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June 17, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show

02:05:18

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The Impeccable Landscaping 00:03:51
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
	Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, another one of our true crime specials.
	The sun was setting behind the ranch-style home in Citrus Heights, a suburb in Sacramento County, California.
	A Volvo and a fishing boat occupied the driveway.
	The landscaping was impeccable.
	A nice house in an idyllic neighborhood.
	And on that April 2018 day, the police were there too.
	They were there to finally arrest a man named Joseph James D'Angelo Jr., now known as the Golden State Killer.
	After four decades and advances in DNA technology, investigators were finally able to identify the serial rapist and killer.
	The grandfather, who was in the middle of cooking a roast that day, was finally going to be held accountable for his heinous acts.
	Former cold case investigator Paul Holz had been waiting for this day to come for 24 years.
	He was integral in cracking the Golden State killer case and documents his experience tracking down D'Angelo in a new book just out called Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases.
	And he is with us here today.
	Paul, thank you so much for being here.
	Thanks for having me, Megan.
	This is such an amazing story.
	And we owe you such a debt of gratitude.
	The nation does, because you just never gave up.
	Just never gave up.
	I know it was a team effort for sure.
	It was.
	And that's nice and humble of you to say.
	And it was a team effort.
	I know that's genuine, but you were the person who just couldn't pull yourself away from this thing long after other people were like, you know, it seems to have died off.
	Let's move on.
	Your family, like, hey, would love to spend more time with you.
	You couldn't stop.
	And it's to your credit because even though when he was finally found, he was 72 years old and we think had stopped the crime spree by then, we never would have known.
	It's important to know and it gives us such insights into why and how and how we can attack new cases differently and so on.
	So before we kick it off, I just wanted to give you my own personal thanks and express to the audience how much we should appreciate what you and your colleagues did.
	I appreciate the kind words.
	Thank you very much.
	Of course.
	Okay, so let's go.
	So wait, you look like such a young man, but you've been at this for so long.
	You can't be that young.
	Do you mind if I ask you how old you are?
	I am 54 years old.
	Yes, you're a baby.
	That's very, very young.
	You know, and I don't know if you realize this, but you actually had a role at the end as we were closing in on D'Angelo.
	Wait, I know we covered this case on NBC and we spoke with the genealogist.
	And then it was like then you guys caught him a month later after we did a big show on him.
	And we put back on his show.
	Yeah, I remember that.
	I was on the shown with Jane Carson and Debbie Domingo.
	And I moved up my retirement date in order to fly out to New York to appear on the show.
	And I had already sat in front of his house.
	And later on that evening, I told these two victims, I think we're close.
	And I'm looking at an Auburn cop.
	And that was after talking to you that day.
	Oh, my gosh.
	That's that's really cool.
	It's cool to just know he had any sort of a role.
	I remember we were all so into the story and it was just so puzzling.
	And it's crazy as a reporter to do that.
Evolving Into A Killer 00:10:27
	And then like a month later, he's caught.
	It's like, wait, what do you mean?
	After all this time, almost three decades of not being able to find him, boom, there he is.
	And your questions answered.
	So this is a long and amazing story from a law enforcement perspective, from a serial killer perspective.
	And it was basically, it took place over a 10-year period, if I have my facts, right, 76 to 86.
	Well, in terms of, you know, when he kind of evolved into a full-blown rapist and killer, that was between those years, but in the years prior to that, he was a fetish burglar and had already killed a father of a 16-year-old girl down in Bisalia before he started as a serial rapist up in Sacramento in 1976.
	So we know that now at the time.
	We know that now because we know his identity, right?
	In part, there was always, so down in Bisalia, 1974, 1975, there was a burglar that hit over 100 times in the Bisalia area right around, clustered around the College of the Sequoias.
	And he was going in and going into the women's undergarment drawers, tossing the women's clothing around, pulling out women's photos out of the photo albums and stealing blue chip stamps and single earrings and was very prolific.
	About after about 85 attacks, he goes into a house in the middle of the night and tries to pull 16-year-old Beth Snelling out of her bed.
	She's kicking and screaming.
	He actually gets her outside when her father, Claude Snelling, a professor at the College of the Sequoias, tries to come to her rescue.
	Well, D'Angelo drops Beth, shoots Claude Snelling three times, killing him, and then runs off.
	And so now at this point, he's actually killed.
	And six months later, he ends up basically up in Sacramento and is now breaking into houses and raping women.
	So that's how it starts, the crimes escalate.
	So burglary to rape to murder, torture, and on.
	I mean, is that unusual to see, or is it more typical to see somebody with like an MO that they just carry through to the end?
	Well, you know, in terms of the evolution of the serial predator, you know, we often see them learning how to do the steps to get up to where they are going to be doing the violence on people.
	You know, they have to get comfortable being on somebody else's property, breaking into the house and get good at breaking into a house when somebody's there.
	And that's what D'Angelo is doing.
	And then eventually they go hands-on with a victim.
	And with D'Angelo, he was sexually assaulting the women and ultimately was attacking couples before he evolved to just committing homicides.
	So this is almost a textbook example of the evolution of a serial predator from a serial burglar to a serial killer.
	It makes sense in a way.
	I mean, it's tough to make sense of any murders, serial killings, but it does make some sense to see him graduating to more serious crimes as his confidence builds.
	And as weird as this sounds, he was very good at what he did.
	I mean, he was very good at covering his tracks right from the get-go.
	That was something he was always excellent at, no?
	Well, no, you know, he was a criminal justice major.
	And then, of course, he was a cop down in Exeter, which is a city right next to Visalia.
	When he first starts as a Visalia ransacker, he was not very good.
	He struggled to get into houses.
	He was seen left and right by people, either victims, residents that lived where he's peeping, or people in the neighborhood.
	But as he is developing in his law enforcement career, he ends up becoming part of a burglary task force and goes to burglary investigation school.
	And now he's learning how law enforcement is investigating these cases as well as how burglars commit their crimes.
	So the public money that went into the law enforcement field basically paid D'Angelo's way to become a better predator.
	And so when he moved up to Sacramento, he realized all the mistakes he made.
	And this is what makes him somewhat more of a sophisticated and an intelligent offender is he learned from his mistakes and he incorporated methodology, strategies, and tactics to where now, as a rapist, which up in Sacramento, he was known as the East Area rapist.
	He is employing these methods, strategies, and tactics and is very, very good at avoiding being seen, avoiding witnesses, and breaking into houses.
	So he basically evolved.
	Now knowing who he is, you know a lot about him.
	Is he above average intelligence?
	Like, how would you describe his level of smarts?
	You know, in terms of D'Angelo, I would say, yeah, he's above average intelligence for this type of offender.
	You know, he, as a cop talking to a sergeant down in Exeter, or actually up in Auburn, when he was a cop up in Auburn starting in 1976, his sergeant said, you know, he wasn't a good cop.
	He didn't employ good tactics.
	So, you know, I can discern, you know, in terms of what he employed during the commission of his crimes, that he's a deep thinker and he was a forward thinker.
	And then he utilized, you know, what he learned, you know, in his law enforcement aspects in order to be able to commit these crimes.
	But he's not very book smart.
	You know, in fact, his ex-fianc, Bonnie, who I have become, you know, great friends with, you know, she went to school with him at Sac State as he's studying criminal justice.
	And they took some classes together and he was constantly cheating off of her just to be able to pass his classes.
	When was he engaged to Bonnie?
	In 1970-ish.
	I can't remember if it was at the end of 69 into 70, but it was circa 1970.
	And that's, you know, we had a case in Davis, California that occurred in June of, actually it was beginning of July of 1978, where as he is literally raping this woman, he's sobbing and he's saying, I'm going to kill you, Bonnie.
	I'm going to kill you, Bonnie, over and over again.
	So we always knew there was a Bonnie in his life that was significant.
	We just didn't know who this Bonnie was.
	Was this a girlfriend?
	Was this a wife, et cetera?
	And then once we identified him through genealogy, I'm looking through his past.
	An analyst up at Sacramento found a newspaper article announcing the engagement of Joseph D'Angelo to Bonnie.
	And that was one of those check marks.
	Oh, he's got a Bonnie in his life.
	Well, that's interesting.
	But of course, that doesn't prove that he's the golden state killer.
	But it was one of those facts that, hey, there's something here.
	What did she say he was like?
	I'm curious because that was before, you know, the 10-year serious rape and murder spree that, you know, he's known for 76 to 86.
	How does she describe the then relatively young D'Angelo?
	You know, the primary characteristic that she really emphasizes is that rules didn't apply to him.
	You know, he didn't demonstrate anything to her, at least through the course of the relationship, until the very end that there was anything criminal about him in terms of indicating that he was capable of violence.
	But he just didn't care about rules.
	You know, he would speed, he would go and trespass, you know, in the Folsom Lake area or on the old Rockadine property in Rancho Cordova.
	And then he would, you know, he was a thrill seeker.
	So he would have her on the motorcycle and try to scare her, you know, as she's holding on to him as he's bombing, you know, off-road, you know, and purposely just trying to intimidate her that way.
	So, you know, it was an interesting but short relationship.
	And then when, you know, they got engaged, when she broke it off, that's when he shows up, knocks on her window at night.
	And when she opens up the drapes, D'Angelo's standing there with a gun pointed at her and basically tells her, you're coming with me.
	We're going to go get married, I think, in Reno.
	She closed the drapes, got her dad.
	Her dad goes out front, and this is up in Auburn, the Auburn area, and confronts him.
	And D'Angelo ends up leaving and Bonnie never talked to him again.
	Wow.
	She must consider herself so lucky.
	She does, you know, absolutely.
	But, you know, she was so courageous.
	She, you know, the victim that was on your show, Jane Carson, I introduced those two, Bonnie and Jane.
	And Jane actually had Bonnie in the courtroom when Jane gave her impact statement.
	And Bonnie stood up, couldn't say anything, but she was there and let D'Angelo know, I'm here.
	You know, so she showed tremendous courage to be able to let him know that she recognized that she really was a victim of his.
	Just fortunately, he didn't physically attack her like he did the other women in the series.
	Oh, that moment of her standing up while Jane was there gave me the chills.
	Like they finally had their say and he was alive to hear it.
Is He Still Alive 00:15:34
	That's thanks to you.
	You know, so often it's like even the Jeffrey Epstein case, you know, he killed himself, whatever.
	He died.
	And his victims only gave these impact statements that he never really got to hear.
	It's just the frustration of the victims in those circumstances is terrible.
	And these women managed to avoid at least that piece of the terror.
	They got to confront him, but it wasn't easy.
	You know, I saw, you know, one of the San Jose victims.
	She had a large contingent of her family in the courtroom with her.
	She gave her statement.
	I happened to be out in the lobby outside the courtroom when she walked out.
	And she literally collapsed after giving her statement.
	Her family had to hold her up.
	So, you know, this really underscores, you know, to this day, you know, how traumatized, you know, these families are, these victims who were personally attacked, as well as the families that lost their loved ones.
	He was so cruel in the way he pursued these attacks.
	He was clearly a sadist.
	I mean, he enjoyed the torture and harming of others.
	And the suffering seemed to be part of what he enjoyed the most, not just of the women he was attacking and the men who he ultimately added to the mix, but even of the children who were who were there in the homes that he went in.
	He couldn't have cared less if he bumped into a three-year-old or a seven-year-old, Paul.
	No, well, he used the children against the adults.
	You know, he knew due to his surveillance, either prior to entering the house or while he's in the house and walking around, he knew they had children.
	And he would threaten the parents, you know, do what I say, or I'll kill everybody in this house.
	I'll kill everything in this house.
	That was a common phrase that he would say.
	But also, when you start talking about the sadistic aspect of him, he wasn't a physical sadist by classic definition.
	He was a psychological sadist.
	You mentioned the fear.
	That's what he wanted to invoke in his victims.
	And so he would do things while he's got his victims bound just to get that fear response.
	And then he would continue after he's attacked them and left.
	He would call the victims.
	We have one victim who was attacked in 1977.
	And in 2001, 24 years later, he calls that victim and tell and basically says, remember when we played.
	You know, so he was still wanting to have that victim live in fear after a quarter century.
	We have one example, and you can hear the torture and how scary this would have been, especially to someone who had been attacked by this guy and lived only to hear him revisit her.
	Take a listen.
	This is, again, 1978.
	My God, it is still scary.
	It's right.
	I'm looking at my assistant, Abby.
	We both like just get the chills down your spine at that.
	And that was the point.
	Yeah, well, and that's exactly what he's doing.
	You know, that's where he wants that victim to know he's still around and to be scared.
	That phone call, that victim that he called in that call was the very first victim that we know of when he was East Area Rapist, which occurred in June of 1976.
	And just let me jump in for one second, Paul.
	Hold up that.
	Because they call him East Area Rapist first because he started with rapes for the most part.
	We talked about the burglary, but that was sort of what they dubbed him East Area Rapist or EAR while he was primarily focused on rape.
	So if you may hear different names for this guy over the course of this interview, we're talking about the same guy, Golden State Keller.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, no, and I probably, yeah, I should clarify that he had multiple monikers over the course of his career.
	An East Area Rapist, when he starts attacking in the East area of the Sacramento suburbs, that's when he got to that moniker.
	And with that first victim, it's June of 76.
	That recorded phone call came in January of 1978, 18 months later.
	So he kept on top of his victims.
	And that victim that he called 24 years later, she had remarried, moved all the way across town.
	So now she's living in a different location, different last name.
	Her phone number was under her husband's name.
	And yet D'Angelo had that victim's phone number to call her after the Sacramento Bee published an article in the newspaper about how DNA had linked the East Area rapist in Northern California to an unsolved series of homicides down south committed by the original Night Stalker.
	It turns out it's all the same guy.
	I cannot imagine going through that where you've been attacked, you've survived.
	You've dealt with it, hopefully, you know, with the help of therapists and friends and God.
	And then 24 years later, the guy resurfaces to spark the terror all over again.
	You know, the kids today use that term triggering.
	This is true triggering.
	Sure.
	And, you know, these victims, you know, they suffered a ton of trauma during their attacks.
	None of them at that point up until 2001 realized that their attacker would blossom into a serial killer.
	And in fact, the rumor on the street that many people, when I was doing the investigation, when I was talking to victims or other people in town at the time of the attacks thought, well, he got killed when he tried to break into house.
	That was the rumor.
	They just thought he was gone.
	And then now the phone call comes in and he's with that one victim.
	He's now letting her know I'm still around.
	And letting law enforcement know too.
	I mean, right?
	Because after 86, was there a question about whether this guy was still alive?
	The crime spree seemed to be over.
	Oh, yeah, no, absolutely.
	You know, and that was, you know, part of the struggles that I had personally with my management, if you will, is, you know, I had my boss at the DA's office was saying, oh, Paul, he's dead.
	Why are you spending so much time on this case?
	You know, and I was pretty convinced, no, I think he's still out there.
	And turns out he was.
	In fact, when I was on your show, I mentioned to your audience, he could be sitting here watching this show right now.
	I remember that and we were all freaked out.
	It is very possible that he is still alive.
	He's still monitoring the investigation.
	He's possibly even still watching the show.
	He could be.
	He could be in this audience.
	Oh.
	Well, that's chilling.
	That was a great moment.
	We talked about it a lot after the fact with the audience.
	And then, of course, you did find him.
	So why did you think he was still alive?
	Why did you believe that?
	Because before the phone call, you didn't really have any evidence of that.
	No, and that phone call was, you know, at that time, had occurred 17 years prior.
	You know, there's always a possibility he could have died or, you know, been in custody.
	But in taking a look at the age range he likely was at the time he was committing these attacks.
	He most certainly was, you know, at an age that he easily could still be alive at the time that I made that statement.
	But also in assessing this offender and him stopping, you know, 1986 for sure that we know of, but I felt that he actually psychologically stopped in 1981 after the last Santa Barbara attack.
	I thought, no, this is an offender that has stopped committing these crimes and is living a normal life.
	And just like the guy that I think is most similar to D'Angelo, Dennis Rader, BTK, you know, I felt the same thing that he just blended back into his life.
	He was getting older, knew he couldn't commit these types of attacks anymore.
	And the fact that after, What was that 15 years after his last known attack, he reached out and contacted a victim?
	Okay, this guy can go quiet for a long period of time.
	And that's where I kind of just put my eggs in that basket going, he's still alive.
	And quite frankly, he's still a threat to the public.
	And we need to find him.
	It's just shocking to think that somebody this committed to this level of depravity could stop, could just turn it off one day.
	And that's something, you know, the myth out there is that, you know, serial killers, once they start, they don't stop.
	But we've seen as some of these notorious serial killing cases have been solved.
	Well, these killers do stop.
	You know, we go to Gary Ridgway, Green River Killer, or as I mentioned before, Dennis Rader with BTK.
	And in interviews with those killers, you know, they had reasons for why they stopped.
	Gary Ridgway said, well, I got married.
	Dennis Rader said, you know, in my last attack, there was a man inside the house that I didn't realize was going to be there.
	I got into a fight and I left scared.
	I thought I could have been hurt, killed, or captured, and I didn't want any of that.
	And I was getting older.
	And that's part of why I thought with D'Angelo, you know, in his last Santa Barbara attack in 1981, possibly stopped because he got into a physical fight with six foot three Gregory Sanchez.
	So as these cases have been solved, we're starting to see that there is the possibility that some of these offenders, not necessarily all, but some of them, after committing the most horrific crimes imaginable, have the ability to go ahead and start living a normal life, the compartmentalize their past.
	They continue to fantasize about that, but they are now the family man.
	D'Angelo was the doting grandfather at the time of his arrest.
	If my math is correct, he would have been born in 46.
	40, 45, 46, yes.
	Okay.
	So when he was committing these crimes, he was between 30 and 40 or so.
	Of the East Area Rapist attacks, yes.
	You know, but we were pretty confident.
	Ken Clark from SAC Homicide, who is also, you know, part of the core East Area Rapist Task Force, a Golden State Killer Task Force.
	He's pretty sure that D'Angelo in 1973 was the Cordova cat burglar, you know, breaking into the houses while people were inside the houses in the very same neighborhood where the East Area Rapist starts up in 1976.
	I know actually from a high school friend that called in after D'Angelo was arrested through my contacts with SAC DA's office.
	This friend said, we used to commit burglaries as high schoolers in that very neighborhood.
	So D'Angelo has been committing crimes at least as far back as being a teenager.
	But my point in raising the 30 to 40 year old range, which was 76 to 86, is that you can see it.
	Like that's when a man would be probably at his strongest, you know, feeling his most confident.
	You get in your 40s, you know, things start to change a bit.
	And you could see consistent with what you just told me, maybe the confidence level going down.
	Well, and as the East Area rapist, and even as the original Nightstalker, D'Angelo, his crimes were very physical.
	He liked to prowl around the houses and go through backyards and then move through neighborhoods by jumping fences.
	If he was being pursued, and there's multiple times during the series in which law enforcement actually gets into, you know, foot pursuits with East Area rapists, you know, he is running and jumping fences and is very adept at it.
	You know, I know, you know, now that I'm, you know, 54, I've gone through from the late 20s into my 30s being very physically capable.
	And as I got older, well, me jumping a fence today is going to be a lot more effort than when I was in my late 20s.
	So that's part of, you know, D'Angelo, you know, self-assessing.
	Can he continue to commit these crimes and get away with them?
	And as he's getting older, the risk elevates because he's realizing he's no longer as physically capable.
	So, because we just did a show on the Zodiac killer or who our guest believes is a Zodiac killer, and we did a show on the DC Snipers, you know, those two guys.
	And in both of those cases, it seemed pretty clear that the person wanted to be caught.
	And the Zodiac wasn't actually caught, but leaving clues.
	And in the sniper case, leaving clues, the tarot card, the notes, and calling, like it just seemed like it was cat and mousey, but this case seems very different.
	D'Angelo, to me, seems the opposite, did not want to be caught at all.
	No, absolutely the opposite.
	You know, and I've actually looked into Zodiac.
	That, you know, Zodiac cases were in my backyard.
	And I would say that I'm not.
	Yeah, I would drive by, you know, the first Zodiac crime scene on my commute into work every day.
	So, you know, I'm very familiar with the Zodiac case.
	Now, Zodiac, you think about, you know, first, the styles of attacks, you know, with the exception of Lake Berryessa, with Lake Berryessa and Napa, you know, he's, he's like David Berkowitz out there in New York.
	He's walking up on young couples that are parked inside a car and shooting them.
	This is about as cowardly a type of crime that can be committed.
	But the communication is demonstrating sort of that narcissic, ego-driven attitude, just like BTK.
	BTK was communicating, you know, with law enforcement, and that's ultimately what got him caught.
	D'Angelo did not want to get caught.
	He probably communicated at times during the course of a series to law enforcement, calling and dispatch, but he recognized that was too risky to him.
	And so when he is arrested and sitting in that interview room, he is so shocked that he got caught and so dejected.
	He just wanted to live out his life, not seeking notoriety like Zodiac or Raider was.
Layers To Hide His Face 00:15:11
	Do you think if you hadn't caught him, he would have left a note, you know, and taken credit in that, or he would have gone to his grave with the secret.
	He would have gone to his grave.
	I mean, to this day, he has never said a word to us about anything related to the attacks.
	So only he has answers to so many questions that all of us have.
	And he hasn't divulged anything.
	I don't think he likes the idea that now he's being seen as a golden state killer.
	And this is what's so important in terms of assessing him for potential interviews is how does he self-identify?
	Dennis Rader, BTK, what he's caught, he was a president of his church, was married, he was active in his son's Boy Scouts.
	But he goes, that's just a facade.
	I'm BTK.
	That's how he identified in this world.
	And I know when we caught D'Angelo, it's like, well, does he identify as the grandfather or does he identify as Golden State Killer?
	And to this day, we don't know.
	But right now, he's not like saying, hey, you know, look at me.
	I'm the Golden State killer.
	He just wants it to be quiet.
	In discussing the snipers, They said, like, I am God, call me God, things like that.
	And they seem to suffer from a God complex.
	I mean, the elder, you know, in particular, Muhammad, who was driving it, suffer from a God complex and really felt powerful in committing these murders.
	D'Angelo seems to have been driven by something very different.
	Yeah, you know, very complicated in terms of assessing what his motive is, true, you know, inner motive.
	Some of these killers, that God complex is very real.
	You know, they control if this person that they're attacking dies and when that person dies.
	And there's numerous examples of such as Samuel Little or even Jesperson, the smiley happy face killer, where they would strangle these women to the point of unconsciousness and let them come back alive, only to do it over and over again.
	This is what they said, gave them that power.
	D'Angelo, there is a true, there's a vindictiveness to him.
	There's also, you know, the sexual assault on these women, many of these women was driven by sex.
	And it's often a misnomer that it's all about power and control.
	Now, there's a sexual aspect to why these offenders are attacking them.
	They have sexualized violence.
	But the vindictiveness is where I think it gets interesting because I truly believe that many of the couples were attacked because D'Angelo had some sort of interaction, prior interaction with the man and decided it was a negative thing and decided, I'm going to come back and show you who I am and basically took control over that man, emasculated that man,
	and then took his wife or girlfriend out into the other room and sexually assaulted her.
	And this is a vindictive act.
	But until he talks, we don't know exactly why, you know, he's choosing any of these victims in this series.
	There were some clues.
	He made small statements to various victims that would pique your curiosity and so on.
	Like I watched you or somebody, he said something to one woman who was like, do I know this person?
	You know, how do I like there were little clues, but they weren't meant for you.
	It was just, you know, slips of the tongue where he had revealed a little too much.
	Well, actually, this is going towards the sophistication of D'Angelo.
	Those weren't slip of the tongue.
	What he was doing is verbal staging.
	So you think about typical, but when we say a crime is staged, you know, this is where evidence has been changed at a crime scene in order to make, let's say, a homicide look like a suicide.
	So the offender isn't, you know, draw the attention of the investigation.
	What D'Angelo was doing was making statements to these victims, knowing that they were going to talk to law enforcement.
	So he was planting seeds.
	And anytime somebody stages a crime, whether it be the physical evidence or the verbal aspect, that is to try to push the investigation away from themselves.
	So D'Angelo would say certain things like, you know, as an example, you better not tell the cops you saw my van parked outside.
	And he said ban over and over and over throughout the second half of the East Area Rapist series.
	Guarantee he never drove a van to any of these seats.
	He's probably in a motor driving a motorcycle or another vehicle.
	Or, you know, I killed two people down in Bakersfield, you know, prior.
	You know, so he's trying to push, I've already killed, you know, down in Bakersfield.
	I'm going to do that to you.
	But he's also wanting the victim to relay that, you know, he is from the Bakersfield area, which he wasn't.
	And most notably, one prime example is when he's asking this victim where her husband was at.
	And she said Roseville, which is just a city just north of Sacramento.
	He says, he asks, where's Roseville?
	Like he doesn't know the area.
	It's from out of town.
	Well, D'Angelo was a police intern for Roseville PD.
	So this shows how this staging was working in his mind to try to throw off the investigation.
	Again, I mean, absolutely cunning.
	That's why I asked you, what level of smarts did this guy have?
	Because he sounds, I don't want to say brilliant, but he sounds very intelligent.
	It's interesting to hear you say, not really.
	It's just he studied this particular field.
	He worked in this particular field and he made himself a bit of an expert in how to misdirect.
	No, absolutely.
	You know, he's not going to score off the charts on an IQ test, but I'm not saying he's dumb.
	You know, I would say probably to anybody, he's of average intellect based on just me kind of assessing him as a person.
	But as a criminal, as a predator, he is, he's savvy.
	And I think you use the term cunning.
	Absolutely.
	And he was trained.
	He was a law enforcement officer and he was smart enough to draw upon that training and those tools in order to be a better criminal, a better predator.
	Now, those investigating him did suspect law enforcement ties, right?
	Like there was enough proficiency at the crime scenes that I've heard some of the former investigators say, yes, we did wonder whether he could have a connection to law enforcement or possibly a military background, which he also did have, if I'm not mistaken.
	He was a 27-year-old Navy veteran in 1973.
	He served in the Navy.
	He served in the Navy back in the 60s.
	He never, it was during the Vietnam War, but he never saw combat.
	He was on a ship.
	But over the decades, there was always suspects that came up that were law enforcement or military.
	And there was some thought, you know, could he have that type of background?
	I took the position that because of, and this was kind of later during my investigation, once I kind of was like, aha, I know, I've got a better read on who this offender is now.
	That the position I took was that the tactics he was employing would be tactics that an intelligent offender would naturally want to do to try to prevent themselves from being caught.
	I could not say, you know, that for sure anything he did demonstrated specialized military training or law enforcement training.
	It just was he doesn't want to get caught and he's employing those strategies.
	Like he wore gloves at every crime scene, right?
	That we didn't do very well on the fingerprints.
	He always wore gloves.
	He would take the gloves off, you know, when he's sexually assaulting the woman from time to time.
	But we don't have any latents across any of the cases that have matched back to D'Angelo.
	Of course, every house that you process have latent prints all over.
	So it's kind of tough to say, you know, leading into the identification of D'Angelo, whether you have the offender's print or not.
	But it turns out, no, he never left a print that we were able to tie back to him once he was caught.
	But he's also, you know, back in the back in the 70s, you know, he's wearing a ski mask all the time.
	But even while wearing a ski mask, so they couldn't see his face.
	He's shining a flashlight in the victim's eyes, blinding them.
	And he's telling them, don't look at me or I'll kill you.
	So he's put in multiple, you know, layers to prevent the victims from seeing his face.
	So that's, you know, part of my entire pursuit of him.
	I only knew this guy as a masked man.
	And then finally, once D'Angelo was identified and he's in handcuffs walking into Sacramento homicide, it was like, well, there you go.
	You know, I've unmasked him and that's what he looks like.
	So that's, you know, he, for the types of evidence that could identify him and the types of witness statements that could produce a composite, you know, for back in the day, he prevented all that from happening.
	What he didn't prevent and didn't know about was, you know, he was leaving his DNA all over the place.
	Oh, yeah.
	No, we'll get to that.
	We'll get to the DNA in just a bit.
	But how do we have composite sketches of him then?
	You know, I remember when they arrested him, the DA was standing next to three of them, which showed a younger D'Angelo in sketch artist form.
	So how do we have that?
	Yeah, all of those composites that were produced back in the day were produced by neighbors that saw strange men walking in the neighborhood.
	I can't say that any of those composites are actually D'Angelo today.
	Some of them may look close to D'Angelo, but I have no confidence in any of those composites.
	I did wonder because as you describe him jumping over the fences and racing around in people's backyards, and I remember you saying once that he liked neighborhoods that had mostly one-story houses, he wasn't a big fan of the two-story houses.
	My question was, why didn't the neighbor see him?
	He struck so often.
	It's not like one crime every five years.
	How is he not seen, spotted, and had the cops called on him?
	Well, most certainly he targeted neighborhoods.
	Now, just to back up a little bit, you know, victim selection, you know, though we don't know how he's selecting all his victims, he's multimodal.
	Some victims he likely followed home.
	Some victims he's in a neighborhood prowling and runs across them.
	Some victims he may have had an interaction with and decided that they fit his needs.
	But he did choose neighborhoods that had certain characteristics that would minimize the threat of him being seen.
	And that very first neighborhood that he attacks in in June of 76 in Rancho, Cordova, this Cordova Meadows neighborhood, single-story houses, you know, five-foot fences, which are relatively easy to get up and over.
	There was no streetlights in that neighborhood.
	The houses, the windows on the houses and between the houses were situated to where he could easily just walk between these houses and nobody could see him.
	They're like dark alleys.
	So this was a perfect prowling neighborhood.
	And I believe he chose that neighborhood because he's familiar with it and he knew that it was tough for people to see him if he employed those types of strategies.
	But we have examples of neighbors outside seeing a man kind of walk past them, you know, towards a victim's house later on that night.
	And then they, as they're out front and they look and to see, well, where did this man go?
	He has absolutely just disappeared into the shadows.
	So he was very stealthy and he knew how to use lighting to his advantage.
	Now, I know you have three adult children of your own at this point.
	As while we're here, is there any sort of advice you want to offer to people?
	And like, where should we live?
	Where shouldn't we live?
	What, like, we shouldn't live in a neighborhood like that if we can avoid it, right?
	I mean, just like, what are your thoughts on that, the general safety aspect of that?
	Well, you know, it is, it's tough comparing today to the 1970s in terms of, you know, how are these offenders going to be attacking?
	You know, most certainly with my kids, you know, going to college, avoid, you know, the first floor, you know, where there's a first floor window or the door's right there.
	You know, it's just offenders today have to do different things in order to be able to attack victims.
	It's relatively rare to see a predator consistently breaking into houses over and over again and getting away with it for any period of time just due to technology and surveillance systems.
	And yeah, you know, so there's so much that really limits the type of series that D'Angelo is doing.
	But predators are now doing different things.
	You know, in the 90s in my jurisdiction, you know, they really grabbed the serial predator was gravitating towards the sex workers because now these women are voluntarily getting into their cars.
	But then eventually, once the stroll area started to dry up out of fear, then they go online.
	You know, now you have the Craigslist killer or the escort services where they call in and then they have the victim meet them someplace where they have now isolated that victim.
	You know, so that's part of how the predator is evolving based on how technology and security consciousness has changed.
	That is just terrifying.
	So back to D'Angelo.
The Psychology Of D'Angelo 00:15:36
	So he committed several rapes and he, as you point out, he had studied criminal justice.
	He got a criminal justice degree from California State University.
	And it seems to me he was actually, he was a cop when he was committing the rapes.
	And even what, the first two murders, he was still an active duty police officer?
	Yes, he was a law enforcement officer for everything that happened in Bisalia, all those burglaries, including the homicide of Claude Snowing.
	In fact, he was a sergeant at the time that he left the police department down in Exeter.
	And when he's hired on by Auburn Police Department, he is now becoming the East Area rapist.
	And for every single attack in Northern California, from Sacramento down to Modesto, Sacramento down to San Jose, 50 attacks, he is an active law enforcement officer.
	And that's part, and the double homicide of Katie and Brian Maggiore up in Sacramento.
	He is a law enforcement officer.
	It isn't until after all those attacks when he gets arrested for shoplifting and he's put on administrative leave and then ultimately terminating, does he go down south?
	And every attack after that, he is wanting to kill or does kill his victims.
	So that change from, you know, having authority as a law enforcement officer, going down south where that authority has been stripped, you know, now he becomes a serial killer just straight up.
	He's not even trying to do anything else.
	And we, and when you say down south, we're still obviously in California, hence Golden State killer.
	It never left California.
	Right.
	So in 1979, after he disappears up north, he turns out in October of 79, he shows up in Goleta, Santa Barbara area.
	Goleta is a small town next to Santa Barbara City in Santa Barbara, does a classic East Area rapist style attack from up north.
	But once he's got the woman out in the family room and the man bound in the bed, the woman hears him pacing back and forth.
	I'm going to kill him.
	I'm going to kill him this time.
	I'm going to kill him.
	Well, D'Angelo at this point had already been terminated as a law enforcement officer.
	That attack actually goes sideways because the victims end up kind of freaking out once the woman hears this.
	And then he ends up getting chased by an off-duty FBI special agent who hears the screams in his neighbor's house.
	But two months later, D'Angelo's back just a block south of that sideways attack and kills a couple there in Santa Barbara.
	Then he goes down to Ventura and bludgeons Lyman and Charlene Smith to death.
	Then he's down in Laguna Nigel in Orange County, where he bludgeons a couple to death there.
	He goes to Irvine a couple of times, kills two women there.
	He goes and attacks another couple in Santa Barbara.
	You know, so he is now moving through Southern California and killing.
	And then in 1986, after his last attack on beautiful 19-year-old Janelle Cruz, he stops.
	And that's one of the mysteries.
	Why does he stop?
	And I have my theories, but until he says why, we just don't know.
	So what you mentioned the couple.
	So he started off, as we discussed, burgling and raping, but there was a point at which he graduated to going into homes to rape women where their boyfriends or their husbands were present.
	And this is, I guess, right before he crossed over to just murdering too.
	And it was almost like a challenge to him after, I think it was the Sacramento B wrote an article saying he had never done that before.
	He'd only attacked women sleeping by themselves in their homes at night.
	And to speak to that, because it almost seemed like he felt as though he'd been dared or his courage had been questioned.
	No, no, absolutely.
	You know, Sacramento B has that article.
	In essence, it says he has never attacked when a man is home.
	And attack number 16 up there as East Area Rapist.
	He goes into a house with a woman and a man.
	And this is where he breaks in, the couple sleeping.
	He wakes them up.
	He blinds them with a flashlight.
	He tells them he has a gun.
	He's going to spatter their brains all over the wall if they don't do what he says.
	And he tosses bindings to the woman and makes her tie up the man face down in the bed.
	And then he goes and ties the woman up once the man is somewhat secure.
	And then ultimately, he would go out and get dishes and put dishes on the man's back as an alarm system and tell the man if he heard, if D'Angelo heard these rattle, he would kill everything in the house would be a common phrase, or cut off a piece of his wife and bring it back to him or cut off the fingers of the kids, whatever.
	And then he would take the woman out into the family room and sexually assault her.
	He was challenged by that Sacramento B article.
	But the interesting thing is, is that he proves in that very first attack with the man present, he could do it.
	But then two-thirds of the attacks from that point on have men present.
	So this really underscores that that victimology is something that satisfied him.
	He really liked the idea of having that power and control over the man while he is being able to sexually assault that man's wife or girlfriend.
	And so, this is where it gets interesting from a psychological standpoint is he didn't start doing that.
	But think about the risk he was taking to break into a house that has an entire family there, a man present.
	Oftentimes, these men had guns nearby, and yet he's willing to take that risk in order to be able to commit this style of crime.
	So, I believe internally he realized I get more personally out of attacking with a man present than just sexually assaulting a lone female.
	And the thing with the dishes is bizarre, too.
	I mean, it was his alarm system, as you point out.
	Like, if he heard the rattling, he threatened to escalate it.
	And as far as I understand, all the victims complied with that.
	I mean, they took him very seriously and they tried not to rattle those dishes.
	D'Angelo is so commanding and threatening.
	All these males ended up saying, you know, I had no choice.
	You know, my fear was if the male tried to struggle against his bindings and the dishes rattled, that he would harm their wife or girlfriend.
	There were times when the men would get uncomfortable because it is very uncomfortable.
	Their hands would hurt from the tight bindings, their ankles would hurt from the bindings.
	They're laying absolutely still.
	They don't know what's going on.
	And there were several times when the men would shift with this alarm system of dishes on their back, and the dishes would rattle or fall.
	And D'Angelo was immediately in that room with the gun to the back of the man's head.
	And he would cock the hammer and say, Do that again, and I'll kill you.
	So these men were helpless at this point.
	They had no control over what was going to happen to them or their wife.
	The only thing that they could control was, I have to stay still.
	And this is part of something I've been very outspoken about: you know, of course, all these women that were sexually assaulted, you know, extraordinarily traumatizing.
	But a lot of people forget about the victimization of the man.
	These men, I interviewed several of the men, and I had several of these men crying either on the phone or in front of me, face to face, after 35 years they were attacked.
	So these men were victims too.
	You think about just remove the sexual assault and the woman out of the crime and just think about a masked man breaking into a house, tying a man up, putting a gun to the back of his head and pulling the hammer back and saying, I'm going to kill you.
	In many states, that practically can qualify as a life sentence in terms of the type of crime.
	So this is a serious crime in and of itself.
	He's been tortured.
	He's brutally tortured.
	Yes.
	It's psychologically, emotionally tortured.
	And D'Angelo knew that.
	In fact, one man in Danville, California, who is a very large man relative to D'Angelo, D'Angelo could tell this man was not liking and wanted to, you know, liking the predicament and wanting to do something.
	And D'Angelo tells him, essentially, you don't like this, do you?
	Well, there's nothing you can do about it.
	You know, so this is where D'Angelo is expressing that he has power and control over that man.
	He loved that.
	That's what the badge gave him.
	And then that's what, you know, victimizing these couples gave him because now he was basically asserting himself as being more of a man than these men who were victims.
	Well, it makes sense from his perspective because otherwise he would just kill the man.
	I mean, I'm understanding it better listening to you because one of my questions is why didn't he just kill the men?
	But he wanted to torture them.
	He enjoyed that piece of it.
	He didn't want to just end it for them.
	No, and that goes to, you know, this is where the sadistic aspect of him, you know, that getting gratification out of the suffering of others, you know, it's psychological.
	I mean, he wasn't beating these men.
	You know, he wasn't doing anything that was physically going to hurt them, but he was instilling fear as he was doing with the women.
	So, you know, this is where he is a complex offender from a psychological standpoint.
	And when he goes down south and he's starting to kill, and it's really when he's bludgeoning the couples to death, the evolution gets to where he is, in essence, he's taking control of the man, but then likely killing that man very early in the attack to minimize that threat.
	And so he changed in terms of what he needed to get out of the crime, the fantasy of the crime, once he is a full-blown killer.
	But now, wait, so before we get to that, you mentioned he lost his cop job around that time before he moved down south.
	And he lost it.
	It's such a weird story that he explained what he did and like, why would he do this?
	You know, this well-trained criminal who had managed to avoid capture and all these other crimes.
	What happened to him?
	Well, July of 1979, up in Citrus Heights, Sacramento, he's off duty, plain clothes.
	He goes into just a local convenience store there and shoplifts dog repellent and a hammer and is caught.
	And Sacramento sheriffs responds.
	He's arrested.
	And of course, that's reported back to his police department, Auburn Police Department.
	And he's now put on administrative leave.
	So as you would expect.
	So now they are investigating the shoplifting.
	And during their internal affairs investigation, they go inside D'Angelo's house, which was up in Auburn at the time.
	And the police chief told me we found all sorts of stolen commercial property, like power tools still in their boxes.
	Like he had just taken them out of a store, but had never opened up or tried to sell them.
	But that was never part of the case in chief.
	It was always the shoplifting.
	And it's like, why is he taking the risk of shoplifting when he's the serial killer?
	But this goes back to Bonnie's assessment of D'Angelo's personality.
	Rules don't apply.
	He got a thrill out of doing these little things.
	Yes.
	And he probably was doing it all the time.
	It's just he got caught this one time.
	In no way do I mean to compare Winona Ryder to this guy.
	But remember when she got arrested for shoplifting and it was at the height of her fame and everyone was so confused.
	It's like, why would this very rich, very successful celebrity shoplift?
	She could afford anything in that store.
	And there were a lot of reports on why people do that.
	And it did relate to the thrill of it.
	You know, there's something, there's a Jones from like doing it and getting away with it.
	No, absolutely.
	You know, and that is really, you know, you talk about Renaldo Ryder case.
	You know, that psychology really is also kind of a foundational psychology for D'Angelo doing that kind of thing, as well as escalating up into committing the burglaries.
	And then he's recognizing he's got fantasies of committing violence against people, which now takes him out well above the psychology of Renona Ryder.
	But fundamentally, it's that gratification.
	It's that thrill.
	So I read something about the police chief shortly after firing D'Angelo.
	Like D'Angelo showed up at his house.
	He was almost an intruder.
	Like, what is that story?
	Well, this is where when I, you know, we were marching down on genealogy and D'Angelo's name came up.
	And, you know, I was skeptical that this full-time police officer could commit all these crimes across Northern California like the East Area rapists did.
	I end up tracking down the police chief that fired D'Angelo, Nick Willick.
	And Nick, you know, was telling me about, you know, Nick was the one that was D'Angelo's sergeant when D'Angelo first came on board up in Auburn, but also ultimately became the police chief and was chief when D'Angelo shoplifted.
	So Nick is the one that put D'Angelo on administrative leave and started the IA investigation.
	And while D'Angelo is on admin leave, Nick told me the story that during this period of time, which would have been in that July, August, 1979 timeframe, he's asleep in his house and his daughter comes into his room and says, Dad, there's a man standing outside my window shining a flashlight into him.
A Daughter's Terrifying Warning 00:06:36
	And Nick goes, Paul, I rabbited out of my bed and went outside and I could see shoe impressions in the dirt all around the perimeter of the back of my house.
	And he goes, I know for sure that was D'Angelo.
	Now, he didn't identify D'Angelo, but he was confident that that was D'Angelo.
	And when I'm talking to Nick, I'm not letting him know.
	I'm looking at the East Area Rapist or the Golden State killer case.
	And once I heard that, I mean, that was where, you know, basically the hairs on my arm stood up.
	And I was like, yeah, that's exactly what the Golden State killer would do if he was being terminated by his employer is that vindictive aspect.
	I'll show you who I am.
	Yeah.
	That's really when I started to turn about D'Angelo and his potential to be the Golden State killer.
	It doesn't mean he was, but it was like, well, if that was D'Angelo.
	Because he was on your suspect's list.
	Is that what you're saying?
	But you didn't, you had a lot of people on your suspect's list.
	Well, at this point, you know, we were working the genealogy angle and his name came up.
	And I had just eliminated a guy in Colorado, or the team had just eliminated a guy in Colorado.
	And that's when I turned to D'Angelo, going, well, I might as well look at this former cop.
	And as I dug in, you know, I try to reach out to Bonnie.
	I'm researching him.
	I'm visiting all sorts of things where he had.
	When I talked to that police chief, I initial phone calls was checking a box.
	But now when it's so painful, Paul, because it's like, I'm sure this poor cop is just kicking himself for not looking into it more back then.
	I mean, how could he know, right?
	But it's like those missed opportunities.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	No, you know, and that's just it.
	There is no way he could have at that point in time, because D'Angelo shoplifted that he should be considered.
	And I know there are probably that the chief received some public criticism after D'Angelo was arrested as the Golden State killer.
	And I publicly said, absolutely not.
	You know, basically he did what he could do to D'Angelo based on the facts.
	And there's just no connection between the shoplifting and the East Area rapist attacks that that chief could have even.
	I'm talking about the moment that he saw somebody had come outside of his house and had shined the light in at his daughter.
	You know, like, again, they're not in any way blaming the guy, but it's just like, oh, God, what if he had followed up?
	What if he had all these moments in time he'd like to go back to and have another look at?
	Yeah, no, sure, absolutely.
	I mean, and that was part, you know, D'Angelo is very good at what he did.
	And that is the prime reason why his series was as long as it was.
	But there were multiple times within the series where he just flat out got lucky.
	And that was one of those times.
	Yes, right.
	So now he goes south in California and he escalates to just murdering.
	And when he started just murdering couples, did he get rid of the sexual assault altogether?
	No, he still sexually assaulted the women.
	There's only one attack, well, two attacks down in Southern California where we don't have his DNA.
	And that's the first attack that went sideways, where basically he's being chased by the off-duty FBI agent in Goleta.
	And then the second attack, which also happened in almost that same neighborhood, in which it appears that the male slipped his bindings and got up and rushed him.
	And D'Angelo had to shoot the male, you know, out of, if you want to call it self-defense, and then went over and shot the female in the top of the head while she laid face down on the bed and ran off.
	So because that attack also kind of went sideways on him, he never got to the stage of sexually assaulting.
	But down in Ventura, the next attack and every attack after that, he is sexually assaulting the women and also killing the women and men in the cases where men are present.
	So that, and that's where it stood straight through to 1986.
	And then what happened?
	Just in 1986, he dropped off the face of the earth.
	You know, nobody, there's no other cases that we can attribute to him.
	He's, you know, he's married.
	At the time of the last attack, his wife was two months pregnant with their second daughter, I believe.
	And, you know, ultimately, they are back up in up in Citrus Heights, you know, living in the house where he was arrested back in 2018.
	So it wasn't becoming a father necessarily because he was already a dad at the time his wife got pregnant, you know, with their second child, obviously.
	Right.
	You know, in fact, so the second to last attack in July of 1981 in Santa Barbara, Gregory Sanchez and Sherry Domingo, his wife is, you know, seven months pregnant with the first daughter.
	You know, and then he commits this attack and five years go by and we have nothing in those five years.
	And then we have May of 1986 in Irvine.
	That's when he bludgeons 19-year-old Janelle Cruz to death.
	And his wife's pregnant again, seven months pregnant with the second daughter.
	But then after that, nothing.
	Then they have a third daughter and no idea, you know, from, you know, why is he not doing anything, you know, but as we talked earlier, at 1986, he's 41 years old.
	So now he's getting older as an offender.
	His life circumstances have changed.
	You know, he's got two daughters moving back up to Sacramento.
	I think, you know, this is where he is really slipping back.
	He's slipping into that mindset.
	I've got to put the serial predator part of me aside.
	And I'm now going to be, you know, a father, a provider.
	And then ultimately, you know, he's just becoming a truck mechanic and enjoying life.
	He's out fishing with his buddies.
Slipping Back Into Darkness 00:08:26
	That's what I was going to ask.
	So how did he pay his bills after he got fired from the police force?
	Big mystery.
	We don't know.
	He hasn't told us what he was doing.
	We haven't found a job that he was doing during the years as the original night stalker.
	Wow.
	His wife was an attorney.
	And I forget exactly when she actually starts making money versus going to school, but he may have been living off of her for a period of time.
	Now, I believe that there's enough evidence to suggest that D'Angelo, even as East Area rapist, was moonlighting as a security guard on construction job sites.
	And now I've had a relative from down south indicate that when D'Angelo was living in Long Beach, seeing a couple of security guard style shirts, as well as a gun and a holster hanging in D'Angelo's residence.
	So I think he's probably still doing security work, which would make sense psychologically for him, because now he still has sort of that, you know, that power and authority that he had as a full-blown peace officer, but just not quite.
	And that may be something that I just don't know about.
	And one of the things that I did after this case was solved, I was so burnt, I literally pushed away.
	And I know there's been a lot of investigation into D'Angelo since.
	And there may be some aspects of D'Angelo that I have not been updated on.
	That's fine.
	I mean, you got your man.
	That's the thing.
	I want to get into how you caught him because that's probably, I don't know if it's the most interesting, but it's one of the most interesting things of the story.
	But before we do that, can I just ask you a couple of psychological issues on him?
	I know in one of the attacks, the victim survived, because this is how we know this.
	He sat at the end of the bed and started crying and talking about his mommy, like mommy.
	I don't want to be bad or mommy.
	I can't remember what it was.
	Do we, what do we make of that?
	You know, well, it actually is, it is one of these oddities.
	It wasn't just in one case in which victims heard him crying or sobbing, you know, after the sexual assault.
	And, you know, we don't know for sure.
	You know, was this an act?
	Was he trying to, just like with the verbal staging, was he trying to portray himself differently?
	But then when he's being interviewed that night that he's arrested and he's being left alone, he's got his head hung.
	I'm looking at him.
	And at one point, I almost see him looking like he's about to cry and he's talking to himself.
	And then his neighbors would say that, you know, Joe, crazy Joe, would be talking to himself.
	So I think it is possible that, you know, at a certain point in these attacks, some of the statements he's making to himself is what he does and the crime.
	From a psychological standpoint, an interesting aspect about D'Angelo is I'm not sure he would be characterized as a true psychopath.
	Everybody assumes he's a psychopath.
	He doesn't experience empathy.
	I saw enough acts that he did to his living victims over the course of 50 attacks where I'm going, you know what?
	He is showing that he is caring about how these victims are feeling.
	And part of it is M.O., if they are getting uncomfortable because they're getting cold, you know, because sometimes they'd complain about being cold.
	He'd put a blanket on them, a pillow under their head.
	Is this just to keep them appeased so they don't become a problem?
	Or is he actually truly, you know, showing a level of empathy?
	And if that's the case, then I question whether he's a psychopath.
	And then as time went on during the series, it almost looked like he was struggling with what he was doing.
	It was almost like he was compelled to do these attacks, but knew internally, wow, I don't want to do these.
	And then after the attack, that's when this emotional release would happen and the crying would happen.
	What about his wife and his daughters?
	You know, what have they said?
	Well, the daughters were absolutely clueless about his past life.
	They didn't even know that he had been a cop.
	So obviously, D'Angelo and their mom kept a lot of what was happening before the daughters were born secret from them.
	The wife, Sharon, they end up getting married in 1973.
	She becomes ultimately a divorce attorney.
	And, you know, she has not really engaged with the investigation to the fullest extent.
	And I have to be careful about how I describe this.
	The Sacramento DA asked me not to be too blunt about my thoughts.
	You know, the only thing that I will say along those lines is, you know, D'Angelo and Sharon separated in 1991, yet they were still technically married in 2018 when D'Angelo was arrested.
	And Sharon's a divorce attorney.
	So it's really odd that that spousal connection, spousal privilege was kept intact.
	Oh, that's riveting information.
	Sharon, what accountability does she have?
	What did she know?
	And when did she know it?
	That's awful.
	I mean, you got to feel for these daughters who at some point, you know, were delivering the news that their father prolific series.
	I saw the middle daughter, you know, the two younger daughters.
	They were at Sacramento homicide that night.
	And I saw them sobbing.
	An FBI agent had been assigned to basically tell them why their father was in custody.
	And they both were allowed to go in separately to talk to their dad.
	And he basically kicked them out.
	So I don't know.
	I've said, you know, they really are victims of his, you know, and it's so sad.
	And you know, what's pitiful is that they've received death threats, you know, and it's like, no, they have nothing to do with what D'Angelo did.
	He is solely responsible for these attacks.
	And now these two girls are having to figure out how their life is going to work moving forward.
	Boy, back to the wife, Sharon.
	And I'll just speculate this isn't you, but it does make you wonder if in 1991 she found something.
	You know, usually these serial killers keep some sort of treasures from their crime scenes.
	They can't let the entire thing go because they're important to reliving the sick moments.
	And it does make you wonder whether she found something that led her to get out of there, but was smart enough not to.
	Well, I don't know, not smart enough.
	I don't mean that.
	I mean, most of us would run to the police to say, my God, but she had children and at some point, grandchildren, and that does complicate it.
	Yeah, you know, and I would say 1991 is probably, you know, whatever happened in 91 that caused them to separate is probably just the tip of the iceberg in terms of D'Angelo and Sharon's relationship.
	Well, did Bonnie shed any light on weird sexual predilections?
	You know, anything about that?
	No, you know, outside of his ability to be able to repeatedly have sex in a very short timeframe, that was really the only thing that she brought up that seemed to really stand out to her.
	Which is consistent with what happened during these crimes.
	It wasn't just one rape and he was out of there.
Living Out A Sadistic Fantasy 00:05:51
	He repeatedly assaulted the women sexually.
	That is right.
	You know, and sometimes, you know, sometimes these attacks would last over the course of hours, but sometimes he's repeatedly sexually assaulting to the point of ejaculation within a very short timeframe.
	So there is some consistency from a physical aspect with what Bonnie's recollection of their interactions were like.
	But she does not, she did not, she does not remember anything that would indicate that he enjoyed violence, you know, during the course of sex.
	And quite frankly, D'Angelo, when he's sexually assaulting these women, obviously it's an act of violence, but he is not the type of a rapist that is punching these women as he's having sex with them.
	He's only striking them when they fight him back.
	And there are times when it appears that he's enjoying and engaging in more of a consensual type of sexual encounter than an actual rape, where he's making the woman put high-heeled shoes on and having her straddle him while he's up on the sofa.
	Like he's living out a fantasy of being with her versus, you know, these really assertive rapists that are using derogatory terms and striking the women or holding knives against their throats, you know, outside of having to control these, doing things to control the women.
	D'Angelo wasn't like that.
	Forgive me for going back to this.
	And I don't know if there are any lessons that we can extrapolate because every crime is different, but I want one.
	You know, I want one for myself and for my loved ones and for all the people out there.
	Is there any lesson from this series of murders on don't comply, you know, run, scream, or no?
	Because it seems like whatever you did with this guy, it was going to end badly.
	Yeah, you know, this is, and I've been asked this type of question, like I'll talk at citizens academies and the women will say, well, what do I do if I'm being attacked?
	Yeah.
	And it really comes down to you do have to fight.
	There's no question.
	From the very beginning, you have to fight.
	You have to make noise.
	But recognize that there is a type of offender that that is what he wants.
	And that is your sexual sadist.
	So a sexual sadist is somebody who gets more amped up.
	The more you fight, the more you scream, the more pain that offender can inflict on the wound.
	And so there are examples, in fact, of a 1969 victim.
	You know, she was being attacked.
	She was trying to fight in the front seat of a car, and she realized she was going to be dead.
	And she's looking out the window at nature and sunlight.
	And she starts stroking the back of the guy's neck as he's raping her.
	And the guy literally just stopped.
	He didn't want that.
	He wanted her fear and her fight.
	And there is another case example out of the Pacific Northwest of a guy who's using a knife in a pickup truck on a woman.
	And she realizes she's dead and she just lays there and he pushes up and walks out.
	This is your sexual sadist.
	Once the woman goes limb, he's not getting what he wants.
	So my recommendation is always fight, fight, fight.
	But if that is not working, if this guy is too powerful and he just seems to be amping up the more you fight, just briefly, you know, do the opposite.
	Give it a try.
	See what happens.
	Give it a try.
	But if that doesn't work, then you got to fight for your life.
	You just have to.
	Yeah, be a difficult victim.
	Be a difficult victim, especially in the case of abductions.
	You know, do not go along.
	He's got a gun, get in the car.
	Do not do that.
	Run, zigzag, serpentine, yell.
	Try it right there.
	Do not get in that car.
	Yeah.
	I tell my kids, if somebody grabs them and starts, you know, pulling them to a vehicle, you know, and they, I don't care if they've got a gun or a knife, you know, you do everything to prevent yourself from getting to that vehicle.
	Doesn't being shot or stabbed there is going to be so much better than what they're going to do to you once they get you to the location they want to take.
	Yes, do not comply.
	It does make me wonder about his childhood.
	You know, what do we know?
	Abuse, sexual abuse, torture.
	Like what happened during his childhood?
	Yeah, I don't have a lot of information on his childhood, and I don't think there's a ton of information out there.
	What we do know was when his dad was military, stationed over in Germany, and D'Angelo and his younger sister, Connie, were walking, and two soldiers abduct them.
	And D'Angelo watches these two soldiers rape his sister.
	And he's 10 years old at the time.
	Obviously, a very traumatic event for a 10-year-old boy to see.
	But in terms of the family dynamics, I have not been updated to see if there's been anything that has been discovered.
	Yeah, that would explain.
	And Bonnie's, you know, Bonnie's dating D'Angelo.
	She's younger.
	She, I think, was 19 and he's, you know, in his 20s, but she knew, you know, his mom.
	And I think at this time, it's his stepdad.
Trauma And Self Medication 00:04:10
	And she said, I didn't see anything that was really alarming.
	You know, his mom was one of the sweetest persons that she had ever met.
	And so it wasn't like that prototypical, you know, the, you know, the overbearing mother and the, you know, drunk alcoholic abusive father.
	Bonnie didn't see that at this point in D'Angelo's life.
	Okay, so let's go forward to the end.
	I should spend one minute on Michelle McNamara.
	So people may remember this piece of the story.
	She was married to Patton Oswald and she died suddenly.
	And he came out and talked about her and her work.
	And I think that that got a lot of our attention.
	Like, what's he talking about?
	this famous guy, his wife suddenly died, and he was talking about her work on this case.
	And you came to know her very well and had spent a lot of hours working with her.
	She was a writer.
	I mean, she wasn't a cop on this case.
	And I thought what you said about, you know, she died of a drug overdose.
	It looks like, you know, potentially even an inadvertent drug overdose, right?
	Just taking a bunch of self-medicating, I should say.
	And yeah.
	Yeah.
	Well, I'll let you speak to it.
	But I know you said you have to understand what's going on in her life to get the full picture of her death.
	Right.
	And that, you know, with Michelle, you know, she initially, she was a true crime blogger.
	You know, she loved to write.
	She was blogging about cases.
	She found out about this unsolved case and eventually wrote an article for Los Angeles Magazine.
	And in the lead up for that article, she reached out to the task force and, you know, interviewed each of us.
	And Michelle and I, you know, initially I just treated her as, you know, just another journalist.
	And I was very kind of standoffish, the Joe Friday type.
	But then as time went on, you know, I recognized she's very bright.
	She knew the facts of the case.
	And I really enjoyed, you know, at that time, our phone conversations and eventually divulge what I was doing investigatively to her, but off the record and was so scared about when her Los Angeles magazine article came out, you know, did she burn me in terms of what I told her that she didn't.
	And she earned my trust.
	And then we just developed a closer working relationship and a closer relationship where when she's contracted to write a book about the case, she asked me if I thought that was a good idea.
	And she reached out to some of the other investigators.
	But then she came up and we drove around and I drove her to crime scenes and we spent all this time together in a car chatting about the case, but chatting about our personal lives.
	And that's when we really, really bonded.
	And then at that point, I was wide open with her on what I'm doing.
	She was, instead of just writing a book, she now kind of got sucked into the rabbit hole and was starting to do the investigations.
	And this is where, you know, this case, it's such a roller coaster ride of emotions because, you know, you work so hard to develop a suspect and you get excited, you get high that I've got this case, I've got this guy, only to have DNA show that it's not the right guy.
	And Michelle started to experience that roller coaster ride, you know, which is which is tough.
	But also she's talking to the victims, you know, victim family members.
	She's recognizing the trauma.
	She's thinking about these cases and had access to case files.
	So she knew exactly what this guy was doing, you know, and so now she's experiencing the trauma, you know, that law enforcement experiences when they're working these types of cases.
	And this is where I think, and I didn't know this, but it appears, you know, now she's, you know, self-medicating.
	And unfortunately, it caught her.
	And one of the drugs in her system was fentanyl, unfortunately.
Solving The Case With DNA 00:11:49
	Deemed an accidental overdose from a lethal mix of Adderall, Xanax, and fentanyl.
	No one was aware that she was self-medicating.
	But I know you write in the book.
	Few people know the pressures of the woeful world of homicide.
	It's a dreadful place and not one to be entered lightly.
	No one leaves unscathed, not even the hardened professionals.
	Michelle was a wife and a mom by day and living among psychopaths and their victims in the dark of night.
	That's chilling.
	It says so much, so much, Paul.
	Well, and, you know, one of the last communications I had with Michelle is an email she sent me, and she is taking her young daughter to a Girl Scout camp just north of Santa Barbara.
	And she emailed me, you know, letting me know, hey, I'm going to be off the grid, so to speak, for a few days.
	But she goes, it's so surreal to be with my daughter in the car.
	driving past the same exits that the Golden State Killer would have taken for his attacks in Santa Barbara.
	And I could only envision Michelle with her cute little girl looking at these exits and starting to visualize the attacks, you know, and you don't want to be with your little girl and thinking about what happened to those victims, you know, and this is part of those interconnections, you know, that you make where now your family life is crossing over with your professional life.
	And it is tough, you know, and there's, you have to, you cope with it, however you cope with it.
	And, you know, for me, I have my own coping mechanisms and Michelle had hers.
	Yeah, like, how do you go out after a day?
	And I've spared the audience the most gruesome details of his crimes because they truly are dark marks on your soul once you've read them.
	And I'm sure once you've read them at your level.
	How do you go out and have a dinner with your family?
	How do you watch a sitcom and manage a laugh?
	Well, that, you know, like that's where you detach.
	That's where I detached.
	You know, because for me, when I was working, you know, I'm always thinking about the case.
	But you mentioned the, you know, enjoying a sitcom.
	You know, to this day, I can't get myself to read a book or sit down and watch a movie right now.
	It's where I have just completely turned away from trying to pursue things that are just entertaining.
	And that's where I have to get myself back, you know, to where I can start enjoying just the normal activities in life.
	And it is hard.
	You know, that's for people.
	It's not everybody that gets into this field, but for people who really care about the cases, care about the victims, those are the people that are the most strongly affected.
	Because every minute of the day that you're not working on the case, you could be working on the case and working on the case is hugely important.
	That's just it.
	You know, and I've been called on that before, you know, hey, you're no longer at work.
	Well, you know, if your daughter was just killed or sexually assaulted and now the investigator is punching out at five o'clock and going home, I think you'd be a little upset.
	You're expecting this public servant, the investigator, to do everything possible as fast as possible to find out who did this.
	And that's the hard part.
	That's the balance of working this type of work is I've got a family.
	I've got a personal life, but I've also got this commitment.
	And that commitment, when you really get attached to cases, like for me with Golden State Killer and other cases, you know, that commitment ends up becoming overriding of everything else.
	When he stopped with the, with the spree, the murder spree in 86, you were in your late teens.
	You were not a cop working this case.
	That would come later.
	That would come later where you picked up a cold case file.
	And the next thing you knew, quarter century had passed and you had devoted the vast majority of your life to this thing.
	That's right.
	In fact, 1986, I was a senior in high school.
	Yeah.
	So you should get, you got to read the book, which you can see the picture of behind Paul now, Unmasked, to find out like his early thoughts on DNA from these crime scenes and how could they be helpful?
	And like, let's get a, let's get him in the system just in case this guy gets arrested.
	So there'll be a hit and stuff.
	Like you'd been working all of that from the moment you got involved in this as a law enforcement officer.
	But let's jump forward to, you know, close to the end when you had a different idea and then you started studying it nonstop, of course, because you're you, about genealogy and what it's not working.
	We're not getting a hit on this guy just by having the DNA in the system.
	What's another way we can use the DNA to advance the case?
	Right.
	You know, I go back a little bit even further with genealogy.
	I started pursuing a type of genealogy in 2012, thinking this possibly could solve the case.
	And after five years, it hadn't.
	And I was frustrated.
	Then just out of a sheer coincidence, I had another case with an unidentified little girl.
	She was alive, but we didn't know who she was.
	We're sure she had been abducted from somewhere.
	And I went into a conference call with a detective out of San Bernardino down south, and he had identified her.
	And I was like, how did you do that?
	And he had gone to a website called DNAadoption.com and worked with a genealogist that was doing a completely different type of genealogy process with DNA than what I had been doing the last five years.
	So now I reach out to that genealogist, Barbara Ray Venter, and I ask, hey, with what you're doing to identify that little girl, would it work to identify an unknown offender?
	And she was like, no, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't.
	And I sent her what I had, but she didn't know what case it was.
	But then she stopped communicating.
	So I was left to my own devices to try to figure out, well, how is this process working?
	And that's when myself and then I had a partner on this, Steve Kramer from the FBI, were doing a deep dive.
	And since I had the DNA background and I'm literally watching YouTube videos and reading website information, I'm going, oh my God, this is powerful.
	And I go, I got excited.
	This is how this case can be solved.
	And that's what we pursued.
	And then we just had to get DNA.
	And I had to get DNA from an agency down south with a homicide case where they still had their evidence.
	And then ultimately, Ventura DA's office stepped up and gave us a sample of the Golden State Killer's DNA so we could do this genealogy process.
	Okay, so now you've got it.
	And you'd been working with it for a while.
	You'd been earlier on, and again, people should read the book, but looking at the rape kits that had been taken from his victims that were no longer prosecutable.
	So it was okay to, you know, test them and deal with them, but respectful of the DNA samples and all that.
	You'd been thinking about the DNA for quite some time.
	So now you're at the point where they give you a sample.
	You know, this is the killer's DNA.
	And what year is this, 2017 or 18?
	We are right at the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018 when we get our first DNA results.
	Okay.
	So what do you do with that DNA?
	You like, what's done to it that's different than what was normally done to it?
	So forensic DNA testing used by law enforcement uses a DNA tool that looks at discrete areas on the DNA that's known as short-tandem repeats.
	It's just right now they're looking at 21 different markers that are going up into the FBI's DNA database, which is called CODIS.
	The genealogy process is the process that your major genealogy websites do in the background, like Ancestry and 23andMe, where you send your saliva sample in.
	And instead of just looking at 21 markers, they're looking at hundreds of thousands of points across the entire genome.
	And then once that type of profile, which is now called a SNP profile, is put up into a database and searched against others, it's able to look for other people that kind of cross over and share DNA fragments with you.
	And the more DNA they share with you, the more closely related they are.
	And the opposite is true.
	The less DNA they share with you, the further related they are.
	And you can get a sense on how close or how distantly related by how much DNA is shared.
	So you can tell, well, this is likely a first cousin.
	This is pretty close to me.
	Or this is a fourth cousin.
	This is very distantly related.
	So now with that type of information and a list of potential relatives, it's a matter of just doing traditional genealogy, building family trees back in time until you find where these potential relatives intersect.
	They're descendants of a common ancestor.
	And it required them, it required some of the Golden State Killer's relatives to have gone through the 23andMe or ancestry.com process.
	Or other websites, yes.
	So these are, you know, with D'Angelo, our initial searches, the closest relatives were third cousins.
	So they're related at the great, great grandparent level.
	And for somebody of his generation, these were individuals.
	The common ancestor were individuals born in the 1840s.
	Oh boy, that's not that helpful.
	So then what?
	Well, now it's you get this common ancestor.
	It's like, okay, the golden state killer is a descendant from this great-great-grandparents.
	So you have to identify everybody that, you know, are offspring of these, this common ancestor.
	And again, it's just genealogy.
	But part of the complexity is people in the 1840s would have 15 kids.
	Some would, you know, die at birth.
	Some wouldn't make it to, you know, where they're actually having children themselves.
	So this tree, as we're building, identifying all the descendants becomes huge.
	But we know something about the Golden State killer.
	He is a man born between the years 1940 and 1960 by best estimates.
	We knew his physical size and we knew his geographic footprint, you know, from Sacramento down to Southern California.
	So as we're building these trees, we're now identifying men who had a California connection.
Building The Family Tree 00:15:33
	And then it's just investigation 101.
	Could this person, you know, match up circumstantially with the person we're looking for?
	And that's where we get into just a small handful of individuals that required a little bit further investigative work.
	And after eliminating each of these other individuals who to this day have no idea they were being eyeballed, that's when I turned to D'Angelo.
	He was sort of the last one on the list.
	And what was that like for you before the arrest, before all that, when you got this one last name, as you say, you start to check boxes and it's like, Bonnie, law enforcement, like you start checking the boxes.
	What was that feeling like?
	Well, I also had the pressure.
	I was retiring in the week.
	So am I going to get this figured out before I retire?
	And I had been there before.
	I had multiple suspects.
	I had other men that had Bonnies in their past that were eliminated with DNA that were also rapists who had geographic connections to some of the areas.
	So some of this circumstantial stuff that I'm using to evaluate D'Angelo, well, I had other suspects who had been eliminated that also had that circumstantial stuff.
	So you kind of become, I was a little bit numb to that.
	It was just like, okay, there's enough here that requires me to be much more involved than just sitting behind a computer.
	And that's when I start reaching out and driving up to Sacramento and taking a look at the locations where D'Angelo is at, researching, going into the Sacramento reporter's office and looking for deeds on where he's purchased houses or what properties he's owned.
	And then ultimately reaching out to the Auburn police chief who fired him.
	And once I kind of gathered all that, I was like, oh, this guy now is very interesting circumstantially.
	We got onto him because of DNA.
	And he's now what I would classify as a prime suspect, where it's now we should get DNA from him.
	And my bud, Steve Kramer, was in full agreement.
	But now I am, I'm retiring in two days.
	And so on Monday, no, I couldn't.
	I couldn't.
	I made the decision six months prior and it had to do with personal financial deadline.
	Can't you just say, I'm just going to do four more.
	I'm like, I'm seeing this case through to the end.
	What does it even matter?
	Even if you retire, can you no longer work on it?
	Well, from a retirement standpoint, just the way the pension system works, they really encourage you to retire at age 50, you know, from a sheer financial purpose.
	But I had made the decision.
	I had already been out to Colorado with my wife shopping for homes, you know, and we had a schedule to go out.
	My kids were going to be transferring schools.
	And so everything in my personal life really was like, this is the time I need to retire, even though we were so close on Golden State Killer.
	But weren't you allowed to continue working on it even post-retire?
	Like what would change from Friday of goodbye to the Monday of I no longer work here?
	Yeah, I wouldn't have peace officer privileges in terms of the accessing criminal databases, going out and being able to identify myself as a sworn investigator if I'm talking to people.
	So I'm a civilian once I retire.
	There's no like, you know, day pass copper a day.
	Well, the way it worked out, though, is that once I did retire, the genealogy team that I was working with, which was a group of six of us, they kept me on board.
	They kept communicating with me as if I was still active.
	Of course, you're the expert on the case.
	They needed your expertise.
	They needed you as much as you wanted to be with them.
	And I, yeah, I brought something to the table on the case.
	And then ultimately, you know, when D'Angelo is arrested, I helped author the arrest warrant and provided information for the search warrant up at SAC Homicide.
	And again, I was so appreciative that that Sacramento Sheriff's Office kept me involved in the case.
	So I hear the grateful ones.
	They're the grateful ones.
	All right.
	Wait, back up, though, because we got to get to arrest.
	So now something big needs to happen.
	You got your prime suspect, but you don't have his DNA.
	I mean, you may, you may have an old sample of it, but you need a present-day sample from this man you've identified as D'Angelo.
	And tell us what happened there because there were two passes at it.
	So, yeah, so I had driven up to his house and seen his car in the driveway, knew he was living there.
	And that was literally the last thing I did and debated if I should get a DNA sample, just knock on his door and say, hey, Joe, this is Paul Holtz and blah, blah, blah.
	You know, can I get a DNA sample and eliminate him?
	But I decided there was too much on him and drove away.
	I then retired the next day.
	But then once I'm retired, we get him under surveillance.
	And so Sacramento, Homicide, and FBI start surveilling him.
	And at a certain point, he drives to a hobby lobby.
	And he actually had a hobby of building these remote-controlled airplanes out of wood.
	So he's going there, hobby lobby, as he's building another plane.
	And while he's at the hobby lobby, an undercover agent swabs his car door handle.
	And that's submitted to the Sacramento lab.
	I happen to be in Colorado Springs buying a house during this time.
	And I'm getting updated on how the surveillance is going.
	And I'm at P.F. Changs with my wife celebrating putting an offer on a house.
	And Lieutenant Kirk Campbell from SACDA's office is calling me.
	I figured it's another update on the case.
	I excuse myself.
	I go stand outside.
	It's snowing.
	And instead of the typical salutation, hey, Paul, how's it going?
	It's Paul, you can't tell anybody this.
	I was like, oh, this is here's something.
	And Kirk tells me, hey, I don't know exactly what it means, but we got that car door handle, the DNA results back.
	And the lab's really excited.
	There's a lot of markers that are matching up with the Golden State Hiller.
	And Kirk's not a DNA guy.
	And I said, okay, Kirk, how many markers?
	And he said, well, they got 21 markers.
	I said, Kirk, it's him.
	So now we finish up that conversation.
	I go back into the restaurant and I'm now, you know, kind of in this weird state.
	I've been on this case for 24 years.
	I now know D'Angelo is a golden state killer.
	And so I'm in this numb space emotionally.
	I sit back down.
	My wife is super excited because her fortune cookie is saying, you know, you're going to find your dream home.
	And we had just put, you know, an offer down on the house, the house that I'm sitting in right now, in fact.
	And she just happened to say, so what did Kirk want?
	And I didn't know what to say because I was like, I'm not going to just say, you know, hey, it's him because I don't want her blowing up in the middle of the restaurant, right?
	And she is a DNA analyst.
	And so I just kind of look at her and she, I don't do anything.
	And she looks at me and she says, well, are the DNA results back?
	And I just do a single nod.
	And she was like, well, and I didn't do anything.
	I'm just staring at her.
	And she goes, no.
	Oh, my God.
	And all I did is another sequel dot.
	And then she's like practically pushing me out of the restaurant to get into our rental vehicle so she can hear what exactly is going on.
	And then as I'm letting her know, and she's super excited, that's when Steve Kramer calls me because now he knows.
	And then it's game on because now it's no longer surveillance.
	It's an arrest has to be affected.
	Interviews need to occur.
	And it's a lot of work.
	So that's where I end up flying back to California.
	Wait.
	What did your fortune cookie say?
	I couldn't tell you.
	Oh, we got it.
	It was one of those things where, you know, I was so, because my wife was excited, open up your fortune cookie.
	And I was just so focused on Golden State Killer, I did it.
	And I just kind of dropped it on the plate.
	And then that's when she starts asking what Kirk wanted, right?
	You know, you make your own fortune, make your own fortune.
	And by the way, my wife's a huge fan of yours.
	She listens to your stuff all the time.
	Oh, tell her I sent my regards and I'm already a huge fan of hers.
	I can feel her excitement in this moment.
	I wouldn't have known whether to leave or to order like a double martini.
	You know, it's like, what do I do?
	I'm not sure.
	I'm technically retired, but yeah, I think I need to go back.
	So, but there was, they did a second pass at it, right?
	They did, they decided the DA, who I also interviewed, who was in, who was running this, the woman, forgive me, I forget her name right now.
	Amory that she was like, let's be really sure, right?
	And that's when there was a dumpster dive, right?
	Somebody took his garbage.
	You guys took his garbage.
	Right.
	No, and in part, you know, the car door handle, of course, multiple people, you know, touch a car door.
	And so even though everything, the 21 markers, you know, were shared with Golden State Killer, there was a second person in that sample, DNA.
	And so that's where Anne-Marie, her office were like, no, we want a better sample.
	So now trash day is, I believe it was Tuesday or Monday, but Sacramento has a very clever way to collect trash without it being noticed.
	And I'm not going to divulge the process because they like to use that on a regular basis.
	But they were able to get his trash collected.
	And they, you know, Ken Clark, the homicide sergeant from Sacramento and Lieutenant Paul Bellai, you know, I've heard the story is as they're filtering through the trash that was collected from D'Angelo.
	They're selecting items that look like the most promising to have his DNA on him.
	And they got 11 items.
	And then the last item that they looked at said, oh, there's a piece of tissue over there.
	We might as well grab it.
	What would it hurt?
	Well, that turned out to be the actual evidence item that came back with D'Angelo's single source DNA profile and it 100% matched the Golden State Killer.
	Wow.
	You had your man.
	That was it.
	I think in your book, I'm trying to remember, there was a line something like that.
	The face of evil had been identified after all these years.
	You knew who it was who'd been taking up your life, your life's work.
	And you were going to be able to provide that to the victims who had survived his attacks, whose lives he had all but ruined in so many cases and so many lives he had taken.
	What a huge, huge moment for law enforcement, for you, everyone involved.
	And I just, I can't even imagine the flow of emotions when you actually got to see him in cuffs and be at the at the DA's office at night.
	Yeah.
	And again, it was such a surreal moment because now this masked man that I've been chasing for 24 years, there he is unmasked.
	And such a weird place to be.
	I can't even describe the emotion because in part, you know, I still had a lot of work that needed to be done that night as well as the following day.
	But at the same time, there was a sense of accomplishment.
	And it was like, okay, you know, this is a big deal.
	And personally, I am very gratified that I had a role in getting the Golden State killer here in handcuffs, sitting in an interview room.
	Crazy.
	So what did he say when the cops went up to him?
	I know they decided we got to go now.
	And they got him on his side lawn.
	What happened?
	Did he say anything?
	What was he like?
	Well, they ended up using a specialized team because he was such a threat.
	If you think about who this man is, D'Angelo, he's a law enforcement officer.
	He's a serial killer.
	He has shot at a cop in his past down in Bisalia.
	He had more guns registered to him over the years than what the California firearms database could print out at once.
	Oh, wow.
	And, you know, we were so concerned that he would fight.
	He would be armed.
	He would take his daughter hostage, grandkids hostage.
	So, you know, the hope was that he would be arrested away from his house.
	And they were going to do a very covert type of arrest, but that didn't play out.
	And so they had to arrest him in front of his house.
	But fortunately, he moved himself over to the side yard where he was isolated from doors and stuff.
	And then they approached him.
	And there was some interactions.
	And those interactions are part of the sheriff's specialized arrest team that I'm not going to divulge.
	But he was quickly taken into custody by multiple individuals.
	Each individual had to control a limb.
	And he's handcuffed and placed in the back of a van.
	And then that's when he makes that famous statement.
	I've got a roast in the oven.
	Yeah, crazy.
	So he winds up, obviously, being charged and he pleads guilty.
	I mean, there was no way around it.
	They're really realistically to talk about having him dead to rights.
	There was just no way around it.
	He had to plead guilty if he wanted to spare himself the death penalty.
	Yes, he had to plead guilty.
	But the notable aspect about his plea deal is he had to admit to everything.
	So he, over the course of the series, you know, some of the cases in Northern California that were not homicides, he could not be prosecuted for because there were past statute limitations.
Pleading Guilty To Everything 00:09:42
	And we wanted all of those victims to have that sense that their case was just as important as the other cases that he could be prosecuted for.
	So he pled guilty to everything that he was charged with.
	But then he also admitted to all those other cases that he wasn't charged with.
	So it was a very interesting process that occurred.
	So he did, right?
	I mean, he did list the crimes.
	Do we believe he listed all the crimes for which he was responsible?
	You know, he didn't list the crimes.
	The crimes were, these are the crimes.
	And then him and his attorneys basically had him plead guilty or admit to them in a court of law.
	Now, if he has other crimes out there and they're crimes that he could be prosecuted for, if there's other homicides out there, he would be stupid to have not thrown those out on the table during that plea deal because now he can still be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, including the death penalty on those cases.
	So the court held a hearing, of course, and did allow victim testimony, which is so important.
	It's such an important piece of this.
	And one of those to testify, we have a short soundbite, was a woman named Mary Burwart, who was only 13 years old when she was attacked by the Golden State killer.
	Here's that soundbite in part number three.
	On June 25th, 1979, at 4 a.m., Joseph James D'Angelo forced his way into my home, into my life, into my room.
	A child's room.
	Personally decorated with hand-painted hearts and rainbows.
	Quotes about love and kindness.
	He raped me.
	He stole my innocence, my security, threatened my life, threatened the lives of my family.
	I was 13 years old.
	No 13-year-old should have to find out what a rape kit is.
	And then it turned out I'd been ovulating.
	So steps were taken to prevent a pregnancy.
	Oh my God.
	Talk about putting a real face on just a list of victims.
	You know, that brings it home.
	Not that the judge was ever going to go light on this guy, but it's somewhat cathartic.
	I've talked to enough victims to know it's somewhat cathartic to just have your say.
	Yeah, Mary, you know, I had reached out to her about 10 years prior, and we chatted briefly on the phone, but she didn't want to come in and have a face-to-face talk.
	It was just too much for her to do at that point in her life.
	But I always had her number in my cell phone.
	And so after the press conference where we announced D'Angelo was arrested, I'm driving to lunch to meet the genealogy team.
	And Mary calls me and I answer.
	Hi, Mary.
	And she asks, and it was such a meek voice on the phone, is it him?
	Is it really him?
	And I told her, yes, it's him and he will never get out.
	And she starts to sob.
	And after sobbing for five seconds, 10 seconds, she's just going, I'm sorry.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm not upset.
	I am so, so happy.
	And here, after 30-some odd years, this 13-year-old girl, now as an adult woman, you know, those 30 years of trauma were pouring out.
	And, you know, to see her be so strong and confronting him was amazing.
	Oh, my gosh, Paul.
	And the relief she must have felt to know this, he cannot hurt anyone ever again.
	He can put no other children, women, men through this.
	He did speak.
	He did speak two days later, August 21st, 2020.
	As you point out, he hasn't said much, but we have a little bit of what he did say in Soundpike 4.
	I've listened to all your statements.
	Each one of them.
	And I'm truly sorry to every one of her.
	Thank you.
	What do we make of that?
	Well, a little bit of backstory from those victim impact statements is not once did he look at his victims as they were talking to him.
	And some of them called him out saying, you're such a coward.
	Now, we talked earlier about D'Angelo and how vindictive he is.
	And he, all along, during the course of, you know, all his court appearance, he's been playing this frail old man.
	We know he's not.
	So here he is being called a coward.
	And so he took that moment.
	He easily could have just leaned forward from his wheelchair and talked in the microphone and said, sorry, in a wimpy little voice.
	But he chose to stand up, turn and face the part of the audience where those victims were sitting.
	This is him basically saying, I'm not a coward.
	And I think his apologies are hollow.
	He took that moment to psychologically instill fear into these victims once again.
	Because I will tell you, when he stood up, even though he's lost a lot of weight, his physical presence resonated throughout that space, that conference room we were in.
	I'm sure.
	So this was him basically, I won't say it on your show, but sort of an F you to the victims.
	Yeah.
	And someone like that, I do believe in one's aura, you know, whatever it is, energy, spiritual, who knows, but they have an evil aura.
	When you're in the presence of evil, oftentimes you actually do know.
	You can feel it.
	And looking at him and knowing what he had done, I'm sure they felt it that day.
	So it is scary.
	I mean, it's, it is hellacious.
	Yeah.
	It's like the devil incarnate right there.
	Nope.
	So he's in prison for the rest of his life.
	That's, that's that.
	He hasn't written a book.
	He hasn't done a big interview.
	Do you think we'll ever know more?
	He has been contacted, of course, by numerous individuals, outlets, you know, to come in and talk to him.
	And he's refused every single request.
	There is hope that maybe he will talk to select individuals from the investigation under certain circumstances.
	And that's something that we're talking about, Anne Marie Schubert, myself, as time goes on.
	And I hope we get that opportunity because, you know, there is knowledge to be gained by law enforcement and by the community with what he knows about reasons for his attack and how he committed these attacks.
	But I don't know when that's going to occur, if it's going to occur.
	And, you know, he's not getting any younger.
	And quite frankly, he's probably the number one target in the nation in the prison system for other inmates.
	So I just hope the prison system does keep him safe, even though that seems contradictory, you know, from considering the horror of the crimes that he committed.
	But I really do want to have a chance to talk to him, or I hope somebody gets a chance to talk to him eventually.
	Is he in solitary?
	He's in down in ADSEG, administrative segregation down in Cocoran.
	And they have what I've been told by a CDC authority is that that's the best location for him.
	They have the most robust ad seg component of any of the prisons in California.
	I mean, based on the history you've just told me, I feel like the best way to get him to sit might be to say he's not man enough to do it.
	Well, that's, you know, we've talked a variety of strategies on what would make him most willing to talk.
	And that conversation is ongoing.
	What about you now?
	You got your man.
Pursuing New Opportunities 00:02:23
	You got your house in Colorado.
	You got your retirement, your pension.
	Now what?
	Well, my retirement hasn't gone the way I thought it was going to go.
	So, you know, I obviously have gotten very involved on the media side of things, both TV as well as podcasting.
	And I'm pursuing those opportunities.
	And I really, in many ways, they keep me involved because I focus in on projects where I can help out on the case.
	I can help law enforcement, you know, consult, not just tell a story.
	You know, that's going to be my goal moving forward is to continue to take on projects where, you know, let's see if we can get other family members answers as to what happened.
	I don't see you just doing golf and fishing and skiing, but it would be nice given the way you've lived if you could get a bit more of that into your day.
	Well, out here in Colorado, you know, I've taken up mountain biking.
	I've got a Jeep where I can go out into the backcountry and what I call my dandelion breaks where I just kind of get away.
	But I've been so pulled in so many directions that, you know, those instances of that type of activity are few and far between.
	Paul, what a pleasure.
	Thank you so much for being here and for telling us the story.
	Well, thank you very much for having me.
	And don't forget, I want our audience to go buy your book, support you in your retirement.
	You've earned it.
	The book is called Unmasked, and it is absolutely riveting.
	My team read it and I'm in the process of reading it and you will not be sorry that you picked this one up.
	Thanks again.
	What an incredible journey and a testament to Paul and all the others who worked so tirelessly on this case.
	Thanks to all of you for listening.
	We're going to be back with you again soon.
	Just a little vacay for yours truly.
	And until then, you can find all of our shows at youtube.com slash Megan Kelly, or you can download the podcast on Apple Spotify Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts for free.
	I'll continue to read your comments on Apple.
	So let me know your thoughts.
	All the best.
	Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no

Chapters

00:00:00 The Impeccable Landscaping
00:03:52 Evolving Into A Killer
00:14:19 Is He Still Alive
00:29:54 Layers To Hide His Face
00:45:06 The Psychology Of D'Angelo
01:00:43 A Daughter's Terrifying Warning
01:07:19 Slipping Back Into Darkness
01:15:46 Living Out A Sadistic Fantasy
01:21:37 Trauma And Self Medication
01:25:47 Solving The Case With DNA
01:37:37 Building The Family Tree
01:53:11 Pleading Guilty To Everything
02:02:54 Pursuing New Opportunities