizing names,” she wrote. “He disabled porch lights and unlocked windows. He emptied bullets from guns. He hid shoelaces or rope under cushions to use as ligatures.”
Police first dubbed the man the East Area Rapist, as he would not begin killing until much later in his spree.
The first known attack, Katie Mettler wrote in The Washington Post, took place in the middle of the night in the summer of 1976, when the man snuck into a home in east Sacramento County, raped a young woman and left.
He raped again a few weeks later, then again and again, dozens of times. After a year, two dozen women had been attacked and a sheriff’s department spokesman told The Associated Press that some residents had started “sleeping in shifts,” because the man would strike even if others were home.
His 44th victim was a 13-year-old girl in the Walnut Creek area in 1979, the Mercury News reported. He allegedly raped her at knifepoint while her father and sister slept down the hall, told her he’d kill her if she told anyone, and departed through the back yard, past her playhouse.
Police rebranded him the Original Night Stalker after he began to kill in 1978, Mettler wrote. He found a married couple walking their dog in the Sacramento Area, chased them and shot them to death.
Future killings would be much more meticulous, and spread from Sacramento to Southern California.
On Dec. 30, 1979, police in Goleta found a husband and wife dead in their house — one shot through the heart and one in the back of the head.
“As detectives processed the crime scene, they stepped around a turkey carcass wrapped in cellophane that had been discarded on the patio,” McNamara wrote in Los Angeles Magazine. “The killer had opened the refrigerator and helped himself to (victim Robert) Offerman’s leftover Christmas dinner.”
He left few clues, and only betrayed a few patterns as his violence escalated: he often ate from his victims’ fridges; often took tokens from their personal belonging’s, like class rings.
Police did not even realize the East Area Rapist and Original Night Stalker were the same person until DNA tests linked all the crimes in the early 2000s, McNamara wrote.
By then, his spree was long over — the last victim being 18-year-old Janelle Cruz, bludgeoned to death in Irvine in 1986 — and the trail had gone cold.