(CNN) A former California police officer has been identified as the so-called Golden State Killer believed to have committed 12 killings and at least 50 rapes across California in the 1970s and 1980s, authorities said Wednesday.
Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, was arrested after investigators matched a discarded DNA sample from his home to evidence collected at some of the crimes, according to law enforcement officials at a news conference outside the crime lab where the key break in the case was uncovered.
"We all knew that we were looking for a needle in a haystack," Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said.
"It is fitting that today is National DNA Day. We found the needle in the haystack and it was right here in Sacramento."
DeAngelo was arrested without incident this week in connection with a crime spree that spanned a decade and at least 10 counties throughout California, officials said. His name emerged in connection with the crimes last week.
"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 has lived near DeAngelo for 20 years, said the suspect was often heard yelling in his home but, in recent years, had become a recluse.
"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 the arrest of DeAngelo, 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.
"When I think back about all tof 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 recorded rape victim 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 his 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, hoping to shed 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."
He became an infamous figure, sometimes known as the Golden State Killer and other times as the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker. His planning was meticulous and he seemed to know precise details about his victims’ schedules. They described the gravelly, angry whisper that he used as he tormented them. He wore gloves and a mask and was a predator with quirks: As his victims lay terrified, he would pause for a snack of crackers after raping them. He placed a teacup and saucer on the bodies of some of his victims and threatened them with murder if he heard the ceramic rattle.
With communities panicking — at one point his assaults averaged two victims a month — the authorities hired a range of experts to help them break the case, among them a military special forces officer and a psychic.
Then, when the rapes and murders appeared to end in 1986, the case went cold.
National interest was reignited this year with the publication of an exhaustive investigation into the serial killer’s identity, “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” written by Michelle McNamara, a crime writer who died in April 2016. The book, published in February, was completed after her death by a journalist and researcher recruited by her husband, the comedian Patton Oswalt.
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[Read about Mr. Oswalt’s quest to finish Ms. McNamara’s book after her death.]
Mr. Oswalt spoke about the reported capture on Wednesday in a video posted on Instagram. “I think you got him, Michelle,” he said.
Mr. DeAngelo, whom the authorities suspect of a total of 12 murders, was arrested by investigators using some of the same tactics employed by the suspect to stalk his victims — the police surveilled his movements, studied his routines and pounced when he left his house.
He was arrested on a warrant stemming from the murder of the married couple in Ventura County in Southern California, but the authorities said more charges were in the works. The Orange County district attorney’s office announced four additional charges late on Wednesday.
Residents of the neighborhoods stalked by the killer said he changed the way they lived their lives. A carefree California lifestyle of open doors and children riding their bicycles to school was forever changed with the knowledge that a rapist now lurked.
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“One person can create a lot of fear,” said Tony Rackauckas, the district attorney of Orange County and one of the dozens of officials on hand in Sacramento to announce Mr. DeAngelo’s arrest. “It was like terrorism — not that it was done for the same reason — but it caused the same type of fear.”
The case had a profound impact not just on fear and public safety in California, but also on the way that rapes were investigated and how rape victims were treated, said Carol Daly, a detective in the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office at the time.
Locks sold out at hardware stores and over 6,000 guns were sold, she said. Community safety forums would be packed with hundreds of people.
Rape victims were seen and cared for faster, and pubic hair, scratches and other evidence were examined and preserved, she said. Rape kits were standardized. “Every victim went through the process,” she said.
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Bruce Harrington, whose brother Keith Harrington and sister-in-law Patrice Harrington were among the murder victims, joined law enforcement officers at the news conference. It was “time for the victims to begin to heal,” he said.
“Sleep better tonight, he isn’t coming in through the window,” he said. “He’s now in jail, and he’s history.”
One victim, Jane Carson-Sandler, who was raped in 1976, said on Wednesday that she was overwhelmed with emotion.
Ms. Carson-Sandler, 72, said she had always believed that her rapist was alive and that he would be caught. The hatred and anger she felt eventually faded, she said, but she continued to pray for two things each night: that he would be identified, and that she wouldn’t dream about the rape.
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She never did dream about it, she said, and on Wednesday morning she turned on her phone to learn that a suspect had been arrested.
“I just feel so blessed that God has finally answered all of our prayers, that this monster would eventually be put behind bars,” she said.
Mr. DeAngelo, who has adult children, was twice employed as a police officer in two small California cities: In Exeter, in the Central Valley, from 1973 to 1976, and in Auburn, north of Sacramento, from 1976 to 1979, according to Mr. Jones.
He was convicted in 1979 for shoplifting a can of dog repellent and a hammer from a store in Sacramento County. The incident led to his dismissal from the Auburn police force. The arrest came amid the rash of rapes in the area.
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One of the neighborhoods where the suspect repeatedly struck was Rancho Cordova, a Sacramento suburb of ranch houses, redwood and birch trees, trim lawns and rose bushes.
In one attack in 1978, Brian and Katie Maggiore, a couple living in the area, were walking their dog in their neighborhood around 9 p.m. After a “violent encounter” with the suspect, they tried to flee, ending up in a private yard, where they were fatally shot, the sheriff’s department said in February, appealing to the public for leads.
Diane Peterson, a retired teacher who lives in Rancho Cordova, said Wednesday that theories about who was behind the rapes and home intrusions had remained a topic of conversation in the neighborhood in the four decades since the attacks began.
“It never totally died down,” Ms. Peterson said. “People would have their own suspicions as to who it might be.”
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Jean McNeill, a retired employee for the state board of equalization who lives near where one of the murders took place, said she was “elated” Wednesday morning when she heard that the suspect might have been captured.
She remembered the terror that the killer instilled in the neighborhood.
“I can remember thinking, ‘It’s getting dark and no one is home with me — I’ve got to be really careful,’” she said. “That’s what made it so frightening. We didn’t know when he was going to strike next.”
After the Maggiore murders, the attacker was not believed to have struck in the Sacramento area again. But in 2001, investigators using DNA evidence linked the crime to others committed in the Bay Area, and to murders in Southern California, the sheriff’s department said.
In June 2016, the F.B.I. announced at a news conference that it would offer a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the “prolific serial rapist and murderer.”
“We came together to bring solace to the victims,” Sean Ragan, special agent in charge of the Sacramento office for the F.B.I., said Wednesday. “But we know the pain and anguish has never subsided.”
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The charges were announced at a news conference in Sacramento
California police have arrested a former police officer for a notorious spree of murders, rapes and burglaries in the 1970s and 80s.
Sacramento police say they arrested suspect Joseph James DeAngelo, 72.
The suspect has been living in the Sacramento area and was identified after new efforts to solve the case, investigators say.
Police blame the so-called Golden State Killer for 12 murders, 51 rapes and more than 120 burglaries.
Mr DeAngelo is being held on suspicion of four counts of murder - the 1978 deaths of Brian and Katie Maggiore in Sacramento and the 1980 killings of Charlene and Lyman Smith in Ventura County.
Prosecutors say additional charges are likely to follow.
What did police say?
Police had been monitoring the suspect and used "discarded DNA" to match him to the crimes, according to Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Golden State Killer: 'A staggering crime spree'
Announcing the arrest, Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said: "The answer has always been in Sacramento."
"The magnitude of this case demanded that it be solved," she added.
Ventura County District Attorney Greg Totten said that prosecutors intend to seek the death penalty.
Two years ago the FBI offered a $50,000 (£36,000) reward to anyone who could help crack the case.
Crime spree that terrorised communities
By James Cook, BBC News Los Angeles correspondent
After four decades of frustration for detectives, it turned out the suspect had been living under their noses all along.
"We found the needle in the haystack and it was right here in Sacramento," said district attorney Anne Marie Schubert.
Joseph James DeAngelo had apparently been living an ordinary life on a quiet suburban street, a former police officer with grown-up children who was "very surprised" when he was arrested and taken into custody.
Details of his alleged crimes are deeply disturbing and collective psychological scars endure.
Many police officers and prosecutors involved in the case vividly recall the terror of the crime spree in their communities.
"Everyone was afraid," said FBI special agent Marcus Knutson, who was born and raised in Sacramento, as he announced a fresh appeal for information on the case two years ago.
"We had people sleeping with shotguns, we had people purchasing dogs. People were concerned, and they had a right to be. This guy was terrorising the community. He did horrible things."
What do we know about the accused?
According to the Sacramento Bee newspaper, he had been living with his daughter and granddaughter in the city's Citrus Heights neighbourhood.
He was fired from the Auburn Police Department in 1979 after he was charged with shoplifting, according to the Auburn Journal.
Police say it was "very likely" that he was committing these crimes while employed as a police officer.
He had also worked as an officer in Exeter, California from 1973 to 1976, during a time when several crimes were committed there, police say.
What reaction has there been?
Jane Carson-Sandler, who was the rapist's fifth victim in October 1976, told the Island Packet newspaper that detectives had emailed her on Wednesday to inform her of the arrest.
"I just found out this morning," she said. "I'm overwhelmed with joy. I've been crying, sobbing."
The case was investigated by author Michelle McNamara for her book I'll Be Gone in the Dark. McNamara died before the book could be published.
Her co-author, Billy Jensen, tweeted on Tuesday night to say there would be a "rather large announcement tomorrow".
Another contributor to the book, Paul Haynes, said: "Stunned. Excited. No other words right now."
What were the crimes?
The Golden State Killer, also known as the East Area Rapist, Original Night Stalker, and the Diamond Knot Killer is believed to have carried out rapes and murders between 1976 and 1986, killing girls and women aged between 12 and 41.
Prosecutors say the "reign of terror" began in Sacramento and spread to San Francisco and then on to central and southern California. Links between the cases were established by DNA evidence, police say.
Image caption A police reward poster shows photofit pictures of the suspect
The attacker broke into homes at night and then tied up and raped his female victims.
Before fleeing he stole items such as cash, jewellery and identification.
The last case to be linked to the Golden State Killer was the rape and murder of an 18-year-old woman in Irvine, Orange County, in May 1986.
Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said the suspect had been called many names but added: "Today, it's our pleasure to call him 'defendant'."
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.
