Why did it take so long to arrest the Golden State Killer suspect? Interagency rivalries, old technology, errors and bad luck
The killer was thought to have law enforcement or military experience. He was believed to stand around 6 feet tall, with an athletic build. He was presumed to live in the Central Valley and Sacramento area at different points in the 1970s.
Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. was a former police officer who served in the Navy in Vietnam. He was 5-foot-11, with a sturdy frame. He worked in Exeter until 1976, before moving to Auburn, a town 30 miles northeast of Sacramento.
Blessed with hindsight, authorities now say that DeAngelo fit their profile for the East Area Rapist, also known as the Golden State Killer. The 72-year-old faces a dozen counts of murder across the state. He is also suspected in dozens of rapes.
The four-decade manhunt sparked multiple law enforcement task forces, spawned an FBI website dedicated to catching the killer and prompted lawmakers to create a DNA database of known and suspected felons. Working off witness testimony and hunches, investigators whittled down the potential pool of suspects over the years. Yet until they pioneered a novel forensic tactic in recent months - running crime-scene DNA evidence against data from genealogy websites - DeAngelo's name never appeared on their list.
In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, retired investigators who hunted the masked assailant said that poor communication between agencies, investigative tunnel vision and antiquated technology all contributed to the Golden State Killer's elusiveness.
"We were in the dark ages back then, especially compared to today," said Richard Shelby, a retired Sacramento County sheriff's detective who investigated the killings in the 1970s.
Authorities chased a trail of rapes and murders up and down the state, waiting for that piece of evidence that would lead them to the perpetrator.
"The Son of Sam got caught off a parking ticket," said Wendell Phillips, a Malibu attorney who once chased the Golden State Killer as a Sacramento County sheriff's deputy. "Sometimes you just have to get lucky. And in this particular case, all the luck went with him."
In 1975 and 1976, police in the town of Visalia were chasing a cunning burglar who took trophies from victims' homes. When detectives there heard about the East Area Rapist attacks in Sacramento, they reached out to the Sheriff's Department thinking their burglar may have graduated to more serious crimes and relocated to the state capital.
"No one was interested in what they had," Shelby said.
When Shelby later combed through the Visalia cases, he noticed a similar modus operandi - but also key differences, including at least one conflicting description of the suspect's age and size. His attempt to draw a connection between the cases was met with indifference from department brass, Shelby said.
Over the years, different investigators worked in isolation trying to capture the Cordova cat burglar, the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker. Only decades later did they come to agree these serial crimes were the work of a single perpetrator: the Golden State Killer.
As he moved to new hunting grounds, local law enforcement operated in siloes that kept them from recognizing the scope of the case.
Some of the insularity can be blamed on rivalries between departments and a law enforcement culture that did not prioritize interagency partnerships. But some of the reticence to share information stemmed in part from the theory the attacker was a cop, Phillips said.
"We couldn't be sure about the guy voluntering from the neighboring agencies," Phillips said. "There was concern about sharing information because let's face it, 'loose lips sink ships.'"
Investigators eventually formed a regional task force including Sacramento County sheriff's deputies and city police, along with investigators from Davis and Contra Costa County. New members were given blood tests to ensure they weren't the rapist.
In a way, the group's wariness proved apt - DeAngelo was working as a police officer in Auburn, just a 20-minute drive north up Interstate 80.
Despite their hunch that the killer might have been a police officer, they missed a potential red flag in 1979 when DeAngelo was convicted of and fired for attemping to shoplift a can of dog repellant and a hammer from a hardware store. News of his termination never made it to the East Area Rapist task force.
The rapist's attacks around Sacramento had stopped months earlier, after Brian and Kate Maggiore were gunned down in Rancho Cordova in the killer's first documented slayings, so a petty theft elsewhere may not have been a red flag as much as it seemed in hindsight, Shelby said.
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