Go die in jail, ‘monster!’
Calif. killer listens as victims tell of soul-crushing pain
The Golden State Killer showed no emotion Tuesday as victim after victim confronted him in court, calling him a “monster” and asking that he be left to rot in the “worst” prison possible.
“I don’t buy his act that he’s on his last legs. The last years of his pitiful life ought to be spent in the worst prison in existence today,” rape survivor Patricia Murphy said in a statement read by her daughter.
“He truly is an evil monster with no soul,” she said of Joseph DeAngelo, the man who held her at knifepoint for two hours during her horrific 1976 attack.
The daughter who read the statement also addressed DeAngelo directly at the start of his four-day sentencing hearing, saying she was just 7-years-old when he raped her mom “and broke up our family.”
“Rot in jail,” she said before cursing at the sadistic serial killer and raising her middle finger. “Joseph DeAngelo…can go straight to hell.”
DeAngelo, 74, is due to receive more than two dozen life sentences Friday after his long line of victims has the chance to address him in Sacramento County Superior Court.
Also dubbed the East Area Rapist and Visalia Ransacker, DeAngelo pleaded guilty in June to a 13-victim killing spree that started in 1975 in Tulare County in central California. Under a deal with prosecutors that spared him the death penalty, he also admitted to more than 50 rapes that were too old to prosecute.
DeAngelo’s reign of terror included two murders in Sacramento County in 1978, four murders in Santa Barbara County between 1979 and 1980, two murders in Ventura
County in 1980 and four murders in Orange County between 1980 and 1986.
Pete Schultz also addressed the court Tuesday and described how he was tied to a bed post at age 11 until his “hands turned blue” while DeAngelo committed “horrific acts” against his mother in another room in 1976.
His younger sister was locked in yet another room, while his mother, Wini Schultz, was bound and blindfolded during the rape, he said.
“Her head was covered the whole time she was bound, but she was certain he had a very inadequate penis,” Pete Schultz said.
“While we all have suffered 44 years, your suffering sir has just begun,” he told DeAngelo. “You are gone. The boogeyman is done.”
A former police officer, DeAngelo managed to live undetected for decades, and was leading a quiet life with his family near Sacramento when cold-case investigators submitted crime scene DNA to an open-source, public genealogy website.
The DNA sample turned up some of DeAngelo’s potential relatives. From there, traditional detective work narrowed down the field of suspects to DeAngelo.
To confirm they had their man, detectives surreptitiously swabbed DeAngelo’s car door handle in a Hobby Lobby parking lot and retrieved a used tissue from his garbage bin.
His DNA came back as a match, and DeAngelo was finally arrested in April 2018.