After 13 Murders, Dozens Of Rape Golden State Killer Pleads Guilty

The Golden State killer was the name pegged on Joseph DeAngelo a former police officer who lived a double life as a serial killer committing several atrocities back in the 70s and 80s.

Victims of California serial killer and rapist Joseph DeAngelo want him locked away in a distant maximum security prison with other inmates since he isn’t going to spend the rest of his life on death row.

But they may not hold much sway over where the 74-year-old former police officer known as the Golden State Killer is imprisoned after he is sentenced Friday.

State corrections officials said they must make their own evaluation about where and how The Golden State Killer can be housed.

Still, survivors and family members of victims have made recommendations during an ongoing sentencing hearing.

“You should be sent to the toughest prison in California,” Dolly Kreis, the mother of rape victim Debbie Strauss, who died in 2016, told DeAngelo in court.

“What a despicable piece of humanity you are.”

Strauss’ sister, Sandy James, urged Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman to send DeAngelo to California’s notorious supermaximum Pelican Bay State Prison.

He “deserves the worst possible environment, where he can live in fear as his victims did,” she said.

Gay Hardwick, who is also a rape victim of Joseph, said in court Wednesday that she is certain DeAngelo is angling to be sent to “some prison nursing home for old murdering psychopaths”.

After the hearing, where victims are describing how they were traumatised by DeAngelo, he will be sentenced to consecutive life sentences under a plea deal that will spare him the death penalty.

Considerations involving his imprisonment include his medical and mental health needs, notoriety and safety concerns — potentially key calculations given his age and headline-grabbing crimes.

Prosecutors have been trying to counter DeAngelo’s courtroom appearance as a feeble man confined to a wheelchair, noting in a court filing that jail video shows him to be “healthy and physically active”.

During one rape in 1978, DeAngelo sobbed and appeared to call out the name of his former girlfriend, saying, “‘I hate you, Bonnie,’ over and over,” investigator Paul Holes said in 2018.

In June, DeAngelo pleaded guilty to 13 murders and 13 rape-related charges between 1975 and 1986. He also publicly admitted dozens more sexual assaults for which the statute of limitations had expired.

The crimes went unsolved until April 2018, when DeAngelo, a father and grandfather, was arrested in Sacramento County.

DeAngelo was the first public arrest obtained through genetic genealogy, a new technique that takes the DNA of an unknown suspect left behind at a crime scene and identifies him or her by tracing a family tree through his or her family members, who voluntarily submit their DNA to public genealogy databases.

To identify DeAngelo, investigators narrowed the family tree search based on age, location and other characteristics.

Authorities conducted surveillance on DeAngelo and collected his DNA from a tissue left in a trash. Investigators plugged his discarded DNA back into the genealogy database and found a match, linking DeAngelo’s DNA to the DNA found at multiple crime scenes, prosecutors said.

Since The Golden State Killer’s arrest, over 150 other crime suspects have been identified through genetic genealogy.

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