Survivors and their loved ones lay in a California courtroom Tuesday to confront Joseph DeAngelo, the so-called Golden State Killer and East Area Rapist, who pleaded guilty in June to 13 counts of rape, kidnapping, murder and terrorizing people over the whole of several decades.
DeAngelo, a former police officer who took four decades in prison, has openly admitted guilt for a number of other crimes, some of which are beyond the statute of limitations and could not be tried in court.
Suspicions of victims are expected to go through Thursday and DeAngelo, 74, will be convicted Friday. He is serving a life sentence in prison without the possibility of prosecution, after entering into a plea deal in June that would save him the death penalty.
On Tuesday, victims described lasting hours of torture while being tied up, tied up, gagged, beaten and raped during attacks dating back to 1975. They called DeAngelo a ‘sick monster’ and a ‘horrible man’ who killed several people. robbed her of her childhood and permanently scarred, both emotionally and physically, countless others.
One woman detailed how she was further stigmatized by the rampant sexism of the 1970s when “women were treated more like suspects than victims when it came to rape.”
DeAngelo sat quietly next to his lawyers with an orange jumpsuit and a mask. Defense attorneys did not respond to requests for comment and did not respond to a statement from prosecutors.
Rape survivor Patricia Murphy’s daughter gave DeAngelo an obscene gesture and cursed him when she told how her mother’s attack changed forever and, eventually, tore the family apart.
“He and his knife had complete control over me for the next two hours,” Patricia Murphy said in a statement read in court by her daughter, Patti Cosper. “He really is an evil monster without a soul.”
Murphy was 29 years old and was going through a divorce from her husband when she was brutally assaulted on September 4, 1976. Earlier in the day, she had been doing laundry at her parents’ house in Sacramento. She was loading her car with the clothes neatly stacked when DeAngelo suddenly came up behind her.
“That night changed me forever,” she said in the statement.
Over the course of several hours, Murphy’s attacker broke her nose, gave her a listening game, raped her and drank her father’s beer before he left. Murphy turned to alcohol and drugs to “blow it out and alleviate my pain.” Still suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, she had a mental breakdown after the arrest of DeAngelo 2018 and was admitted to hospital for several days.
“I pretended life was good, but it wasn’t,” she said. “It was exhausting. It was bad to find joy.”
In her own statement, the daughter of Murphy DeAngelo said “can go straight to hell.”
“I could not forgive,” she said. “I think maybe after Friday, I will.”
Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney Thien Ho said earlier that the extent of DeAngelo’s crime spread was “simply staggering, involving 13 known murders and nearly 50 rapes between 1975 and 1986.”
All told, DeAngelo admitted to killing 87 victims in 53 separate crimes that swept across 11 California provinces, prosecutors said.
Sixteen victims of Sacramento County’s DeAngelo rape were expected to speak Tuesday, with a similar number scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday.
Among them was Pete Schultze, who was 11 years old when he was tied so tightly to a bedpost that his hands turned blue, while DeAngelo performed “horrible acts” against his mother. He called DeAngelo a ‘sick monster’ with an ‘inadequate penis,’ a recurring theme of several of the victims.
Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman referred to Schultze’s mother as Jane Doe no. 22, who was raped in October 1976. But Schultze, speaking on behalf of his family, said his “mother is not Jane Doe.”
“We are the family of Wini Schultze and we have all survived because of her bravery and determination to do whatever it takes to save herself and her family,” he said.
According to prosecutors, DeAngelo’s crime game began in 1975 while he was working as a police officer in Exeter, a northern California community in the San Joaquin Valley near the fountain of the Sierra Nevada. Over the years, his crimes escalated from peeking through windows to stalking to rape and serious murder.
He was also a police officer in Auburn, but was fired in 1979 for shoplifting. DeAngelo continued to marry and raise his own family before being arrested in 2018 in Ventura County.
His attacks up and down California inspired the likes of the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist, the Original Night Stalker, and the Golden State Killer.
“His monikers reflect the sweeping geographical impact of his crime,” Ho said in June. “Every time he escaped, he slipped quietly into the night, leaving communities scared for years.”
For decades, the blood trail had gone cold, but using genetic genology, Sacramento authorities identified DeAngelo in 2018 as the person responsible for the heinous acts.
A recent HBO documentary, “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” details the gruesome attacks, the media rushing to discover a suspect and a 40-year-old manhunt for the Golden State Killer. It is based on crime writer Michelle McNamara’s book of the same name. McNamara, wife of cabaret artist Patton Oswalt, died in 2016, two years before the arrest of DeAngelo.
While the case has provided a lot of fodder for real criminals, victims said Tuesday that they remain haunted and traumatized by what happened to them.
In her statement, Phyllis Henneman said she was 22 years “young and carefree” when her life changed forever in June 1976. She was alone at home with her sister while her father was out of town when DeAngelo attacked.
“Joseph DeAngelo, henceforth called ‘the devil incarnate’, broke into my house, bound me, bound me, bound my life with a knife and raped me,” she said in a statement read by her sister, Karen Veilleux. “Life as I knew it changed that day unforgettably.”
Her sense of security was broken. Even the ringing of the phone scared Henneman, who worried that her attacker might call to tease her, as he once did in 1978. She said her health had suffered over the years and that she doubted her own sense of self-worth.
“The roles are reversed now,” she said.
With the arrest of DeAngelo and the forthcoming conviction, “his victims and their families are now free,” she said.
