For forty-two years the man was three files in three sets of cabinets. In Visalia, in the San Joaquin Valley, he was the Ransacker, a burglar who broke into more than a hundred houses in 1974 and 1975, took single earrings and family photographs and piggy banks, and shot a college professor who caught him dragging a sixteen-year-old girl out of her bedroom window. In Sacramento County he was the East Area Rapist, who from June 1976 tied up some fifty women, and the men beside them, in their own beds. In Santa Barbara, Ventura and Orange counties he was the Original Night Stalker, who bludgeoned couples to death between 1979 and 1986. DNA joined the second file to the third in 2001. Nothing joined either of them to a name until April 2018, when investigators uploaded his genetic profile to a public genealogy site and found his cousins. Joseph James DeAngelo, seventy-two, a retired truck mechanic who had been a police officer at the time of the Snelling murder and the first rapes, was arrested in his driveway in Citrus Heights. He was the first killer in the world to be identified that way, and there have been hundreds since.
He was born in Bath, New York, on November 8, 1945, the son of an Army sergeant, and moved with the family between postings in West Germany and California. He has said that in Germany he was made to watch two airmen rape one of his sisters in a warehouse on an Air Force base, and that both his parents beat him regularly. He went to junior high in Rancho Cordova and to Folsom High School, and finished with a GED in 1964. He served in the Navy as a damage-control man on the USS Canberra off Vietnam, came home to Sacramento, took a criminal justice degree at Sacramento State, and in May 1973 was sworn in as a patrolman in Exeter, a farm town in Tulare County twelve miles from Visalia. He was engaged for a time to a woman named Bonnie Colwell, who broke it off after he pressed her to help him cheat on a psychology test he was failing, and whom he then tried to force into marriage at gunpoint; several rape victims in Sacramento heard him sobbing the name Bonnie in the dark. In November 1973 he married Sharon Huddle, who became an attorney, in a ceremony in Auburn; they bought the house in Citrus Heights in 1980, kept a second home in Long Beach through much of the 1980s, and had three daughters. In August 1976 he moved to the Auburn police department in the foothills east of Sacramento, and in July 1979 he was fired for stealing a hammer and a can of dog repellent from a Pay 'n Save drugstore. He spent the next twenty-seven years as a mechanic at a Save Mart distribution center in Roseville and retired in 2017, still in the ranch house on Canyon Oak Drive, living with one of his daughters, and he fished, kept the yard in order, and shouted at the neighbors.
Claude Snelling was forty-five, a journalism professor at the College of the Sequoias in Visalia, and at two in the morning on September 11, 1975, he heard a noise and went out to the back yard to find a masked man pulling his daughter Elizabeth, sixteen, across the lawn. The man shot him twice and let the girl go, kicking her three times in the face as he went. Snelling died on the way to the hospital. The gun had been stolen in one of the Ransacker burglaries. Three months later a Visalia detective named William McGowen staked out a house on the burglar's pattern and confronted him; the man screamed, pleaded, then pulled a gun and fired into McGowen's flashlight, and the burglaries in Visalia stopped that week. McGowen's description, of a heavy-thighed man with a round face and small eyes, was the best anyone would have for four decades. DeAngelo's transfer to Auburn came six months later.
The Sacramento attacks began in June 1976 in Rancho Cordova and moved through the new subdivisions east of the city, Carmichael, Citrus Heights, Orangevale, Fair Oaks, then across to Stockton, Modesto, Davis and the East Bay. He would case a neighborhood for days, prowling yards, learning which windows were unlocked, sometimes entering while the house was empty to unload the man's gun and leave lengths of ligature in a drawer. He came in after midnight in a ski mask, woke the couple with a flashlight and a gun, tied them with shoelaces, and stacked dishes on the man's back with a promise to kill everyone in the house if he heard them rattle. Then he took the woman into another room. He would stay for hours, eating from the refrigerator, and he telephoned victims for years afterward, sometimes a decade later, to whisper that he would kill them. In March 1977 a town meeting at a Sacramento school drew five hundred people; a man stood up to say that no wife of his would be raped while he was in the house, and the couple were attacked in their home that year. Brian and Katie Maggiore, twenty-one and twenty, an Air Force sergeant and his wife walking their dog on a February evening in 1978 in Rancho Cordova, were chased down and shot dead in a stranger's yard when they apparently crossed him on a prowl. They were the first of his victims in Sacramento to die, and the case was not attached to him with certainty until 2018.
He moved south in October 1979, and in Goleta, outside Santa Barbara, an attack on a couple went wrong when the woman screamed and both got free; an FBI agent living nearby chased him on a bicycle and lost him. Dr. Robert Offerman, forty-four, an osteopathic surgeon, and Debra Manning, thirty-five, a psychologist, were spending the night of December 30, 1979, at his condominium on Avenida Pequena and were shot in bed; he ate their Christmas turkey. Lyman Smith was forty-three, a lawyer who was about to be appointed a Superior Court judge, and Charlene Smith, thirty-three, was an interior decorator with a jewelry business; they were beaten to death with a log from their own fireplace in their Ventura home on March 13, 1980, and were found three days later by Lyman's twelve-year-old son Gary, sent to mow the lawn. Keith Harrington was twenty-four and a fourth-year medical student at UC Irvine; Patrice was twenty-seven and a pediatric nurse; they had been married three months and were living in a house belonging to Keith's father in a gated community at Dana Point when they were bound and bludgeoned on August 19, 1980. Keith's father found them when he came for dinner. Manuela Witthuhn was twenty-eight, a loan officer in Irvine, alone on the night of February 5, 1981, because her husband David was in the hospital; she was raped and beaten to death and her body found by her mother. Cheri Domingo, thirty-five, was house-sitting a relative's home in Goleta on July 27, 1981, and Gregory Sanchez, twenty-seven, a computer technician, had come over to see her; he was shot in the face and then hit twenty-four times with a garden tool, and she was raped and beaten. A realtor found them. Then five years passed. Janelle Cruz was eighteen, working at a pizza parlor in Irvine and living a few blocks from the Witthuhn house, home alone on May 4, 1986, while her family was in Mexico; she was found beaten to death with what may have been a pipe wrench missing from the garage. She was the last.
The connection between north and south was made slowly and then all at once. In 1996 an Orange County criminalist, Mary Hong, matched the Witthuhn, Harrington and Cruz scenes to one another by DNA; in 2001 the Contra Costa laboratory matched the same profile to semen from three East Area rapes, and the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker became one man. The FBI put up a fifty-thousand-dollar reward in 2016. A Contra Costa cold case investigator, Paul Holes, who had spent twenty-four years on the file, and a writer named Michelle McNamara, who coined the name Golden State Killer and died in 2016 before finishing her book about him, kept the case public. In late 2017 Holes and an FBI attorney, Steve Kramer, took the crime scene DNA, converted it into the format used by consumer genealogy sites and uploaded it to GEDmatch, a free database of about a million people who had tested with other companies and posted their results. It returned a set of distant cousins. A team of genealogists built the family trees back to the 1800s and forward again, and by April 2018 the list of men of the right age living in the right places had one name on it. Sacramento detectives took DNA from the handle of DeAngelo's car door at a Hobby Lobby parking lot and from a tissue in his trash, and it matched.
He was arrested on April 24, 2018, and appeared in court in a wheelchair, blinking and silent, a performance the prosecutors later showed the judge on jail video in which he climbed on furniture and did calisthenics in his cell. He was charged first with eight murders; the rest followed, with the kidnapping counts added in August 2018, and six district attorneys agreed to try him together in Sacramento on thirteen counts of murder and thirteen of kidnapping, with the death penalty on the table; a year earlier the prosecutors had held him up as a "poster child for the death penalty" in their argument against Governor Gavin Newsom's moratorium on executions. The rapes could not be charged; California's statute of limitations had run on all of them. In June 2020, with the pandemic making a trial impossible for the foreseeable future and the oldest survivors in their seventies, the prosecution offered life without parole in exchange for a guilty plea to everything. On June 29, in the ballroom of Sacramento State University, rearranged so that hundreds could sit apart, DeAngelo said guilty thirteen times and then admitted, one by one, sixty-two uncharged crimes so that they would be in the record. The count read into the record that day came to 161 crimes against forty-eight victims.
The sentencing lasted four days in August 2020. More than forty survivors and relatives spoke to him directly; a woman he had raped at fifteen told him he was a coward and a monster; Jennifer Carole, Lyman Smith's daughter, said she wanted to remind people there was still good in the world; Elizabeth Hupp, who had been dragged across her father's lawn at sixteen, said he had died saving her life and was her hero. Bonnie Colwell, now Bonnie Ueltzen, was brought into the courtroom and stood looking at him, and a prosecutor six feet away said that for a moment his breathing stopped. DeAngelo, in a mask, stood at the end and said in a thin voice, "I've listened to all your statements, each one of them, and I'm truly sorry to everyone I've hurt." Judge Michael Bowman sentenced him on August 21, 2020, to multiple consecutive terms of life without parole. He was moved to North Kern State Prison in November 2020 and by February 2025 was being held in protective custody at California State Prison, Corcoran. He turned eighty in November 2025.
The method that found him has changed policing. Within a few years genetic genealogy was a routine tool of cold-case units across the United States. GEDmatch, which had never asked its users whether police could search them, changed its rules in 2019 to make consent explicit; Maryland and Montana passed the first laws restricting the technique in 2021. Sharon Huddle, long separated from him, filed for divorce in July 2018, and it was final the next year; neither she nor their daughters had suspected him, and the eldest described him as a perfect father. In September 2026 a Fox Nation series, Golden State Killer: Unmasking a Monster, went back over whether his crimes began earlier than the record shows, and Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento district attorney who had led the prosecution, said there was "probably a high likelihood" that he had committed more than would ever be known. Michelle McNamara's book was finished by others and published two months before the arrest, and its title, I'll Be Gone in the Dark, is what he told one of the women he tied up in Sacramento in 1977.