Hobby Lobby trip yielded key DNA
Detectives tailed Golden State Killer suspect to store, swabbed his car door
SACRAMENTO — As police were closing in on a man they suspected of being the Golden State Killer, detectives took a DNA sample from their target’s car door handle while he shopped at a Hobby Lobby, according to arrest and search warrant records released Friday.
A second DNA sample, from a tissue found in trash that Joseph James DeAngelo had put out for garbage pickup, confirmed for police that they had the right suspect, leading to his arrest in a case that had haunted law enforcement agencies around the state for more than three decades.
The information in the arrest and search warrants was previously kept under seal, but Judge Michael Sweet of Sacramento County Superior Court sided with media outlets, including The Chronicle, that argued the documents should be released in the public interest.
DeAngelo, 72, is charged with 12 murders in four counties. The slayings have been linked to a suspect known variously as the Golden State Killer, the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker.
DeAngelo has not entered pleas to any of the charges. He is suspected in a 13th killing, according to the search warrant affidavit: The victim was a journalism professor in Tulare County who was shot in September 1975 while stopping a man from kidnapping his daughter from their home.
DeAngelo is also suspected in dozens of rapes in the 1970s and 1980s, but it’s unclear
whether he will face charges in any of those cases because the statute of limitations has passed.
In page after page, the documents released Friday detail the horror of the crimes and terror that neighborhoods were experiencing in the 1970s and ’80s. Sweet required that details of nearly all the rapes DeAngelo is suspected of committing be redacted, saying those cases have not been charged and that releasing the information would make it difficult for DeAngelo to receive a fair trial.
Sweet also did not allow the release of records detailing what evidence authorities found in April inside DeAngelo’s home in Citrus Heights near Sacramento. The search warrant unsealed Friday detailed dozens of personal items — rings, cameras, photos, driver’s licenses, a women’s bathrobe — that were stolen from victims’ homes.
Investigators had zeroed in on DeAngelo after trying a novel approach — they uploaded a DNA profile from one of the unsolved cases attributed to the Golden State Killer to an opensource genealogy website that was able to identify relatives of their suspect.
Detectives then obtained a search warrant
to collect DNA from an unsuspecting DeAngelo. On April 18, detectives tailed him as he drove to a Hobby Lobby in the Sacramento suburb of Roseville and swabbed his car door handle while he was inside the store, according to the arrest warrant affidavit.
That sample contained DNA from three people, one of which matched their suspect in the 1980 killings of Charlene Smith and her husband, Lyman Smith, in Ventura, according to the affidavit.
Five days later, detectives returned to DeAngelo’s home for another DNA sample, sifting through his trash can on Canyon Oak Drive that he had pulled out to the street the night before. A tissue was the only item to produce enough DNA to run a test, but was a match to the suspected killer, the affidavit says.
DeAngelo’s attorneys had argued against releasing the information from the search and arrest warrants, saying intense media scrutiny will make it difficult to seat an unbiased jury for “what will inevitably be the biggest trial in California history.”
Sacramento County prosecutors did not object to releasing some of the information, but asked that names of victims and witnesses be omitted to protect their privacy and to avoid tainting a continuing investigation.