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The Double Life: How a Cop Became California's Most Wanted
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Joseph James DeAngelo was a working police officer during the Golden State Killer's worst years — and that insider knowledge may be exactly what kept him hidden for four decades. This chapter traces the double life behind three names, six county investigations, and a trail of evidence that should have led somewhere sooner.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
How does a serial killer stay hidden for forty years? Not in the wilderness.
Visalia, California. Nineteen seventy-four.
Sacramento, nineteen seventy-six. A new name, a new geography, the same man.
Southern California. The crimes were no longer rapes.
Joseph James DeAngelo began working for the Exeter Police Department in May of nineteen seventy-three, roughly a year before the Visalia ransackings started. He worked in the burglary unit.
While DeAngelo was living in Citrus Heights, a writer named Michelle McNamara became consumed by the case. She'd read about the Original Night Stalker years earlier and couldn't let it go.
The key figure in the arrest wasn't a department. It was a retired investigator named Paul Holes.
The legal proceedings moved across two years before a resolution came. In June of twenty-twenty, Joseph James DeAngelo pleaded guilty to thirteen murders, thirteen kidnapping charges, and more than fifty rapes.
The sentencing hearing in August of twenty-twenty lasted five days. More than forty survivors and family members of murder victims addressed the court.
The arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo didn't just close a forty-year case. It opened a new chapter in criminal investigation.
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