More charges for suspected Golden State Killer.
6 county D.A.’s teaming up to prosecute Golden State Killer case
“Thankfully, we can now hold someone accountable for these crimes and seek justice for our victims.” Diana Becton, Contra Costa County district attorney
Prosecutors in six California counties, including Contra Costa, filed 13 new charges Tuesday in the high-profile Golden State Killer case and announced they will jointly prosecute Joseph James DeAngelo in Sacramento.
DeAngelo, 72, is charged with 13 murders, with district attorneys adding kidnap for robbery charges for crimes that included rapes in Sacramento and Contra Costa counties. Those rapes can’t be charged due to the statute of limitations at the time, but the crime of kidnap for robbery did not have the same restrictions.
Prosecutors said it’s possible additional charges will be filed against DeAngelo, who is suspected in dozens of additional rapes that also run into statutes of limitation. DeAngelo is accused of being the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker, whose reign of terror in the 1970s and ’80s was pieced together decades later by investigators who used DNA and the similar tactics of the suspect to link cases up and down the state attributed to a masked man with many monikers, including the Visalia Ransacker.
“For decades, he evaded justice and devastated communities across California,” said Contra Costa District Attorney Diana Becton. “Thankfully, we can now hold someone accountable for these crimes and seek justice for our victims.”
DeAngelo’s public defender, Diane Howard, declined to comment Tuesday.
The district attorneys in the six counties said at a news conference
in Santa Ana that they would combine their resources to prosecute DeAngelo, referring to the team they first assembled in 2016 as Team Justice.
“These counties came together with their passion, with their persistence and with their resources with one goal in mind: To bring justice for the most significant, probably the most notorious, unsolved serial rape killings in California history,” said Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert. “And that’s what we did.”
The long-sought capture of a suspect in the Golden State Killer case came after detectives used DNA evidence found at a murder scene and plugged it into an open-sourced genealogy website to identify relatives. Investigators narrowed the list of possible suspects based on the presumed age and geography of the suspect they were looking for.
Detectives then took a DNA sample from DeAngelo’s car door handle while he shopped at a Hobby Lobby and a second sample from a tissue found in the garbage outside his Citrus Heights home in Sacramento County, according to court documents.
DeAngelo, a former police officer in Placer and Tulare counties, was arrested in April and faces charges in Sacramento, Orange, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Tulare and Contra Costa counties.
Prosecutors charged DeAngelo with the 13th murder earlier this month, accusing him of killing Claude Snelling, a 45year-old community college professor who was shot to death in Visalia (Tulare County) while trying to save his teenage daughter from a masked intruder in 1975. At the time of that crime, DeAngelo worked as a police officer in the small Tulare County town of Exeter.
Nine of the kidnap charges from rapes DeAngelo is accused of committing in the late 1970s were alleged to have occurred in Sacramento, with four in Contra Costa. A knife or gun was used in all 13 kidnapping cases, with each charge carrying a life sentence if DeAngelo is convicted.
DeAngelo is scheduled to appear Thursday at 1:30 p.m. in Sacramento County Superior Court to face the new charges.