Joseph James DeAngelo was arrested in the driveway of his house in Citrus Heights, a suburb of Sacramento, on April 24, 2018. He was 72, a grandfather, retired after 27 years at a supermarket distribution warehouse. Four decades earlier, while he was working as a police officer, he had begun a series of crimes that California investigators had known under several names: the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist, the Original Night Stalker and, in later years, the Golden State Killer. The crimes ran from 1975 to 1986 and reached from the San Joaquin Valley to Sacramento, the San Francisco Bay Area and the Southern California coast.
On June 29, 2020, in a university ballroom fitted out as a courtroom, he pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of kidnapping to commit robbery, and he admitted dozens of rapes and other crimes that were too old to be prosecuted. Prosecutors counted 87 victims at 53 crime scenes in 11 counties. On August 21, 2020, a Sacramento judge sentenced him to 11 consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole, plus a further life term and eight years.
The case is also remembered for how it was solved. DeAngelo had never given a DNA sample to any criminal database. Investigators found him by uploading a crime scene profile to genealogy databases, finding people who shared part of his DNA, and building their family trees forward until they reached a man of the right age who had lived in the right places. The Ventura County district attorney called it the first use of genetic genealogy to solve a murder or rape case.
DeAngelo was born on November 8, 1945, in Bath, New York, and came to California in his teens. He graduated from Folsom High School in Sacramento County in 1964. The Sacramento Bee, as summarized by The Washington Post, reported that he was raised by a waitress and a welder.
He served in the Navy during the Vietnam War. The Associated Press reported that he was a repairman aboard the cruiser USS Canberra in the late 1960s. After leaving the service he studied police science, earning an associate's degree with honors from Sierra College in Rocklin, and then a bachelor's degree in criminal justice from California State University, Sacramento. He interned with the Roseville Police Department before he was hired as a police officer.
On May 18, 1973, DeAngelo joined the police department in Exeter, a small farm town in Tulare County about 12 miles from Visalia. He was 27. The Exeter Sun welcomed him that year with a short article headlined "Navy veteran serves Exeter as Policeman," in which he said that without law and order there can be no government, and without a democratic government there can be no freedom. Exeter officers patrolled alone in one-man shifts and often backed up neighboring agencies, according to The Sun-Gazette, a local paper that went back through the Exeter Sun files after his arrest.
In the fall of 1973 he married Sharon Marie Huddle. Marriage license records described by KTVU show that he was 27 and she was 20. The couple later had children. Law enforcement described them in 2018 as technically married but estranged.
From April 1974 to December 1975, a burglar broke into about 100 homes in Visalia, most of them in the neighborhoods around the College of the Sequoias. Visalia police called him the Ransacker. He was elusive and often traveled by bicycle, according to Jason Salazar, Visalia's police chief in 2018. The Visalia department set up a special unit to catch him.
DeAngelo was never charged with the Visalia burglaries, and no DNA was collected in any of the Visalia cases. In 2018 Salazar said his department had long believed the Ransacker was linked to the Golden State Killer, and that he was confident the Ransacker had been caught. Two crimes connected to the Visalia series did reach court records: the killing of Claude Snelling, which was charged, and the shooting at a detective, which DeAngelo admitted.
Claude Snelling was 45 and taught journalism at the College of the Sequoias. He lived with his family on Whitney Lane in Visalia. His daughter Elizabeth, known as Beth, was 16.
Shortly before 2 a.m. on September 11, 1975, an intruder came into the Snelling house through the back door. According to The Sun-Gazette's account of the case announced by prosecutors, he went through the purse of Snelling's wife, Arlene, and then went into Beth's bedroom, threatened her and forced her outside when she struggled. Her father woke and confronted the man. The intruder shot him twice with a .38-caliber revolver, then kicked the girl in the head and fled. Claude Snelling was pronounced dead at Kaweah Delta Hospital at about 3 a.m.
The bullet matched a .38 revolver stolen in a residential burglary in August 1975, according to the prosecution's statement of facts. No one was charged with the killing until 2018.
Elizabeth Snelling, later Elizabeth Hupp, spoke at the sentencing hearing in 2020. "My dad died saving my life that night and he is my hero," she said, according to the Associated Press. She told the court that his death left a hole in her heart: he never walked her down the aisle and never met her children. She also said that the man who had stalked her had been a police officer, someone sworn to protect people.
After the Snelling killing, Visalia police increased their efforts to trap the burglar, staking out places where he had recently been seen. On the night of December 10, 1975, Detective William McGowen was waiting in the garage of a house in the 1500 block of West Kaweah, where there had been recent prowling, when he saw a man walking along the side of the garage.
The prosecution's statement of facts gives the sequence. McGowen came up behind the man with a flashlight, drew his gun and identified himself as a police officer. The man ran through the yard, McGowen fired a warning shot into the ground, and the man stopped at a fence and said he was giving up. As McGowen moved in to detain him, the man drew a revolver and fired at the detective, hitting his flashlight. The man escaped. McGowen was cut in the face by the broken glass. He helped make a composite sketch of the suspect, and The Sun-Gazette noted that it was the first time anyone had seen the burglar without a mask. The Visalia break-ins stopped after that night, Tulare County District Attorney Tim Ward said in 2018.
DeAngelo was not charged with this shooting. Under the 2020 plea agreement he admitted it as an uncharged attempted murder of a police officer, the only uncharged Tulare County crime on the list.
DeAngelo left the Exeter police in 1976. The Sun-Gazette, citing local records, dated his departure to April 1976. He joined the police department in Auburn, a foothill town in Placer County east of Sacramento, and served there for about three years. He was photographed in uniform at the Auburn department's "Fuzz Ball" in June 1979.
The attacks that made the case famous began in the summer of 1976 in the eastern suburbs of Sacramento County: Rancho Cordova, Carmichael, Citrus Heights, Fair Oaks, Orangevale and parts of Sacramento itself. Investigators called the attacker the East Area Rapist. The FBI later counted 24 sexual assaults and two killings in the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department's area alone, and about 45 rapes overall between 1976 and 1986. Victims ranged in age from 13 to 41. They included women at home alone, women with their children, and, increasingly, couples.
The prosecution's statement of facts for the charged kidnapping counts describes the pattern in plain terms. He came at night, woke his victims with a flashlight, threatened them with a gun or knife, and tied them with shoelaces or cord. When a couple was at home, he bound both, put the man in one room and took the woman to another. He demanded money and took cash, rings and other small belongings. Courthouse News Service, reporting from the plea hearing, described how prosecutors told the court that he stacked dishes on the bound man's back and threatened to harm everyone in the house if he heard them move. Burglaries and prowling in a neighborhood often came before a cluster of attacks there, the FBI said.
The first count in the charged kidnapping series is from September 4, 1976, in Carmichael, where a woman doing laundry outside her parents' home was tied up and forced inside at knifepoint; he took her car and purse and told her he only wanted the car to get to Bakersfield. Through 1977 the charged counts follow him across Orangevale, Carmichael, Citrus Heights and Sacramento, with couples bound and robbed of money, wedding rings and other property. In the list of uncharged crimes he admitted, the Sacramento County incidents run from June 18, 1976, in Rancho Cordova, to January 28, 1978, in Carmichael. Most of them involve rape and false imprisonment.
Fear spread through the east county. In 2018 the Sacramento district attorney, Anne Marie Schubert, who grew up in the Arden-Arcade area near where the attacker prowled, recalled that her parents were not gun people but her father bought a firearm, and her mother slept with an ice pick under her pillow. "It wasn't a matter of if he was coming, it was when," she said. She told reporters that the crimes ended a gentler time in the suburbs, when children rode bicycles to school and people left their doors unlocked.
Brian Maggiore was 21, an Air Force sergeant stationed at Mather Air Force Base. His wife, Katie, was 20. They were newlyweds. On the evening of February 2, 1978, they were walking their dog near La Alegria Drive in Rancho Cordova when a man chased them into a neighbor's yard. He shot Brian, and then shot Katie as she tried to get away through a locked gate.
Witnesses saw a masked man with a gun running from the scene. Deputies found pre-tied shoelaces near Brian's body, knotted in the same way as cords left at East Area Rapist attacks, according to the prosecution's statement of facts. Their killings were not solved until 2018.
Katie's brother, Ken Smith, addressed DeAngelo at the 2020 sentencing hearing. "You no longer live in the shadows, we all know who you are," he said. He told DeAngelo that he was now the prey and would spend his time in prison looking over his shoulder.
From late 1977 the attacks moved beyond Sacramento County. The uncharged crimes DeAngelo admitted include attacks in Stockton in September 1977 and March 1978; in Modesto in June 1978; in Davis in June and July 1978; in San Jose in late 1978; in Fremont in April 1979; and in Danville and Walnut Creek, in Contra Costa County, from December 1978 to June 1979. Most involved rape, robbery and false imprisonment of couples.
Contra Costa County also brought four of the charged kidnapping counts: two in Concord in October 1978, one in San Ramon on October 28, 1978, and one in Danville on June 11, 1979. In the Concord cases the intruder wore a mask with cut-out eyes and mouth, and in one he wore brown leather gloves. The San Ramon and Danville cases had DNA. In May 2018, after the arrest, the California Department of Justice notified prosecutors that the profile from those scenes matched DeAngelo.
Paul Holes, a Contra Costa County investigator who hunted the attacker for more than 20 years, later pushed for the genealogy search that found DeAngelo.
In July 1979 DeAngelo was arrested for shoplifting a hammer and a can of dog repellent from a Pay 'n Save drugstore in Citrus Heights. The Auburn department fired him that year. At the 2020 plea hearing, Deputy District Attorney Thien Ho told the court that when store employees detained him in 1979, DeAngelo faked a heart attack and pretended to be feeble and incoherent, a performance Ho compared to the way DeAngelo behaved after his arrest in 2018. The reports do not say how the shoplifting charge was resolved.
The last uncharged attack DeAngelo admitted in Northern California was in Walnut Creek on June 25, 1979. By October 1979 the attacks had moved to the Southern California coast.
In Southern California the crimes became killings. Detectives there called the unknown attacker the Original Night Stalker. By October 1979, the FBI said in 2016, the crimes had moved to the coast, beginning in Goleta, near Santa Barbara, and running through Ventura, the Laguna Niguel area and Irvine. The Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department counted four homicides and two attempted homicides in its area.
In the coastal murders the pattern was the same each time: he entered a house at night, tied up the people inside, raped the woman when a woman was present, and killed everyone he had tied up. Investigators in different counties worked the cases separately, and for years nothing tied them together.
Robert Offerman, 44, and Debra Alexandria Manning, 35, were staying at his condominium in Goleta on the night of December 30, 1979. Manning was a doctor; two of her closest friends, Natasha Holliday and Roseanne Howard, wrote to the court in 2020 remembering her as "beautiful and brilliant."
According to the prosecution's statement of facts, the intruder came in through a rear sliding door and tied both of them with white nylon cord. Offerman broke free and got to his feet before he was shot several times. Manning was shot as well. Similar cord was found at nearby condominiums. A camera and a medical bag were taken. ABC News, reporting the plea hearing, said prosecutors told the court that the killer had eaten leftovers from the refrigerator afterward.
Lyman Smith was 43, a lawyer who had worked as a prosecutor in Ventura County. His wife, Charlene, was 33 according to the Associated Press, or 34 according to the prosecution's statement of facts. They were killed in their Ventura home on or about March 13, 1980.
The house had been ransacked, and jewelry was taken. Both were tied with drapery cord and killed with a log of firewood, which was left on the bed. Lyman's 12-year-old son found them; the court record dates the killings to between March 13 and March 16, 1980. Speaking in 2018, Ventura County District Attorney Gregory Totten said the killings had "struck terror in the hearts of Ventura residents."
The Smith case would matter more than any other in the end. The Ventura County medical examiner's office had kept a duplicate of the sexual assault evidence kit from Charlene Smith's autopsy in a freezer. Thirty-seven years later, the DNA profile from that kit became the starting point of the genealogy search.
Lyman Smith's daughter, Jennifer Carole, spoke at the sentencing. She described DeAngelo's "legacy of sadism, cruelty, moral and physical depravity," and said the plea deal did not amount to justice, though she wanted to focus on the good that had come since. United Press International reported that she told the court she had herself been treated as a suspect for two days after the killings and had lived with the shame for decades.
Keith Harrington was 24, a fourth-year medical student. Patrice Harrington was a pediatric trauma nurse; the Associated Press gives her age as 27 and the prosecution's statement of facts as 28. They had been married three months and were living in a house in a gated community in Dana Point, in southern Orange County.
On the night of August 19, 1980, the intruder came into the house, tied them both and killed them with blunt force. Keith's father found them on August 21. A DNA profile from the scene was later confirmed as DeAngelo's, with a match the prosecution described as "more rare than 1 in 1 trillion."
On the day the arrest was announced, Keith's brother Bruce Harrington spoke to other survivors: "To the victims, sleep better tonight, he isn't coming through the window." At the sentencing hearing another brother, Ron Harrington, told the court that if the crimes had happened in the age of DNA databases, DNA might have stopped the attacker before he moved on to murder.
Manuela Witthuhn was 28 and lived in Irvine. Her husband was in the hospital on the night of February 5, 1981, and she was alone in the house. The intruder tied her, raped her and killed her with blunt force. He took jewelry, a lamp and a tape from the telephone answering machine. ABC News reported that her mother found her. A partial DNA profile from the evidence was matched to DeAngelo and confirmed with a cheek swab taken from him in 2020.
Cheri Domingo was 35 and was house-sitting at a home in Goleta in July 1981. Her friend Greg Sanchez, 27, was with her on the night of July 27. The intruder took a screen off an unlocked bathroom window and climbed in. He shot Sanchez and then beat him to death. He tied Domingo and killed her. Semen on a blanket covering her was later matched to DeAngelo's DNA.
Domingo's daughter, Debbi Domingo McMullan, was 15 when her mother was killed. At the sentencing she called herself back then "a fragile teenager whose world had just been turned upside down," and recalled seeing her mother and Greg dancing in their living room for the last time. "Today the devil loses and justice wins," she said. United Press International reported that she told the court she fell into years of undiagnosed depression after her mother's death. A relative of Greg Sanchez, who did not give his name, told DeAngelo that all their lives had been changed and that he had tormented the families for 39 years.
After the Goleta killings of July 1981 the FBI found no linked crime for about five years. Then, on the night of May 4, 1986, Janelle Cruz, 18, was alone in her family's home in Irvine while her family was away on vacation. The intruder came into the house, tied her, raped her and killed her with blunt force. A pipe wrench belonging to the family had recently gone missing, and the autopsy surgeon said the weapon had been something like a hammer. She was the youngest person he killed and the last known victim.
Her sister, Michelle Cruz, told the court in 2020 that she had cried for hours after learning of the arrest. "I hope he rots," she said.
By the time of the Cruz killing, DeAngelo was living in Citrus Heights, in the same part of Sacramento County where the East Area Rapist attacks had begun. The Sacramento Bee reported that by 1986 he had been living for three years in a ranch-style house in Citrus Heights, and he lived for at least two decades in the house where he was later arrested. KTVU reported that at some point he worked for Sierra Crane and Hoist in Newcastle. From the early 1990s he worked at a Save Mart supermarket distribution center, where he stayed for 27 years. He retired the year before his arrest. A former co-worker called him "a regular joe" who never smiled.
Neighbors described a meticulous man with a perfectly painted house and a carefully kept lawn, and also a man with a temper. One neighbor said he heard a stream of profanity when DeAngelo worked on his car. Another said that in 1994 DeAngelo left a voicemail threatening to "deliver a load of death" over a barking dog. A third said neighbors had nicknamed him "Freak" for his outbursts, often over lost keys, but that he had calmed down in recent years. By 2018 one of his daughters and a granddaughter were living with him. NPR, citing the Los Angeles Times, reported that his recent record showed nothing major.
For years the cases sat in separate files in separate counties. DNA connected them gradually. According to the prosecution's statement of facts, Orange County crime laboratory comparisons in 1996, 1998 and 2001 linked the Orange County murders, the Ventura murders and the Contra Costa attacks to a single man. The East Area Rapist of the north and the Original Night Stalker of the south were the same offender. A California Department of Justice database upload in 2011 added the Santa Barbara murders. The profile matched no one in the state or national offender databases, because the man who left it had never been required to give a sample.
On June 15, 2016, the 40th anniversary year of the first Sacramento attacks, the FBI's Sacramento field office announced a 50,000-dollar reward and a national publicity campaign with the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department, the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office and the Contra Costa Sheriff's Department. The FBI said the attacker was a white man about 5 feet 10 inches tall, with blond or light brown hair and an athletic build, probably between 60 and 75 years old by then. He might have had military or law enforcement training, might have had no violent history, and, the FBI warned, people who knew him might not believe him capable of such crimes. That year Schubert also convened a task force of the agencies involved.
The case had a second public champion. Michelle McNamara, a writer, spent years researching it and wrote about her search. She died suddenly in April 2016. Her colleagues completed her book, I'll Be Gone in the Dark, and her husband, the actor and comedian Patton Oswalt, wrote its afterword. It was published in February 2018, two months before the arrest, reached the top of the New York Times best-seller list and was credited by ABC News with renewing wide interest in the case.
In the fall of 2017, Paul Holes, by then the assistant chief investigator for the Contra Costa County district attorney, asked Schubert's office to help him try a new tool: investigative genetic genealogy. The idea was to compare crime scene DNA not with criminal databases but with the DNA of ordinary people who had sent their samples to consumer testing companies and shared the results online to find relatives.
Government laboratories produce a type of DNA profile that is useful for matching against criminal databases but not for family research. The genealogy sites use a different kind of data. A 2026 account in the University of Texas School of Law's magazine, based on interviews with members of the team, describes how the problem was solved. Dr. Peter Speth, the former Ventura County medical examiner, had kept a duplicate of the 1980 Charlene Smith rape kit in a freezer for 37 years. FamilyTreeDNA, a commercial testing company whose founder agreed to help, produced a genealogy-style data file from that evidence. In January 2018, according to the prosecution's statement of facts, a profile from the Charlene Smith evidence was uploaded to a public genealogy database. The Texas account says the file went to both FamilyTreeDNA and GEDmatch, a free site where users could compare their results.
The search did not find the killer himself. It found people who shared stretches of DNA with him, more than 1,000 "genetic cousins" according to KTVU. Barbara Rae-Venter, a retired patent attorney who had taken up genealogy to help adoptees find their birth families, worked with the team to build family trees from those matches. The team identified the great-grandparents shared by the killer and a second cousin, then built the family forward from that couple, confirming each name with birth and death certificates, marriage licenses and census records. The Texas account names the other members of the six-person team as Holes, the FBI attorney Steve Kramer and three investigators from the FBI and the Sacramento district attorney's office.
The trees narrowed thousands of relatives to six men who were the right age and had lived near the crimes. A DNA analysis suggested the killer had blue eyes. Records showed that only one of the six did. "We found a person that was the right age and lived in this area, and that was DeAngelo," said Steve Grippi, the assistant chief of the Sacramento district attorney's office. The prosecution's statement of facts records that on March 18, 2018, an investigative assistant reported, "We just found another guy." The search took 63 days, according to the Texas account, which quotes Kramer's comparison: decades of conventional work involving hundreds of detectives and agents and thousands of people under surveillance, against a genealogy search that cost 217 dollars in test kits and a website subscription.
A family tree was a lead, not proof. Investigators needed DeAngelo's own DNA without alerting him. On April 18, 2018, they watched him shopping at a Hobby Lobby store in Roseville and swabbed the driver's side door handle of the car he had been driving, according to search warrant records released later that year and reported by the Los Angeles Times. The door handle sample also held DNA from two other people, which limited its value, the records showed.
On April 23, 2018, detectives collected items from the garbage can DeAngelo had put at the curb outside his house the evening before. A tissue from the trash matched the profile from the Contra Costa attacks and the Southern California murders. "You leave your DNA in a place that is a public domain," Schubert said, defending the method. A Sacramento Superior Court judge, Michael Sweet, unsealed redacted versions of the arrest and search warrants on June 1, 2018, after the Associated Press and other news organizations went to court for them.
Sheriff's deputies watched DeAngelo's house for several days. On April 24, 2018, officers in several vehicles, some of them armored, arrested him in his driveway without a struggle. The Washington Post reported that he told deputies he had a roast in the oven. He was booked into the Sacramento County jail.
Schubert and Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones announced the arrest the next day. "We knew we were looking for a needle in a haystack, but we also knew that needle was there," Schubert said. Ray Biondi, who had led the sheriff's homicide bureau during the Sacramento attacks, said DeAngelo had been "totally off the radar till just a week ago." Monica Miller, who ran the Sacramento FBI office from 2013 to 2017, said people in the area had come to think of the attacker as a phantom.
The news that the suspect had been a police officer through the first years of the crimes raised questions about how he had escaped notice. In Visalia, the local historian and former police officer Terry Ommen called DeAngelo's work history next door in Exeter "as close to a smoking gun as you can get."
DeAngelo was questioned after his arrest. Prosecutors later described what he said when he was left alone in the interview room. He spoke to himself about someone he called Jerry. "I did all that," he said, and "I pushed Jerry out and had a happy life." He also said, "He made me," and, "I've destroyed all their lives." The prosecution put these statements into the court record as part of the factual basis for the plea.
The first charges, filed within days of the arrest, were murder counts for the Maggiore killings in Sacramento County and the Smith killings in Ventura County, followed by four counts in Orange County for the Harringtons, Manuela Witthuhn and Janelle Cruz. On August 13, 2018, Tulare County District Attorney Tim Ward announced a first-degree murder charge in the killing of Claude Snelling. Ward said that case had been built mainly on traditional police work rather than DNA: after the arrest, detectives tracked down witnesses from 1975, and Beth Snelling and five other witnesses picked DeAngelo out of photo lineups in 2018. "Those wounds never healed," Ward said.
On August 20, 2018, the elected district attorneys of six counties, Contra Costa, Orange, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Tulare and Ventura, signed a first amended felony complaint that put all the charges into one case in Sacramento County Superior Court, People v. DeAngelo, No. 18FE008017. It charged 13 counts of murder and 13 counts of kidnapping to commit robbery. The Snelling killing was count 1. The 12 later killings carried the special circumstance of multiple murder, and several carried special circumstances of murder in the course of rape, burglary or robbery.
The rapes were not charged because the statute of limitations had run on them, Courthouse News Service reported. The 13 kidnapping counts came instead from Sacramento and Contra Costa attacks in which, according to the prosecution's statement of facts, the victims were bound, moved and robbed.
On April 10, 2019, the prosecution filed notice that it would seek the death penalty. In March 2020 prosecutors asked the court to compel DeAngelo to give a cheek swab, and a sample taken on March 12, 2020, confirmed the earlier DNA matches.
In court DeAngelo appeared weak. He used a wheelchair, moved slowly and spoke in a faint voice. Prosecutors argued that this was an act. At the plea hearing, Thien Ho said detectives had seen him working hard in his yard and riding a motorcycle shortly before his arrest, and that in the 2018 interview room he had "feigned feeble incoherence," as he had during the 1979 shoplifting stop. In their sentencing memorandum the prosecutors wrote that at the plea his "slow gait," the position of his hands and the tilt of his head "presented an appearance of feebleness," while jail video showed "an individual who is healthy and physically active." The Sacramento district attorney's office released the jail video, which showed him moving easily and exercising in his cell.
The case was enormous. Prosecutors said the discovery ran to more than 1.3 million pages and that a trial could take up to 10 years. California had a moratorium on executions, the coronavirus pandemic had disrupted the courts, and the defendant, the survivors and many witnesses were old. After consulting victims and families, the six district attorneys accepted a plea: life in prison without parole in return for guilty pleas to all 26 counts and admissions of the uncharged crimes.
The hearing was held on June 29, 2020, before Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman, in a ballroom at California State University, Sacramento, chosen so that victims, families and reporters could sit far enough apart. DeAngelo, 74, came in wearing an orange jumpsuit and a plastic face shield. Prosecutors from the different counties described each crime in turn. Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer presented the Orange County murders himself. Santa Barbara County Chief Deputy District Attorney Kelly Duncan described the Goleta cases. Deputy District Attorney Amy Holliday of Sacramento told the court that the death penalty was off the table and that he would serve life without parole.
To each count DeAngelo answered "guilty," and to each uncharged crime, "I admit," in a weak, strained voice.
Beyond the 26 charged counts, DeAngelo admitted 161 uncharged crimes against 61 victims, the six district attorneys said in a joint statement that day. The uncharged crimes took place in Alameda, Sacramento, San Joaquin, Santa Clara, Stanislaus, Tulare and Yolo counties, and included attempted murder, kidnapping to commit robbery, rape, robbery, first-degree burglary and false imprisonment. Counting both charged and uncharged crimes, the prosecution's sentencing memorandum put the total at 87 victims on 53 separate occasions in 11 counties.
These admissions are not convictions. They are statements he made under the plea agreement, set out in a separate exhibit of factual bases, and the court did not convict him of those crimes. Courthouse News Service reported that investigators believe he committed 62 rapes in all. The FBI's 2016 count was about 45. The difference reflects what each figure counts and when it was made.
The victims' hearings ran for three days in the same ballroom, in the week of August 17, 2020. Survivors, their husbands and children, and relatives of the murdered spoke with no limit on time or content. A mask covered all of his face except his eyes, and he sat without visible response. The Santa Barbara Independent reported that his response over the first two days had been to stare at the wall in front of him.
Many of the women who had survived his attacks in the 1970s spoke about losing their sense of self and how long it took to regain it, according to the Independent. Some asked the judge to send him to the toughest prison in the state. One survivor's husband, who had been tied up during the attack, said he wanted DeAngelo to suffer for the rest of his life. The Associated Press reported that a former fiancée of DeAngelo's, whose engagement to him had ended before the crimes began, came to court with one of the survivors.
The relatives of the murdered spoke on August 20. Elizabeth Hupp spoke for her father. Ken Smith spoke for his sister Katie Maggiore. Jennifer Carole spoke for her father, Lyman Smith. Debbi Domingo McMullan spoke for her mother. Ron Harrington spoke for his brother Keith, and Michelle Cruz for her sister Janelle. "I am so thankful that he will at least spend the rest of his miserable life in prison," Hupp said. "Joe spending the rest of his life in prison is not justice," Carole said.
On August 21, 2020, before he was sentenced, DeAngelo rose from his wheelchair and took off his mask. "I've listened to all your statements, each one of them, and I'm truly sorry to everyone I've hurt," he said, according to ABC News. It was the only statement he made to the victims.
Judge Bowman then imposed the agreed sentence. The joint statement of the six district attorneys describes it as 11 consecutive terms of life without parole for the 13 murder counts, a further life term for the 13 kidnapping counts running consecutive to the murder terms, and an 8-year term for weapon enhancements, also consecutive. The prosecution's sentencing calculation shows how the counts fit together. The 12 murders committed from 1978 onward carried life without parole, with the two Maggiore counts running together; the Snelling count, a 1975 killing, carried life with the possibility of parole and ran concurrently. The kidnapping counts carried life terms with the possibility of parole, all but one of them concurrent. The Associated Press summarized the result as 11 consecutive life terms without parole, 15 life terms with the possibility of parole and eight years. The Associated Press wrote that he will die in prison.
The prosecution also asked the court to require lifetime registration as a sex offender and a lifetime ban on owning firearms. "I honestly believe that this person, not even a person, this beast, deserved the ultimate punishment of death," Spitzer said. Schubert called the day one of reckoning and told the survivors, "The greatest revenge is to live your lives." Ventura County District Attorney Greg Totten called the case groundbreaking and addressed future offenders directly: "We will find you."
After sentencing DeAngelo went to the reception center at North Kern State Prison. On January 26, 2021, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation moved him to the Protective Housing Unit at California State Prison, Corcoran, ABC30 in Fresno reported. The department said the unit holds inmates whose safety would be at risk in general population housing, including those whose cases have drawn intense public interest.
In February 2021 he was reported held at Corcoran, where he had been transferred in January 2021. No death, release or new court proceeding had been reported by October 20, 2026. His sentence is life without the possibility of parole.
DeAngelo's arrest was the first public arrest made through genetic genealogy, and the method spread quickly. ABC News reported in June 2020 that more than 150 other suspects had been identified through genetic genealogy since his arrest. Rae-Venter told KTVU in 2018 that she had already been approached about more than 50 cold cases, including killings and unidentified remains.
The case also raised questions about privacy. People who had uploaded their DNA to find relatives had not agreed to help police search for theirs. The U.S. Department of Justice issued an interim policy on forensic genetic genealogy, effective November 1, 2019, that limits its use by federal agencies to violent crimes, chiefly homicides and sexual offenses, and to identifying the remains of suspected homicide victims. Under the policy a genetic association is a lead only: no arrest may rest on it alone, and any suspect must be confirmed through standard DNA testing. In 2021 Maryland and Montana passed laws restricting police use of consumer DNA databases. Maryland's law requires a judge's approval and limits the method to serious crimes; Montana's requires a warrant unless users have waived their privacy rights.
Proven by final judgment, on his guilty pleas: the murders of Claude Snelling, Brian and Katie Maggiore, Robert Offerman, Debra Manning, Lyman and Charlene Smith, Keith and Patrice Harrington, Manuela Witthuhn, Cheri Domingo, Greg Sanchez and Janelle Cruz, and 13 kidnappings to commit robbery in Sacramento and Contra Costa counties.
Admitted but never charged or tried: the 1975 shooting at Detective William McGowen in Visalia, and the uncharged rapes, robberies, burglaries, kidnappings and false imprisonments listed in the prosecution's exhibit of uncharged crimes. He admitted these under the plea agreement; he was not convicted of them.
Attributed but neither charged nor admitted: the roughly 100 Visalia Ransacker burglaries of 1974 and 1975. Visalia police attribute them to him, but no DNA was collected and the burglaries were not among the crimes he admitted under the plea agreement.
Unknown: whether he committed crimes before 1975 or after 1986. Reporters asked in 2018 why the known attacks stopped after the Cruz killing, and the court records do not answer it.
Accounts differ on the total number of rapes (about 45 in the FBI's 2016 count; 62 in investigators' estimate reported by Courthouse News; "nearly 50" in the Santa Barbara Independent); the ages of Charlene Smith (33 or 34) and Patrice Harrington (27 or 28); the description of the sentence (the district attorneys' wording against the Associated Press's "15 life terms with the possibility of parole"); and the date of the trash collection (April 23, 2018, in the prosecution's statement of facts; two days after April 18 in the Los Angeles Times report of the warrants).
November 8, 1945: Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. is born in Bath, New York.
1964: graduates from Folsom High School, Sacramento County.
Late 1960s: serves in the Navy aboard the USS Canberra.
May 18, 1973: joins the Exeter police department in Tulare County.
Fall 1973: marries Sharon Marie Huddle.
April 1974 to December 1975: about 100 burglaries in Visalia attributed to the Ransacker.
September 11, 1975: Claude Snelling is shot and killed in Visalia while protecting his daughter.
December 10, 1975: the Ransacker fires at Detective William McGowen and escapes.
1976: DeAngelo joins the Auburn police department.
June 18, 1976: first of the admitted East Area Rapist attacks, in Rancho Cordova.
September 4, 1976: first charged kidnapping count, in Carmichael.
February 2, 1978: Brian and Katie Maggiore are shot and killed in Rancho Cordova.
September 1977 to June 1979: attacks in Stockton, Modesto, Davis, San Jose, Fremont, Concord, San Ramon, Danville and Walnut Creek.
July 1979: arrested for shoplifting a hammer and dog repellent; fired from the Auburn police later that year.
June 25, 1979: last admitted Northern California attack, in Walnut Creek.
December 30, 1979: Robert Offerman and Debra Manning are killed in Goleta.
March 13, 1980: Lyman and Charlene Smith are killed in Ventura.
August 19, 1980: Keith and Patrice Harrington are killed in Dana Point.
February 5, 1981: Manuela Witthuhn is killed in Irvine.
July 27, 1981: Cheri Domingo and Greg Sanchez are killed in Goleta.
May 4, 1986: Janelle Cruz is killed in Irvine; she is the last known victim.
Early 1990s until the year before his arrest: works at a Save Mart distribution center.
1996 to 2001: DNA comparisons link the Orange County, Ventura and Contra Costa cases.
2011: a state database upload links the Santa Barbara murders.
April 2016: Michelle McNamara dies.
June 15, 2016: the FBI announces a 50,000-dollar reward and national campaign.
Fall 2017: Paul Holes asks the Sacramento district attorney's office to help with a genetic genealogy search.
January 2018: a profile from the Charlene Smith evidence is uploaded to a genealogy database.
February 2018: I'll Be Gone in the Dark is published.
April 18, 2018: investigators swab the door handle of the car he was driving at a Roseville Hobby Lobby.
April 23, 2018: a tissue from his curbside trash matches the crime scene profile.
April 24, 2018: arrested at his home in Citrus Heights.
June 1, 2018: redacted warrants unsealed.
August 13, 2018: Tulare County charges him with Claude Snelling's murder.
August 20, 2018: six district attorneys sign the consolidated amended complaint in Sacramento.
April 10, 2019: prosecution files notice of intent to seek the death penalty.
November 1, 2019: the Justice Department's interim policy on genetic genealogy takes effect.
June 29, 2020: pleads guilty to 13 murders and 13 kidnappings and admits 161 uncharged crimes.
August 2020: three days of victim statements in Sacramento.
August 21, 2020: sentenced to 11 consecutive terms of life without parole, a further life term and 8 years.
January 26, 2021: moved to the Protective Housing Unit at California State Prison, Corcoran.
October 20, 2026: no later report of death, release or new proceedings found.