The Golden State Killer: The Walk That Ended in Murder

On the evening of February 2, 1978, Brian and Katie Maggiore took their dog for a walk in Rancho Cordova, California. Brian was an Air Force sergeant. Before the walk was over, both he and Katie would be dead.

Their killer was already terrifying communities around Sacramento, but nobody yet knew his name. Nor did investigators know the full extent of the crimes that would eventually be connected to him. This is the story of the Maggiores’ last walk, the violence that preceded and followed it, and the extraordinarily long road to identifying Joseph James DeAngelo.

A note before we begin: the case involves sexual violence and murder. We’ll describe what happened without dwelling on graphic details. And where the record does not establish what someone thought or intended, we won’t pretend that it does.

To understand that night, go back several years. DeAngelo worked as a police officer in Exeter, California, from 1973 to 1976. He later joined the force in Auburn. In 1975, while he was an Exeter officer, someone shot and killed professor Claude Snelling at his Visalia home. Decades later, prosecutors attributed that killing to DeAngelo, and his eventual guilty plea encompassed it.

Visalia had also been troubled by a prolific burglar whom people called the Visalia Ransacker. Then, as DeAngelo moved north, burglaries and sexual assaults began occurring around Sacramento. At the time, these crimes did not arrive with a single name attached. People had reports of break-ins, assaults and an offender who kept getting away.

The pattern mattered. The FBI says burglaries in a neighborhood tended to come before clusters of sexual assaults. The intruder sometimes took small possessions—coins, jewelry, identification—and left homes ransacked. Women alone were targeted, and so were women at home with their children. Couples were attacked too. Survivors later described threatening calls, restraints, and an assailant who could remain in a house for hours.

That history explains why the Maggiore murders were so alarming, but it does not explain what DeAngelo had in mind when he encountered Brian and Katie. The evidence supports the sequence of the attack; it does not give us access to his thoughts.

February 2, 1978. Brian and Katie are outside with their dog on an evening walk. According to the FBI’s account, the assailant chases them. Prosecutors later described what happened next: Brian is shot. Katie runs and calls for help. The attacker catches up with her and shoots her in the head.

Both die. Their walk ends not in some remote place but in the neighborhood where they were going about an ordinary part of their lives.

That is the documented play-by-play. There is no need to fill the spaces between those facts with imagined words, a dramatic confrontation or an invented reason for the chase. For years, investigators were left to work out who had killed the couple and whether the deaths belonged to the wider pattern of crimes haunting California.

The attacks did not end with the Maggiores. The offender’s activity continued elsewhere in Northern California, then shifted to the coast, where couples were assaulted and murdered in their homes. In December 1979, Debra Manning and Robert Offerman were killed in Goleta. In March 1980, Lyman and Charlene Smith were murdered in Ventura. Keith and Patrice Harrington were killed later that year in Southern California. Other victims followed.

The names used for the unknown attacker changed with the places and the years. In Sacramento, he was the East Area Rapist. Investigators elsewhere knew crimes associated with the Original Night Stalker. At first, police did not understand that attacks separated by geography and time were connected. Advances in DNA analysis eventually helped bring the cases together; the Los Angeles Times reports that by 2001, detectives had linked attacks across the state.

After killings in 1981, there was a five-year gap in crimes attributed to the offender. Then, in May 1986, eighteen-year-old Janelle Cruz was murdered in her Irvine home. Hers was his last known crime. The gap before her death, and the absence of another known attack afterward, are not proof of why he stopped. They are limits of what the documented record can tell us.

Meanwhile, survivors and families had to live with what had happened. For some, there was no identified offender to put before a court. Even after the crimes were linked, a match between cases was not the same thing as a name.

In 2016, the FBI and California agencies made a renewed public appeal for help. They described an offender whose crimes had spanned a decade and noted that DNA evidence could exclude suspects as well as help identify the right one. In that pre-arrest appeal, the FBI attributed twelve homicides to the same subject. The later prosecution would end with guilty pleas to thirteen murders.

The breakthrough came in 2018. Investigators used crime-scene DNA to explore relatives in a genealogy database called GEDmatch. This was not a simple case of typing in a sample and seeing ‘Joseph DeAngelo’ appear. Genetic genealogy offered possible family connections. Investigators then worked through a family tree and considered such facts as age and where a person had lived. DeAngelo, a former officer with ties to the areas of the crimes, emerged as a candidate.

Then came a separate, crucial test. Investigators watched DeAngelo’s home and obtained a discarded tissue from his rubbish. DNA from that item matched the crime-scene evidence. Authorities arrested him in Sacramento County in April 2018. Roughly forty years after Brian and Katie’s walk, investigators had identified the man who killed them.

The method also raised a lasting question: what does it mean when a person’s DNA contribution to a genealogy site helps police identify a relative who did not submit his own sample? The debate does not undo what investigators established here. It is part of the story of how they established it.

DeAngelo had been fired from the Auburn police force in 1979 after a shoplifting incident. When he was arrested decades later, prosecutors said he spoke to himself in an interview room: ‘I did all those things. I destroyed all their lives.’ His words were reported in court; they are not a substitute for the evidence that brought investigators to him.

On June 29, 2020, DeAngelo pleaded guilty to thirteen counts of first-degree murder and thirteen kidnapping charges. He also admitted to numerous other crimes, including rapes for which the time limit on prosecution had expired. Under the plea deal, prosecutors did not seek the death penalty.

During the proceedings, relatives of Brian and Katie Maggiore stood as their murders were recounted. Rape survivors and relatives of other people DeAngelo had killed also addressed the court. Some spoke about fear that had followed them for decades. Their testimony made clear that an arrest had not ended the consequences of the attacks.

On August 21, 2020, DeAngelo was sentenced to eleven consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. Before sentencing, he told the court he was sorry to everyone he had hurt. That apology, like the sentence, was something survivors and families could judge for themselves.

The Golden State Killer case is often told as a triumph of forensic ingenuity. It is one: old evidence, new methods and painstaking investigative work finally gave the unknown offender a name. But that ending can make the decades in between sound shorter than they were.

Brian and Katie Maggiore went out with their dog on a February evening in 1978. Katie tried to get away and called for help. Their families then waited forty years for an arrest. Across California, other people carried the effects of the same offender’s violence while the crimes acquired different names and investigators struggled to connect them.

DeAngelo was caught, pleaded guilty and will not be released on parole. That answers what happened to the killer. It cannot give back the people he killed, or return those lost years to the people who survived him.