Golden State Killer (East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker)

I think a lot of things he did were deliberate misdirects so it was easy for him to put investigators on other tracks

plus he had extensive military training & active policing experience

ie he knows exactly how to a) burglar-proof a home AND b) burglarize a home

Coming & going would be no concern with his military & police background, since he knows what people look for when reporting suspicious behavior

he wasnt using main thoroughfares & if he used an automobile he changed it every time

Even the belongings & notes he left behind may have easily been stolen from elsewhere or just random shit he used to throw them off

police didnt do a bad job; they just didnt have the tools at the time to look for one of their own imo

It's a remarkable apprehension. He's sort of the opposite of Ted Bundy: he went about his ways in complete discretion for all these years. Quite a feat, both from him and from the police to catch him.

Oh yeah it was definitely the time but even so you’d think if they’d done some DNA testing when it viable they could have caught him some 20 years ago.

Veg I’m super interested in your opinion as to whether he was mr cruel.

i highly doubt it. seems like wishful thinking to me, imo

there’s def similarities but the international aspect just seems like such a long shot idk

I saw something about how he’s lived in the same neighborhood for 30+ yrs so wouldn’t that disqualify him from the mr cruel murders? I can’t remember the exact timeline

http://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article209913514.html

The effort was part of a painstaking process that began by using DNA from one of the crime scenes from years ago and comparing it to genetic profiles available online through various websites that cater to individuals wanting to know more about their family backgrounds by accepting DNA samples from them, said Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Grippi.

Don't even know what to think about this.

if you're going to be a serial killer dissuade your relatives from doing 23 and me?

Or if you were a serial killer already, kill all your relatives before they do a 23 and me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

xxxp that is fucking spooky

Yeah, came here to post this:

this is ABSOLUTELY bonkers. it *seems* like investigators made a profile for DeAngelo on genealogy websites using old DNA evidence, then matched relatives to him, etc. i'm extremely glad he's been caught but this is a dystopian nightmarehttps://t.co/9bge8cOh1c pic.twitter.com/68PJDWIJjy

— Sarah Emerson (@SarahNEmerson) April 26, 2018

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

― reggae mike love (polyphonic), Thursday, April 26, 2018 3:20 PM (thirty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

12andMe https://t.co/gmrLomRowa

— Zachary Fox (@zackfox) April 26, 2018

i would generally recommend people not to give companies - e.g. Facebook - their data. this goes double for your genetic data

many x-posts: while never a resident, i can totally see someone like this getting away with breaking into houses and doing all this heinous shit in Sacramento. it is a very "suburban"-feeling city.

yeah there is a lot of sprawl

I wish the actual investigators got their moment in the sun at the press conference yesterday; there are so many that deserve acknowledgement

Nice piece about Contra Costa investigator Paul Holes here
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/26/retired-cold-case-investigator-tracked-the-golden-state-killer-to-his-door/amp/

And one on Richard Shelby, the Sacramento detective who partnered with Carol Daly (mentioned upthread) in the beginning:
http://www.abc10.com/mobile/article/news/local/from-east-area-rapist-to-golden-state-killer-early-years-of-the-investigation/103-545872204

The thing with these types of cold cases that I respect is the investigating officers that carry these cases with them decades later. Every detail burned in their brain, their commitment, it’s really moving. I think for all the heartache & frustrations the families have been through, there’s has to be a small amount pf comfort knowing that there’s ppl like that who still care, who are going into bat for you & your loved ones well into retirement.

Whenever they catch one of these psychos I’m ecstatic. I was over the moon when they caught the Brown’s Chicken massacre perps a decade later.

I am kinda hoping this raises the profile of cold case investigation even more & perhaps throw more funding/ppl behind it

And/or push the effort to test more rape kits

many x-posts: while never a resident, i can totally see someone like this getting away with breaking into houses and doing all this heinous shit in Sacramento. it is a very "suburban"-feeling city.

"Fun fact: Sacramento has seen over a dozen serial killers and hosts 15% of the nation’s serial murderers. (Great Job River City!)"
https://jamesletoile.com/2017/04/06/is-sacramento-a-serial-killer-friendly-place/

My new boss told me yesterday that she lives a block away from his house in Citrus Heights ! she’s lived the neighborhood since she was a girl. She was travelling on the East Ciast during the week & freaked OUT when she heard where he lived.

Also I read a detail today I hadnt heard.
He used to call random victims years after the attacks. The most recent call he made was *2001*. To me it’s the gross, malignant cherry on top of an already heinous sundae.

I have been thinking about this a lot: the balance sheet of the long-range emotional, psychological effects on all of his victims. Marriage breakups, job loss, insomnia, addictions, trauma. So much pain!
All of those people suddenly dont get to live normal lives. Why? Because this unbalanced, hateful, vindictive, sadistic dude decided they dont. It’s the most infuriating thing to me, in all of true crime but especially this case. He didnt leave just a trail of wreckage, he scorched the earth. He took something from these women & these families, AND he took lives and he kept doing it over and over.
And he tormented them after the fact.

I dont fucking care about Bonnie or what happened. I kind of dont even care why he did any of it. What I care about is the survivors. Their quality of life is important. Their stories are the stories I want to hear. They can’t be made whole but in my ideal fantasy world they should collectively stand up and rob him of the spotlight. Take him off the headlines finally and tell everyone your names. And let him be forever ignored & made small & rot in ignominy.

* To claify: I knew he had called victims after the fact but I didnt know he had done it so recently.

I’m reading I’ll Be Gone In The Dark now and it’s striking that some of the victims and some of the investigators thought he was a cop and ex-military at the time. Given that DeAngelo was both, was clearly very odd and lived minutes away from the largest cluster of crime scenes it’ll be interesting to find out how far back he was on their radar.

He wasn’t at all! That’s one of the surprising elements

It was the familial DNA match on the genealogy website that led them to him afaik

plus he lived a good 45 minutes away from the Sacramento attacks, WAY up in the foothills in a different county

that's interesting and also differentiates him from someone like BTK who iirc stuck to Wichita and also killed someone who lived within a block or two of his own home.

i mean obviously this guy was an extremely calculated and cold and cautious guy, even moreso than Rader, who was also very controlled but made a couple errors and had lapses in judgement w/r/t his own escaping the law.

interesting science-angle article on the methods used to snag the GSK

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/golden-state-killer-suspect-dna-genetics-genealogy

“Scary.” That’s the boat’s name in suspected #EastAreaRapist Joe DeAngelo’s driveway. Great eye by @mikel394 who caught this little detail. pic.twitter.com/1Cl8laNlqR

— stevelarge (@largesteven) April 27, 2018

VG the Casefile True Crime podcast is spooky as fuck. I listened to the first in the EAR series last night and finished it. The anonymous Australian guy does an exceptionally good job with the methodical coverage of his entire crime spree. And in hindsight of course it makes perfect sense now that he was a cop, and it's amazing how early on many people suspected that he might be.

then after I finished listening to it, a bignmoth in the bedroom started banging against the window trying to get outside and after being like...

https://i.imgur.com/HV31cHD.gif

...for a minute I captured it and took it outside at 1 AM, on my very quiet L.A. side street, which has seen a rash of break-ins and street robberies lately. I expected to see a guy on the front porch wearing a mask.

yeah one night i was in bed asleep & the floor creaked outside our bedroom door & the door handle turned & i sat bolt upright in bed about to scream but it was just Mr Veg coming to bed

i was like that for weeks after listening to Casefile

we drive around Carmichael a fair bit for shopping & whenever I see the canals now I wig just little thinking about how he was coming & going so readily. they’re quite inconspicuous, too if you’re just driving around, you kinda have to know they’re there to notice them.

plus he lived a good 45 minutes away from the Sacramento attacks, WAY up in the foothills in a different county

Aha! McNamara mentions that investigators thought he might be tied to somewhere close to Rancho Cordova as he kept attacking there but my geography is terrible. As you say, he apparently only registered as a suspect three weeks ago!

xp after listening to that last night i'm even more aware of how safe the place we live in is, it's a duplex with the three sides visible to the street (since we live at a corner) and the bedrooms are the second floor, accessible just by the one creaky stairwell. it sounds perhaps creepy but it's not very welcoming to intruders. i'm more creeped out by where i grew up, in a town of 1200 people, with homes backed up to random clusters of gnarled trees and half a block from a lake.

we all need moats & archers w flaming arrows imo

i would be freaked out to live in a whole house or ground floor apartment. I'm too paranoid. I lived in a ground floor apartment for a couple of years a while back and twice caught dudes scoping out the joint late at night - me being a night owl and at the time working irregularly or being unemployed id usually be up till 4 or 5 am -thankfully. Woman that lived next door with her partner once was home alone and woke up to a guy trying to force open her bedroom window, he was scared off by her screams, which I, sleeping in the room directly through the wall from her slept through.

and i live in a reasonably bougie part of a safe city

we had a run of homeless ppl sleeping on our porch when we first moved in but they were just looking for shelter & we didnt chase them off or anything

our neighborhood is thought of as kinda sketchy but we havent really seen or heard of any breakins or anything and we’ve been there 13 years now

only thing that wigged me out was when we got our deadbolt replaced a few years ago & the locksmith pointed out the marks on it from where someone had tried to force it O_O

^^^ That's like finding a bloody hook on your car door handle.

no kidding

many more of these to come i’d wager

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/30/us/cold-case-possible-link-to-golden-state-killer/index.html

our neighborhood is sketchy-adjacent, but it's pretty benign. it's stuff like...

...the neighbors up the street (with two kids) found a transient climbing in their window at 2 AM. one of them saw him the next morning walking down the street and he apologized, "I thought the house was empty, was just looking for a place to take a shower." O_O

and once i almost went outside to catch someone stealing our neighbor's car but there were five dudes involved in the theft, probably a good thing i didn't (actually didn't know it was a car theft til the next morning.)

there was in fact a random unsolved shooting of someone in their car a few years ago on New Year's Eve, one block down the street. a total cold case, and no one ever talks about it.

also unrelated but the current cold case that I find most sinister is the decapitation murder of a young dude in Ashland Oregon a few years ago, walking back from work in the early evening down a well-trafficked park path, someone ambushed him and cut his head off. zero leads. the park is very close to I-5, so who the hell knows.

This is why I love living in a cul de sac of solely two storey, side by side, duplexes. We actually see cops on our street a lot bc it’s - like Omar - sketchy-adjacent. But I’ve never felt safer.

Is this the casefile everyone recommends (I've never listened to one of these before)? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awgZSR7ao6c

I had a house in Brooklyn and I think the main thing that kept people away (we had random dents appear in the doors, awnings and window ac units) was that we had a fairly large dog (boxer). And I had a sublet once and 4 apartments were broken into within 2 weeks (we think it was someone who lived in the building, only 8 units) and again I am sure my dog kept people away. But I still keep a heavy magnum flashlight by my bed

Ok, nevermind that totally was not the right podcast. I have the right one now.

Set yr DVR’s if you are so inclined

This is it guys. Tonight. #GoldenStateKiller #earons #EastAreaRapist #originalnightstalker https://t.co/C12EVIAXe4

— Jennifer Carole ❄️ (@jcarole) May 4, 2018

20/20 special was a decent overview. Love seeing Carol Daly & Paul Holes on camera.

The show talked to his former police chief in Auburn & some eyeopeners there: apparently D’Angelo had cased the chiefs house after he was fired., but couldnt find the bedroom & left.
AND. A short time after D’Angelo was fired the chief’s *daughter* told him one morning that a man had been looking in her bedroom window with a flashlight the night before. But at the time the chief never suspected DAngelo.

Creepy-shivers.

Not surprising news but worth sharing anyway

Joseph James DeAngelo, the suspected Golden State Killer, has been charged with four more counts of first-degree murder, Santa Barbara County District Attorney Joyce Dudley said https://t.co/VbMd5yPXAi

— CNN (@CNN) May 11, 2018

Interesting piece at LGM from a pseudonymous contributor about the failures of various LE jurisdictions to consider whether EAR/ONS might have been a cop or former cop: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/05/east-area-rapist-identified-suspect-1980

Interesting read!!! Thx Phil. it def raises a good point that i’d like to see addressed by the players when the dust settles. I do really want to see some analysis on where they went wrong investigatively, because it seems they latched onto some ideas p early that carved them into a deeper path than it should have.

However, I do have some misgivings abt publishing this under a pen name, it just seems kinda cowardly. Also imo “Chip” isn’t bringing a whole lot of analysis to bear other than WELL THEY SHOULD HAVE FIGURED IT OUT. idk. The smug monday morning qb, “expert from The Internet” aspect doesn’t sit great with me.

It’s a good read all the same, tho.

With so many victims & families still living, writing about the case has to be a very difficult highwire act. I wonder if the rush to go to print after McNamara’s death may have been a contributing factor. Speculation on my part there, though.
Perhaps there was a deliberate choice not to speak to some of the families, or logistical reasons for not doing so. It’s not always cut & dried.

I’ve read her story a few times but it suddenly struck me the cold calculatedness of attacking in the early morning. No cover of darkness but with ppl starting to go to work etc you’re less suspicious being a body moving around in a suburban neighborhood.

When I leave my house to go to work in the morning, about 1-2 hours before my wife and kids get up, is definitely when I feel the most anxiety about someone breaking in and attacking them or something. Sometimes I'll double back when I'm halfway to my bus stop to make sure I've set the alarm. I dunno, it's not like you hear about very many early morning home invasions but it's a very vulnerable time nevertheless.

pleading guilty this morning. his voice is creepy as fuck. and the HBO series just started last night.

How was the HBO series? I really liked the book, but I'm curious as to the angle they take with the series. Was going to start it last night, but chose to go with something a little lighter after that pretty dark Perry Mason ep.

it just started. it's good, but it's a bit unfocused. I expect it will tighten up as it goes on.

i had no idea perry mason was on until I saw the trailer last night and it looks fucking amazing though I'm not sure how much it has to do with the perry mason character we know?

I like it so far, but it's early going. Honestly I only know of the character via reruns of the Raymond Burr series from when I was younger, and this is quite a bit different so far. Mason himself is def more of a rumpled private investigator working for a lawyer, not a lawyer himself (though I guess this might be closer to the written origins? idk). It's gripping so far and I love seeing Tatiana Maslany as a weird cult preacher, though it's def very gruesome in bits.

on DeAngelo, one thing I hadn't seen until today was a report from his nephew that DeA
ngelo's sister was raped by two servicemen at the age of 7 while she and DeAngelo were playing in a warehouse. Apparently she told her son this last year before she died of cancer. He said he wonders if this was an instigating event. He hadn't seen Deangelo in many years.

also, that DeAngelo's parents beat the fuck out of their kids, which seems to be the case in almost every serial killer story.

End of story

Golden State Killer Joseph DeAngelo sentenced to life in prison

I watched some of the victim’s statements yesterday, I cant imagine what that must have been like for them. What all of this has been like.

We just started the HBO documentary (I never read the book) and while it is less successful when it comes to the intersection of her life and her quest for the truth, the way it depicts the destructive impact on the victims is by nature uncomfortable but still very ... not sympathetic, that's the wrong word. I don't know the right word right now, but it mostly captures the terror without being exploitative.

Final episode really hits that home re the victims & victims families & what he did to their lives - the show really handled that in a sensitive & impactful way

Spry old feller

https://www.kcra.com/article/sacramento-county-da-releases-videos-of-joseph-deangelo-in-cell/33670432

just tangentially, the doc/show gave me a lot more sympathy for patton... not that michelle dying wasnt an unexpected tragedy but from afar it never sat well w me that he re-tweeted iirc a newsstory about her death

the old Unsolved Mysteries segment is legit terrifying

Yeah, with the negligee model? it was totally gross and in such bad taste.

The small problem I have with the doc (and we have one more episode to go) is the way it kind of elides over her drug use/abuse by making it almost a romanticized part of her obsessive pursuit. Like she needed the pills to keep on her path and get past the nightmares and insomnia to bring truth, justice and closure to the victims. I was shocked to learn there was fentanyl (or iirc multiple opiates) in her system, though, and while Oswalt seems aware of at least some of the other stuff she was taking (I think he at least initially claimed the Xanax was his, but they also reportedly found cocaine and ecstasy and other recreational stuff after she died) it's unclear if he was aware she was into significantly more serious pharmaceuticals than Xanax or whatever, or in significantly high quantities. The doc is really smart by paralleling her death with that of Prince, but of course Prince was taken advantage of (or at least lead astray) by bad medical advice. There's an indication in the doc that McNamara (whose family lives right by me, btw!) wasn't getting *any* of her meds legitimately, which is scary; there's a text they post in passing that iirc has her asking Patton or a family member if they could grab more pills from another family members' cabinet.

Wouldn't really matter except that the doc is as much about her as the case, yet like Prince or Tom Petty the accidental OD seemingly comes out of nowhere; the epic Peter B. Tom Petty doc that nonetheless cut out his years of heroin addiction taught me not to trust authorized docs to necessarily give me the whole truth.

Anyway, truly tragic and sad.