SACRAMENTO — It was a rash of sadistic rapes and murders that spread terror throughout California, long before the term was commonly used. The scores of attacks in the 1970s and 1980s went unsolved for more than three decades. But on Wednesday, law enforcement officials said they had finally arrested the notorious Golden State Killer in a tidy suburb of Sacramento.
Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, who was taken into custody outside his home on Tuesday and charged with six counts of murder, had been living undisturbed a half-hour drive from where the 12-year rampage began. He was described as a former police officer, and his time in uniform partly overlapped with many of the crimes he is accused of committing.
The case was cracked in the past week, Sheriff Scott Jones of Sacramento County said on Wednesday, when investigators identified Mr. DeAngelo and were able to match his DNA with the murders of Lyman and Charlene Smith in Ventura County in 1980.
“We found the needle in the haystack and it was right here in Sacramento,” said Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento district attorney, who helped organize a task force two years ago that included investigators from across the state as well as the F.B.I. A DNA database showed links to other murders in Southern California, the authorities said Wednesday.
(CNN) For decades, Joseph James DeAngelo's neighbors thought he was a little odd. He kept mostly to himself, sometimes yelling at the people who got too close to his fence or mowed their grass too early.
But they didn't have any reason to suspect he might be behind a series of killings, rapes and assaults in the 1970s and 1980s that spawned an investigation that lasted more than 40 years -- and, until recently, neither did authorities.
"We all knew that we were looking for a needle in a haystack," Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said Wednesday at a news conference announcing DeAngelo's arrest.
"It is fitting that today is National DNA Day," Schubert said. "We found the needle in the haystack and it was right here in Sacramento."
DeAngelo, 72, was taken into custody Tuesday evening in the Sacramento suburb of Citrus Heights. Police allege he is the so-called Golden State Killer, who is believed to have committed 12 killings and at least 50 rapes in at least 10 counties in California.
Detectives matched a discarded DNA sample from his home to evidence from the investigation, according to law enforcement officials who gathered outside the crime lab where the key break was uncovered. DeAngelo was arrested not far from where the Golden State killer committed some of his crimes.
While officials would not say what led them to seek DeAngelo's DNA, they said his name emerged in connection with the crimes last week.
He was arrested without incident.
"When he came out of his residence, we had a team in place that was able to take him into custody. He was very surprised by that," Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones said.
DeAngelo faces capital murder charges in connection with the killings of Katie and Brian Maggiore in 1978. He is being held without bail in Sacramento. He will be arraigned Friday afternoon.
He also is accused of murder by authorities in Orange and Ventura counties, according to documents and officials.
Six years as a cop
"All too often we forget to talk about the victims, and today we at least brought the first step towards closure for those victims of these horrendous crimes," Jones said.
The suspect is a former Auburn, California, police officer who was fired in 1979 for shoplifting a can of dog repellent and a hammer from a drugstore, according to Jones. He worked as a police officer in Exeter and Auburn between 1973 and 1979.
"Very possibly he was committing these crimes during the time he was employed as a peace officer, and obviously we'll be looking into whether it was actually on the job," Jones said.
Exeter Police Chief John Hall said, "It is absolutely shocking that someone can commit such heinous crimes, and finding out someone in a position of trust could betray that is absolutely unbelievable."
The Auburn Police Department said it will "do everything within its power to support this investigation and any prosecution that follows."
"We will pull out all the stops for our Sacramento-area law enforcement partners in this horrific and historic case."
A CNN crew outside DeAngelo's home saw investigators bring some bags of evidence out of the residence as they worked into the night.
Neighbors say he could be different
From 1976 to 1986, DeAngelo's alleged crimes sowed fear across the state, where the suspect was also known as the "East Area Rapist" and "the Original Night Stalker."
Kevin Tapia, who said he has lived near DeAngelo for 20 years, said neighbors could often hear DeAngelo yelling in his home. In recent years, he said DeAngelo had become a recluse, sometimes yelling at neighbors for minor annoyances, like mowing the grass too early in the morning.
"He's not like an overly creepy person, but he definitely, you know, kept to himself and kind of was ... a little different," Tapia told HLN. "It was definitely some concern."
George Hirsch, who said Wednesday he witnessed DeAngelo's arrest, described the suspect as someone who was quiet most of the time but "a little bit out of control."
Jane Carson-Sandler told HLN on Wednesday that she used to live in Citrus Heights -- where DeAngelo was arrested and resided -- when a man broke into her home, and raped her while she and her 3-year-old son were tied up.
"When I think back about all of the lives that he destroyed and all of the folks that he has affected over all of these years, I can't help to get angry," she said. "I want to punch him."
Carson-Sandler became the first of the Golden State Killer's recorded rape victims on June 18, 1976. In an HLN documentary on the case, she said she was dozing in bed with her son after her husband left for work. Then, she was abruptly awoken.
A masked man stood in the bedroom doorway, holding a large butcher knife and shining a flashlight at her face.
He bound her and her son with shoelaces and blindfolded and gagged them with torn sheets. After moving her son off the bed, he unbound Jane's ankles.
"And then I knew what he was there for," she said in the HLN documentary, in which she didn't share her last name.
That first rape sparked the hunt for the man who authorities say went on to commit rapes and killings in California over the next decade.
Renewed interest in case
It's been more than 40 years since the Golden State Killer's first recorded attacks, which began in and around Sacramento in Northern California. No suspects were caught or even identified in the case. Police only had minor details about his looks, along with a sketch from an almost-victim.
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In recent years, there was renewed interest in the case. This year, a book and a series from HLN were released, in the hopes of shedding more light on the case.
When the Sacramento-area rapes were first being reported, it was always by women who were alone or with their children. But by 1977, a year after Jane's attack, the list of victims had expanded to couples in their homes.
It's believed the attacker chased down and killed Katie and Brian Maggiore in February 1978.
Police believe the East Area Rapist killed the Maggiores after the couple -- who were walking their dog at the time -- spotted him before he broke into a home in Rancho Cordova, California, just outside Sacramento, in February 1978. Those were his first known homicides.
"We thought he would never stop, but then two months after the Maggiore homicides, the East Area Rapist left our jurisdiction. It was like he disappeared in thin air," said Carol Daly, a retired detective from the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department.
That's when a serial attacker began terrorizing Santa Barbara County, California -- more than 300 miles south of Sacramento. Police didn't realize it at the time, but the attacker's crimes fit the same pattern as Sacramento's East Area Rapist. He attacked women and couples across Southern California from December 1979 to May 1986, and became known there as the Original Night Stalker.
Depictions of the East Area Rapist, also known as the Original Night Stalker and Golden State Killer. Today he would be between 60 and 75 years old.
"These cases are some of the most horrific I've had to investigate," said Erika Hutchcraft, an investigator for the Orange County District Attorney's Office. "They're not a one-time, you know, crime of passion, but these are almost passionless crimes. Very cold, very violent."
DNA changed the case
Even with such distance between Sacramento and Southern California, detectives in the north who heard about the Original Night Stalker believed he was the same perpetrator as the East Area Rapist.
"Over the years, we heard of homicides down in Southern California, and we thought it was the East Area Rapist," said Larry Crompton, retired detective for Contra Costa County Sheriff's Department. "But he would not leave fingerprints, so we could not prove, other than his M.O., that he was the same person. We did not know anything about DNA."
Once DNA tests were available to investigators, they were able to confirm the same man committed three of the attacks that had previously been blamed on the so-called East Area Rapist, according to Paul Holes, who investigated the case for the Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office.
"That's when I reached out to Orange County" in Southern California, he says, "just to see, you know, if the East Area Rapist DNA was a match with the Original Night Stalker."
In 2001, DNA evidence determined the East Area Rapist was the same offender as the Original Night Stalker.
Investigators matched the East Area Rapist's DNA, and they say it led them to Joseph James DeAngelo, 72.
In 2016 -- 40 years after his first attack -- the FBI offered a $50,000 reward for any information that could lead to his arrest and conviction.
"The sheriff's department never gave up on this investigation," Detective Paul Belli of the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department said at the time. "This person ruined a great number of lives, and he should be held accountable."
Note: Unless stated otherwise, the interviews from this story came from the HLN series "Unmasking A Killer."
Michelle McNamara, shown in 2012, wrote a book about the Golden State Killer that her husband, Patton Oswalt, left, helped get published after she died. (Matt Sayles/Associated Press)
She knew his blood type, his build, his habits and the way he breathed. She knew his twisted proclivities, embarrassing faults of his anatomy and exacting details about dozens of rapes and 12 murders that police believe he committed. And after tracking him and the gruesome trail of crimes he had left throughout California, for years, she even seemed to know how it would all end.
But Michelle McNamara never lived to see the day that a suspect was arrested.
The true crime writer, who died in 2016, looms large over a case that has captivated the country with the news that former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, has been arrested and charged with two counts of murder in a case that had long gone unsolved.
McNamara is the author of a book about the horrific cold case, “I’ll Be Gone In the Dark,” which was published posthumously this year with help from her husband, comedian Patton Oswalt. The book, the result of years of painstaking research by McNamara, helped bring the case a national prominence it didn’t have before. She even coined the killer’s catchy nickname, disregarding the monikers bestowed on the suspect by police in the many jurisdictions where he struck, in favor of a title that sewed the state’s geography together: the Golden State Killer.
[‘Golden State Killer’ suspect, a former police officer, arrested after DNA match, officials say]
Joseph James DeAngelo. (Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office, via AP)
But officials have played down the suggestion that McNamara’s book played a role in the suspect’s apprehension.
“That’s a question we’ve gotten from all over the world in the last 24 hours, and the answer is no,” Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones told reporters.
Authorities did acknowledge that the work built public interest in the case, which can have the effect of lending an old investigation more urgency and, potentially, more resources.
“It kept interest and tips coming in,” Jones said, but “other than that there was no information extracted from that book that directly led to the apprehension.”
Many of McNamara’s family, friends and fans said they believed she deserved more credit for the arrest in the case.
“It was pretty amazing,” Sarah Stanard, a longtime friend of McNamara’s told The Washington Post. “I’m going to try not to be angry, but they’re taking all the credit.”
Oswalt, who spent the day doing interviews and tweeting ecstatically about the news of DeAngelo’s arrest, said that McNamara “didn’t care about getting any shine.”
“She cared about the Golden State Killer being behind bars and the victims getting some relief,” he wrote on Twitter.
Still, he said that he believed the police would be disinclined to credit writers and journalists who helped them with the case.
“But every time they said Golden State Killer, they credited” her work, he said.
McNamara’s long fascination with true-crime stories sprouted from an unsolved murder near her family’s home in Oak Park, Ill., when she was 14. After moving to Los Angeles later, she worked briefly for a private detective, before going on to write for television, Stanard said. But she returned to focus on her fascination with true crime, starting a blog in 2006 to examine unsolved cases.
“She was just a dogged person,” Stanard said. “She had a different brain.”
One of the cases she examined was the unknown assailant known variously as the East Area Rapist, for early crimes committed in Sacramento, the Original Night Stalker, after police learned that his crimes predated that of serial killer Richard Ramirez, and the Visalia Ransacker.
The killer left a lurid trail of crime scenes and victims across the large state: horrifying home invasions, women raped in front of their bound loved ones, and a series of couples killed in their homes together. His meticulousness helped him elude capture for decades.
“To zero in on a victim he often entered the home beforehand when no one was there, learning the layout, studying family pictures, and memorizing names,” McNamara wrote. “Victims received hang-up or disturbing phone calls before and after they were attacked. He disabled porch lights and unlocked windows. He emptied bullets from guns. He hid shoelaces or rope under cushions to use as ligatures. These maneuvers gave him a crucial advantage because when you woke from a deep sleep to the blinding flashlight and ski-masked presence, he was always a stranger to you, but you were not to him.”
For her, the case had become a fixation. She joined with other amateur sleuths in online message boards, met with survivors of the killer’s victims, pored over decades-old files, autopsy reports, maps and mug shots.
“I’m obsessed,” she wrote on her blog in 2011. “It’s not healthy.”
She wrote a long narrative about the case and her obsession with it for Los Angeles Magazine in 2013, which led to a book deal with HarperCollins.
“And, you know, in writing the book, she began to recruit retired homicide detectives and cops from all these different jurisdictions and precincts and cities. And she got them to pool information,” Oswalt said last year during an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. “But her research was so meticulous and so complete that they would contact each other and say, talk to Michelle. She knows. This person is actually not some weird, you know, overenthusiastic amateur. She wants to put the bracelets on this guy.”
But the work began to take a toll. McNamara, who would often work at night after her daughter and husband went to bed, began to develop anxiety and sleep issues, Oswalt said. He has spoken about the panic the case created for her, including one time she mistook him for an intruder in the middle of the night and swung a lamp at his head.
“I think that is what led her down this road of using Xanax. And I know she was taking Adderall in the mornings to get up and some — you know, before she died, the three days before she died, she really didn’t sleep because there was all this new breaking stuff on the case,” Oswalt said. “I’m not going to be glib and say that’s the cause of death. The cause of death was a lot of things. But that certainly held the door open for the other causes.”
She died in her sleep from what host Terry Gross said was an undiagnosed heart problem along with Xanax, Adderall and fentanyl in her system on April 21, 2016. She was 46.
Oswalt helped steward the book’s completion, with the help of a journalist, Billy Jensen, and a researcher, Paul Haynes. It has been hailed by critics, writers such as Stephen King and Gillian Flynn, and readers, and landed on bestseller lists.
It appears police have caught the Golden State Killer. Go get Michelle McNamara's excellent book about the case, I'LL BE GONE IN THE DARK. — Stephen King (@StephenKing) April 25, 2018
Family and friends said they had just done a reading of her book at a Chicago-area bookstore around the time they believe DeAngelo was arrested.
“I think you got him, Michelle,” Oswalt said in a video he posted to social media.
“On the night when all of Michelle’s collaborators were together for the first time, in Michelle’s hometown, with Michelle’s family present, the monster we sought is simultaneously taken into custody,” researcher Paul Haynes wrote. “I’m a rational man, but I can’t help but feel this transcends coincidence.”
Many shared a particularly prescient passage from the book that envisioned the suspect’s arrest in the future.
“One day soon, you’ll hear a car pull up to your curb, an engine cut out. You’ll hear footsteps coming up your front walk,” McNamara wrote. “The doorbell rings. No side gates are left open. You’re long past leaping over a fence. Take one of your hyper, gulping breaths. Clench your teeth. Inch timidly toward the insistent bell. This is how it ends for you.”
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More than 40 years after the so-called “Golden State Killer” began terrorizing California, raping dozens of women and killing at least 12, authorities announced Wednesday that they had arrested 72-year-old Joseph James DeAngelo, charging him with capital murder.
DeAngelo’s arrest offered a shocking, abrupt development in what had long been one of the most notorious unsolved string of crimes in U.S. history. The gruesome attacks unfolded across California for more than a decade during the 1970s and 1980s, shattering families and frightening communities. Then the crimes stopped, remaining a mystery for a generation, with little sign the case would ever be solved.
The trail ultimately led authorities to DeAngelo, a former police officer living in Citrus Heights, Calif., a city outside Sacramento. Authorities said DeAngelo — who was an officer during the years when police believe the attacks began — was found through DNA evidence obtained in recent days. Though investigators declined to elaborate on what the DNA evidence was or how it was obtained, they said it clearly linked him to the crimes that had transfixed them for so long.
Authorities said DeAngelo’s name had not been on their radar at any point until last week, but that they were able to link him to homicides and rapes from decades ago.
“The magnitude of this case demanded that it be solved,” Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said at a news conference in the California capital Wednesday afternoon. “We found the needle in the haystack, and it was right here in Sacramento.”
Joseph James DeAngelo. (Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department)
Sacramento County court records showed that DeAngelo was booked into jail early Wednesday morning on two counts of murder. No bail was set, and it was not known if he had an attorney.
The string of attacks for decades were actually considered three separate sprees, beginning in the mid-1970s in Visalia, Calif., authorities said, when dozens of home invasions and burglaries led people to call the then-unknown assailant the “Visalia Ransacker.” A later series of horrifying home-invasions and rapes beginning in 1976 in Northern California — attributed to the “East Area Rapist” or the “Original Night Stalker” — included lengthy attacks, sometimes involving sexual assaults on women in front of their bound loved ones. Then a series of slayings involving couples in their homes in Southern California by the “Golden State Killer” lasted up into the mid-1980s.
It wasn’t until 2001 that authorities connected the crimes via DNA evidence.
Through 1986, the FBI said, the attacker killed a dozen people and raped 45. The victims were as young as 13 and as old as 41, they said.
Investigators had said they thought the Golden State Killer may have had a law enforcement background, and DeAngelo fit that bill. Between 1973 and 1979, DeAngelo served as a police officer in two different California police departments, said Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones.
The timeline meant that DeAngelo was a law enforcement official when the attacks began, learning how to be a police officer at the same time authorities now believe he was beginning an escalating reign of terror. It remains unclear whether this training and knowledge of law enforcement tactics played a role in how the case stayed unsolved for so long.
“Very possibly he was committing the crimes during the time he was employed as a peace officer,” Jones said Wednesday.
Jones said DeAngelo had worked for the Exeter, Calif., police department between 1973 and 1976, a department located about 10 miles east of Visalia. John Hall, the city’s police chief, said in an interview Wednesday that no one currently with the department was there at the time. Still, he said, the idea that DeAngelo might have worked for the department was a blow.
“It’s absolutely shocking as well as disheartening and disappointing,” Hall said. “Not only did he commit these horrific crimes, but he did it while wearing the uniform and enjoying the public’s trust.”
The case remained an object of intense focus for many in law enforcement and the public over the years. In 2016, the FBI made a renewed plea — and offered a $50,000 reward — for help in finding what they called “the violent and elusive individual.”
The wanted poster for the man known as the East Area Rapist/Golden State Killer. (FBI)
Beginning in 1976, the Golden State Killer is believed to have raped dozens of women in their homes — meticulously planning intrusions, sometimes ambushing entire families, and killing several victims toward the end of the bloodshed, all before vanishing in 1986. The attacker also was behind numerous residential burglaries in the state, the FBI said.
For relatives of the victims, the shock of DeAngelo’s arrest and the charges against him left some feeling a sense of closure. Others were overwhelmed by the sudden news. Jennifer Carole was sleeping in her Santa Cruz home when the text came in at 7:11 a.m. on Wednesday. When she awoke, she could hardly believe it.
“Could this really be him?” a friend had typed out and sent a link to a news article.
Almost four decades after Carole’s father, Lyman Smith, and stepmother, Charlene Smith, were found murdered in their Ventura, Calif., home, police said they had found a suspect. She was torn by conflicting emotions.
“This is a hard one,” said Carole, 56. “There aren’t really words for this. I have feelings all over the place … In my mind, I had him dead as a way to cope, so his capture is stirring up all kinds of emotions.”
Carole said it was a chilling feeling to know the alleged killer had been in the Sacramento area the whole time, the same area her mother and father had lived.
In March 1980, her brother had gone to their father’s home to mow the lawn, but he grew suspicious when the home’s alarm didn’t go off when he entered. He went upstairs to check on his father and stepmother, Carole said, and called 911 after he found sheets pulled up over their bodies.
“I hope to God he confesses,” said Carole, who was 18 at the time, of the man now in police custody.
In Citrus Heights, residents recalled strange encounters with DeAngelo, who neighbors said lived in a home with his daughter and granddaughter. Attempts to reach DeAngelo’s relatives were unsuccessful.
Eddy Verdon recalled meeting DeAngelo after moving to the area and found him to be nosy, eventually discovering DeAngelo on his property three years ago. When he heard someone around the property and looked in the garage, he found DeAngelo ready to flee on his bicycle.
“I stared him down, and he looked at me nervously,” he said. “I never really interacted with him again. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea.”
Since the attacker seemingly disappeared, investigators and amateur detectives have searched for him across the United States and inquired as far away as Australia.
“He was young — anywhere from 18 to 30 — Caucasian, and athletic, capable of eluding capture by jumping roofs and vaulting tall fences,” the crime writer Michelle McNamara wrote in a Los Angeles Magazine profile of the old cases.
If they’ve really caught the #GoldenStateKiller I hope I get to visit him. Not to gloat or gawk — to ask him the questions that @TrueCrimeDiary wanted answered in her “Letter To An Old Man” at the end of #IllBeGoneInTheDark. pic.twitter.com/32EHSzBct5 — Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) April 25, 2018
McNamara, who wrote a best-selling book about the crimes, wrote that the attacker had entered homes beforehand, “learning the layout, studying family pictures, and memorizing names” in preparation. As a result, she wrote, when someone “woke from a deep sleep to the blinding flashlight and ski-masked presence, he was always a stranger to you, but you were not to him.”
When a woman managed to escape a 1979 attack, McNamara wrote, she said she saw a man pedaling away on a bicycle. The attacker was particularly cruel, McNamara wrote, placing dishes on the male victims he had tied up and “telling him that if he heard the dishes fall, he’d kill the female, whom he would then lead into another room to rape.”
Police first dubbed the man the East Area Rapist, since they do not believe he began to kill people until later. The first known attack took place in the middle of the night in the summer of 1976, when a man slipped into a home in east Sacramento County, raped a young woman and left.
Authorities said the same man raped someone again a few weeks later, then raped people again and again. After a year, two dozen women had been attacked in the Sacramento area. One victim was said to be a 13-year-old girl whose family was home at the time.
Two people were beaten to death with a fireplace log. Brian and Katie Maggiore were gunned down while walking their dog in Rancho Cordova. A man and his girlfriend were fatally shot in his condo, with a cellophane-wrapped turkey carcass found on the patio. The killer, McNamara later wrote, had eaten some of their leftover Christmas dinner before departing.
The last known victim was 18-year-old Janelle Cruz, who was raped and bludgeoned to death in Irvine in 1986.
Decades would pass before DNA tests linked all of these crimes, and investigators realized that the East Area Rapist of Sacramento was the same man called “Original Night Stalker” near L.A. DNA evidence has proven crucial in other cases, such as the East Coast Rapist, who was arrested in 2011 when one of his discarded cigarettes proved to be a match for genetic material in that case.
Julie Tate and Matt Zapotosky in Washington and Sawsan Morrar in Citrus Heights, Calif., contributed to this report, which has been updated.
