SERIAL SHOCK
Ex-cop held in notorious ’70s slay, rape spree
LOS ANGELES — The notorious “Golden State Killer” who terrorized California with a stunning series of at least 50 rapes and a dozen murders starting in 1976 is now behind bars — and may have committed some of the crimes while he was a cop, authorities said Wednesday.
Joseph DeAngelo, 72, was arrested Tuesday afternoon outside his residence in the sleepy Citrus Heights neighborhood of suburban Sacramento after investigators surveilled his “routine,” collected some “discarded DNA” and matched it to evidence collected from the one-man crime spree, prosecutors and police said at a press conference Wednesday afternoon.
DeAngelo was an officer with the Exeter Police Department near Visalia, Calif., in the early 1970s and was fired from the Auburn Police Department in 1979 for shoplifting dog repellent and a hammer, Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones confirmed. His time on the force would have overlapped with the first wave of his attacks.
“Very possibly he was committing crimes during the time he was employed as a peace officer,” Jones said, adding that investigators were looking into the possibility DeAngelo may have used his badge to carry out some early crimes.
Authorities declined to say how they first landed on DeAngelo as a suspect, saying only that new technology led to the break in the case after four decades.
They did say DeAngelo has a family with adult children, making it possible they used familial DNA collected from a relative to connect the dots.
Prosecutors in Sacramento and Ventura County quickly charged DeAngelo with the 1978 murders of Brian and Katie Maggiore in Rancho Cordova, and the 1980 slayings of Lyman and Charlene Smith in Ventura.
In the case of the Smiths, DeAngelo allegedly bound the married couple’s wrists and ankles using drapery cord secured with the same type of diamond knot used in the first cluster of rapes in Sacramento County years earlier. DeAngelo allegedly raped Charlene and used a fireplace log to bludgeon both victims to death.
“It was a very personal and brutal crime. The person who did it was an animal. Only an animal could do things like that to other people,” Maureen Doyle, 60, who was Charlene’s former sister-inlaw and close friend, told the Daily News.
The Golden State Killer was also known as the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker.
DeAngelo’s arrest came after the FBI and Sacramento County law enforcement announced a new $50,000 reward in the unsolved case in 2016, and created a website where people could view police sketches and hear interviews with survivors. The cold case also received renewed attention from the recent book, “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” by the late writer Michelle McNamara, which became a best seller when it was published in February after McNamara’s death in April 2016 from an undiagnosed health condition. She was the wife of comedian Patton Oswalt and predicted in the tome that the killer would be arrested “soon.”
Authorities believe the East Area Rapist sexually assaulted at least 37 victims in the Sacramento area and central California, and killed two people between 1976 and 1978.
After that, authorities believe he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and down to Southern California, where he continued his reign of terror.
His last known crime was in 1986, when he brutally murdered Janelle Cruz, 18, in her parents’ home in Irvine, Calif.