Ex-cop DeAngelo pleads guilty to Golden State Killer murders, rapes after 40-year hunt

🚨 THE PLEA

In 2020, Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. pleaded guilty to 13 murders and 13 kidnapping-for-robbery counts, plus numerous rape-related charges, as part of a plea agreement.

The plea spared him the death penalty.

In August 2020, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The plea covered crimes committed in multiple counties.

He admitted to the rapes and other offenses as part of the deal.

DeAngelo was a former police officer.

He was arrested in April 2018.

The courtroom record does not establish any statement from DeAngelo in court.

The exact wording of his plea is not in the record.

What is in the record is the shape of the deal: a guilty plea, a life sentence, no trial for the rapes.

Not a confession delivered to the families.

Not a statement of remorse.

The record shows a plea agreement, signed and entered, covering decades of crimes across jurisdictions.

It is final.

It is also incomplete, in the way that a sentence of life can be final without being whole.

For forty years, the case was a series of open doors.

Then it was a name, an arrest, a charge sheet.

Then it was this: a man in a courtroom, pleading guilty.

The families of the dead did not get a trial.

They got a plea.

The survivors did not get a verdict.

They got a sentence.

The record does not explain why DeAngelo chose to plead.

That would require evidence the case file does not contain.

What the record does show is the outcome: 13 murders admitted, 13 kidnapping-for-robbery counts admitted, the rapes folded into the deal.

Life without parole.

He will not be eligible for parole.

He will not be granted it.

The case moved from cold to closed in the space of a guilty plea.

The fear that defined the decades did not end in a courtroom.

It ended on paper.

It is a heavy thing, that paper.

It is also the only thing the record offers.

1976 — THE FIRST REPORTS

It began in Sacramento County, in 1976.

The record does not state the exact date of the first attack.

The record does not state how many rapes occurred that year.

What is documented is a pattern: a man entering homes in the suburbs, targeting women alone or with a partner.

He stalked first, the reports said.

He sometimes bound the victim and her partner.

The media gave him a name: the East Area Rapist.

It fit the geography. It fit the fear.

The attacks escalated to burglary and rape.

They spread across multiple Northern California counties.

A house in the dark. A door left unlocked. A sound downstairs.

The pattern held: a stranger, a weapon, a command.

He was not a phantom in the woods.

He operated where people believed they were safe.

The suburbs were his terrain.

The crimes were reported, logged, filed.

The offender remained a name without a face.

The dread was creeping. So was he.

1979 — THE MOVE SOUTH

The attacks did not stay north.

In 1979, the crimes moved south to the San Francisco Bay Area.

The same offender was linked there to a series of violent assaults and murders.

The media gave him a new name: the Original Night Stalker.

The record does not establish the specific crimes in the Bay Area, nor the exact number of victims in this period.

What is documented is the pattern: homes entered, couples bound, violence escalating.

The East Area Rapist had been a prowler, a stalker, a shadow in Sacramento bedrooms.

The Original Night Stalker was something else.

He killed.

The crimes continued into the mid-1980s.

The last confirmed murder attributed to the offender came in 1986, in Goleta, California.

That is where the trail goes cold.

Not because the offender stopped. But because the record stops.

The geographic terror widened even as the identification narrowed.

He was in the Bay Area. He was in the south. He was in the suburbs.

Where was he not?

That would require evidence.

For now, there was only a name from the media and a string of jurisdictions that did not yet talk to one another.

The dread had moved south with him.

THE COLD CASE

For decades, the case was defined by a lack of physical evidence linking the crimes.

Police had DNA from several crime scenes, but no match in criminal databases.

The samples sat in storage, waiting for a name that would not come.

A critical mistake was the failure to connect the two series earlier.

Partly due to jurisdictional boundaries, the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker were investigated as separate horrors.

Not because the crimes were different. But because the counties did not talk to one another.

The exact number of DNA samples is not established in the record.

The specific jurisdictional failures are not established in the record either.

What is documented is the gap: years of parallel investigations, each one blind to the other.

DeAngelo had been a police officer.

That may have helped him avoid suspicion.

That may have helped him understand police tactics.

It is a theory supported by his former profession.

It is not a fact the record confirms.

He knew how patrols worked. He knew how evidence was logged. He knew how long a lead could sit untouched.

The case went cold.

The perpetrator unidentified. The full scope of his crimes unknown.

Detectives retired. Files moved to storage. Families waited.

The DNA remained, and the DNA was the only thread.

But a thread with no match is just a strand.

It does not point. It does not speak. It waits.