True Crime Vault: Golden State Killer

Speaker 1 Hi 911, what is the address to your emergency?

Speaker 4 This 911 call began an investigation that would turn the town of Ashland, Ohio, into a crime scene.

Speaker 5 We've got something big going on here.

Speaker 6 The first thing hit my mind is a monster.

Speaker 3 A new series from ABC Audio in 2020: The Hand in the Window.

Speaker 10 Out now, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 12 Welcome to the 2020 True Crime Vault, where heart-stopping headlines come to life.

Speaker 2 He told us with clenched teeth, shut up or I'll kill you.

Speaker 6 Sorry, it's just, you know, finding out what she went through. Tonight, on 2020, the so-called Golden State Killer, a 40-year-old cold case, back in the news tonight.

Speaker 16 The police are saying lock up tight.

Speaker 18 Is this my last moment alive?

Speaker 19 He wanted fear. He wanted to see fear in me.

Speaker 13 Hands tied, legs tied.

Speaker 6 Meet, shut up, shut up, shut up.

Speaker 20 One of the most notorious and elusive serial killers in American history.

Speaker 23 He's a pro. Nobody even knows what he looks like.

Speaker 2 He was like a puff of smoke in the night.

Speaker 19 We have his DNA.

Speaker 24 We just need a name to go with this DNA.

Speaker 20 Tonight, we have one.

Speaker 11 I think they got him.

Speaker 15 Now we're taking you inside the Epic Manhunt.

Speaker 28 We have a master suspect name list of 8,000 names honing in on his M.O.

Speaker 15 He would balance plates on many of his victims.

Speaker 19 That was his thing, you know, if he hears the plates rattle, he's gonna come back to them.

Speaker 15 And how they developed a profile from the bizarre details. What was he saying?

Speaker 2 Mommy, mommy, I don't wanna do this anymore. Why am I doing this?

Speaker 10 I have talked to victims who said he called them in the 90s and said, I'm coming back.

Speaker 20 Now, how an obsessed detective and his team and a tiny DNA sample almost forgotten in cold storage for four decades led to last week's arrest.

Speaker 27 Finally, I got to see the face of the man that I've been hunting for 24 years.

Speaker 20 And you won't believe the man authorities say is behind the mask.

Speaker 15 I'm Elizabeth Vargas.

Speaker 6 And I'm David Muir, and this is 2020.

Speaker 15 And ABC's with Johnson tonight, reporting this hour.

Speaker 32 He's been on this story from the start.

Speaker 22 And he begins tonight with the words from an author who spent much of her life obsessed with this case.

Speaker 33 Control was this offender's chosen language. It was in the bindings, the Blitz attacks.
He ruled in the houses he sneaked into.

Speaker 33 A static mask imposing horror.

Speaker 13 Tuesday, October 5th, 1976.

Speaker 13 It was about 6.30 in the morning.

Speaker 13 My husband had just left for work. My three-year-old son hopped in bed with me for a snuggle.

Speaker 13 Within one to two minutes, I saw a flashlight shining down the hall, and I screamed out to my husband, what have you forgotten?

Speaker 13 Next thing I knew, I looked up, and there was a man shining this flashlight in my eyes with a ski mask on, holding a large butcher knife.

Speaker 13 He told us with clenched teeth, shut up or I'll kill you.

Speaker 6 She would soon become victim number five.

Speaker 6 But before that terrifying morning, she was simply Jane Carson, a 30-year-old nursing student at Cal State Sacramento, living with her Air Force pilot husband and their young son in the suburb of Citrus Heights.

Speaker 13 Life was very good back then, just a normal routine, getting up in the morning, taking my son to daycare. Then I would go to school, come home, fix dinner.

Speaker 6 That month's number one song was Chicago's If You Leave Me Now. If you leave me now,

Speaker 6 you'll take away the biggest part of me.

Speaker 6 Rocky was due to hit theaters. A new president, Jimmy Carter, was on the cusp of election, and Sacramento was still an up-and-coming capital city with a small-town feel.

Speaker 34 It was a sleepy town, friendly, safe.

Speaker 10 People didn't lock their doors.

Speaker 2 You could park your car in the driveway and you could leave it unlocked. You could leave the keys in it.

Speaker 10 And you didn't worry about your safety.

Speaker 10 That was until 1976.

Speaker 6 For Jane, her once secure home would soon become her prison.

Speaker 13 The next thing is he gags us, blindfolds us, ties us up with shoelaces. He started ripping sheets or towels, I'm not sure.

Speaker 13 But it was very methodical and it was very slow.

Speaker 34 That tearing sound, he's doing that purposefully because he knows the victims can hear that sound.

Speaker 38 He wanted to inflict absolute fear and suffering in these victims.

Speaker 27 And that was his primary goal.

Speaker 13 His next move was to move my son.

Speaker 13 This is where the fear really

Speaker 13 took place.

Speaker 13 My heart was pounding through my chest and I just prayed, dear Lord, please, please let my son be safe.

Speaker 13 And he came around and he untied my ankles. I wasn't paying attention to the rape.
I was paying attention to what had he done with my son.

Speaker 2 After the assault, her son is put back in bed with her.

Speaker 13 I could feel his body and then I was relieved. And then he said, don't move or I'll come back and kill you.

Speaker 19 Then he goes into the kitchen and he starts rattling pots and pans.

Speaker 13 It's like he's cooking something.

Speaker 13 And I went, wow, this is really off the wall. This is really weird, strange.

Speaker 6 When her attacker finally leaves, the sun is rising.

Speaker 6 Jane and her little boy still bound in bed. Then she breaks free.

Speaker 13 And when I got my blindfold down, would you believe that my three-year-old was asleep? That was God's protection for that child.

Speaker 6 Carol Daly, a detective with the Sacramento Sheriff's Department, was one of the first on scene.

Speaker 2 By the time our patrol officer got in the area and started looking for him, he was nowhere around.

Speaker 8 Nowhere close? No.

Speaker 6 There had been four similar attacks in Sacramento in recent months.

Speaker 38 At what point did you realize you had a serial rapist on your hands?

Speaker 2 With Dane Carson, when we looked back and realized she was number five of similar rapes.

Speaker 6 In each case, the same meticulous, petrifying M.O.

Speaker 17 He always had a mask on. He always had gloves on.

Speaker 10 Sometimes he would break into the house the night before.

Speaker 17 Part of that is probably to figure out the layout of the house.

Speaker 2 He would be in there anywhere from one to three hours in the assault. They could hear him going into the kitchen.
He would eat food. He would drink a beer.

Speaker 39 This was about power for this guy. This was not about sex.
He's thinking to himself, I'm king here, and I'm just going to relish that feeling.

Speaker 38 So he would just make himself at home.

Speaker 2 Knowing that he had the victim secured.

Speaker 10 He would find their wallet. He would take their driver's license.
He said, I know where you live. I know who you are.

Speaker 2 He took rings off the victim, take some of the jewelry. Anything that would be a memento for him to look back and say,

Speaker 2 That was my victim.

Speaker 10 And he's simply driving a stake through people's psyche.

Speaker 6 After Jane's attack, there are three more rapes just that month. Police have been keeping them quiet, certain they would soon solve the case.

Speaker 6 But public safety was at risk, and rumors had begun to spread.

Speaker 10 It was almost like wind through the trees. Everybody knew something was going on, but nobody knew exactly what.

Speaker 2 The sheriff decided that we would hold community forums.

Speaker 40 If you are going to defend yourself, you must injure your attacker.

Speaker 2 I had no idea there were going to be several hundred people that would show up.

Speaker 41 Concern over rape is mounting in this community. I live alone and I would like to learn how to protect myself.

Speaker 42 I imagine a lot of women in the area are scared and are nervous.

Speaker 6 Terror gripping the city. Residents desperate to protect themselves from a madman, now dubbed the East Area Rapist.

Speaker 1 People in these quiet East Bay suburbs have wondered and worried. Wondered about why the police can't catch the rapist and worried about their own homes being violated.

Speaker 2 Locks were flying off the hardware shelves.

Speaker 41 I don't like it. It's getting too close to home.
I put locks on my doors, people in just last week.

Speaker 2 Gun sales soared.

Speaker 1 They just want to protect themselves and protect their families.

Speaker 11 I have a gun, but I still don't feel safe being, you know, at home alone.

Speaker 13 Every day in the newspaper, it was number eight, it was number 10, it was number 15, 20, 28, 30. You know, it just kept going on and on and on.

Speaker 6 This map of the area showed the rapist's brazen ability to strike wherever and whenever he wanted.

Speaker 43 This particular rape happened within one block of another rape.

Speaker 6 The initial attacks are on women home alone or with their children. But then the East Area rapist shifts his target to couples.

Speaker 17 It tells me that this guy has the self-confidence in his abilities to be able to go into a house with the threat of this male present and take control.

Speaker 6 One of the town meetings addresses the new development.

Speaker 2 A man stood up and said, I don't believe somebody could be raped if a man was in the house.

Speaker 8 What happened to him?

Speaker 2 Well, several months later, he and his wife were victims of the East Area rapist.

Speaker 39 It's chilling to think that this guy said, oh yeah, really? You think you can protect your wife? And then he attacked them.

Speaker 2 I believe the rapist was in that room and followed him home.

Speaker 8 It's a completely devastating story of predatory evil connected to the psyche of the town in a way I've never seen before. But until he's caught, Vitelia will continue to live in fear.

Speaker 10 This one man

Speaker 10 could change a city.

Speaker 6 Next.

Speaker 13 I was fortunate that I was number five because after my rape, he became much more aggressive.

Speaker 2 As time went by, we felt that our next call was going to be to a homicide.

Speaker 6 Stay with us.

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Speaker 33 The majority of violent fantasizers never act.

Speaker 33 What makes the ones who do cross over?

Speaker 33 The daydreamer steps out of his trance and into a stranger's house.

Speaker 23 Every time the East Area rapist strikes in the new city, the police switchboard lights up.

Speaker 41 Conquer Police Department is like this.

Speaker 48 We're getting an awful of calls. Some people even turning in their neighbors because they think he might be the rapist.

Speaker 6 It's the fall of 1977. Sacramento, California is under siege.
A violent serial rapist on the prowl.

Speaker 42 With this guy, the next rape could be anywhere.

Speaker 10 This guy was a menace. He was striking time and time again.
The fact that they couldn't catch this guy just ignited the city in fear.

Speaker 1 A lot of people are buying guns. The cops say that's a bad idea, noting the weapons are a bigger danger than the rapists.

Speaker 6 This spunky 13-year-old named Margaret Wardlow couldn't get enough of those headlines.

Speaker 19 It was really piqued my interest. Like, what was making this guy tick? Why was he doing this?

Speaker 2 Anything that she could read or hear about on TV of the East Area rapists, she was just intrigued by it.

Speaker 6 Thursday, November 10th, it's a school night. Margaret goes to bed early.

Speaker 19 I was awoken about 2.30 in the morning with a flashlight in my face.

Speaker 19 And I knew at that moment this is the Easter rapist most likely.

Speaker 6 Margaret's mother tied up in the next room. The rapist stacking plates on her back.

Speaker 2 He did that with so many of the victims when there was more than one person in the house.

Speaker 38 Why would he stack the plates?

Speaker 2 So if he heard anybody moving, he was right back and told them, don't move, don't move, I'm going to kill you, I'll kill you.

Speaker 38 Like an alarm system.

Speaker 2 Yes, like an alarm system.

Speaker 19 The whole time he'd been threatening me, he'd been saying, Do you want to die? And I answered him very clearly, saying, I don't care.

Speaker 38 He said, I'm going to kill you, and you told the serial rapist, I don't care.

Speaker 19 I knew by telling him this, he most likely would leave sooner than later. He wasn't getting what he wanted.
He wanted fear. He wanted to see fear in me.

Speaker 2 Margaret was probably the strongest young victim I have ever talked to.

Speaker 6 She was victim number 27, but the attacks continued to escalate, now spreading to neighboring cities.

Speaker 23 He moved on to Stockton, Modesto, and Davis. He surfaced in Concord and San Ramon.
Then two nights ago, he hit Fremont.

Speaker 6 The East Area rapist taunting his victims even further with chilling phone calls.

Speaker 2 He would say things like, remember the fun we had. And sometimes it was just heavy breathing, but they knew it was him.

Speaker 38 How long after the fact would he make these calls?

Speaker 2 Sometimes it was within a week, and sometimes it was years later.

Speaker 38 So it was as if as soon as a victim started to get comfortable, he would circle back and try to prolong the fear and suffering.

Speaker 2 He did everything he could to make sure that he tormented them for the rest of their life.

Speaker 23 The infamous masked man made his 44th attack.

Speaker 1 Our biggest problems are in being able to clearly identify a suspect.

Speaker 38 What did he look like as far as what the victims were saying?

Speaker 2 510, 180. We thought he had lighter brown hair.

Speaker 39 Eye color was sometimes dark, sometimes light. Some said he had a strange smell.

Speaker 38 Did the victims give a description that was unique about him?

Speaker 2 Most Most of the victims described him as having a very small penis.

Speaker 6 Detective Carol Daly says they thoroughly checked out all leads.

Speaker 2 There was not a stone left unturned in trying to identify this rapist. And we didn't have any luck there.

Speaker 6 Authorities canvassed neighborhoods, surveilling at all hours. They even brought out canines.

Speaker 38 All those resources, and yet you still couldn't catch him.

Speaker 2 No, we didn't catch him.

Speaker 6 There were few physical clues left behind, but a blood sample showed showed the East Area rapist had a rare genetic condition that would eliminate 85% of the population.

Speaker 10 They would bring a cloth out of a little kit and you would chew it so they would get your saliva.

Speaker 2 We went to UPS briefings and delivery people just volunteered officers because at one time everybody thought it could be a cop.

Speaker 38 Was there a point in time when there were clues that maybe he was former law enforcement or military?

Speaker 27 In attack number three, they're confronted with this man.

Speaker 26 He's got a mask on, he's got a t-shirt on, and he's got a gun in one hand and a padded baton in another hand.

Speaker 28 And he says, freeze or I'll shoot.

Speaker 28 When you look at his tactics,

Speaker 36 he definitely had an understanding of how law enforcement would respond to this type of attack. He understood how law enforcement would investigate that.

Speaker 38 Well, he was definitely good at getting away with it.

Speaker 37 He was very good at getting away with it.

Speaker 6 And there is something else striking. The East Area rapist reportedly said during one of his assaults, a name.

Speaker 27 He is sobbing and saying, I hate you, Bonnie. I hate you, Bonnie, over and over.

Speaker 38 What was the significance of that?

Speaker 37 That he had some significant female in his life named Bonnie, and he had some anger against what Bonnie had done to him.

Speaker 18 And he's taken that anger out on this victim that he's raping.

Speaker 23 The only thing we really know about the East Area rapist is that he's a pro. He's been at this for four years now and still nobody even knows what he looks like.

Speaker 2 We felt that our next call was going to be to a homicide. We really felt he was ready to kill.

Speaker 6 Suddenly, the spree of sex assaults stopped abruptly in 1979 with no rhyme or reason. What investigators didn't know was their biggest fear had come true.

Speaker 6 The rapist re-emerging in Southern California, now a killer.

Speaker 1 It can happen to you, and it apparently can happen without reason or motive.

Speaker 6 Ten murders in succession, earning him the nickname Original Nightstalker.

Speaker 6 Among the victims, prominent attorney Lyman Smith and his wife Charlene. Daughter Jennifer was just 18 at the time.
He was bigger than life.

Speaker 11 He loved to laugh. Charlene was vivacious, musical, loved to cook.
She had a flair for style.

Speaker 17 They had been bludgeoned in the head head with a log that had been collected from a wood pile outside the house.

Speaker 11 It was horrible to think you're blindfolded, your hands are bound, they're behind your back.

Speaker 17 Charlene's body was processed for sexual assault evidence, and semen was found.

Speaker 6 Police preserved that semen sample from Charlene Smith's rape kit. It would take 17 years to match the killer's DNA to the DNA collected at three other murder scenes.

Speaker 24 So they worked them independently for many, many, many years. It wasn't until the advent of DNA technology in the mid-90s that they were able to link a crime.

Speaker 6 Then, four years later, in a stunning development, authorities are finally able to connect the original Night Stalker to the East Area rapist.

Speaker 32 This serial offender was probably one of the most prolific, certainly in California. possibly within the United States.

Speaker 14 Your serial rapist in Northern California was the same serial killer they were dealing with in Southern California.

Speaker 38 How significant was that development?

Speaker 31 Holy smokes, this is like the big break because

Speaker 27 they got more insight, 50 cases worth of investigation.

Speaker 6 Now they know the rapist and the killer are one man. A 10-year crime spree spanning 500 miles.
At least 12 murders and 50 rapes, investigators say. Now rebranded as the Golden State Killer.

Speaker 24 We have his DNA. We just need a name to go with this DNA.

Speaker 6 How a genetic roadmap led investigators to an alleged criminal mastermind.

Speaker 18 The DNA came back, and it's looking like it's him.

Speaker 6 Next.

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Speaker 19 Mom Talk started as a sisterhood, and that's gone to flames. New secrets and lies are coming out.

Speaker 21 This is going to be catastrophic.

Speaker 39 We're fighting for our marriages, and the girls are just putting us through hell. They make everything about themselves.

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Speaker 35 Watch the Hulu original, The Secret Lives Lives of Mormon Wives, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bonus subscribers. Terms apply.

Speaker 47 2020 continues with To Catch a Killer.

Speaker 33 It was a power play, a signal of ubiquity. I am both nowhere and everywhere.

Speaker 33 You may not think I have something in common with your neighbor, but you do.

Speaker 6 Me.

Speaker 6 Despite the discovery of a DNA link among his many vicious crimes, the man known as the original Nightstalker would elude investigators for decades.

Speaker 38 How frustrating was that at the time to have the DNA but not have a name or a face to go with it?

Speaker 13 I mean, it's frustrating.

Speaker 6 The clue that would unlock the mystery of the Golden State serial killer for police was hidden inside that 1980 murder of Lyman Smith and his wife Charlene.

Speaker 49 I'd arrive at the scene with my little suitcase, a tube rack and dry ice and a microscope.

Speaker 6 Pathologist Dr. Peter Speth investigated the Smith case when the use of rape kits was in its earliest stages.
Speth had an unusual methodology.

Speaker 49 I always made duplicate kits. and both kits were identical.
To my knowledge, there are no other medical examiners who make duplicate rape kits.

Speaker 6 Smeth's decision to make two kits would prove prophetic.

Speaker 37 That turned out to be

Speaker 5 a gold mine for us because that second kit had sat in the coroner's possession for 38 years untouched. And so the swabs collected from Charlene Smith's body were pristine.

Speaker 6 For years, those pristine swabs languished in an evidence room past rows of case files. The DNA of the man who authorities say killed 12 people and raped 50 sat undisturbed in a freezer.

Speaker 6 For almost four decades, police were sitting on a genetic fingerprint, waiting for the science to catch up.

Speaker 6 Little did they know that years later, a brave new world of genetic genealogy would begin to flourish.

Speaker 5 Ancestry.com searches the world's largest online family history resource.

Speaker 6 Now, everyone looking to find their family roots or a long-lost relative could spit into a test tube and compare it to millions of other samples.

Speaker 50 About 2009, this new type of DNA to use for genealogy was introduced and it's become a huge industry.

Speaker 6 Cece Moore, a genetic genealogist, helped pioneer the use of DNA to help build family trees and has helped thousands find long-lost relatives. Your mom.
Oh, give me a hug.

Speaker 50 Adoptees and people with unknown parentage started coming to me and asking me to identify their birth parents.

Speaker 6 But law enforcement was slow to realize its power until Detective Paul Holes started to wonder, could this genetic genealogy create a roadmap to a serial killer?

Speaker 27 I started watching these PhDs, these genetic genealogists, explain the technology.

Speaker 31 And I was like, that looks interesting.

Speaker 6 Holes went back to that freezer and took the killer's DNA information and uploaded it onto a no-frills genealogy website called JEDMatch.

Speaker 38 How did you plant the mystery DNA of that unknown attacker into the website?

Speaker 27 I created an undercover account and I just uploaded the Golden State killer's profile and allowed the JEDMatch servers to do their magic and produce the list of people that potentially shared some DNA with my offender.

Speaker 38 Why did investigators choose JEDMatch?

Speaker 50 It's a public database. The largest databases, 23andMe and Ancestry DNA, only accept saliva samples.

Speaker 50 And so you have to spit in that tube, create quite a bit of saliva, so you can't get that from a crime scene biological sample.

Speaker 6 And remember, investigators had that DNA from a 1980 crime scene rape kit to work with.

Speaker 38 So investigators, even if they wanted to, they didn't have the ability to submit a sample on something like Ancestry or 23andMe.

Speaker 50 That's correct. And those companies have purposely tried to make that difficult because they don't want law enforcement using their databases for these purposes.

Speaker 6 JEDMatch says they were not approached by law enforcement. Their policy statement says users should expect their information will be shared with other users.

Speaker 6 And despite the JEDMatch database being significantly smaller than 23andMe and Ancestry.com, Detective Holes got lucky.

Speaker 27 I got a list of individuals that shared shared DNA with the offender on the order roughly of third cousins to fourth cousins.

Speaker 6 Holes spent months building out family trees, working with a team of investigators, including a genetic genealogist.

Speaker 6 They poured over obituaries, gravesite locators, census records, and DNA databases to begin a process of elimination.

Speaker 38 In the end of this painstaking process, narrowing down, sifting through the family tree, how many people did you end up with in your final group?

Speaker 31 We start looking at his geographic profile and seeing that he has a Sacramento area connection and a Southern California area connection. We're evaluating these people that were of the right age.

Speaker 26 They were of the right physical size that we knew our offender to be, somebody who's roughly 5'8, 5'10, 160, 80 pounds.

Speaker 26 We had settled on roughly five.

Speaker 38 How do do you narrow in on Joseph D'Angelo?

Speaker 27 We started focusing on Joe DiAngelo because he looked better than the remainder.

Speaker 6 But still at that point, he wasn't a prime suspect, was he?

Speaker 28 No, in fact, he was just somebody who rose to the level as many people have.

Speaker 27 It wasn't anybody thinking,

Speaker 28 this is the guy.

Speaker 6 To narrow the focus, police knew they needed to get fresh DNA from D'Angelo to match against that 1980 sample.

Speaker 38 How did they get the DNA from him?

Speaker 27 By a surveillance team that watched him for days. And when he went to a public location, he discarded some of his DNA at that public location that was then collected.

Speaker 11 Learning new details about the arrest of the suspect.

Speaker 15 The suspected Golden State killer killed.

Speaker 2 With help from genealogy websites.

Speaker 44 Years and years later, a genealogy site.

Speaker 6 Paul Holz retired in March after nearly three decades chasing the killer, but was so so driven he was still actively working the case.

Speaker 38 Where were you when you got the news?

Speaker 27 I was outside a restaurant in Colorado. I received a call from the Sacramento DA's office and they told me, don't say a word, but the DNA came back and it's looking like it's him.

Speaker 6 When we come back, how did the man accused of being one of the most notorious criminals in American history blend into his neighborhood, his workplace, for over 40 years.

Speaker 11 He's been right here the whole time, under all of our noses,

Speaker 11 living his life.

Speaker 33 Most violent criminals smash through life like human sledgehammers. They're caught easily, but every so often, a blue moon surfaces.
A snow leopard slinks by.

Speaker 24 The reason that he has evaded capture for so long is that he's so evidence savvy.

Speaker 23 After an hour and a half, it was over and he fled without a trace.

Speaker 2 It was like he knew every step that law enforcement was doing all along.

Speaker 42 With this guy, the next rape could be anywhere.

Speaker 10 In my estimation, he's the most prolific major crime

Speaker 10 perpetrator, maybe in American history.

Speaker 6 It's April 25th, 2018.

Speaker 39 Police say they now have the Golden State killer in custody.

Speaker 6 42 years after the Golden State killer commits his first crime, a break in the case drops like a bombshell.

Speaker 2 Thousands of nightmares and thousands of sleepless nights have come to arrest.

Speaker 6 The man accused of being one of the most violent serial criminals in American history is found hiding in plain sight.

Speaker 28 Finally, I got to see the face of the man that I've been hunting for 24 years.

Speaker 6 He's 72-year-old Joseph James D'Angelo.

Speaker 15 That former police officer who authorities say went on a reign of terror for so many years.

Speaker 11 And I just was shaking everywhere, just shaking like the adrenaline just flood.

Speaker 6 The Vietnam War veteran is discovered living in this sleepy Sacramento suburb.

Speaker 38 Living just a few hours away from you.

Speaker 11 Can you say the balls involved in being right here under all of our noses? He's been right here the whole time,

Speaker 11 living his life.

Speaker 6 Authorities say D'Angelo was tinkering on a woodworking project in his garage when investigators took him into custody.

Speaker 29 The only thing he really said was

Speaker 29 that he had a roast in the oven.

Speaker 6 Joe D'Angelo appeared to live a quiet and normal life, working 27 years at this grocery distribution center, fixing trucks before retiring last year.

Speaker 6 He was married to a local attorney, the couple raising three daughters before reportedly separating in 1991.

Speaker 38 Were you surprised to learn that Joseph D'Angelo was a father, a grandfather, family man?

Speaker 31 I wasn't because I had predicted that he likely would just be blending in.

Speaker 6 It was a different story for some of his neighbors who say the man who kept a meticulous front lawn also had an explosive temper.

Speaker 15 He would go into a yelling tirade, not sure who he was yelling at, a lot of four-letter curse words.

Speaker 18 He'd accuse us kids here of spying on him in the backyard. He was paranoid at times.

Speaker 6 Grant Gorman, who lived in the house directly behind D'Angelo's, says his neighbor once left his family an anonymous but threatening voicemail.

Speaker 38 And it said, if you don't shut that dog up, I'll deliver a load of death.

Speaker 6 Perhaps the most alarming of revelations, that D'Angelo at one point had actually been a police officer. In 1973 he was working in Exeter, California.

Speaker 7 Well I don't think anybody really got to know the guy.

Speaker 6 Pharrell Ward says he worked patrol with D'Angelo for three years.

Speaker 7 And I told him he was overeducated so why would he want to stay in Exeter? He should be an FBI.

Speaker 6 It was while he was a police officer, authorities allege D'Angelo's reign of terror begins.

Speaker 26 Now that we've identified D'Angelo and he was a law enforcement officer, then it's like, well, sure, he's been through the academy. He's been working on the force.

Speaker 31 He understands all that, and he's using that to his advantage to commit these attacks.

Speaker 6 By then, he had moved north, working here at the Auburn Police Department outside Sacramento.

Speaker 30 He had a nickname on the department. It was Junk Food Joey.

Speaker 27 Junk Food Joey. Yes.

Speaker 6 What was that about?

Speaker 30 He would always have a Coke in his hand, a bag of chips, a candy bar.

Speaker 6 At times, D'Angelo's behavior made his colleagues uncomfortable.

Speaker 30 When he talked to you, he'd get kind of close to your face and always be touching you. I remember one time I told him, I said, you know, Joe, my mother doesn't touch me as much as you do.

Speaker 8 How did he respond to that?

Speaker 30 He got his feelings hurt.

Speaker 6 Nick Willick fired D'Angelo in 1979 for stealing dog repellent and a hammer from a local hardware store, saying D'Angelo later filed a lawsuit against the department.

Speaker 27 The investigator told me that

Speaker 30 Joseph had gone to my house one night to kill me

Speaker 30 and said that he walked around the house looking in the windows but couldn't find my bedroom.

Speaker 38 And when you heard that you thought what?

Speaker 30 I just never saw him as a person who could you know kill somebody.

Speaker 6 But Willick says looking back he now remembers something else.

Speaker 30 A short time after he had been fired, I woke up one morning and my daughter said that last night there was someone looking in my bedroom window with a flashlight.

Speaker 38 Did you think that could have been Joseph D'Angelo outside your home?

Speaker 30 No I did not. I did not.

Speaker 6 There is one more chilling detail that helped investigators target their suspect. Remember that mysterious name, Bonnie? The name one woman told authorities her rapists cried out.

Speaker 6 Could that hold the clue to the Golden State killer's rage?

Speaker 38 You thought this guy had a grudge?

Speaker 37 He had a grudge.

Speaker 5 And we didn't know, was Bonnie his mom, a wife, ex-wife, girlfriends?

Speaker 27 We just knew that there was a Bonnie in his life.

Speaker 38 Tell me how Bonnie's name later on helped you zero in on Joseph D'Angelo.

Speaker 27 When we're looking at Joe D'Angelo, we run across a newspaper article of an engagement to a Bonnie back in 1970. So now we have a guy that has a Bonnie in his life.

Speaker 31 And we couldn't find any indication that they ever got married.

Speaker 6 Now, after linking the Golden State killer to 12 murders and 50 rapes, could there be more surprises for investigators?

Speaker 32 It's possible there's attacks out there that we haven't linked to him.

Speaker 6 When 2020 continues.

Speaker 6 Two rings surrounded by a steel cage.

Speaker 6 Oh my god, are you kidding me? This is gonna be a war!

Speaker 51 Stream Survivor Series War Games, November 29th at 7 Eastern on the ESPN app.

Speaker 47 2020 continues with To Catch a Killer.

Speaker 16 He's been called the Eastside Rapist, Original Night Stalker, and the Golden State Killer. Today,

Speaker 16 It's our pleasure to call him Defendant.

Speaker 6 It was the first of likely many appearances before a judge last week as Joseph D'Angelo was rolled into a Sacramento courtroom.

Speaker 43 In custody of D'Angelo.

Speaker 6 The 72-year-old appeared sullen and feeble, barely enough energy to respond to Judge Michael Sweet.

Speaker 43 Is Joseph James D'Angelo your true correct legal name?

Speaker 43 I'm sorry?

Speaker 6 Coughing him to the wheelchair seemed almost pointless, his eyes barely able to stay open as the charges were read.

Speaker 2 I think that he was either tranquilized or it's all an act.

Speaker 18 I don't believe it at all.

Speaker 38 Completely faking it. Thought it was a big show.

Speaker 27 Yep.

Speaker 5 This is a physically capable 72-year-old man.

Speaker 26 For him to be in that wheelchair based on what was seen in the week prior

Speaker 18 is faking it.

Speaker 38 The week before he's arrested, he was seen riding a motorcycle.

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 27 He's the ultimate tactician, and now he is employing a strategy to get sympathy.

Speaker 18 I'm a frail old man.

Speaker 6 So far, D'Angelo has been hit with eight murder charges spread over three counties. On this day, two counts for the 1978 double homicide of Katie and Brian Majori.
No bail and a public defender.

Speaker 19 She couldn't speak.

Speaker 2 She had to lean in and touch him to hear his words.

Speaker 11 When you hear his neighbors, he could be heard shouting in anger. Come on, dude, let's make it a fair fight.
Let's go.

Speaker 2 Stand up.

Speaker 6 Frail or not, D'Angelo will likely avoid prosecution on the 50 rapes he's suspected of.

Speaker 42 He raped a 29-year-old housewife. There was a knife used, and he was wearing a mask or hood of some sort.

Speaker 6 The statute of limitations has long since expired.

Speaker 7 But there's no statute of limitation on murder. We were tugging 40 years, but they found him.

Speaker 37 And now he's going to pay.

Speaker 6 If convicted, he could face the death penalty. But for now, there are unanswered questions about D'Angelo's alleged reign of terror.
First, could it have been even worse than authorities suspect?

Speaker 39 And I was wondering, what else had he done? Who knows? He might have gone to summer camp somewhere. He might have

Speaker 39 gone on vacation somewhere.

Speaker 6 Still, there is much speculation about one big question.

Speaker 6 Why did the Golden State killer finally end his years-long crime spree? What do you think happened?

Speaker 27 In 1981, he ends up going in to kill Gregory Sanchez and Sherry Domingo, and he gets in a physical fight with 6'3 Gregory Sanchez.

Speaker 5 And I think that physical altercation with Sanchez scared him.

Speaker 27 We don't have an attack for five years, but then he runs across beautiful 19-year-old Janelle Cruz and can't help himself and kills her.

Speaker 34 But at this point,

Speaker 27 he's an aging offender.

Speaker 39 His testosterone might have gotten lower. He might have gotten heavier.
He wasn't able to jump around the way he was doing before.

Speaker 2 I always felt he quit because he lost the ability. Maybe to control, maybe to be as agile and as quick as he used to.

Speaker 38 So he just retired from the killing business?

Speaker 32 I think it's possible, but it's also possible there's attacks out there that we haven't linked to him.

Speaker 6 Even if the killer finally gave up on rape and murder, criminal profilers Mary Ellen O'Toole and ABC News consultant Brad Garrett say it's possible the killer didn't stop in 1986.

Speaker 6 He just moved on to different crimes or changed his M.O.

Speaker 44 If you're psychopathic, you're psychopathic and you're going to take that to your grave.

Speaker 52 It is just unbelievable to me that he stopped Colt Turkey in 1986

Speaker 52 because those urges don't go away.

Speaker 6 Perhaps the biggest unknown, is it even possible to know what triggered the killer's rampage?

Speaker 25 Fantasy drives him and the fantasies get richer and to fulfill whatever excitement, thrill, need, sexual thing he needs, he's got to bump it up a notch.

Speaker 52 When people have those facades of normalcy around them good jobs good backgrounds with families they fly under our radar screen far longer than that serial killer that's out there just grabbing people off the street just yesterday d'Angelo's public defender was back in court

Speaker 6 failing in her attempt to block investigators from collecting more dna fingerprints and photographs of specific parts of d'Angelo's body as for Paul Holz he personally doesn't need any more evidence.

Speaker 38 Now that you've seen his face after all these years, what do you see in his eyes?

Speaker 6 I saw glimpses of the evil when he

Speaker 27 saw a female and his face turned into rage briefly.

Speaker 37 And I thought, that is the real Joe D'Angelo.

Speaker 6 When we return, the sister survivors of the Golden State killer speak out.

Speaker 19 No matter how cold your case is, it's not hopeless.

Speaker 6 Stay with us.

Speaker 33 Unsolved murders became an obsession.

Speaker 33 I need to see his face.

Speaker 33 He loses power when we know his face.

Speaker 6 Michelle McNamara's book ends with the hope. that one day a killer would be unmasked.

Speaker 39 She would have been thrilled. She would have been looking through her files, which is what every investigator is doing now that has been involved with this.

Speaker 6 Unexpectedly, Michelle passed away in her sleep a little over two years ago before she could finish her book or see the arrest of Joseph D'Angelo.

Speaker 33 One day soon, you'll hear a car pull up to your curb.

Speaker 33 You'll hear footsteps coming up your front walk. This is how it ends for you.

Speaker 33 Open the door. Show us your your face.
Walk into the light.

Speaker 13 It's been 42 years. I carried a backpack of feelings of revenge,

Speaker 6 of hate,

Speaker 8 of shame, for a long time.

Speaker 13 But I no longer carry that.

Speaker 39 I don't want them to be remembered for this.

Speaker 8 But now...

Speaker 38 They might be remembered for perhaps being the link

Speaker 32 to solve the case.

Speaker 10 The key.

Speaker 21 The key.

Speaker 50 This is indeed a game changer because every law enforcement department in the country, maybe in the world, just realized the power of genetic genealogy.

Speaker 2 I've kept a big binder of information just so I could be able to answer questions over the years and pretty soon I can burn it all. It'll be gone.

Speaker 38 What is the most important thing that you want people to remember about this story?

Speaker 2 I want people to remember the victims. You know, everybody's going to be talking about the rapist, but the victims are the most important part of this story.

Speaker 6 Jane Carson is now an advocate for rape survivors like herself, speaking out at rallies like this one last Friday night.

Speaker 53 I have been a hot mess. I have just been an emotional roller coaster.

Speaker 13 Got to make your mess the message. You can't let it destroy your life.
Life is too beautiful.

Speaker 22 What a survivor. We will continue to follow this incredible story.
And that's 2020 for tonight. I'm Elizabeth Parkas.

Speaker 15 And I'm David Muir from all of us here at ABC News. Thank you for watching.
Have a great evening.

Speaker 6 Good weekend. Good night.

Speaker 12 Thanks for listening to the 2020 True Crime Vault. We hope you'll join us Friday nights at 9 on ABC for all new broadcast episodes.
See you then.