The most feared serial predator in modern California history was finally dragged into the light because one prosecutor refused to let an old man in a recliner disappear into anonymity.
How a Police Officer Became California’s Invisible Predator
Joseph James DeAngelo did not look like a horror story when he put on a uniform in the 1970s; he looked like protection. As an officer in Exeter and later Auburn, California, he cruised the same quiet streets where families slept with their windows open, and kids rode bikes until dusk. Behind that badge, according to prosecutors, he was learning the rhythms of neighborhoods, patrol gaps, and exactly how much fear ordinary people feel when they dial 911 and no one comes in time.
Between 1975 and 1986, that knowledge became a weapon. The so-called Visalia Ransacker escalated from prowling and burglaries to the shooting of college professor Claude Snelling, who was killed while defending his daughter.
In Sacramento’s suburbs, the East Area Rapist crept into tract homes, binding husbands and wives, raping women, and vanishing before officers arrived. By 1978, couples were turning up murdered, and by the early 1980s, Southern California beach towns were discovering bludgeoned bodies in what would later be linked to the Original Night Stalker series.
DeAngelo’s alleged double life rested on a simple, chilling premise: he knew how the system worked because he was the system. Prosecutors have suggested that his police training gave him a roadmap to exploit radio response times, evidence procedures, and the complacency of communities that trusted the man with the badge. Then, in 1979, after he was caught shoplifting dog repellent and a hammer, Auburn fired him. The deluge of murders ended in 1986 with the killing of 18‑year‑old Janelle Cruz in Irvine. For the next three decades, the monster vanished. The neighbor remained.
The Long Freeze: When a Terror Becomes a Cold Case
Detectives in different counties once believed they were hunting separate offenders. The Visalia prowler, the East Area Rapist, the Original Night Stalker—each had its own task force, incident boards, and aging binders. Victims received taunting phone calls for years, including some as late as 2001, reminding them that the man who invaded their bedrooms still walked free. DNA technology finally connected the Northern and Southern California murders in 2001, proving that one man had stitched this entire trail of devastation together.
That revelation created a new problem: knowing a single predator existed and proving who he was were two very different things. By 2016, the FBI publicly acknowledged that the killer was probably between 65 and 75 years old and offered a $50,000 reward, a sobering admission that the man who once vaulted fences like a teenager was now likely shuffling through a grocery store aisle.
Detectives and prosecutors, including Sacramento’s Ann Marie Schubert and future DA Thien Ho, faced a brutal clock: if they did not identify him soon, nature would grant him the one mercy he had denied every victim—an unchallenged death.
Why the Prosecutor Refused to Let an Old Man Disappear
When Thien Ho later said of DeAngelo, “He shouldn’t be allowed to hide,” he was not speaking only about the years the killer spent as a faceless composite sketch. He was addressing a broader temptation in American culture to confuse age with innocence.
By the time of his arrest, DeAngelo was a 72‑year‑old grandfather in a quiet Citrus Heights neighborhood, tinkering in his garage, his violent past concealed behind a paunch, a lawn chair, and Social Security checks.
From a conservative, common-sense standpoint, Ho’s position aligns with a basic moral arithmetic: passage of time does not convert murder into a misdemeanor. Prosecutors argued that a man who terrorized at least 50 rape survivors and murdered 13 people forfeited any claim to privacy or gentle treatment simply because he managed to avoid capture. Letting him “hide” behind the veneer of age would reward evasion, not repentance. Justice, in this view, demands that the public see exactly who was living next door—and what he did to his victims’ lives.
The DNA Breakthrough That Kicked Open a Locked Door
The case finally broke in 2018, not with a confession, but with a distant relative uploading their DNA to a public genealogy site. Investigators used genetic genealogy to build family trees backward from partial DNA profiles, narrowing their suspect list until only one man fit the age, geography, and history: former officer Joseph DeAngelo. Undercover teams collected his discarded DNA, matched it to crime-scene samples, and arrested him outside his Citrus Heights home on April 24, 2018.
Critics of this technique have raised serious privacy concerns about law enforcement mining genealogy databases. The facts here, however, show that the method targeted a man already linked by hard DNA evidence to murders and rapes spanning a decade.
From a public-safety perspective rooted in conservative principles of law and order, using lawfully available genetic tools to stop a verified serial predator aligns far more with common sense than allowing unsolved homicides to gather dust for fear of offending theoretical sensibilities about data.
What Justice Looked Like After Forty Years
In June 2020, DeAngelo pled guilty to 13 murders and admitted to dozens of rapes and burglaries, avoiding the death penalty in exchange for a full accounting. Prosecutors read horrific details into the record—husbands forced to listen as their wives were assaulted, families waking to blinding flashlight beams and fists, children growing up with the knowledge that the person who killed their parents still breathed free air. In August 2020, a judge sentenced him to life in prison without parole.
DeAngelo murmured, “I’ve listened to all your statements. Each one of them. And I am truly sorry,” a remark many survivors described as hollow when measured against decades of calculated cruelty. The real meaning of the case lies elsewhere: in a justice system that refused to shrug and move on, in prosecutors like Ho who insisted that no one is too old or too entrenched to answer for bloodshed, and in a new era of forensic tools that make it harder for the worst among us to fade into the crowd and wait out the clock.
Sources:
Inside the timeline of crimes of the Golden State Killer – Good Morning America
Timeline: Major events in Golden State Killer case – 10News
Inside the timeline of crimes of the Golden State Killer – ABC News