For the first time, a former police officer pleaded guilty Monday to committing a series of rapes and murders in California in the 1970s and 1980s that were attributed to the elusive “Golden State Assassin.”
Wearing a transparent mask and orange suit, Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., 74, was taken to a makeshift courtroom on Monday, where he pleaded guilty to the first of 13 murders.
A plea agreement will allow DeAngelo any chance of the death penalty for 13 murders and 13 kidnapping-related charges throughout California. In partial exchange, the survivors of the assaults expect him to admit up to 62 rapes of which he could not be criminally charged because too much time has passed.
FILE: Joseph James DeAngelo, is prosecuted in the Sacramento County Superior Court in Sacramento, California.
(AP)
A guilty plea and life sentence prevents a trial or even the planned preliminary hearing of weeks. The victims hope to confront him at a later date, where he is expected to take several days to tell DeAngelo and Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman what they have suffered.
Initially, investigators linked certain crimes to a masked, armed rapist who broke into the suburban houses of the sleeping couples at night, tying up the man while raping the woman.
Decades passed before investigators reported a series of assaults in central and northern California with subsequent murders in southern California and were decided by the nickname Golden State Killer for the mysterious assailant whose crimes spanned from 1974 to the mid-1990s. 1986.
He was arrested in 2018 after authorities used DNA to track him through a popular genealogy website.
A prosecutor said Monday that DeAngelo Jr. made incriminating statements after his arrest, indicating that he was led by an internal force that he could not control.
OHIO POLICE SAY COLD CASE MURDER OF 8-YEAR-OLD GIRL SOLVED WITH DNA, GENETIC GENEALOGY
Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho said DeAngelo was alone in a police interrogation room in April 2018 when he started talking to himself.
“I did all of that,” said DeAngelo, according to Ho. “I didn’t have the strength to drive him out. He forced me. He went with me. It was like in my head, I mean, he’s part of me. I didn’t want to do those things. I pushed out and I had a happy life. I did all those things. I destroyed all of their lives. So now I have to pay the price. ”
Ho said the day had come for DeAngelo to pay that price.
“The scope of the Joseph DeAngelo crimes is just amazing,” Ho said of the spree, which included nearly 50 rapes. “Every time he escaped, he quietly escaped into the night.”
Joseph James DeAngelo, center, accused of being the Golden State Assassin, receives help from his attorney, Diane Howard, when Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman enters the courtroom in Sacramento, California on Monday 29 June 2020.
(AP)
DeAngelo had remained almost silent in court since his arrest in 2018 until he quietly and hoarsely uttered the word “guilty” of killing a community college teacher in 1975, the first murder in his decades of robbery, rape, and other crimes that were later dubbed the work of the Golden State Killer.
DeAngelo’s defense attorneys have since publicly lobbied for a deal that would save him the death penalty, although they did not respond to repeated requests for comment before Monday’s hearing.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Prosecutors who had applied for the death penalty cited the enormously complicated case and the advanced age of many of the victims and witnesses in agreeing to consider the plea agreement.
“Death doesn’t solve anything. But having to go through a trial or preliminary hearing would have helped,” said Carole, who said that neither she nor her murdered father believed in capital punishment.
Michael News Lundin and The Associated Press of Fox News contributed to this report..
