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Three Names, One Killer: The Crimes That Shook California
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Joseph James DeAngelo operated as the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist, and the Original Night Stalker — three identities, six counties, forty years of silence. This chapter traces the full arc of crimes that made him the most prolific unidentified serial offender in American history.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before the arrest, Joseph James DeAngelo was a retired man in a quiet suburb. He mowed his lawn.
A small city in California's Central Valley. The kind of place where people left windows cracked at night, where neighbors knew each other's schedules.
In September of nineteen seventy-five, a College of the Sequoias professor named Claude Snelling heard an intruder in his home. He went to investigate.
By nineteen seventy-six, DeAngelo was in Sacramento and Contra Costa counties, and the crimes had escalated far beyond burglary. He was now attacking women in their homes at night.
Here's what the map looked like from the outside. Six separate California counties, each with their own district attorney's office, each running their own investigations.
For many people, the case became known through a book published in February of twenty eighteen. "I'll Be Gone in the Dark." It was written by Michelle McNamara, a true crime writer who had become consumed by the Original Night Stalker case and had coined the name "Golden State Killer" while working on the manuscript. McNamara died in April of twenty sixteen, before she finished the book.
By twenty eighteen, DNA from the crime scenes had existed in law enforcement databases for years. The problem was that the FBI's CODIS system, the primary forensic DNA database, only contained profiles of people who had already been arrested or convicted of certain crimes.
Investigators worked the family trees backward and forward. They identified candidates.
The guilty plea came in June of twenty twenty. Because of the pandemic, it was held in a Sacramento courthouse parking lot.
The case didn't end with the sentence. In some ways, that's when its broader impact began.
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