The Golden State Killer: The Fight for Justice with Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_00] I'm Anya, and today we're going to hear from the elected District Attorney of Sacramento County about his experience prosecuting one of the nation's most infamous serial killers.

[00:00:10] [SPEAKER_01] Content Warning! This episode contains discussion of sexual assault, rape, and murder.

[00:00:17] [SPEAKER_00] The Golden State Killer. The original Night Stalker. The East Area Rapist. Joseph James D'Angelo. It's one of the most infamous serial killer cases in American history. For years, this perpetrator terrorized communities across California with his reign of terror, stalking, raping, and murdering with apparent impunity.

[00:00:38] [SPEAKER_00] He killed 13 people and raped many, many more. His modus operandi was the stuff of nightmares. Breaking into homes at night, tying up couples, or single women, or even children. Taking the woman away to be raped. Sometimes brutally murdering his victims. The level of violation is terrifying to contemplate. Well, today we're going to talk to a person who was instrumental in bringing that heinous killer to justice.

[00:01:07] [SPEAKER_00] Thien Ho is now the elected District Attorney of Sacramento County. Sacramento and Rancho Cordova were two communities that D'Angelo preyed upon. When investigators identified D'Angelo through DNA, plenty of obstacles still stood in the way when it came to holding this killer accountable.

[00:01:25] [SPEAKER_01] Prosecutors had to wrangle with issues around the death penalty, statutes of limitations, and a defendant who seemed eager to try to manipulate public opinion. Thien was there throughout it all. He wanted this case, and he got it. Over the course of his work on this case, he was able to connect with law enforcement, with the other prosecutors from a whole host of California counties, and with the survivors and families of the murdered.

[00:01:55] [SPEAKER_01] In so many ways, the prosecution of Joseph James D'Angelo was a singular case. Thien recently recounted all of this in his new book, The People vs. the Golden State Killer. It's a great victim-centric book, and part of the proceeds will go to a charity set up in memory of one of the survivors in this case.

[00:02:19] [SPEAKER_00] In our conversation today, Thien will share more about what it was like embarking on a quest for justice against one of the most heinous serial killers of all time. My name is Anya Kane. I'm a journalist.

[00:02:32] [SPEAKER_01] And I'm Kevin Greenlee. I'm an attorney. And this is The Murder Sheet. We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting, interviews, and deep dives into murder cases. We're The Murder Sheet.

[00:02:44] [SPEAKER_00] And this is The Golden State Killer, the fight for justice with Sacramento County District Attorney, Thien Ho.

[00:03:36] [SPEAKER_00] Well, Thien, first of all, thank you so much for joining us today here on The Murder Sheet.

[00:03:40] [SPEAKER_02] Absolutely. Thank you so much. It's an honor to be on the show. So thank you.

[00:03:43] [SPEAKER_00] Awesome. Yeah, it's an honor for us as well. And it's an honor to talk with you about this amazing book, The People vs. the Golden State Killer, which Kevin and I both read and thought was amazing. So congratulations on a wonderful book.

[00:03:54] [SPEAKER_02] Thank you. You know, I wrote it in about seven months or so, so I kind of jammed through it. It's been percolating in my mind for years. But once we had the structure and the format down, it just sort of flowed. And writing a book for the first time was an interesting process.

[00:04:09] [SPEAKER_00] I bet it's it's it can be a bit of an ordeal, but I think the results are great. And one thing I was really impressed with with your book was how much you were able to encapsulate about what is truly like the scope of these crimes committed by the serial killer really cannot be understated. The book really conveys that while also making it very easy to follow along. I mean, we're talking about crimes that spanned years, that spanned counties in California, that spanned types of crimes.

[00:04:37] [SPEAKER_00] So many victims, so many lives altered or taken by this individual. And I'm wondering if you could just maybe give us a bit, give the audience a bit of a taste of the scope and the size of this crime spree.

[00:04:52] [SPEAKER_02] You know, that's one of the things that really stood out about the Golden State Killer. We start by his monikers, his nicknames, right? He was the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist, the East Bay Rapist, the original Night Stalker. And finally, Michelle McNamara coined the term the Golden State Killer. He committed 13 known murders, upwards of 67 sexual assaults, 120 burglies in 11 different counties up and down the state of California.

[00:05:22] [SPEAKER_02] And it stretched from 1974 to 1986. Just a pure geographical scope and the breadth of his crimes in terms of the stalking, the peeping toms. And then he eventually evolved into a serial predator and then a rapist and a murderer. And so it's just the pure scope of his crimes.

[00:05:43] [SPEAKER_02] And the fact that he suddenly went dark for almost 30 something years from 1986 until we caught him in 2018 and that whole process and that he was still alive, living amongst us. And so part of the challenge in the book, I think, is trying to capture the breadth and the scope of his crimes and then the different eras from the 70s and the 80s. And then we caught him in 2018.

[00:06:08] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, it's like a saga because it just spans so much time, so much space. And it's horrifying the scope of his crimes and what he was able to get away with for so long, but fortunately, ultimately being caught. You know, you're coming from the Sacramento area and that's one of the many locations that he was preying upon and doing his horrible crimes.

[00:06:29] [SPEAKER_00] I'm wondering, and you capture this really well in the book as well, but could you tell the listener a bit about how this crime spree affected the Sacramento area when it was going on?

[00:06:41] [SPEAKER_02] You know, Sacramento, if you've ever been to it in the summertime, it's incredibly hot. But we get in the evenings, the cool breeze from the delta where the river meets the ocean. And in the 1970s, you know, we were still a bucolic kind of farming agriculture community. We're the state capital. So you had this dichotomy where you're the state capital. You have a lot of state workers, but you have still in parts a rural and kind of small town atmosphere.

[00:07:08] [SPEAKER_02] The kids would ride their bikes all day long and they wouldn't come home until late at night. And in the summertime, people would leave their doors open and their windows open. So you get that cool breeze in the evening. But that all changed. When he started committing his first rape in 1976 in Sacramento and in Rancho Cordova in the eastern part of the county. And then sometimes he would commit three to four rapes in a month.

[00:07:32] [SPEAKER_02] And his crime was evolved in such a sadistic behavior that people started forming patrols and would patrol their neighborhoods at night. We had people who at night would sleep on their rooftop to avoid being in their homes, afraid that he was coming in. Whole families would barricade themselves inside a room with the dresser up against the door. You couldn't buy a German shepherd or an alarm system. You couldn't buy guns.

[00:07:57] [SPEAKER_02] They were all sold out because his reign of terror was so prolific here in Sacramento. And he seemed to strike at random, but it was never at random. And then he's targeting couples and doing sadistic things to both the husband and the wife.

[00:08:13] [SPEAKER_00] One part of the book that I found very haunting was discussion of the murders of Katie and Brian Maggiore. Can you talk a little bit about this young couple and what happened to them?

[00:08:24] [SPEAKER_02] So this was in the height of the East Area Rapist Crime Spree. And he was consistently breaking into homes, tying up couples, separating them and forcing the husband on all fours and putting bedsheets and stacking plates on him and sexually assaulting the wife in the other room. And in the midst of that crime spree, the East Area Rapist, Brian and Katie were in Rancho Cordova where it all started. They were just walking their dog one night in February of 1979.

[00:08:53] [SPEAKER_02] And essentially what happened was as they were walking their dog, they came across the East Area Rapist and he chased them. He chased them down into a backyard and gunned both of them down and then escaped from the crime spree. And as he was running away from the crime spree, he took his mask off and people saw his face. And he's literally jumping over fences, running, hiding as the helicopters and the police patrol cars are coming to the scene. And people saw his face.

[00:09:21] [SPEAKER_02] And in the midst of that, they drew a composite sketch of his face. In the book, I call it the Robin Williams sketch because he looked like Robin Williams. That's the Robin Williams sketch. And if you notice that, that looks very similar to the photo of him as a police officer. And so once his picture was seen throughout the entire community, he began to commit his crimes in the Bay Area.

[00:09:49] [SPEAKER_02] And then he started committing his crimes in Southern California. And that's when he became the original Night Stalker and then the Golden State Killer. But Brian and Katie, they were just beginning their lives and their lives were cut short. And one of the things that struck me, you know, in the course of the case, I went down and I met Brian's mother, Loretta, who was still alive at the time. And the pain after 40-something years, it still hung over their family. They had a picture of Brian, you know, sitting on the coffee table.

[00:10:19] [SPEAKER_02] And then Katie's brothers, who were both in law enforcement, we met them in 2018. And they told me that their father, Katie's father, stopped celebrating birthdays and holidays after his daughter was murdered. And so the impact of these crimes, they continue on and on for decades.

[00:10:37] [SPEAKER_00] It's absolutely tragic. And with killing them in the way he did, I mean, is there any speculation on why that happened?

[00:10:45] [SPEAKER_02] You know, Brian was the sort of person that if he saw something that was out of place, he was a staff sergeant, Brian Marjorie at the local Air Force Base, that he wouldn't just let it go. And just a few minutes before Brian and Katie happened to reach this intersection in Rancho Cordova because they were walking their dog that night, there was another young man named Benny. And Benny was jogging southbound on West La Loma.

[00:11:12] [SPEAKER_02] And as he was going southbound, he saw a peeping Tom, a prowler who was in this brown jacket, a white male with a mask on, peeping inside a window. And if Brian and Katie had continued walking about maybe a minute later, they would have encountered the Golden State Killer, the East Air Rapist. And Brian was the sort of person, if he saw something he missed, he was going to confront them. And speculation that has been lost to time and in the darkness of that night, but Brian probably confronted him. There was some sort of conflict.

[00:11:41] [SPEAKER_02] And then the predators started chasing them and gunned them down because they had seen too much at that point. And so there's just a lot of speculation that we will never know about what led up to their murder.

[00:11:56] [SPEAKER_00] Absolutely. I want to kind of zoom back a moment and kind of focus a little bit about you and your legal career. And wondering, can you tell us a bit about what drew you to the law, specifically prosecutions?

[00:12:09] [SPEAKER_02] I was born in Vietnam. And when I was about four years old or so after the fall of South Vietnam, my parents and I, we escaped Vietnam on a tiny fishing boat. We were lost at sea for about two weeks until we were rescued. And where do we go from there? We were taken to a refugee camp in Malaysia. And I remember running around barefoot on a dirt field playing soccer as a child until we were sponsored and came to the U.S. And I always felt a debt to America.

[00:12:36] [SPEAKER_02] There's that scene from Saving Private Ryan where Captain Miller on that bridge reaches out to Private Ryan and pulls him and says, earn this, right? Earn this. So my family, my parents gave so much for us to come to this country. And I felt coming to this country and having earned a second chance at life, I wanted to give back. And so I became a prosecutor. And as a prosecutor, we fight for the voiceless, the vulnerable, for victims in a courtroom.

[00:12:59] [SPEAKER_02] And so I started off as a prosecutor in the Bay Area and in Contra Costa where some of the crimes brees happen of the Golden State Killer. And then I became a prosecutor up here in Sacramento. And I've been here for over 20 years handling all sorts of cases from sex crimes to gang cases to homicides. And now I'm the head of the office. I'm the elected district attorney of California's Capitol. But it's always been about fighting for victims.

[00:13:27] [SPEAKER_00] Absolutely. And yeah, tell us about that, becoming the DA. I mean, what was that journey like for you?

[00:13:33] [SPEAKER_02] For many, many years, I was what we call a line deputy, where our job is to be sort of the frontline troops. You know, we charge out of the trenches and into the fray, right? Because we are the front lines. We're the ones trying the cases in the courtroom. And as I moved up to the office and, you know, I became an executive in the office a few years ago. And this was a few years after I had prosecuted the Golden State Killer.

[00:13:59] [SPEAKER_02] The position of elected district attorney opened up and I ran for district attorney. I talk about it in the book in terms of that process. And I was fortunate enough that the community elected me as the DA. And so now I run the office. And after becoming DA, I started the Code Case Science and Technology Unit using genetic genealogy, which is the tool that we use to find Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer. And using that right now, we've solved many other cases.

[00:14:27] [SPEAKER_02] I started a task force to investigate missing murdered indigenous people. Indigenous women, native women are 10 times more likely to be murdered than their counterpart in our country. And so there's a lot of code cases there. So now I get to decide the policy. And one of the things that I care very much about is the investigation of code cases.

[00:14:47] [SPEAKER_00] That's absolutely wonderful. I imagine your experience with the Golden State Killer case certainly informed that. I love the scene in the book where you describe overhearing, I guess, in a way, the news about the Golden State Killer. Can you kind of tell the listener about that?

[00:15:03] [SPEAKER_02] As a line deputy, I take whatever file, whatever case shows up. On my desk. And I've never asked for a case in my life because, you know, whatever case comes, it comes. A few years before we found the Golden State Killer, I was prosecuting my first homicide case in Rancho Cordova. And as I was visiting the crime scene, I was talking to the lead detective on that homicide case.

[00:15:28] [SPEAKER_02] And every house and every townhouse and every apartment that we came across in Rancho Cordova had these bars on the outside of it. I said, why are there bars in all these houses? And so he says, they're there because of the ear. I said, the ear? Who's the ear? Oh, the East Area Rapist. And so he started telling me about the case and I was blown away, but I'd never heard about it. And so the detective on the case, he was part of a task force to find the ear, the East Area Rapist, the Golden State Killer. And I said, is he still alive?

[00:15:58] [SPEAKER_02] The detective said, no, he's probably dead. And so I said, well, if they ever find him, I want to prosecute that case. Fast forward about maybe four or five years later, I saw the head of our homicide team. He's whispering to the chief deputy, the number two in the office. And there's this frenetic energy between the two of them. And I'm wondering what's going on. And so they go inside the head of homicides. His name is Rod Norgard. He runs our homicide team at the DA's office and they close the door.

[00:16:27] [SPEAKER_02] And my office is right next to him. And so the walls are really thin because it's a government building. So if you put your ear up to the wall, you can hear what's being said. So I put my ear up against the wall and I heard them say a one in 16 septillion match to the EAR, to the ear. Well, in Sacramento County, the ear, the EAR means one thing and one thing only, the East Area Rapist.

[00:16:55] [SPEAKER_02] And I nearly fell out of my seat because after 40 something years, we had found the East Area Rapist. And so that night I went home. I was checking the news all night long, you know, 11 o'clock at night, you know, one o'clock in the morning. And then four o'clock, five o'clock in the morning, there's a press release that there was going to be big announcement on the East Area Rapist case. And lo and behold, they found them. So that's how I found out that we had caught the East Area Rapist.

[00:17:23] [SPEAKER_00] Can you tell us about how you then got assigned that case?

[00:17:27] [SPEAKER_02] About a week goes by and they hadn't assigned anybody to prosecute the case yet. They're still talking about it. I mean, this is the biggest case our offices ever had, ever, right? I mean, you're talking about somebody who committed 13 murders, 67 sexual assaults, like I said, right? 11 different counties. He's notorious. And this was obviously after Michelle McNamara had written her book, I'll Be Gone in the Dark. So it just gained so much attention. So early one morning, I walk into Rod's office.

[00:17:57] [SPEAKER_02] Rod is the head of homicide. And I don't say anything other than, Rod, if you're on SEAL Team 6 and they told you they found Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, do you know what you say? He says, what? And I said, you tell them you want on that helicopter ride into Pakistan. Rod, I want on this helicopter ride. And I pointed to the file and I walked out, didn't say another word. Two hours later, I was assigned the case.

[00:18:25] [SPEAKER_02] Obviously, they thought about me, but, you know, I think coming in and just saying I wanted the case, that I wanted to prosecute the case. Because at that time, we were going to join all the cases together. There were discussions about all the different counties joining in a single prosecution. And there were a lot of discussions about trying the case in Southern California where many of the murders were located.

[00:18:45] [SPEAKER_02] And if that was going to happen, I would have to relocate to Southern California, you know, in Ventura County, for example, or Orange County, be down there for a year or two years trying the case. They wanted somebody that was committed to it, somebody that wanted the case. And so I think walking in and giving that short little line sealed the deal.

[00:19:06] [SPEAKER_00] It was a great line. I mean, that's hard to argue with that. So you get assigned to this case, you're on this case. And as you mentioned, it's an unusual case. Because, I mean, while I'm sure there's oftentimes, you know, some collaboration between prosecuting attorneys across counties, like depending on the case, like in this, it's a lot of counties. It's a lot of people. Can you, we talked about scope earlier of the crimes. Can you talk about the scope of this just mass of attorneys that are working on this?

[00:19:34] [SPEAKER_02] Sometimes you'll get two counties working together on a particular case, like Richard Ocala, the dating game serial killer. He committed murders and rapes in both L.A. and Orange County. So they tried them several times. And I think the last time they tried them, it was in Orange County. But you had prosecutors from L.A and Orange County coming together. Here you have somebody who committed crimes in 11 different counties.

[00:20:00] [SPEAKER_02] And so eventually we had attorneys from six different counties join in the prosecution. Some of the crimes, the statute of limitation had run. And so those counties didn't have an attorney in the prosecution of the case. But there were six counties that had active cases. And so now we were bringing attorneys from six different counties. And attorneys have A-type personalities. We're aggressive. We have our own set of egos.

[00:20:26] [SPEAKER_02] But I can say that in terms of the line deputies, the attorneys that were actually handling the case day to day, we got along great. We met in Santa Barbara. We met in L.A. We met in Orange County. We met in Sacramento. And we divvied up the work, right? Who was going to handle what? For example, I was working with the Orange County prosecutor in regards to any mental health defense, right? And then another group of attorneys would work, you know, on a particular aspect of the case. It was just that collaboration on the line deputy side.

[00:20:53] [SPEAKER_02] Now, obviously, I got into the books because on a much higher level with the elected DAs, there was a fight about where to ultimately hold the trial, right? Where were we going to venue the case, which means where the case was going to actually be tried and litigated. And so those are the issues talked about in the book.

[00:21:13] [SPEAKER_02] And there was just a lot of when you're talking about, for example, the amount of discovery, which is the amount of police reports and evidence that we had to discover, turn over to the defense. I mean, we're talking about three million pages of discovery. Every county had their own police reports, their own video, their own crime lab reports, their own supplemental interviews and all the stuff that has been going on for nearly 40 years.

[00:21:40] [SPEAKER_02] And in some cases, some of the other counties actually, for example, Santa Barbara County, they had actually looked and were prosecuting somebody else for one of these murders. And so that had to be unwind as well, right?

[00:21:57] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, no, I mean, it's so complicated. So you mentioned the statute of limitations had run out on some. Was it predominantly the murders that were being tried at that point or were there also sexual crimes in there or had the statutes on the predominantly run out?

[00:22:13] [SPEAKER_02] So the statute of limitation for your listeners and viewers is basically how long we have to where we can still charge a case. So, for example, rape back in the 1970s, the statute of limitation was six years. That meant that if it was six years from the time that the crime occurred to the time that we found the suspect and charged him, we could charge him anywhere up to six years. If it was six years in a day, the statute ran and we couldn't charge him.

[00:22:39] [SPEAKER_02] And so for the rapes in Sacramento and many of the jurisdiction, the statute of limitation had run because we were just looking at six years. The murder charges carried a life sentence. Because it's a life sentence, we have forever to charge a case. There's no statute of limitation for murder. And so we could still charge those murder cases 40 years later. But the rapes, we couldn't. But we came up with a theory called aggravated kidnapping.

[00:23:09] [SPEAKER_02] Essentially, what he would do is he'd break into a home at one o'clock in the morning. And if there was a couple involved, he'd shine a flashlight and say, don't move. I'm just here for drugs and money. If you move, I'm going to blow your brains out, right? And he would throw some pre-tied shoelaces to the wife, have the wife tie up the husband. Then he'd tie up the wife. Then he would ransack through the home, eating their food, drinking their beer, cutting pictures of the woman out of a photo album, taking their driver's license. Then he'd come back and he says, look, I can't find your purse. Where is it?

[00:23:38] [SPEAKER_02] You know, oh, it's on the kitchen counter, she would say. And he'd come back and pretend like he couldn't find it. And using that as a ruse, he'd take her and move her into another room, tie her back up again, come back in the bedroom, put the husband on all fours and put a bed sheet over him, stack plates and glasses on his back and said, look, if I hear anything move, I'll kill everybody in the house. Then he sexually assault the wife in the other room.

[00:24:03] [SPEAKER_02] So under the theory of aggravated kidnapping, he moved the wife from one room to another room, increasing the threat of harm to her. So it was a significant movement. And so aggravated kidnapping back in the 1970s was a life offense. You could go to prison for life. Because it was a life offense, there was no statute of limitation. And so in some of those cases, we could charge him. And so we had to do the research, find that out.

[00:24:29] [SPEAKER_02] And once we did, we charged those cases in addition to the murders.

[00:24:34] [SPEAKER_00] There was so much law enforcement work on this case across jurisdictions. What was it like getting to look at some of their work over the years, but also maybe even interact with some of these detectives who'd been on the case for so long, who had, you know, been kind of getting nowhere until this moment?

[00:24:51] [SPEAKER_02] A lot of true crime books focus on the killer and they focus on the notoriety of the crime. What I wanted to do with the book, and part of it starts with really the cover. The cover here is the home in front where Brian and Katie were murdered. You have what we call the ARC, the advanced reader copy. And in the ARC, which was never sold, by the way, it has a picture of D'Angelo, right? And that's pixelated.

[00:25:19] [SPEAKER_02] And that was a decision that when we ultimately decided to create the final cover was to put the emphasis away from the killer. My book, I wanted to focus it on the generation of law enforcement that never gave up the search for D'Angelo. I wanted to focus on the survivors and the victims and their resiliency and their strength. And so I chose to focus on that. And in particular, to your question about law enforcement, they never gave up.

[00:25:47] [SPEAKER_02] Some of these police officers, after they retired, continue as private investigators going through people's garbage cans, thinking that they had found the suspect only to reach another dead end. And when I met some of the law enforcement officers that had pursued him in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and the 2000s, you could almost see the years weighing down on them.

[00:26:14] [SPEAKER_02] And that had been lifted because he was finally caught. And Carol Daly, I talked about it. She was way ahead of her time in terms of how she interacted with victims. She rose from a deputy to the detective investigating a number of the rapes to becoming the undersheriff, the number two in the department. And even talking with her, you could sense the stress and the emotion in her voice years later.

[00:26:39] [SPEAKER_02] And to me, this is a celebration and a recognition, this book, of their grit and their endless pursuit of justice for these victims.

[00:26:50] [SPEAKER_00] Absolutely. And you mentioned the victims as well. I feel like we get to know some of them through the book. Can you talk about what was it like for you personally, as a person prosecuting this, to get to know some of those victims and survivors?

[00:27:03] [SPEAKER_02] The first rape victim in Sacramento was Phyllis. Phyllis had been on TV and identified herself, so I can say her name. Phyllis was 23 years old at the time that she was sexually assaulted and she was home alone. And I just remember reading the police report and getting into the facts of her sexual assault. And then the first time I was in court, Phyllis, who was under five feet tall, was in her 50s.

[00:27:33] [SPEAKER_02] These Coke bottle glasses, the gray hair. She came up to me. She says, hi, my name is Phyllis. I'm victim number one. And it was almost as if I was reaching through space and time. I had this image of a 23-year-old, but now I'm holding the hand of this older woman who for years struggled with what had happened to her. You know, she always had to have the alarm system on in her house. She always didn't like when her husband was out of town. She was terrified of being home alone.

[00:28:03] [SPEAKER_02] And here she was identifying herself. And then I met Chris. You know, Chris says, hi, I'm Chris. I'm victim number 10. Hi, I'm Jane. I'm victim number five, right? And so the victims were identifying themselves in Sacramento by the order in which they were sexually assaulted. And every time I would come to court, you know, Phyllis would always be there. And I'd sit down and I'd talk to Phyllis and I'd let her know what's happening in court. Near the end of the case, Phyllis was diagnosed with cancer.

[00:28:31] [SPEAKER_02] And so she couldn't be there, you know, when D'Angelo pled guilty and admitted his guilt. And when that happened, all the other victims and their family stood up to represent Phyllis. And I remember at the very end when he was sentenced, I looked across the courtroom and I saw Phyllis. And she just had this twinkle in her eye. For the first time in 40 years, she finally found a measure of closure and justice.

[00:29:02] [SPEAKER_02] And about three months later, she passed away from cancer. So I was so grateful that we were able to complete the case while she was still alive. So she had that measure of justice. And I talk about in the book, several of the other victims started a nonprofit called Phyllis's Garden. And part of the proceeds from the book goes to support Phyllis's Garden.

[00:29:23] [SPEAKER_00] That's absolutely wonderful. You mentioned how well the line prosecutors, the line deputies were all getting along. There was drama at the higher levels. What were some other, I guess, challenges or maybe unique aspects of this case that made it maybe more of a challenge to prosecute?

[00:29:42] [SPEAKER_02] The biggest hurdle was really the lack of forensic evidence in Sacramento. Remember, the statute of limitation on the sex crimes was six years. For us in Sacramento, after the statute of limitation had run, after six years, the forensic evidence had all been discarded in Sacramento. The saliva, the DNA, the blood, whatever there was. And so the problem was there was no forensic evidence in Sacramento. There was no DNA evidence in Sacramento where all these other counties had it.

[00:30:10] [SPEAKER_02] And so for us, we had to prove the case through modus operandi through a pattern. You know, D'Angelo broke into these homes and committed these rapes. And when he did so, he often brought pre-tied shoelaces with him to tie up the victims. And right next to Brian Majore's body was a set of pre-tied shoelaces. And where Brian and Katie were murdered were in the areas where the rapes happened.

[00:30:36] [SPEAKER_02] And the MO of the rapes in Sacramento matched exactly the MO of the sexual assaults where there was DNA evidence in the Bay Area and in Southern California. So the challenge was really in Sacramento being able to connect the case through a pattern, through modus operandi.

[00:30:53] [SPEAKER_00] I love that your book does not emphasize the serial killer at the heart of it. And in fact, it really is very victim-centric and more about the case than kind of glorifying some violent person. But what were you able to learn about D'Angelo? I mean, not that anything you would learn would make this make sense, obviously. But I mean, what stood out to you about him?

[00:31:16] [SPEAKER_02] There's always this debate, and I talk about in the book, in regards to nature versus nurture, right? Are people like D'Angelo and predators born that way? Born evil? Born as a predator? Or are they created by their environment? And I think a lot of it comes to a combination of both. And for D'Angelo, as we see in a lot of these sort of predators and serial killers, they abused animals, but even before, and he definitely abused animals, in particular dogs.

[00:31:45] [SPEAKER_02] But even before then, we were able to discover that when he was a child, you know, around nine or ten, he was on a military base overseas, and he witnessed and was present and was held down when his sister, his younger sister, was sexually assaulted by two military personnel. And I think that that traumatic experience, plus his traumatic home life as well, combined together, created the monster that we have.

[00:32:15] [SPEAKER_02] But when I brought that up, I bring that up as an aspect of this, is that all of us have a choice. We have a choice to either seek the light or seek darkness. He chose darkness. That lies ultimately within our own hands. But that was something that we had found about his background. That was something that helped sort of explain why and how the monster was created. Nonetheless, we had a monster.

[00:32:42] [SPEAKER_02] And it was my job, and it was our job, to make sure that that monster was held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. We retraced his life from when he was born in Bath, New York, to the day he was caught as a retired mechanic in Citrus Heights.

[00:32:57] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. I think one chilling aspect of his biography for a lot of people is that he was at one time a police officer.

[00:33:03] [SPEAKER_02] He was a police officer for a large chunk of his crime that he committed as the Visalia Ransacker and as the East Area Rapist. But he got fired as a police officer. And I think his knowledge of law enforcement, it gave him the ability to evade capture. He knew the areas of ingress and egress. He knew how long it would take before the police would arrive. He knew his escape routes. He knew their protocols and procedures in terms of investigating a case. That's why he wore gloves.

[00:33:30] [SPEAKER_02] Even when he was committing his sexual offenses, he wore a mask. He knew how to cover up in terms of the forensic evidence. Now, during his crime spree, forensic DNA had not yet been discovered. And so, you know, curiously, his known crime spree stopped in 1986 with the last known murder of Janelle Cruz. And obviously, forensic DNA, you know, really started to be utilized and discovered in 1987.

[00:33:58] [SPEAKER_00] And one thing that kind of factors into the book a bit is the death penalty and sort of how that can be certainly a measure of holding people accountable, but also a tool for prosecutors when you're kind of going through this process. Can you talk about maybe some of the wrangling around the death penalty or, you know, the possibility of going for the death penalty in this case and how that sort of factored into the ultimate outcome?

[00:34:20] [SPEAKER_02] Yes. You know, the death penalty is a controversial subject. You know, some people believe in an eye for an eye and some people believe that if you live by an eye for eye, everybody's blind at some point, right? The way we had looked at it and I looked at it is if anybody deserved the death penalty, it was him. 13 murders, 67 sexual assaults, 120 burglaries, the havoc and the crime that he wrecked in different lives and different communities, he deserved it.

[00:34:47] [SPEAKER_02] Obviously, we had homicides in six different counties. And if we were to proceed with the death penalty, there's a whole process in California. You can't seek the death penalty for just any crime. There has to be, you know, mostly, you know, a murder with very aggravating circumstances, the murder of a police officer, a rape or a child molestation in the course of a murder, right? So there are all these other factors involved that we had here in this case. But you have to look at the aggravating and the mitigating factors.

[00:35:16] [SPEAKER_02] What was aggravating about it? Were his crimes particularly heinous? Were the victims particularly vulnerable? And then you looked at any mitigating factors in his background. And we all had to agree, the counties that had death penalty cases, that we would all proceed by way of the death penalty. Or else we all wouldn't seek it because it doesn't make sense to seek the death penalty in four counties and not the fifth. And so, you know, we had to have this meeting in this process.

[00:35:41] [SPEAKER_02] And I talk about in the book in terms of, you know, making sure that everybody was on the same page in regards to that. And ultimately what happened was we took the death penalty off the table. As part of that, he would plead guilty to both all the charge offenses, but also the uncharged offenses. So that the people where the statute of limitation had run, those victims had their day in court. He would have to admit that he committed those crimes.

[00:36:10] [SPEAKER_02] And those victims would have an opportunity to speak in court in terms of an impact statement of what happened to them. And so that was really important for us because we were then able to get justice for those victims. And Phyllis was one of those victims. We couldn't charge her crime. And so because we took the death penalty off the table, D'Angelo had to admit that he raped Phyllis.

[00:36:34] [SPEAKER_02] And she got the opportunity to stand up or her family did and talk about the impact of those crimes. And that gave a measure of closure to people like Phyllis.

[00:36:46] [SPEAKER_00] Absolutely. What was it like getting to see these victims and their families speaking out in that moment?

[00:36:53] [SPEAKER_02] It was, first of all, on a very personal level. It's just emotionally draining. The victims are pouring 40 plus years of pain and anguish and anger out of their hearts.

[00:37:12] [SPEAKER_02] You know, one person talked about how her father passed away without ever seeing the person that raped his daughter brought to justice. Right? Another person, she talked about essentially, she ended up becoming a teacher, working with little kids because she felt safe around little kids versus adults. Right? It changed the trajectory of her life and where she was headed.

[00:37:42] [SPEAKER_02] And then just, you know, for example, with some of the murders in Southern California, the family members talked about the loss years and what could have been, what would have been, what should have been. Right? And so it was just sitting there for a whole week listening to those impacts. It was incredibly emotional and draining. But at the same time, to bring that measure of justice to them felt immensely rewarding.

[00:38:11] [SPEAKER_02] You know, in these cases, I always talk about this. You know, I prosecuted child molestation for years. If we lost the case, it was devastating because the victim never got justice. The child never got justice. If we won the case and the defendant was convicted and went to prison, the victim was still molested. They had the fabric of the tapestry of their lives torn apart. And so for us, there was never joy in winning a case. There was only relief. So there's never joy. There's only relief.

[00:38:39] [SPEAKER_02] And I just sitting there felt a tremendous amount of relief. There was never joy, just relief.

[00:38:49] [SPEAKER_00] You know, you have this eloquent anger and sorrow being expressed by these victims and their families. And then you have, on the other side, this feeble old man act, I think, as you eloquently put it at one point. Can you tell me a bit about that? You know, I think a lot of people were struck with, oh, this is this extremely old man, like, throughout this whole process. And there was always debate of, like, is he faking it? Is he not faking it? But what is your take about D'Angelo's affect in court and how real that was?

[00:39:18] [SPEAKER_02] You know, Joseph D'Angelo was the master manipulator. In the days before he was arrested, our surveillance team from the Sheriff's Department, they were following him around. He was riding his motorcycle, going 70, 80 miles an hour, weaving in on traffic, doing counter-surveillance moves. He was hopping in and out of his boat, you know, because he liked to fish. He was doing all this yard work, lifting and doing all sorts of stuff. And he was doing that the morning of his arrest.

[00:39:44] [SPEAKER_02] And all of a sudden, the moment he gets arrested, he's in a wheelchair and he gets rolled into court playing this feeble old man kind of game. And I have video of him walking back into his cell with a cane, right, hobbling as he comes into his cell. And the moment the door closes, he drops the cane and he's walking around doing jumping jacks, climbing up and down. He was just manipulating us, wearing this mask that he was putting on for show.

[00:40:13] [SPEAKER_02] When he was first arrested, they had put him in the booking room. He put his head back and he ran it up against the wall. And so that booking photo that we have of him, let me see if I can find it. And it was one that I had picked out. That booking photo, he has red at the top of his head. That's because he rammed his head into the wall and it was bleeding. But it was all for show. He wasn't really trying to kill himself. If he did, he would have done something else. But we were worried that he was going to kill himself.

[00:40:43] [SPEAKER_02] So they put him in a cell with a camera. And so we watched him in a cell basically pace around like a cage animal. They'd send me the videos of that. And so I knew how he was acting in a cell versus in court. So I knew that he was just the master manipulator.

[00:40:59] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, absolutely. Where can people get the people versus the Golden State Killer? I mean, there's so much that we're not even getting into that is in here that is just absolutely fascinating and disturbing. But also, I think, like a very, very good read of a very important case. So where can people get this?

[00:41:15] [SPEAKER_02] So people can get the people versus the Golden State Killer at third state books. So that third state book, they can go on that website. They can buy the book, have it delivered to them. Obviously, you can get it on, you know, at bookstores. You can get it on Amazon. We also have an audio version as well. But third state books, a part of the proceeds will go to Phyllis's Garden. I hope people enjoy it. The way I've set up the book is obviously, you know, we go back and forth in time. There's several different storylines that all come together at the end to wrap it up.

[00:41:44] [SPEAKER_00] Before we go, you're the DA now. This case is behind you to the extent that it's over. He's in prison for life, for the rest of his life. What do you take away from this whole experience?

[00:41:56] [SPEAKER_02] You know, when I think about the case now, I don't think about him. Even though I get updates on where he is in prison and what he's doing, he works in the mess hall. He's constantly looking over his shoulder. I don't think of him. I don't think of the facts of the case. I don't think of the heinous crimes anymore. I think of the victims and the survivors. I think of Phyllis. And I think about the relentless pursuit of law enforcement and prosecutors

[00:42:24] [SPEAKER_02] to bring justice to people like Phyllis and all the survivors and the victims. And I'm left with the notion and the idea and the principle that you can run and hide, but eventually we're going to find you. You can commit your crime in the darkness of night, but we will find you. We will shine a bright light and bring justice to the survivors and the victims. And that's what I think of. I think of Phyllis and I think of all the survivors and the law enforcement officers.

[00:42:51] [SPEAKER_00] Absolutely. Well, Tin, marvelous job with the book. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. It's been a delight. And I would strongly encourage everyone go get this book. It's amazing. And you're going to be supporting a great cause as well.

[00:43:03] [SPEAKER_02] Great. Thank you so much. And really enjoy the conversation as well.

[00:43:06] [SPEAKER_00] Thank you so much to Tin for talking with us. We encourage everyone to check out his book, The People vs. the Golden State Killer, available at Third State Books or wherever you get your books. We think it's great that a portion of the proceeds of the book will go to Phyllis' Garden, an organization devoted to empowering survivors of sexual assault. We'll include a link to the book, which you should definitely read, and to Phyllis' Garden in our show notes.

[00:43:31] [SPEAKER_01] Thanks so much for listening to The Murder Sheet. If you have a tip concerning one of the cases we cover, please email us at murdersheet at gmail dot com. If you have actionable information about an unsolved crime, please report it to the appropriate authorities.

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