LOS ANGELES _ The suspect in the Golden State Killer case will face 13 charges of kidnapping to commit robbery, in addition to numerous murder counts, and will be tried in Sacramento County, prosecutors announced Tuesday.
At a news conference in Santa Ana, Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, along with prosecutors from Contra Costa, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Tulare and Ventura counties, announced the new charges and trial venue.
Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. faces 13 counts of murder in connection with a string of horrific crimes spanning the state in the 1970s and 1980s linked to a suspect dubbed the Golden State Killer. Prior to the slayings, the suspect was believed to have operated as the East Area Rapist, who raped dozens of women, including some in Contra Costa County.
The new kidnapping charges are related to those Contra Costa County attacks.
A week ago, prosecutors in Tulare County charged DeAngelo, 72, with the murder of Claude Snelling in his Visalia backyard in 1975. Snelling's daughter, Elizabeth Hupp, told police that she was sleeping when a man in a ski mask entered her bedroom and forced her to move in silence to the backyard. Her father saw his daughter from the kitchen window and rushed out the back door to come to her aid. The attacker pushed the teenager to the ground, kicked her in the head, and shot her father twice before running off alone.
Snelling, 45, a journalism professor and public information officer at the College of the Sequoias, died on the way to the hospital.
The murder was immediately linked to a prolific series of burglaries in Visalia in which a prowler over two years broke into 102 homes, ransacked dressers for women's underwear, and stole coin banks, random pieces of jewelry and a gun later linked to Snelling's killing.
DeAngelo at the time was a police officer in a nearby small town, Exeter, where his mother, sister and brother also lived.
He left Exeter at roughly the same time the Visalia ransackings stopped to join the police force in Auburn, a small town north of Sacramento. Concurrently, a serial rapist began to operate in Sacramento's eastern suburbs, attacking some 34 women and killing a young couple who evidently surprised the prowler while they were on an evening stroll.
The so-called East Area Rapist then moved south and west, attacking couples in their homes in Modesto, Stockton, Davis and in the San Francisco Bay communities of Danville and Fremont. Visalia detectives said it was the work of a single attacker, but detectives in other jurisdictions disagreed.
After DeAngelo was fired from the Auburn Police Department in 1979 for shoplifting a hammer and dog repellent from a store, the rapes stopped, but a serial killer began attacking women and couples in Southern California. He assaulted and killed 10 people in Orange, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties by bludgeoning or shooting them. The last victim, an 18-year-old, was raped and killed in 1986 at her home in Irvine.
Police departments for decades disagreed over whether attacks spanning the state over more than a decade were committed by a single man. Finally, in 2000, DNA evidence linked most of the murders. The following year, DNA unearthed in three rape kits confirmed they were also the work of the East Area Rapist.
But it wasn't until earlier this year that cold case detectives uploaded the killer's DNA profile to a public genealogy site to identify the likely family line of the killer, and from there, narrowed their hunt to DeAngelo.
He was arrested in late April and charged with 12 murders. The retired truck mechanic was living in the same north suburban Sacramento home he had bought in 1979.
A search warrant accompanying his arrest showed police had sifted through DeAngelo's trash to find a tissue with DNA that matched that of the serial killer. They had little other evidence to go on beside geographic coincidence between DeAngelo's movements and those of the killer. No DNA was left behind in the Snelling shooting, but the bullets that killed him matched those from a gun stolen by the Visalia Ransacker from another home.
DeAngelo is represented by a Sacramento County public defender. He has not yet entered a plea in the murder charges.
DeAngelo's arraignment on the Tulare County charges is not set. He remains in custody in Sacramento County jail, pending charges now in five counties. Prosecutors in those counties have met several times to discuss where and when to bring the case to trial but have not yet reached a decision.
