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Abroad

Veteran Member
Police say the Golden State Killer has committed at least 12 murders, 45 rapes and hundreds of home break-ins all over California. This week they arrested a man they think is responsible. How has the perpetrator of such shocking crimes eluded capture for over 40 years?

Since the early 1970s, an unknown assailant had been terrorising various parts of California from Sacramento to south of Los Angeles, earning him different nicknames in each crime spree: the "Vidalia Ransacker", the "East Area Rapist" and the "Original Night Stalker".

It wasn't until the advent of DNA testing that law enforcement realised they were dealing with a single perpetrator. And even then, it took another two decades to find him.

"This is a piece of our history that generations of investigators have worked towards," says Sacramento County Sheriff's Department Sergeant Shaun Hampton.

The EAR raped over two dozen women by the time he committed his first known murder in 1978.

Katie and Brian Maggiore were out for a walk with their dog on the night of 2 February 1978, when they had a violent confrontation with a strange man. No-one knows what was said, but by the end of it, both 20-year-old Katie and 21-year-old Brian were dead from gunshot wounds. A man wearing a ski mask was seen fleeing by several witnesses.

Katie had complained in the months before that a man was stalking her at her work. Her colleagues said someone called Katie repeatedly, saying, "Your turn is coming." A strange man sitting in a blue Volkswagen would watch her for hours. After she attempted to confront him, he drove off, only to return hours later. Katie quit her job soon afterwards.

After the Maggiore murders, the EAR moved his hunting grounds to nearby Contra Costa County, committing 20 more rapes before he killed again, this time an osteopathic surgeon named Robert Offerman and his girlfriend, Alexandria Manning. Both were bound and shot in Offerman's home.

From there on, none of the EAR's victims were allowed to live. At the dawn of the 1980s, a perpetrator known as the "Original Night Stalker" began killing in Santa Barbara, Ventura and Orange counties. He seemed to develop a new taste for raping women in front of their partners before executing them both.

He murdered married couple Lyman and Charlene Smith, newlyweds Keith and Patti Harrington, and Cheri Domingo and her boyfriend Greg Sanchez. The Smiths were bludgeoned with a fireplace log.

Although law enforcement has had a DNA profile for the Golden State Killer for decades now, a matching profile was never found in any national DNA database, meaning the man had never been caught for a subsequent crime where his DNA would have been collected.

Eventually a task force joined all the affected jurisdictions together with the FBI to try to collaborate, offer new reward money and send out a call for tips to the public. Although journalists and armchair detectives have been fascinated by the case and offered thousands of tips over the years, no suspect has ever matched the DNA profile, until two weeks ago.

The break came after Paul Holes, a retired investigator with the Contra Costa District Attorney's Office and long time investigator on the case, searched a free, do-it-yourself genealogy website called GEDmatch.

According to the Sacramento Bee, the site is a place for people to find long lost relatives, and has a database of 800,000 DNA profiles. Sacramento District Attorney Chief Deputy Steve Grippi confirmed that a family member of DeAngelo's had used the service, and they were able to isolate him as a suspect and collect "discarded" DNA on two occasions. They finally had a match.

"We were looking for a needle in a haystack and we found it," says District Attorney Schubert, who has had some role on the case since she was a deputy district attorney in 2000.

DeAngelo is a former police officer with the Auburn Police Department who was fired after he was caught shoplifting a hammer and dog repellent from a hardware store in 1979. He married and had a daughter, and worked as a truck mechanic for a grocery store chain for 27 years.

Sheriff Scott Jones told the Sacramento Bee that DeAngelo was "very surprised" when he was arrested.

Since the arrest, officers from all the jurisdictions touched by the Golden State Killer flocked to the quiet street in Citrus Heights to begin an exhaustive search of the house.

DeAngelo may yet argue his innocence.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-43915187
 
I love science sometimes.

72 years old ... I wonder how many really old serial killers out there just shit their pants? All of them I hope.
 
I don't care he is old and gimped and in a wheel chair.
Taser him every waking hour.
Die behind bars.

Have been reading the book "I'll Be Gone In The Dark" detailing this.
It is fascinating and very respectful to the victims.
I have gotten very emotionally invested in this case from the time these murders were unfolding.

He is a special kind of hateful prick.
No mercy shown, so may he get none.
 
I'm glad they finally caught this guy. It's crazy to think that he was fired from his law enforcement job because he was caught stealing a hammer and dog repellent! How was that not a red flag to his fellow officers? Guess the cops back in the 70's weren't concerned about why he'd steal those things...

And this may seem a little nitpicky, but his original nickname was the "Visalia Ransacker" (not "Vidalia") because he intially preyed upon the city of Visalia, CA. I mention this only because I currently live in Visalia and my fiancee grew up here, and he was stunned to hear that someone had finally been apprehended. He's heard about the Visalia Ransacker his whole life and never imagined someone would eventually be caught.
 
"Attorneys for the man accused of being the Golden State Killer said Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. would be willing to plead guilty if prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty, according to new court papers.

The statement from the public defenders representing DeAngelo appears as a footnote in a 41-page dismissal motion filed in Sacramento County Circuit Court late Monday night and obtained by the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday.

“Mr. DeAngelo is 74 years old. He has offered to plead to the charges with a lifetime sentence,” the statement says."

Link: HERE!
 
Hat tip @BuffettGirl for the update.

For the first time, a former police officer pleaded guilty Monday to committing a series of rapes and murders across California in the 1970s and 1980s that were attributed to the elusive “Golden State Killer.”

Wearing a clear face shield and an orange jumpsuit, 74-year-old Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. was wheeled into a makeshift courtroom Monday where he pleaded guilty to the first of 13 murders.
full

A plea deal will spare DeAngelo any chance of the death penalty for 13 murders and 13 kidnapping-related charges throughout California. In partial return, survivors of the assaults expect him to admit to up to 62 rapes that he could not be criminally charged with because too much time has passed.

A guilty plea and life sentence avoids a trial or even the planned weeks-long preliminary hearing. The victims expect to confront him at a later date where it's expected to take several days to tell DeAngelo and Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman what they have suffered.
[....]
Sacramento County prosecutor Thien Ho said DeAngelo was alone in a police interrogation room in April 2018 when he began speaking to himself.

"I did all that," DeAngelo said, according to Ho. "I didn't have the strength to push him out. He made me. He went with me. It was like in my head, I mean, he's a part of me. I didn't want to do those things. I pushed Jerry out and had a happy life. I did all those things. I destroyed all their lives. So now I've got to pay the price."

Ho said the day had come for DeAngelo to pay that price.

"The scope of Joseph DeAngelo's crimes is simply staggering," Ho said, of the spree, which included nearly 50 rapes. "Each time he escaped, slipping away silently into the night."

DeAngelo had remained almost silent in court since his 2018 arrest until he uttered in a hushed, raspy voice the word "guilty" to killing a community college professor in 1975, the first homicide in his decades of burglaries, rapes and other crimes that were later dubbed the work of the Golden State Killer.
[....]

 
A former police officer known as the Golden State Killer for his crime spree across California in the 1970s and '80s was sentenced Friday to consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
[....]

Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman said Friday in a rare sentencing statement that DeAngelo would "meet his death confined behind the walls of state penitentiary."

"The court is not saying DeAngelo does not deserve to have the death penalty imposed," Bowman said, but given the age of the defendant and victims, a life sentence made more sense. Bowman said he hopes "survivors will find some resolution" after DeAngelo is permanently placed behind bars.

DeAngelo on Friday made a short statement in court addressing victims and their families. "I’ve listened to all your statements. Each one of them. And I’m truly sorry to everyone I’ve hurt. Thank you your honor," he said.
[....]

 
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