How a big news tip and a manila envelope broke the Golden State Killer story wide open
On June 15, 2016, Sacramento’s law enforcement leaders held a press conference to announce a $50,000 reward for information leading to the identity of the East Area Rapist, a serial criminal who authorities believed had started his crime spree exactly 40 years earlier with an attack on a woman in her Rancho Cordova home.
I didn’t bother to go. It was obvious they would never find the guy. The case was too old and too cold. They might as well be looking for the Zodiac killer, I figured.
Less than two years later, at 7:18 p.m. on April 24, 2018, my editor sent two reporters and me an email tip he had received.
“you may know this already but, i’m told by a source that the eastside rapist (or east area rapist) has just been arrested, and is in custody at the jail...”
It seemed preposterous, but I started making calls, finally reaching two law enforcement sources who were working late that night. They yelled at me when I asked about the tip, then started laughing and hung up.
I went to bed, but was up early the next morning worrying when another source returned my calls from the night before at about 6 a.m.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” the source said, adding that the suspect had been living in the Sacramento area the entire time he was being sought.
My editor and I both rushed into The Sacramento Bee newsroom at 21st and Q streets and started putting the breaking news story together as other reporters began to stream in to help and plan for covering a press conference later that day that had been scheduled to announce the arrest.
Rumors were flying around the internet that a suspect had been arrested in Australia and would be brought back to the United States. That the arrest had come from a tip to police. That the best-selling book “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” led to the arrest.
Benjy Egel worked the phones furiously. Tony Bizjak raced out to Citrus Heights, where a tipster said the FBI was in the process of searching a suburban home there. Other reporters started calling any source they could find.
But I had to leave.
That day was the same day that Luis Bracamontes, a methamphetamine addicted drifter from Mexico, was to be sentenced to death for the October 2013 slaying of two Sacramento-area deputies. I’d covered the case for more than three years. I couldn’t miss it.
The hearing seemed to drag on forever as Sacramento Superior Court Judge Steve White methodically read the charges on which Bracamontes had been convicted and, finally, sentenced him to be executed.
I raced out of the courtroom as the judge was still talking and headed to my car for the drive to the District Attorney’s crime lab in the coroner’s office complex at 4800 Broadway, where law enforcement leaders from around the state were gathering to make the announcement in the courtyard of the building.
But there was traffic, and no parking when I got there. And by the time I abandoned the car illegally at a nearby DMV parking lot, the steel gates to the courtyard had been closed and locked.
I pounded and yelled, but no one heard me. I looked up at the gates, which appeared to be about 15 feet tall, and started climbing in my slacks, blazer and dress shoes. Twice I fell from the gates. As I made a third effort – and kept yelling “I’m with The Sacramento Bee! You have to let me in!” – someone came out to see what was going on.
Finally, they agreed to let me join the dozens of media types who had gotten there on time, and District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, Sheriff Scott Jones and a parade of law enforcement officials from the length of California walked out into the blazing hot sun.
“We found the needle in the haystack, and it was right here in Sacramento,” Schubert announced.
A cold case cracked
Schubert had made cold cases a specialty long before she was elected district attorney in 2014, and she had formed a task force in 2016 to focus attention on the case. She and the sheriff disclosed that the case had been solved through the use of crime-scene DNA, but refused to discuss how that led them to Joseph James DeAngelo, a former Auburn police officer and truck mechanic.
The next day, it seemed like every reporter in America was looking for the answer to one question: How did they find him?
Schubert made the round of network morning shows, appearing on camera in pre-dawn darkness, then meeting with reporters individually for interviews.
Photographer Randy Pench and I were ushered in after she finished with a New York Times reporter, and we sat down with Schubert and Steve Grippi, her chief deputy.
I congratulated her, flattered her, asked a few meaningless questions, then got down to business. They were having none of it. No matter what I tried, neither would tell me what led them to DeAngelo.
I am not a warm and fuzzy guy, but I was starting to get desperate. I told them The Bee had to have the story. That if I got beat I’d be fired. I tried begging.
Nothing worked. As we walked down the street afterward, Pench was very quiet. Finally, he said, “I’ve never seen you like that.”
On the way back to the newsroom, I called every source I could think of, but no one had the answer.
And then my cell phone rang.
Think about family trees, the source said. Think how they work.
DNA and a family tree
Finally, the source explained it. Increasingly desperate to find a suspect, investigators took the DNA sequence from the crime scenes and plugged it into an open-source genealogical website, then compared it to similar genetic profiles uploaded to the site by people wanting to know more about their family histories.
A DeAngelo relative apparently had uploaded DNA in early 2018 to GEDmatch.com, and once investigators saw that it was a close match to the crime scene DNA, they began building a family tree out from the person who had uploaded the genetic profile.
They eliminated suspects who were too young or had never lived near California. And eventually they got to DeAngelo, a former cop who lived in several of the areas where the crime had occurred over the years.
Investigators had always theorized the suspect was a former police officer or someone with military experience. DeAngelo was both.
Investigators began tailing him April 18, 2018, watching as he walked into a Roseville Hobby Lobby store and slipping through the parking lot to swab his car handle for DNA.
Two days later the results came back, linking him to DNA found at murder scenes in Ventura County. But they wanted to be sure, so they went to his home on April 23, where his trash can was on the street waiting for pickup. They grabbed “multiple samples” from the trash, including a piece of tissue paper that had DNA tying him to some of the murders.
The process pioneered by the hunt for the suspect – alternately known as the East Area Rapist, Golden State Killer and several other nicknames bestowed over the years – is now called “investigative genetic genealogy,” or IGG, and has been used to arrest numerous rape and murder suspects nationwide since DeAngelo’s arrest.
Investigators returned to his home on April 24 and arrested him as he stepped outside, startling him to the point where he exclaimed, “I have a roast in the oven.”
Authorities maintained that he had never been on their radar as a suspect before, that his only brush with the law came from a shoplifting conviction in 1979 that got him fired from the Auburn Police Department.
But they’d arrested him at least once before, a fact I discovered months later.
Immediately after DeAngelo’s 2018 arrest, reporters filed public records requests in courthouses around the state looking for any information on DeAngelo.
Among the requests I filed in April 2018 was one with Placer County for a file that had a name close to DeAngelo’s. Nearly a year passed and I forgot all about the request.
Then a manila envelope showed up in my mailbox at work on a Friday in March 2019. Inside was a note apologizing for the delay, and copies of a court file from the 1990s.
DeAngelo had gotten into an argument in 1995 with a gas station clerk who did not speak English and stormed off. The clerk thought DeAngelo had been trying to rob him and called police, the file said.
Nothing came of the complaint for eight months, until officials clearing old cases sent DeAngelo and suspects in other crimes a letter saying they had won free Super Bowl tickets as part of a sting operation.
He was booked into the Sacramento County Jail and released a few hours later, and the charges eventually were dropped.
Nearly 22 years later, DeAngelo would return to the jail. And he’s been there ever since.
This story was originally published June 29, 2020 at 3:46 PM with the headline "How a big news tip and a manila envelope broke the Golden State Killer story wide open."