In a weak voice, his emaciated face covered by a plexiglass mask, he replied: "guilty". On Monday, Joseph James DeAngelo pleaded guilty to the 13 murders he was charged with in 2018 in California. The man who was nicknamed the "Golden State killer" also admitted to being the author of 60 rapes committed in the years 1970-80, which were not part of the charges. Via an agreement negotiated with the prosecutor, DeAngelo, 74, will avoid the death penalty but should be sentenced to life.
For 14 years, the "Golden State killer" terrorized California, from north to south. He first raged in Sacramento in 1974, then in the San Francisco area and in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. He began by targeting single women at home, then attacked couples, like Lyman and Charlene Smith, whose skulls were smashed with chimney logs in 1980.
Confused thanks to his DNA and a genealogy site
Like the Zodiac killer, DeAngelo plays cat and mouse with the authorities, taunting them via telephone messages. And if he succeeds in escaping them, it is undoubtedly because he himself was a police officer in the 1970s and knew how to cover his tracks.
And then all of a sudden, nothing. After a last murder, in 1986, DeAngelo becomes a model father, and he raises his three daughters in a residential area of Sacramento. The tracks dry up and the case becomes a "cold case". Until 2016.
The FBI then uses DNA traces taken from several murders and creates a profile on the GEDmatch genealogy site, which makes it possible to find family members thanks to genetics. Authorities identify several distant cousins, and go back to Joseph DeAngelo. They then monitor his home and intercept his garbage cans to compare his DNA to that of the killer. The samples "match". As he leaves his house, one afternoon in April 2018, the police arrest him. According to the sheriff, DeAngelo seems "surprised".
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VIDEO. How investigators went up the trail of the Golden State Killer, 40 years later
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