The moment their victims have waited decades to experiment, when a man admits to terrorizing California as the Golden State Killer, will take place on Monday, when a 74-year-old former police officer enters not a courtroom but a university dance hall.
When Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. takes the stage at Cal State Sacramento, cameras will project his face onto the wall of the ballroom for all to see, closing the Golden State Killer case with more spectacle than court decorum.
The guilty plea hearing has a script that leaves no room for impromptu confessions. DeAngelo is expected to admit guilt for 13 murders, 13 counts of kidnapping for theft, the only crimes brought against him, as well as 62 other crimes of rape and kidnapping for which the statutes of limitations expired long ago.
The series of crimes lasted from at least 1973 to 1986 and involved attacks on some 106 children, men and women. Fifty women were raped. Thirteen people were killed.
Detectives did not have a last named suspect until 2018, when they used crime scene DNA and genealogy services to identify the killer’s cousin and, ultimately, DeAngelo.
All women who were raped should be called “Jane Doe,” a decision that was criticized before the hearing by some seeking to rid themselves of decades of social stigma for their attacks.
“I don’t want that,” said Kris Pedretti, who was 15 when she became the tenth victim of a serial predator operating in the Sacramento suburbs and then known as the East Area Violator. “I want to be seen as a real person who did this to and not as a Jane Doe.”
The Sacramento County District Attorney’s office told Pedretti that a decision had been made for her, she said, but admitted her request that she be allowed to stand during the hearing when her 1976 attack is mentioned.
Prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty, the main request made by DeAngelo’s public defenders. In exchange for his guilty plea, DeAngelo will likely be sentenced to prison for the rest of his life.
The public will also save years of criminal proceedings, which prosecutors estimated could have cost more than $ 20 million. There will be no need for testimony from dozens of rape victims, relatives of those killed and DeAngelo’s three daughters and ex-wife.
District attorneys from the eight counties prosecuting DeAngelo will also take the stage on Monday and read their indisputable view of events on the record.
Due to the space requirements of COVID-19, the proceeding was moved to the ballroom in Cal State Sacramento, the school from which DeAngelo received a criminal justice degree in 1972. The audience will be comprised almost entirely of victims and their families, with spaces granted by lottery for 27 members of the media.
Unlike mock court proceedings that are conducted in Sacramento school gyms, the ballroom will not be designed to resemble a courtroom.
The judge, the accused and the lawyers must be on stage, in front of an audience of almost 200 people and banks of television cameras. Large projection screens will amplify the faces of those on the podium, as in a political rally. The hearing will be broadcast live by the Sacramento County Superior Court, a national real crime entertainment network and multiple news programs.
“All that is missing are the lions,” said an anonymous judicial official.
Judicial experts said there is little that the courts can do to prevent such an uproar from forcing a balancing act between First Amendment rights to public access and Sixth Amendment rights to a fair trial.
“It’s the reality of today’s world,” said United States Chief District Judge Reggie B. Walton, who presided over the 2007 perjury trial of former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, covered by media around the world, and who most recently ruled on the censorship of the United States Department of Justice of Mueller’s highly politicized report.
“That is something that the courts have to adapt to and implement: processes that make the procedures accessible to all concerned, but at the same time, do not allow that accessibility to affect the obligation to be fair to both parties.” . Walton said.
“It is a challenge, but I don’t think it’s impossible.”
Essays like this fueled the public’s appetite for drama long before television programming existed.
“We saw OJ, both the Bronco manhunt and the trial, like it was on HBO,” said Benjamin Holden, a lawyer-turned-reporter who covered the 1995 Los Angeles double-homicide trial of former soccer star OJ Simpson. and now he teaches media laws. at the Illinois College of Media. “Not only will we be burdened with this entertainment affliction by raising its ugly head in the courtroom, we probably always have.”
From start to finish, the crimes that involved DeAngelo unfolded in public view.
The rapist in the eastern area drew so much media attention that it caused public panic, prompting citizen patrols, rewards, and a run on sales of weapons, door locks, and watchdogs. Midway through the series of rapes, detectives believe, the attacker began to feed on that public hysteria, and began to instruct victims to transmit death threats to police and future victims.
DeAngelo was fired from his police job in Auburn, California, in 1979, after he was discovered shoplifting. The murders that followed when he and his wife moved to Southern California, which again involved attacks on the bedroom and rapes, were initially unrelated. The unknown assailant received new local nicknames: Diamond Knot Slayer and Nightstalker, later switched to Original Nightstalker after another serial killer took that nickname.
Advances in forensic DNA changed the case dramatically. In 2001, detectives were able to link the attacks across the state.
The crime wave turned into media fodder again as a television series, then was picked up by a Los Angeles writer, Michelle McNamara, who branded the perpetrator as the Golden State Assassin and marketed a book about her attempts to chronicle , and perhaps solve, crimes.
A 2016 decision by unidentified investigators from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department to break the chain of custody and allow McNamara to take home 37 boxes of case files and two containers of evidence has now become fodder for the challenges Legal against the law enforcement agency. The defense attorney for a man serving life in prison for another DNA-resolved rape and murder cited the breach of evidence to support his own allegations of negligence and misconduct within the county criminal laboratory.
Defense attorney said McNamara’s investigative assistant told him that the case files were returned to Orange County after McNamara’s sudden death in April 2016, prior to the release of his book, which became a series of HBO. The first episode aired on Sunday, and the series will wrap up just before DeAngelo’s sentencing in August.
Victims have been told to prepare impact statements to be read aloud during proceedings that are expected to last a week before DeAngelo’s sentence is declared.
