Case File: Joseph DeAngelo

The DeAngelo family moved several times as a result of Sergeant Joseph James DeAngelo Sr.’s position in the U.S. Army. By many accounts, DeAngelo's mother Kathleen was physically assaulted by her husband, and both DeAngelo parents were abusive to their four children. 

When his sister was just 7 years old, Joseph DeAngelo Jr. witnessed two servicemen rape her at a military base in West Germany. "That's pretty crazy for a kid to see his sister be violated," Jesse Ryland, a nephew of DeAngelo’s, told BuzzFeed News, adding that the event might have been the beginning of DeAngelo's mental shift.

As a teenager, DeAngelo reportedly engaged in disturbing practices such as blowing up animals and breaking into homes. After getting a GED and enlisting in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War, DeAngelo began dating Bonnie Colwell, an 18-year-old sophomore at Sierra College in Rocklin, Calif. By 1970, they were engaged, but she called it off as DeAngelo became increasingly manipulative, controlling and risk-taking.

In 1973, he married Sharon Marie Huddle; the couple bought a house in suburban Citrus Heights, Calif., and would eventually have three children. The same year of the wedding, after getting a degree in criminal justice at Sacramento State University, DeAngelo began working as a police officer, first in Exeter, Calif., then in Auburn, approximately 33 miles northeast of Sacramento. 

In 1979, DeAngelo was arrested for shoplifting and immediately began acting erratically, feigning mental illness in the hopes that security wouldn’t call the police. The bizarre stunt cost him his career in law enforcement, leading DeAngelo to then drift from one job to another.

In 1974, an unusual series of break-ins, shootings and other crimes began occurring in Visalia, Calif., while DeAngelo was working as a police officer in nearby Exeter. The break-ins began harmlessly enough, with coins stolen from a piggy bank or coin jar, and personal items like women’s underwear tossed around or rearranged inside houses. The perpetrator was referred to as the Visalia Ransacker.

By 1975, however, the prowling and break-ins became more brazen, and in September, a professor who caught a man trying to abduct his teenage daughter was shot and killed. Throughout the Visalia area, several dogs were found bludgeoned to death. There were 120 burglaries in a 3-mile square radius–and one of the local cops investigating the crimes was DeAngelo himself. 

“As a police officer, he knew how everything operated, how long it took to respond to the scene, where they would set up their blockades and how to get around that,” Thien Ho, the lead prosecutor in the case against DeAngelo, told CNN. “He used his expert knowledge as a police officer to commit his crimes, find his victims and then escape.”

When DeAngelo began to work in the police department in Auburn in 1976, a series of crimes began happening in that area, but instead of nonviolent crimes like burglary, DeAngelo began raping his female victims. In June, a woman was raped at knifepoint inside her home. Over the next few years, at least 49 more sexual assaults occurred in the area east of Sacramento; the yet-unknown perpetrator was dubbed the East Area Rapist.

Within a few years, DeAngelo began attacking couples, sometimes binding a male partner’s hands while he raped a woman in a nearby room. After one such attack, DeAngelo tearfully repeated “I hate you, Bonnie,” a reference to his first fiancée. Other victims reported that he whimpered, “Mommy, please help me. I’m sorry, Mom. I don’t want to do this, Mommy.”

In a daring 1978 attack, DeAngelo approached a young couple walking their dog and, after a confrontation, shot and killed both of them. The following year, DeAngelo moved to Southern California, and as attacks by the East Area Rapist ended, a new wave of violent crimes began in Santa Barbara, Ventura and Orange counties. 

In December 1979, DeAngelo shot and killed a couple in their seaside home west of Santa Barbara; the woman had also been raped. Over the next two years, seven similar murders occurred across Southern California that were blamed on the Original Night Stalker (a moniker that DeAngelo was given after serial killer Richard Ramirez, who was also active in California during the 1980s, was called the Night Stalker). 

In 1986, after a five-year hiatus, DeAngelo raped and killed an 18-year-old woman. Following his modus operandi, he broke into the woman’s home and bludgeoned her to death; other victims were shot. In many cases, DeAngelo would typically tie up a man while he raped his female partner, placing dishes or glassware on the man which would alert DeAngelo if the man moved or tried to escape. 

Given the geographic distribution and lengthy time span of DeAngelo’s crime spree, investigators didn’t link many of his crimes to a single perpetrator. After the last attack in 1986, the cases went cold and little was done to connect or solve the wide-ranging crimes. 

That all began to change when crime writer Michelle McNamara started researching the long string of unsolved crimes across the Golden State. By 2001, forensic DNA technology had advanced to the point that the FBI and local police investigators throughout California were able to establish a link between the multitude of DeAngelo’s crimes. They soon began referring to the case as the EARONS investigation, an acronym for East Area Rapist-Original Night Stalker. 

In 2016, the FBI announced a $50,000 reward for helping to identify the EARONS killer. McNamara, however, coined the term Golden State Killer, a name that resonated with the public. Her book, I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, was published posthumously in 2018. 

DNA technology helped advance the case. Investigators took semen from the 1980 Ventura rape to form a genealogy database using the free DNA sharing site GEDmatch, which includes DNA profiles from services like 23andMe. This led experts to build a family tree that consisted of more than 1,000 names. 

By conducting an analysis that included geographic location, age and other demographic information, experts were able to narrow their list of people down to just three individuals, and DeAngelo was one of them. Police put him under surveillance, and by using DNA collected from DeAngelo’s trash, they linked him with the DNA sourced from other crimes.

Through their genealogical research, police had all the evidence needed to arrest DeAngelo at his home in Citrus Heights in April 2018. The 72-year-old man put up no resistance but complained in a high-pitched voice, “I have a roast in the oven!”

Because the statute of limitations had expired for the rapes and burglaries DeAngelo committed in the 1970s and 1980s, he was instead charged with 13 counts of murder and 13 counts of kidnapping. 

Prosecutors originally sought the death penalty for DeAngelo, but through a plea bargain, he agreed to plead guilty to all charges against him in exchange for life imprisonment. In August 2020, DeAngelo was given 11 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, plus eight years.

Just before receiving his sentence, DeAngelo offered his victims’ families a belated apology. “I listened to all your statements, each one of them, and I’m truly sorry for everyone I’ve hurt,” he said. Many of DeAngelo’s rape survivors also testified at his sentencing and were given the chance to make a statement to DeAngelo and the court.

Jane Carson-Sandler, who was raped in 1976 while at home with her son, told him in court that she took “comfort” in “remembering that you are finally going to prison and will remain there until you die.” 

"I was frozen in fear beyond description,” she recalled. “... My attention was not on the rape, but fully on where did you put my son when you removed him from the bed? Where did you put him and what were you going to do to him?”

In the years since DeAngelo’s conviction, the use of DNA databases to capture criminals has become a controversial issue, primarily due to privacy concerns over health records, warrantless searches and other issues, including the creation of a fake profile, which investigators created in the DeAngelo case to tap into the GEDmatch database. 

“It’s perfectly legal for law enforcement to follow people around and wait for them to leave a discarded sample of their genetic information, for example, a cup, pizza crust, something like that,” Malia Fullerton, a professor of bioethics at the University of Washington, said. “The people who created these databases, and the vast majority of people who use them for genealogical purposes, were concerned about law enforcement coming in to make use of this information … to indirectly identify relatives.”

Following the DeAngelo case, the U.S. Department of Justice placed restrictions on the use of genealogical databases for criminal investigations, and most major consumer DNA testing companies began to limit access by law enforcement agencies. Critics, however, contend that existing legal safeguards remain inadequate and cannot guarantee privacy.