DNA brings arrest in sadistic crime spree from decades ago
— A DNA match led to the arrest of a 72-year-old former police officer in one of the most baffling and sadistic crime sprees of the 1970s and ’80s — a string of at least 12 slayings and 45 rapes in California by an attacker dubbed the Golden State Killer, police said Wednesday.
Armed with a gun, the masked attacker would break into homes while single women or couples were sleeping. He sometimes tied up the man and piled dishes on his back, then raped the woman while threatening to kill them both if the dishes tumbled. He often took souvenirs, notably coins and jewelry, from his victims, who ranged in age from 13 to41.
The match led to Joseph James DeAngelo, who was fired in 1979 from the police department in Auburn, northeast of Sacramento. Despite an outpouring of thousands of tips over the years, his name had not been on authorities’ radar before last week, District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said.
“We knew we were looking for a needle in a haystack, but we also knew that needle was there,” Schubert said.
“The answer was always going to be in the DNA,” she said.
Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones referred to the genetic material as “discarded DNA,” but authorities refused to give specifics about how it was collected or matched to the suspect.
DeAngelo was arrested on suspicion of committing four killings in Sacramento and Ventura counties, authorities said.
“Very possibly he was committing the crimes when he was employed as a peace officer,” Jones said.
The suspect was fired from the Auburn 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.
FBI agents were gathering evidence at a Sacramento-area home linked to DeAngelo, the agency said.
As the crimes unfolded across the state, authorities called the attacker by different names. He was dubbed the East Area Rapist after his start in Northern California, the Original Night Stalker after a series of Southern California slayings and the Diamond Knot Killer for using an elaborate binding method on two of his victims.
He was most recently called the Golden State Killer.
Jane Carson-Sandler was sexually assaulted in 1976 in her home in Citrus Heights by a man believed to be the East Area Rapist. She said she received an email Wednesday from a retired detective who worked on the case telling her they had identified the rapist and he was in custody.
“I have just been overjoyed, ecstatic. It’s an emotional roller-coaster right now,” Carson-Sandler, who now lives near Hilton Head, S.C., told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “I feel like I’m in the middle of a dream and I’m going to wake up and it’s not going to be true. It’s just so nice to have closure and to know he’s in jail.”
DeAngelo, who was also a police officer in Exeter, in Southern California, from 1973 to 1976, was taken into custody without incident as officers surprised him at his Sacramento-area home, Jones said.