Unmasking Joseph James DeAngelo: The Golden State Killer

It began with a ringing phone in the middle of the night. The air inside the survivor’s home was still, the hour late enough that every sound seemed to echo. In 2001, decades after the last murder, after the last rape, after the last whimper of the terror that had swept across California, the phone rang one final time. When the line connected, the voice on the other end was familiar to investigators who had spent years chasing shadows. There was no mistaking the chilling words, the cadence, the malicious intent. The caller taunted his victim, a whisper from the past, reminding her—and the police—that the man who had haunted their lives for so long was still watching, still out there. The woman who answered survived that nightmare, and hung up, haunted again by the certainty that the Golden State Killer was not a story, but a man still breathing in the dark.

For decades, that darkness had a name, but no face. The man behind the voice had slipped away from scene after scene, leaving behind not just victims and shattered lives, but also a trail of monikers. In the 1970s and 1980s, California was gripped by panic as law enforcement chased the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist, the Original Night Stalker. Each name marked a chapter in an escalating campaign of terror—a campaign that would only much later be linked to a single man, hiding in plain sight.

Joseph James DeAngelo was born in 1945 in Bath, New York, into a family with a strict military background. His father, Joseph DeAngelo Sr., was a sergeant in the United States Army, and the family moved frequently, even spending time stationed in West Germany. Joseph’s childhood, by his own account and that of investigators, was marked by violence—both parents beat him, and he reported witnessing the brutal rape of his sister by two airmen on a U.S. Air Force base.

He attended Mills Junior High School in Rancho Cordova, California, and graduated with a GED from Folsom High School in 1964. Joseph joined the United States Navy in 1964, serving 22 months during the Vietnam War. When he returned, he pursued police science at Sierra College and earned a degree in criminal justice from Sacramento State University in 1971. In 1973, he married Sharon Huddle and, that same year, joined the Exeter Police Department as a burglary-unit officer.

DeAngelo’s career as a police officer was, by most accounts, unremarkable—except when it wasn’t. Colleagues recalled odd behaviors: standing too close, reacting poorly to criticism, sulking, and occasional outbursts. He worked as a police officer in Exeter until 1976, when he transferred to the Auburn Police Department. In 1978, his law enforcement career came to an abrupt end. He was arrested for shoplifting a hammer and dog repellent from a payless store. During the arrest, DeAngelo staged dramatic antics—defecating himself, feigning a heart attack, and rolling around on a chair pretending madness before finally admitting it was an act. He was fired that October and placed on probation. During the termination process, he was rumored to have stalked the police chief’s home, even going so far as to threaten him under the guise of a claim for work-related stress.

It was during his years as a police officer, and even before, that DeAngelo’s criminal double life began in earnest. The first chapter unfolded in Visalia, a small city in the Central Valley. Between 1974 and 1975, a prowler known as the Visalia Ransacker broke into homes across the town. These were not ordinary burglaries—over 100 in the space of 20 months. The Ransacker would break in, rifling through possessions, scattering women’s underclothes, stealing low-value items like coins and jewelry, but often leaving cash and valuable electronics untouched. He would sometimes arrange or display objects in bizarre tableaus. In at least one case, he killed: in September 1975, Claude Snelling, a local journalism professor, confronted the intruder as he tried to abduct Snelling’s daughter. The masked man shot Snelling twice and disappeared into the night.

Investigators set up nighttime stakeouts, but the burglaries continued. In December 1975, Detective William McGowen, sitting in wait, surprised a masked prowler in a backyard. The intruder shrieked, pulled off his mask, feigned surrender, then drew a revolver and fired at McGowen before escaping over a fence. The Visalia Ransacker vanished soon after.

By 1976, a new nightmare had begun in the Sacramento area. The East Area Rapist, as the papers dubbed him, targeted middle-class neighborhoods—always at night, always with methodical planning. He stalked his victims for weeks beforehand, learning their routines, making harassing phone calls, prowling in their yards, and sometimes breaking in ahead of the attack to plant ligatures or unlock windows. He began by attacking women alone, but as the media reported on his pattern, he shifted to targeting couples.

His methods were precise and chilling. He would break in through a window, awaken the occupants with a flashlight and a gun, and threaten them into submission. The man would be bound with ligatures, sometimes with dishes stacked on his back so that any movement would bring swift retaliation. The woman would be separated, blindfolded, gagged, and raped—sometimes repeatedly, sometimes for hours. The attacker would ransack the house, eat food from the kitchen, and sometimes disappear for long stretches while his victims remained paralyzed with fear. In these years, over 50 rapes and a series of murders were committed across Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto, and Contra Costa County. In February 1978, Brian and Katie Maggiore were murdered while walking their dog, chased down and shot after a confrontation near the site of several previous attacks.

The evolution continued. In 1979, the attacks moved to Southern California and took on a new, deadlier form. The killer, now known as the Original Night Stalker, targeted couples, breaking into their homes at night, binding and bludgeoning them to death. In some cases, he shot his victims; in others, he raped and then murdered. The attacks spanned Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Orange counties, and the violence reached new heights: many were bludgeoned so viciously that their features were unrecognizable. Between 1979 and 1986, at least ten people were murdered in this phase, including medical student Keith Harrington and his wife Patrice, nurse Manuela Witthuhn, and 18-year-old Janelle Cruz, whose body was discovered by a realtor when her family was out of the country.

The staggering tally by the time the spree ended: at least 13 murders, over 50 rapes, and more than 100 burglaries. Investigators struggled to connect the crimes. The shifting geography and evolving methods led law enforcement to believe they faced multiple perpetrators. In Sacramento, detectives chased the East Area Rapist; in Southern California, others hunted the Original Night Stalker. It was only years later that forensic evidence would link the two.

DeAngelo’s crimes were not just physical. He tormented his victims and the police with written notes, calls, and even poetry. In December 1977, a poem titled “Excitement’s Crave,” handwritten and full of self-aggrandizing prose, arrived at the offices of a Sacramento newspaper and the mayor’s office. The letter taunted law enforcement, craving recognition and fame. He called police stations and victims, sometimes before the attacks, sometimes years afterward, hissing threats or simply breathing menacingly into the receiver. In one call, he declared, “I’m the East Side Rapist and I have my next victim already stalked and you guys can’t catch me.” These acts of psychological warfare deepened the terror.

He adopted multiple monikers throughout his spree—the Visalia Ransacker, East Area Rapist, Original Night Stalker, Creek Bed Killer, Diamond Knot Killer. Each provided law enforcement with a new puzzle, complicating efforts to connect the crimes and catch the man responsible. The lack of communication and mutual suspicion among California law enforcement agencies allowed him to slip repeatedly through their grasp. Investigators in Contra Costa County, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Orange County each developed their own behavioral profiles, sometimes nine in total, all describing a different predator.

For the families of the victims and survivors, the years passed with no answers. The case became cold, relegated to archives and the memories of those who had lived through the fear. It would take a generation, and then another, before the pieces would fall into place.

By the early 2000s, forensic science had advanced, and DNA evidence from the crime scenes began to yield new insights. In 2001, forensic analysis finally confirmed that the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker were the same person. The public, though, still had no name, only a chilling composite—a phantom predator who, by then, had not struck in fifteen years.

It would take another breakthrough—one that did not yet exist in the minds of most detectives. The answer came with the rise of genetic genealogy. Investigators preserved the DNA from the old crime scenes. In 2018, they turned to public genealogy databases, uploading the killer’s genetic profile and searching for distant relatives. The process required tracing family trees, narrowing the pool across generations, until, finally, they arrived at a name: Joseph James DeAngelo.

On April 24, 2018, law enforcement officers closed in on the Citrus Heights home where DeAngelo had lived for decades. He was 72 years old, long retired from his job as a mechanic at a supermarket distribution center. He was arrested and charged with eight counts of first-degree murder, his DNA a perfect match to the evidence left at the scenes decades before.

The story of the Golden State Killer exploded into public consciousness, not only because of the horror and scale of the crimes, but also because of the quest to solve them. Michelle McNamara, a crime writer who had spent years obsessively researching the case, published “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” in 2018—two months before DeAngelo’s arrest. She coined the name “Golden State Killer,” brought renewed national attention to the investigation, and galvanized both law enforcement and the public to keep searching for answers. Her work, though it did not directly lead to DeAngelo’s arrest, played a crucial role in keeping the case alive.

After his arrest, DeAngelo faced more than a dozen counts of murder and kidnapping. Due to California’s statute of limitations on pre-2017 rape cases, he could not be charged with most of the sexual assaults, but prosecutors charged him with thirteen counts of kidnapping and abduction. In June 2020, DeAngelo pleaded guilty to thirteen counts of first-degree murder and numerous related crimes, admitting also to many rapes and burglaries for which he could not be prosecuted. As part of the plea bargain, he was spared the death penalty. On August 21, 2020, he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, his final days destined to be spent in a California prison.

The man who once prowled California’s suburbs, using his training as a police officer to outsmart his pursuers, had been brought down by the very science he could never have anticipated. His arrest set off a wave of relief but also of reckoning—a recognition that hundreds of lives had been forever altered, and that justice, though delayed, had arrived.

The Golden State Killer case changed the way cold cases are investigated in America. The use of genetic genealogy, once a novelty, quickly became a powerful tool for law enforcement. Forensic scientists and detectives began solving decades-old crimes by scouring public DNA databases, connecting crimes across geography and time that had long seemed unsolvable. The California DNA database—one of the largest and most effective in the country—became a model for others, its effectiveness demonstrated by the resolution of the Golden State Killer case.

The legacy of Joseph James DeAngelo is one of terror, but also one of scientific and investigative transformation. His crimes spurred legislative action, including California Proposition 69, which authorized DNA collection from felons and certain other criminals. The case made clear that, no matter how meticulously a criminal tries to hide, the tiniest trace of DNA may one day reveal the truth.

And in the end, it was a single genetic match, buried in forgotten evidence, that brought the man who had haunted California for decades, the man who called in the night, to justice.