THE PEOPLE VS. THE GOLDEN STATE KILLER

A first-person account of the long quest to bring a serial rapist and murderer to justice.

As district attorney of Sacramento County, California, Ho spearheaded a complex prosecution against Joseph DeAngelo, dubbed the Golden State Killer for his 13 proven murders in the 1970s and ’80s. As Ho reveals, his quarry’s crimes took an unsettling trajectory. As a teenager, DeAngelo thrived on bullying and petty crimes. He graduated to animal abuse, killing a dog with fireworks, and then turned his attention to humans. At first it was burglary in the small city of Visalia, 120 break-ins in a single year, 11 in a single night. He graduated to kidnapping, rape, and murder—some of his crimes committed while serving as a police officer; he was so prolific that he would be pegged the “East Area Rapist.” In the late 1980s DeAngelo’s decades-long pattern of crime quieted in Northern California, though only because he moved on to other California locations. He was finally apprehended more than 30 years after the fact through DNA and other identification technologies along with sheer logic. There Ho’s difficulties multiplied. For one, there was the question of where DeAngelo would be tried, since his crimes crossed many jurisdictions; as Ho recounts, one source of aggravation in particular was Orange County, its prosecutors jockeying for position in an election year. (“It ain’t gonna fucking happen!” Ho responded.) There were evidentiary issues, since many police departments had discarded relevant crime-scene materials decades earlier. Finally, there were legal concerns, some of which, as Ho lays them out, were complex technicalities. But in the end, as Ho’s careful, well-written account chronicles, DeAngelo was brought to justice, with one rape survivor saying at trial, succinctly, “Some people are wired wrong, and DeAngelo is one of them.”

A disturbing real-world procedural about “the bogeyman who couldn’t be found—until we found him.”