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The Man Nobody Caught: How DeAngelo Hid in Plain Sight for Forty Years
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A former police officer raped and murdered across California for twelve years — and his badge may have been his greatest weapon. This chapter traces how Joseph James DeAngelo evaded capture across three counties, three identities, and four decades.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
For twelve years, one man raped and murdered his way across California. He worked as a police officer the entire time.
The story begins in Visalia, in the early nineteen seventies. A small city in California's Central Valley.
He'd moved north. To Sacramento.
By nineteen seventy-nine, DeAngelo moved again. Three hundred miles south.
The nineteen eighties ended. The murders stopped.
One of the people who couldn't let go wasn't a detective at all. Michelle McNamara was a crime writer who became consumed by the Original Night Stalker case.
In April of two thousand eighteen, retired investigator Paul Holes made a decision that changed cold case investigation permanently. He uploaded the Golden State Killer's DNA profile to GEDmatch, a free genealogy database that amateur users had built for tracing family ancestry.
DeAngelo was arrested outside his Citrus Heights home on April twenty-fourth, two thousand eighteen. He was taken into custody without significant resistance.
Because of the COVID-nineteen pandemic, the formal proceedings were unconventional. In June of two thousand twenty, DeAngelo pleaded guilty to thirteen murders and thirteen kidnappings, along with additional charges.
In August of two thousand twenty, more than forty survivors and victims' family members addressed DeAngelo directly in court. The impact statement phase lasted multiple days.
The arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo didn't just close a forty-year case. It opened something.
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