![]() ![]() He held that job until 1979 when he was caught shoplifting dog repellent and a hammer - two items that could be of use to a burglar.ĭeAngelo killed a couple walking their dog in a Sacramento suburb in 1978, but the majority of murders came after he left the police force and moved to Southern California.Ī guilty plea and life sentence avoids a trial and even a planned weeks-long preliminary hearing. He started on the police force in the San Joaquin Valley farm town of Exeter in 1973, where he is believed to have committed his first break-ins and first killing.ĭeAngelo was among the officers trying to find a serial burglar in the neighboring city of Visalia responsible for about 100 break-ins.Ĭommunity college professor Claude Snelling was killed by the suspected "Visalia Ransacker" after trying to prevent him from kidnapping his 16-year-old daughter.Īfter three years on the force, DeAngelo moved back to the Sacramento area, where he got a job with the Auburn Police Department in the Sierra foothills. He slipped off into the dark on foot or by bicycle and even managed to evade police who at times believed they came close to catching him. He stole whatever he could find, sometimes a few bottles of Budweiser and some cash, other times diamond rings. "I admit," DeAngelo said after the prosecutor read the description of that crime. He piled dishes on the backs of men and said they would both be killed if he heard the plates crash while he raped the woman.Īt a home in Contra Costa County in the fall of 1978, he told a woman he would cut her baby boy's ear off if she didn't perform oral sex after he had raped her. Victims described being prodded by the barrel of a gun or the tip of a knife. He would have the women bind their husbands or boyfriends face down in bed with shoelaces, and then he would bind the women. The masked prowler initially said he only wanted their money to earn their cooperation. Prosecutors detailed sadistic acts he committed after slipping into homes undetected and surprising couples in bed by shining a flashlight in their faces and threatening to kill everyone in the house - including young children - if they didn't follow his orders. The retired truck mechanic was arrested at his home in the Sacramento suburbs - the same area he terrorized in the mid-1970s, earning the title East Area Rapist. They tailed DeAngelo and were able to secretly collect DNA from his car door and a discarded tissue to get an arrest warrant. Police used DNA from crime scenes to find a distant relative through a popular genealogy website database then built a family tree that eventually led them to him. ![]() It wasn't until after the crimes ended that investigators connected a series of assaults in central and Northern California to slayings in Southern California and settled on the umbrella Golden State Killer nickname for the mysterious assailant. "I feel a lot of anger, which I don't think I've felt so powerfully before."ĭeAngelo, a Vietnam veteran and a grandfather, had never been on the radar of investigators who spent years trying to track down the culprit. And I thought it was going to be hard," Carole said. "This is much harder than I thought it was going to be. A pile of used tissues sat on the floor next to Jennifer Carole, whose father, attorney Lyman Smith, was slain in 1980 with his his wife, Charlene Smith, who was raped before being killed. So now I've got to pay the price."ĭeAngelo, who wore orange jail scrubs and a plastic face shield to prevent possible spread of the virus, listed to one side and his mouth appeared agape as prosecutors read graphic details of crimes, where he raped and killed and then snacked before leaving.įamily members wept as the proceeding went on for hours. It was like in my head, I mean, he's a part of me. "I didn't have the strength to push him out," DeAngelo said. "I did all that," DeAngelo said to himself while alone in a police interrogation room after his arrest in April 2018, Sacramento County prosecutor Thien Ho said. had remained almost silent in court since his 2018 arrest until he repeatedly uttered the words "guilty" and "I admit" in a hushed and raspy voice as part of a plea agreement that will spare him the death penalty for a life sentence with no chance of parole.ĭeAngelo, 74, had never publicly acknowledged the killings, but offered up a confession of sorts after his arrest that cryptically referred to an inner personality named "Jerry" that he said forced him to commit the wave of crimes that ended abruptly in 1986. SAN FRANCISCO, California - A former police officer who terrorized California as a serial burglar and rapist and went on to kill more than a dozen people while evading capture for decades pleaded guilty Monday to murders attributed to a criminal dubbed the Golden State Killer. Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., the man accused of being the Golden State Killer, is entering guilty pleas as part of a deal to avoid the death penalty. ![]()
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