Golden State Killer suspect charged with another murder.
DeAngelo has been charged with another murder — believed to be the first committed by the alleged killer
Joseph DeAngelo, the man authorities allege is the infamous Golden State Killer, was charged Monday in the fatal shooting of a Visalia father who tried to rescue his teen daughter from an attempted kidnapping in 1975, believed to be the first slaying committed during the suspected serial killer and rapist’s decadeslong crime spree.
The charge — coming four months after DeAngelo’s arrest in Citrus Heights — formally linked what many victims, families, law enforcement and amateur sleuths had long believed — that the Golden State Killer was also the infamous Visalia Ransacker. The Sept. 11, 1975 slaying of Claude Snelling, a college journalism professor, also represented a dark and violent turn in the criminal timeline of the notorious serial killer. On Monday Tulare County District Attorney Tim Ward filed the first degree murder charge — along with a special circumstance of using a .38-caliber handgun during the crime — against DeAngelo, detailing the tragic murder of Snelling in front
of his 17-year-old daughter. The filing includes details about 100 bizarre burglaries in the small city south of Fresno, along Highway 99.
“From spring of 1974, this community was terrorized by these rampant crimes in their tenacity, in their intimate nature, in the frequency in which they were occurring,” Ward said Monday at a news conference. “Those wounds never fully healed, the community was never given justice and the victim’s family was never given justice.”
Law enforcement believes DeAngelo, 72, killed a dozen other people and carried out more than 50 rapes up and down the state of California during the 1970s and ’80s, including in Contra Costa, Alameda and Santa Clara counties. In April, investigators matched DeAngelo’s DNA to evidence collected at a Ventura County crime scene.
Snelling was shot to death after a masked gunman broke into his daughter’s bedroom in the middle of the night, dragging her into the family’s carport.
“That’s when I heard my dad yell and… the man with a ski mask pushed me to the ground, turned, and shot my dad twice as he was coming through the back door,” Snelling’s daughter Elizabeth Hupp told CBS News on Monday.
Snelling died on the way to the hospital.
“He’s always been my hero,” Hupp said. “I would not be here today, I’m sure of it, if it hadn’t been for him.
“In my heart, I believe he’s the one, and that my father was his first victim,” she said.
Ward said DeAngelo could only be charged with the murder, as the other Visalia crimes all were long past their statute of limitations. Unlike the other crimes for which DeAngelo is charged, there is no DNA evidence linking him to Snelling, however Visalia police chief Jason Salazar said similar methods used by the intruder and other physical evidence make him confident DeAngelo is the Visalia Ransacker.
The gun used to shoot Snelling had been stolen from a Visalia home in a burglary a month earlier, and the getaway bike used by the attacker that was found a block away was also stolen two days earlier in a Ransacker crime, the chief said. Visalia police located victims and witnesses from the crime spree and re-interviewed them after DeAngelo’s April arrest.
At the time of Snelling’s murder, DeAngelo worked as a police officer in the nearby town of Exeter.
The Visalia Ransacker is suspected of committing about 100 burglaries in the small city. He broke into homes at night, prying open doors or windows. Rather than stealing expensive items, Salazar said the intruder took collectibles, keepsake items and family photos. He snatched costume jewelry and left the expensive necklaces, or took only one earring from a pair.
The Ransacker balanced items on door knobs during his burglaries as a “warning system,” Salazar said. Once he moved on to the Sacramento area in 1976, prosecutors say he began a similar makeshift alarm system by balancing dishes on the backs of men as he raped their loved ones.
Salazar said the Ransacker sometimes prepared food inside the Visalia homes and sometimes called victims days after the burglaries with creepy messages. Investigators believe he targeted and monitored homes before breaking in and often escaped on a bicycle.
The Visalia Ransacker was nearly caught three months after Snelling’s murder. A police officer conducting a sting operation tried to arrest him in a neighborhood garage, but the elusive predator shot at the cop and got away. Police believe he then moved his crime spree to the Sacramento area where he became known as the East Area Rapist and began working for the Auburn Police Department.
Visalia police very early on became suspicious that the East Area Rapist was the same person who had terrorized their city. But when Visalia investigators approached the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office, which was leading the investigation into dozens of rapes there, they were told the cases were unrelated.
In a Sacramento Union story back then, the paper quoted Bill Miller, a sheriff spokesman at the time, as saying they reviewed the Visalia cases and found “no similarity,” citing differences in physical descriptions of the Ransacker and East Area Rapist.
“It appears to me,” Miller told the paper in 1977,” that these investigators in Visalia were looking for publicity — and it’s not there … That is really irresponsible.”
On Monday, Hupp only expressed satisfaction that her father’s killer had been charged.
“I’m just very happy that he’s caught,” Hupp said. “He’s a very evil person.”
DeAngelo returns to court next month and Sacramento County Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Grippi said the various jurisdictions are working together to determine on how to proceed.
“The overarching objective is to attain a fair and just outcome for all the victims in the most efficient and effective manner possible,” he said. “We hope to make some decisions related to that goal in the upcoming weeks and months.”
As DeAngelo’s current charges stand, Grippi said the Sacramento cases would proceed first, followed by the other counties but it’s possible the cases will all be consolidated at some point.