Latest / The Last Known: True Crime, Missing Women & Unsolved Mysteries / The Officer Next Door: Unmasking the Golden State Killer | The Last Known
Transcript
- He wore the badge to hide the monster, walking among us while leaving a trail of fear in his wake. For decades, California lived in the shadow of a man who knew exactly how to disappear. There is a specific kind of terror that comes not from the unknown, but from the known becoming unrecognizable. It’s the feeling that the person standing next to you, the one with the keys and the authority, might be holding something far darker than duty. Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. didn’t just blend into the background; he weaponized it. Born on November 8, 1945, in Bath, New York, his early life was marked by violence before it ever touched the streets of California. We often look for patterns in childhood trauma, and DeAngelo’s was stark. He was regularly beaten by both parents. Later, during a stint in West Germany with his father, an Army sergeant, he claimed to have witnessed his sister raped by two airmen in a warehouse. These are heavy, haunting fragments, pieces of a puzzle that would eventually form a profile of profound damage. But as we listen, let’s remember that these facts don’t excuse what came next. They only explain the fractured mind behind the crimes. By the time he reached his teenage years in California, attending schools in Rancho Cordova and Folsom, prosecutors noted disturbing behaviors: burglaries, mail theft, and the torture and killing of animals. These were small, quiet acts at first, barely noticed, like cracks forming in a foundation before the house falls. What makes this story so chilling is not just the violence, but the preparation. DeAngelo didn’t stumble into criminality; he trained for it, using the very system designed to catch criminals to sharpen his own skills. After serving in the Navy during the Vietnam War, he pursued education with a singular focus. He graduated with honors in police science from Sierra College and earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Sacramento State University. He even completed a thirty-two-week police internship with the Roseville Police Department. He learned how investigations worked. He learned how evidence was collected, how suspects were questioned, and perhaps most importantly, how investigators thought. This wasn’t accidental knowledge. This was deliberate study. When he finally joined the Exeter Police Department in May 1973, moving from Citrus Heights, he was no longer just an offender. He was part of the apparatus. He knew the protocols. He knew the blind spots. And for three years, until August 1976, he served as a burglary-unit officer. The irony is almost unbearable to contemplate: he was assisting in searches for himself, wearing the uniform, drinking the coffee, and nodding along with colleagues who had no idea they were discussing their own colleague’s crimes. Nick Willick, who would later become Chief of Police, described him simply as an unremarkable officer. That was the mask. That was the camouflage. His crimes began quietly, methodically, in Northern California. Between 1974 and 1976, operating out of the San Joaquin Valley, he committed a minimum of one hundred and twenty burglaries and one murder. He called himself the Visalia Ransacker during this period, a name that suggests chaos, but the reality was precision. He moved through homes, taking what he wanted, leaving destruction in his wake. Then, in August 1976, he transferred to the Auburn Police Department. This move marked a terrifying escalation. No longer satisfied with property, he began targeting people. From 1976 to 1979, in Sacramento County, he committed at least fifty-one rapes and two additional murders. He also left a trail of attacks in Stockton, Modesto, and Contra Costa County. He was becoming bolder, more aggressive. He taunted victims and police alike, sometimes through obscene phone calls, possibly through written communications. He was playing games, asserting control over a region that felt increasingly unsafe. The silence here is loud. You can hear the fear in the gaps between the dates, the way communities tightened their locks, the way mothers pulled children closer. He was building a reputation, not as a ghost, but as a force of nature that could not be caught. In 1979, DeAngelo moved south, and the scale of his violence expanded again. In Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Orange counties, he murdered at least ten people between 1979 and 1986. This period, often linked to the name East Area Rapist or Original Night Stalker, saw him commit serial murders across Southern California. The number of victims climbed. The brutality intensified. For years, law enforcement struggled to connect the dots. Was the burglar from Visalia the same as the rapist in Sacramento? Was the murderer in Orange County connected to the assaults in the Bay Area? For decades, these were separate cases, separate files, separate nightmares for different families. But DNA doesn’t lie, even when memory does. In 2001, testing confirmed what many had suspected but couldn’t prove: the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker were the same person. This led to the combined acronym EARONS. The case became a catalyst for change, directly influencing the establishment of California’s DNA database, which now collects genetic material from all accused and convicted felons. It is considered second only to Virginia’s in effectiveness. Yet, despite this powerful tool, DeAngelo remained free. He went dormant in 1986, vanishing into the ordinary rhythm of suburban life, while the state continued to search for a phantom. Time passed. The names changed. Michelle McNamara, a crime writer, coined the term Golden State Killer in the 2010s, bringing renewed attention to the cold cases. In 2016, the FBI and local agencies held a news conference, offering a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for his capture. They were desperate. They were tired. They had cleared several suspects through alibis and other methods, but the true identity remained elusive. DeAngelo was seventy-two years old then, living a quiet life in Citrus Heights. He had worked in various roles, including stints in Sanger and Sacramento, always remaining under the radar. The investigation spanned decades, a testament to persistence in the face of near-impossible odds. Detectives used forensic genetic genealogy, uploading crime scene DNA to public databases like GEDmatch. They built family trees, narrowing down suspects based on shared genetic markers. It was a new frontier in policing, one that would change cold cases forever. And it led them, inevitably, back to DeAngelo. On April 24, 2018, authorities charged him with eight counts of first-degree murder. It was the first official connection to the Visalia Ransacker crimes. Justice isn’t just an outcome; it’s a presence. And for the first time in forty years, it was present in the form of handcuffs and a courtroom. The legal proceedings that followed were complex, constrained by the statute of limitations on pre-2017 rape cases. DeAngelo could not be charged for the dozens of rapes he committed in the seventies. Instead, in August 2018, he faced charges for thirteen related kidnapping and abduction attempts. But the truth didn’t stay hidden for long. On June 29, 2020, he pleaded guilty to multiple counts of murder and kidnapping. As part of a plea bargain that spared him the death penalty, he admitted to numerous crimes not formally charged, including the rapes. On August 21, 2020, he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Later, in November 2020, he pleaded no contest to thirteen counts of first-degree murder, receiving twenty-four consecutive life terms. He was finally accounted for. The man who hid in plain sight, who used his training to evade detection, who terrified an entire state for over a decade, was removed from society. His legacy is not one of freedom, but of confinement. And while no sentence can undo the harm, it provides a closure that families had waited decades for. The silence is broken, replaced by the finality of justice. We close this chapter today, but the echoes remain. Joseph James DeAngelo’s story is a reminder of how fragile safety can feel, and how important it is to trust our instincts, to support our investigators, and to never stop looking for the truth. This story is drawn from public records and widely reported accounts. Our thoughts are with everyone affected. I’m Teresa Howarth. Thank you for listening, and for remembering those we’ve lost.