Golden State Killer: long wait for the cops to come calling

The US is coming to terms with police claims the wrinkled, balding man is none other than the Golden State Kil­ler.

Golden State Killer suspect Joseph James DeAngelo. Picture: AFP

By day, Joseph James DeAngelo was a policeman working to uphold law and order in California.

By night, he is said to have discarded his uniform, slipped on a mask and gloves, and broken into the homes of couples as they slept, tying up the men and raping the women.

As the years rolled by, authorities say, he took to killing them ­afterwards. It was the 1970s, and De­Angelo had no idea the evolving science of DNA would one day lead police to his home.

Now the US is coming to terms with police claims the wrinkled, balding man who was arrested this week is none other than the Golden State Kil­ler, one of the most wanted men in the nation’s history. “We found a needle in the haystack and it was right here in Sacramento,” said Sacramento Country District ­Attorney Anne Marie Schubert.

That needle was discovered ­almost by chance, when police this month plugged the genetic profile of the killer into a public online genealogy database. They found distant relatives of ­De­Angelo and then homed in. “We found a person that was the right age and lived in this area, and that was Mr DeAngelo,” said Schubert’s colleague Steve Grippi.

Police say until this week, DeAngelo, 72, had every reason to think he had got away with a crime spree, from 1973 to 1986, during which 12 people were killed and 45 women raped.

For reasons known only to the killer, the murderous rampage came to an end in 1986, causing the police trail to go cold. From that point, De­Angelo appears to have lived an uneventful life in a non­descript home in the suburb of Sacramento where the crime spree began.

Yet with passing each year the mystery grew larger. Who was the Golden State Killer? And what had happened to him? Was he in prison? Was he dead?

Interest in the case spiked early this year with the publication of the book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by true-crime writer Michelle McNamara, who had obsessed about the case until her death in 2016. McNamara’s book, published with the help of her comedian husband Patton Oswalt, reminded a new generation of Americans of the cruelty and cunning of a killer now allegedly unmasked as DeAngelo.

“To zero in on a victim, he often entered the home beforehand when no one was there, learning the layout, studying family pictures, memorising names,” McNamara wrote.

“Victims received hang-up or disturbing phone calls before and after they were attacked. He disabled porch lights and unlocked windows. He emptied bullets from guns. He hid shoelaces or rope under cushions to use as ligatures.

“These manoeuvres gave him a crucial advantage because when you woke from a deep sleep to the blinding flashlight and ski-masked presence, he was always a stranger to you, but you were not to him.”

Police allege DeAngelo began his crime spree with burglaries in Visalia, near to where he was stationed in 1973-76. The early burglaries were unconventional and possibly a sign of things to come.

Police say he would lay out women’s underwear on a bed and, at times, tear up family photos. He would take some pieces of jewellery but not others. The perpetrator became known as the Visalia Ransacker.

In 1976, DeAngelo was transferred to Auburn near Sacramento and that was when the rapes began. Police say, to begin with, he sought out women who lived alone or with young children. He would choose houses next to parks or creeks, allowing a quick escape. He would then carry out surveillance at length, working out their schedules. To confirm whether they were home, he would sometimes phone them. When they answered, he would either hang up or claim it was a wrong number.

The Golden State Killer’s first known rape victim, Jane Carson-Sanders, recalls a masked man breaking into her home in June 1976 and tying her and her three-year-old son up before raping her.

“When I think back about all of the lives that he destroyed and all of the folks that he has affected over all of these years, I can’t help to get angry,” she said this week.

“I want to punch him.”

A few weeks later, DeAngelo is said to have committed another rape and then a series of them.

Within a year, two dozen females, including a 13-year-old girl, had been raped in their homes in the Sacramento area. Then De­Angelo, who had been dubbed the East Area Rapist, is said to have turned his attention to couples.

Marcus Knutson, an FBI agent assigned to the case, said the ­assailant would break into a house, enter the bedroom and shine a flashlight in the eyes of the couple. He would tie up the man and then the woman.

Then he would ransack the house, taking jewellery and cash.

“This individual also has the audacity to go through people’s ­refrigerators and eat inside their residences while the victims were tied up,” Knutson said.

Sometimes he would place plates or a tea cup on a saucer on top of the man’s back and warn him that he would kill both of them if he heard the china rattle.

“The female would be raped in a separate room and then brought back to her male companion or, if no one’s there, left alone,” said Knutson.

“And then our guy would vanish in the middle of the night.”

McNamara wrote in her book: “He was young — anywhere from 18 to 30 — Caucasian, and athletic, capable of eluding capture by jumping roofs and vaulting tall fences.”

The rape spree changed the freewheeling lifestyle of people in Sacramento. No longer did they leave doors open as kids played in the yard. Families locked themselves in their homes and became suspicious of strangers.

“Everybody knows about the East Area Rapist/Golden State Killer here in Sacramento,” Knutson recalled. “During that time­frame, everybody was in fear. We had people sleeping with shotguns. We had people purchasing dogs. I think locksmiths’ business went way out of control because of the fact that everyone was changing locks on their doors.”

It was in February 1978 that police believe DeAngelo committed his first murder. Sacramento couple Brian and Katie Maggiore were walking their dog when an assailant chased them and gunned them down, reportedly after they saw the man preparing to break into a home.

The following year DeAngelo’s police career came to an end when he was charged with stealing a can of dog repellent and a hammer from a shop. Detectives now say DeAngelo then switched his focus to the San Francisco Bay Area where he began to combine rapes with killings.

Between 1979 and 1981, four couples and a single woman were attacked and either shot dead or bludgeoned to death after the woman was raped. Then in 1986, after a five-year gap, DeAngelo is said to have struck for the final time when he raped and beat to death 18-year-old Janelle Cruz in her home.

At this point the killer became known as the Original Night Stalker. And then he disappeared. Completely. No more crimes, no more clues.

For years, police followed ­numerous leads without success but in 2001 DNA evidence ­allowed them to connected the three crime sprees together for the first time. The Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker were one and the same. He became known as the Golden State Killer.

Even after these dots were joined, police came up empty-handed. In 2016, the FBI made one final push to crack the cold case, offering a $US50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the “prolific serial rapist and murderer”.

As The Australian reported this week, that search led the FBI as far away as Australia after a tip-off that maybe the killer had moved here in 1986 and was in fact the infamous Victorian criminal known as Mr Cruel — the name given to the man suspected of a series of ­attacks on young girls in Melbourne from 1987 and continuing into the 1990s.

Victoria Police has admitted ­officers looked into the theory but rejected it. “This was reviewed in relation to the outstanding Mr Cruel ­investigations in Victoria and any connection has been ruled out,” Victoria Police said this week.

Yet after more than 30 years searching in vain for the Golden State Killer, the breakthrough that led to the arrest of DeAngelo took less than a week.

Investigators matched crime-scene DNA with genetic material stored by a relative on an online genealogical site and then homed in on DeAngelo.

Once they suspected him, they needed to obtain a sample of his DNA without him knowing, so they placed him under surveillance. Sacramento sheriff Scott Jones said detectives used “dogged determination” to get a sample of DNA from something DeAngelo had discarded. They returned to get a second sample, which gave them a conclusive match with DNA found on some of the victims. “The answer was always going to be in the DNA,” district attorney Schubert said. “The magnitude of this case demanded that it be solved.”

The story DeAngelo’s life is still unfolding. He joined the navy at a young age, serving during the Vietnam War on the USS Can­berra. In 1973, when he was 27, he married Sharon Huddle, who was 20, and they had three daughters — meaning he was married with a family during at least part of the rapes and murder spree.

From 1973 to 1979 he served two three-year stints in the police force at Exeter and then at Auburn in California. For the 27 years until his retirement in 2017, De­Angelo worked at a distribution centre for the grocery store Save Mark in Sacramento. He reportedly lived with one of his daughters and a granddaughter.

Neighbours say he was often grumpy and kept to himself. He was meticulous about the pristine state of his lawn but otherwise ­appeared to live a normal life.

Many of the victims and the relatives of those killed were stunned by the arrest. “This is a hard one,” said Jennifer Carole, whose father Lyman Smith and stepmother Charlene Smith were murdered by the Golden State Killer.

“There aren’t really words for this. I have feelings all over the place ... in my mind I had him dead as a way to cope, so his capture is stirring up all kinds of emotions.”

McNamara did not live to see her work become a bestseller or to hear of DeAngelo’s arrest this week, but in the book she accurately predicted the way the story of this serial killer would end.

“One day soon, you’ll hear a car pull up to your curb, an engine cut out. You’ll hear footsteps coming up your front walk,” McNamara wrote.

“The doorbell rings. No side gates are left open. You’re long past leaping over a fence. Take one of your hyper, gulping breaths. Clench your teeth. Inch timidly towards the insistent bell. This is how it ends for you.”

And so it did.

Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia