In the 1970’s and 80’s, over one hundred families in California had their homes ransacked
by the same man.
Many of them woke up in the middle of the night to a flashlight blinding their eyes.
A man was standing over their bed, wearing a black ski mask.
He held knives to throats, and guns to heads, demanding that they do what he said, if they
wanted to live.
Within a matter of hours, he ruined and ended lives, slipping small mementos in his pocket
as he ran into the darkness.
Fifty one women were raped in their own beds- sometimes while their husbands and children
watched.
He murdered 12 people that we know of, but the kill count may be higher.
He traveled all throughout California, targeting homes wherever he went.
He changed his style of killing and left misleading clues to throw off the police.
Unlike most serial killers, there was no connection between the victims, and virtually no way
of predicting where he would strike next.
The survivors tried to move on with their lives, but many of them received phone calls
years after the attacks, hearing a threatening whisper on the other line- “Remember when
we played?”
In 1986, the killings mysteriously stopped, and the trail ran cold.
For decades, this serial killer was on the loose.
The police called him the “East Area Rapist”, or “The EAR” for short.
He has also being called “The Original Night Stalker”.
For years, The true identity of the EAR was an unsolved mystery that no one in California
could forget.
For 44 years straight, the Sacramento County Police Department received phone calls from
people who believed they had information about the EAR, and yet none of those suspects ever
panned out.
A freelance writer named Michelle McNamara began digging into this cold case.
In 2006, she began a blog and podcast called True Crime Diary, and shared clues with a
community of online websleuths who were equally as passionate about getting the EAR behind
bars.
In 2013, she wrote an article about the East Area Rapist in Los Angeles Magazine, called
“In The Footsteps of a Killer”.
She gave this murderer a more fitting nickname, “The Golden State Killer”.
She began writing a book called I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, where she interviewed detectives
and compiled information across various jurisdictions that had never been pieced together before.
She met an investigator from the Contra Costa County Police Department named Paul Holes,
and together, they shared theories and information on how to potentially catch the killer.
In 2016, Michelle McNamara suddenly passed away in her sleep.
Before she died, she told her husband that the one thing she wanted was for the Golden
State Killer to get caught.
It didn’t matter if she was the one to do it.
After taking time to grieve, her husband, Patton Oswalt, hired help to posthumously
publish her book.
It was finished in February of 2018.
One of the many leads Paul Holes discussed with McNamara before she died was the potential
of DNA evidence found on new genealogy websites like 23andMe.
Holes took the DNA from old rape kits and ran it through an online Genealogy database,
and they got a match to a first cousin.
Together with a task force, they were able to gather enough evidence to find the man
to match the DNA.
In April of 2018, the police raided the home of Joseph James DeAngelo.
Early Life While we do not know the intimate details
about his private life, it would seem that Joseph James DeAngelo had a fairly normal
childhood.
He was born in 1945 in Bath, New York.
His father, also named Joseph DeAngelo, was a celebrated pilot in the Air Force during
World War II.
His mother, Kathleen DeGroat, was a waitress at Denny’s.
His parents would later divorce.
Kathleen married her second husband, and they moved to California.
There was a piece of paper found at one of the crime scenes that may give some insight
into his childhood.
The paper has been named “the homework evidence”, and it reads like a journal entry.
“Mad is the word.
The word that reminds me of the 6th grade.
I hated that year.”
DeAngelo goes on to write about his teacher who punished him for talking in class by forcing
him to write the same sentence 50 to 150 times as a homework assignment.
“I never hated anyone as much as I hated him.”
He describes spending hours on this homework, and wrote, “It wasn’t fair to make me
suffer like that.
I cried because I was ashamed….I will be ashamed of my sixth grade year forever.”
Some people believe that the story of the sixth grade may have been a lie.
It could have been a red herring to confuse the police about his motives for a crime.
Or, he truly does perceive himself as a victim, and he sees the sixth grade as the turning
point in his life when he began to harbor deep hatred for people.
He attended Folsom High School in Sacramento, and then to California State University in
Sacramento to earn a degree in Criminal Justice.
He joined the navy after graduation, and served in the Vietnam War.
In the late 60’s, he was engaged to a young woman named Bonnie Colwell who worked as a
lab assistant at Sierra College.
Bonnie called off the engagement, and it broke DeAngelo’s heart.
We may never know what happened behind closed doors, but according to her brother, she had
“plenty of good reasons” for dumping him.
Just like the shame and anger he harbored towards his sixth grade teacher, he never
let go of this betrayal.
Years later, victims would hear him sobbing, “I hate you Bonnie.
I hate you Bonnie,” over and over again.
In 1973, Joseph James DeAngelo married a woman named Sharon Marie Huddle, and they would
go on to have three daughters together.
In 1974, he graduated from the police academy and became an officer in Visalia, California.
The very next year, in 1975, a police officer was shot by a criminal known for years as
the Visalia Ransacker, who has now also been identified as Joseph James DeAngelo.
In 1976, he transferred to the Auburn Police Department.
He was caught stealing a can of dog repellant and a hammer from a grocery store.
These items clearly should have been a red flag that he was up to more than shoplifting,
but the police fired him, without looking into it any further.
After being fired from his job, DeAngelo threatened to kill the police chief, Nick Willick.
A few days after being threatened, the police chief’s daughter ran into his room in the
middle of the night, saying that she saw a man in a mask outside shining a flashlight
into her bedroom.
When Chief Willick went outside to check, he saw shoe impressions at his daughter’s
window.
The Murders The first recorded victim was a ransacking
in Visalia, California in 1974, after DeAngelo joined the police force.
In the beginning, he was sloppy, and didn’t wear a mask.
Witnesses were able to describe his face to the police.
He was 29 years old at the time, but he looked young for his age, and many people believed
the ransacker was in his teens to early 20’s.
He would not begin to kill people until he was in his 30’s.
According to crime writer Billy Jensen, he has spoken to victims who believed Joseph
James DeAngelo attempted to murder them long before 1974, and as the police uncover new
evidence about him, it may reveal a much darker youth.
Back in the 70’s and 80’s, various police jurisdictions did not communicate with one
another when it came to their crimes.
DeAngelo would have known this fact first-hand, and he took advantage of that.
After committing a few crimes in one county, he would move on to the next one.
After nearly being caught as a ransacker, he went to great lengths to prevent being
seen, and began wearing a black ski mask.
He also planned out strategies for each of his crimes.
Police sketches and physical descriptions were released that looked almost identical
to his true face, so he lost a huge amount of weight in order to change his appearance.
He targeted one-story homes with similar layouts, which made it was easier for him to tell how
many people were in the house.
He drove around neighborhoods, and sketched out maps to help find his way at night.
After breaking into someone’s house, he would search through the victim’s purse,
and look for her driver’s license.
When he approached them in their bedrooms, he would whisper their names, which made them
wonder if he actually knew them in their personal lives.
He would also take notice to their hobbies, and make up a story of where he knew them
from.
Police now know that he chose his victims at random, and he was purposely leaving false
breadcrumbs for them to follow.
For example, one married couple had a boat in their driveway, so he said, “I saw you
at the lake.”
Other times, he would give the victims false information about himself, like, “Don’t
tell the pigs about my van outside.”
He didn’t have a van.
In fact, his transportation of choice was bicycles he would steal from open garages,
and later dump as he ran.
This way, no one could identify his real vehicle and report it to the police.
The fact that he always called police officers “pigs” was also misleading, since he was
a cop himself.
After years of targeting women who were home alone, he rose the stakes higher, and moved
on to couples.
He would come prepared with pre-tied shoelaces, so he could force the husband to lay on his
stomach, and tie his hands.
Then, he put a stack of plates on the man’s back.
If the husband moved, he said, he would hear the crashing plates, and kill the wife immediately.
The husband had to lay there, helpless, while he heard his wife being sexually assaulted.
DeAngelo switched up the weapons he used in each break-in.
Sometimes it was a knife, sometimes it was a gun.
In one case, he even beat someone to death with a log from the fireplace.
The only common thread he could not run away from was his own body.
Each of his rape victims described him as having an extremely small penis.
This would become a detail that investigators took very seriously.
They asked local doctors if they could identify patients with a micro penis, and ruled out
potential suspects if they were too well-endowed.
He was a psychological sadist who got off on instilling fear into the heart of human
beings.
One of the many tricks he used to avoid capture was waiting in the house long after committing
the rape.
One victim in Sacramento laid in her bed after being assaulted for several minutes of silence.
Her young daughter had been laying in bed next to her the entire time.
When the mother asked her daughter if she was okay, the little girl whispered, “Sshh.
Mommy.”
He was still standing in the the bedroom, hiding in the darkness.
As soon as she spoke, he lurched forward and pushed down on the bed next to her head.
He would then leave silently while his victims remained frozen on the bed in fear.
This gave him hours to escape before the police were called.
Months or even years after being raped, DeAngelo would call his victims to taunt them on Christmas
Day, threatening to come back and finish the job.
Many of his surviving victims now have PTSD.
According to Carol Daly, a woman who worked for the Sacramento County Police Department
in the 1970’s, they held a town hall meeting to discuss the East Area Rapist.
People were understandably terrified.
This was years before proper security systems were invented.
Over 6,000 guns were sold within a month.
People were hiring locksmiths to add deadbolts to their doors, and many people bought guard
dogs to keep them safe.
During the town hall meeting to discuss the EAR, a man stood up in the crowd and claim
that he did not believe the EAR was real, because he could not fathom that any man would
allow his wife to be raped while he was home.
A few months later, that same man and his wife became victims.
Officer Carol Daly was shaken to the core.
She knew that whoever the EAR was, he had been at that meeting that night, probably
relishing in the fear her brought to those people.
The Devil was hiding in plain sight.
Later Life Since he could no longer work as police officer,
Joseph DeAngelo became a big rig truck mechanic for a grocery chain called Save Mart.
According to one of his co-workers, DeAngelo was always on his best behavior, and acted
like he was afraid of getting in trouble.
He was never late to work, and never called in sick.
Secretly, he continued his crimes at night, only stopping in the year 1986.
No one knows yet why he chose that year to stop his killing spree, except that it was
the same year his youngest daughter was born.
It’s possible that he reached a point when he simply could no longer continue to live
a double life and keep it a secret from his family.
Or, he continued his crimes under a completely different MO.
At home, he had a reputation for being an angry, violent man.
People in the neighborhood avoided interacting with him, and he never made any friends.
He once left his neighbors a voicemail threatening to kill their entire family.
The father recognized DeAngelo’s voice, and knocked on his door to confront him.
DeAngelo responded that he left that voicemail because their dog was barking too much.
His neighbors would often hear Joseph DeAngelo screaming and cursing at his wife and daughters
so loudly, they could hear him inside the house.
He didn’t seem to care what people thought of him, because he frequently stood in his
front yard screaming at himself.
He would yell, “I’ll kill you”, even though no one was there.
Meanwhile, Sacramento County investigator Paul Holes had been hunting The Golden State
Killer for 24 years.
Holes was getting ready to retire, but he was still obsessed with solving the case.
He was finally able to get an ancestry DNA company to agree to work with him, and uploaded
the DNA from the Golden State Killer into an online database in January of 2018.
Through this technology, he was able to find a third cousin.
Holes took this to a Sacramento County DA, and he assigned a task force to scour this
family tree.
Before this moment, Joseph James DeAngelo had never been one of the potential suspects.
He had succeeded in hiding his crimes for 44 years.
The day before he was supposed to hand in his gun and badge, Paul Holes sat outside
of Joseph James DeAngelo’s house.
At this point, he was so jaded by the number of failed leads over the years, that he didn’t
actually expect DeAngelo to be the one.
Holes wondered if he should just knock on DeAngelo’s door and ask for a DNA sample,
so they could rule him out as a suspect.
But something in hit gut told him to keep driving.
DNA samples take time to process, and if he truly was the Golden State Killer, he would
have too much time to run, or possibly commit suicide.
The police followed DeAngelo in public places, instead.
They retrieved his DNA and fingerprints by wiping his car door, and went through his
trash to find a discarded tissue.
The Sacramento crime lab and task force worked non-stop to connect the dots to prove without
a doubt that he was the Golden State Killer.
The police obtained a search warrant to go into Joseph James DeAngelo’s home and arrest
him.
DeAngelo was shocked.
Police on the scene said they could see it in his eyes that he was calculating a way
to escape, but the officers detained him before he had a chance.
He didn’t try to deny being the Golden State Killer.
He simply said, “There’s a roast in the oven.”
Since then, he has not spoken a word to the police, and refuses to give any interviews,
to avoid incriminating himself.
Since then, he just stares into space when he appears in court.
DeAngelo’s wife, Sharon Huddle, moved away and stopped speaking to him decades ago.
At the time of his arrest, he was living with one of his adult daughters, and his granddaughter.
His wife is a divorce lawyer, and yet she never filed for divorce after being separated
for so many years.
This has lead some people to speculate that he may have threatened her, or that she may
know something about his crimes.
As his wife, she will not be forced to testify against him in a court of law, and this would
save her from being partially responsible for his crimes.
Sharon Huddle released a statement basically asking the press to leave her alone.
“My thoughts and prayers are for the victims and their families.
The press has relentlessly pursued interviews of me.
I will not be giving any interviews for the foreseeable future.
I ask the press to please respect my privacy and that of my children.”
According to neighbors, DeAngelo was very physically fit, as if he was only 50 years
old, instead of 72.
He had a stationary bike in his house, rode a motorcycle, and was walking around without
any issues.
However, when his lawyers rolled him up to the trial, he was sitting in a wheelchair,
pretending to be a feeble old man who didn’t know what was going on.
This was his final attempt of self-preservation, but he wasn’t fooling anyone.
During the motion hearing, DeAngelo was no longer in a wheelchair.
He standing inside of a barred holding cell, next to an armed guard.
He stared at the judge the entire time with a blank expression.
He showed absolutely no emotion or remorse.
It will be years before he goes to trial, but not even his defense lawyer is trying
to deny that he truly is the Golden State Killer.
There is also an ongoing investigation, with information that is being kept from the public.
The police took a lot of his personal belongings from his home into evidence, which included
many of the mementos he stole from his victims.
It may be years before we learn any more details about his life, or what drove him to become
the devil incarnate.
At the very least, DeAngelo is finally behind bars.
Hopefully, the victims, their families can finally
get a good night’s sleep.