Golden State Killer faces new charges
Joseph James Deangelo, the suspected East Area Rapist, is arraigned in a Sacramento courtroom and charged with murdering Katie and Brian Maggiore in Rancho Cordova in 1978 on April 27 in Sacramento. nearby small town, Exeter, where his mother, sister and brother also lived.
He left Exeter at roughly the same time the Visalia ransackings stopped to join the police force in Auburn, a small town north of Sacramento. Concurrently, a serial rapist began to operate in Sacramento's eastern suburbs, attacking some 34 women and killing a young couple who evidently surprised the prowler while they were on an evening stroll.
The so-called East Area Rapist then moved south and west, attacking couples in their homes in Modesto, Stockton, Davis and in the San Francisco Bay communities of Danville and Fremont. Visalia detectives said it was the work of a single attacker, but detectives in other jurisdictions disagreed.
After Deangelo was fired from the Auburn Police Department in 1979 for shoplifting a hammer and dog repellent from a store, the rapes stopped, but a serial killer began attacking women and couples in Southern California. He assaulted and killed 10 people in Orange, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties by bludgeoning or shooting them. The last victim, an 18-year-old, was raped and killed in 1986 at her home in Irvine.
Police departments for decades disagreed over whether attacks spanning the state over more than a decade were committed by a single man. Finally, in 2000, DNA evidence linked most of the murders. The following year, DNA unearthed in three rape kits confirmed they were also the work of the East Area Rapist.
But it wasn't until earlier this year that cold case detectives uploaded the killer's DNA profile to a public genealogy site to identify the likely family line of the killer, and from there, narrowed their hunt to Deangelo.
He was arrested in late April and charged with 12 murders. The retired truck mechanic was living in the same north suburban Sacramento home he had bought in 1979.
A search warrant accompanying his arrest showed police had sifted through Deangelo's trash to find a tissue with DNA that matched that of the serial killer. They had little other evidence to go on beside geographic coincidence between Deangelo's movements and those of the killer. No DNA was left behind in the Snelling shooting, but the bullets that killed him matched those from a gun stolen by the Visalia Ransacker from another home.
Deangelo is represented by a Sacramento County public defender. He has not yet entered a plea in the murder charges.
Deangelo’s arraignment on the Tulare County charges is not set. He remains in custody in Sacramento County jail, pending charges now in five counties. Prosecutors in those counties have met several times to discuss where and when to bring the case to trial but have not yet reached a decision.