Survivors of rapes committed by Joseph DeAngelo, the man now known as the “Golden State Killer”, made their voices heard in statements from victims in court Wednesday.
One survivor, who was raped at the age of 23 in 1978, immediately approached DeAngelo, telling him, “You will not defeat me, you will not break me.”
She said she has loved water skiing since she was 3 years old. But “the night you attacked me violently, you mentioned that I saw myself at the lake and that I looked good there. I will never have water separation again.”
“You have destroyed the life I had,” she told him.
But, she said, “I am free to leave this courtroom and lead the life I choose. You will spend the rest of your miserable life in a cage.”
‘Remember what I have to say’
“I want you to look at me, DeAngelo … I want you to remember what I have to say,” Jane Carson-Sandler said in court Wednesday as DeAngelo sat quietly in a white face mask.
In October 1976, Carson-Sandler was at home with her 3-year-old son when a knife broke into DeAngelo. DeAngelo bound her, bound her for blind and did her, and did the same to her son.
“Then you threaten to kill us several times,” Carson-Sandler said. “The fear escalated when your sheets and clothes started to tear. I had no idea what you were going to do with all that cloth. Strangle us, maybe?”
“Yes, I was frozen in fear above description,” she continued. “My focus was not on the rape, but entirely on where you placed my son when you removed him from the bed? Where did you place him and what would you do to him?”
“If it were not for the trauma I endure, I would be the person I am today. And I am proud of what I have accomplished. I am happier than words,” she said, putting her prepared marks on pausing to say to DeAngelo, “I see your eyes are closing.”
Carson-Sandler said that now, decades later, scars from her attack remain. Seeing a ski mask or hearing someone write “shut up” will “scare me forever,” she said.
“My comfort at that moment is the reminder that you will finally be in prison and will stay there until you die,” she said.
Carson-Sandler and the other victims were joined in court by the former DeAngelo fiancée, a woman named Bonnie, whose breakup with DeAngelo may have sparked some of DeAngelo’s violence, according to an investigator.
At one rape in 1978, DeAngelo cried and appeared to shout out the name of his ex-girlfriend, saying, ” I hate you, Bonnie, ‘over and over again,’ “researcher Paul Holes told ABC News in 2018.
In June, DeAngelo, 74, pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first-degree murder as part of a plea deal, which also required him to plead guilty to multiple uncharged acts, including rape.
The death penalty was taken off the table in exchange for the guilty plea cases.
Three days of statements on victims and families began Tuesday. DeAngelo, who was a police officer from 1973 to 1979, will be formally sentenced to life without parole on Friday.
‘Our life was never the same’
On March 18, 1978, Gay Hardwick was asleep at home with her now-husband, Robert Hardwick, when DeAngelo broke in.
“He abducted me from my bed. He raped me repeatedly, he sodomized me, he forced oral copulation. He stole the few precious jewels I had,” Gay Hardwick told the court Wednesday. “He ate out of my fridge and he drank two beers while I lay bound and blindfolded … he ransacked our house and in between he tortured me with death threats.”
“I have survived those repeated attacks. The hours of terror,” she said. “However, our lives were never the same.”
Gay Hardwick said she has suffered for decades from PTSD, nightmares, insomnia, social anxiety, flashbacks and the inability to be alone.
“I became the Black Hawk helicopter of all parents,” she said.
She told the court an incident two decades after the attack at one point “I thought I was completely recovered.” Her husband and four children were out of town and she was looking forward to some time, but pieces of tape left them on a counter sending her in fear to her father’s house, where she spent the night in her childhood bed.
‘He stole my innocence’
Mary Berwert was 13 years old, enjoying the summer before eighth grade, when she was raped in her child bedroom in June 1979.
“He stole my innocence, my safety, threatened my life, threatened the life of my family,” Bertwert said in court.
“I had to break the ties to my legs … I had to open my bedroom door with my hands tied behind my back,” she said, and then she ran to her father’s room and said to him, “Dad, I raped . ”
“He flew out of his bed. He started crying. I had never seen him cry before,” she said.
The rape ruined her childhood, she said, from undergoing a rape kit to seeing the pain on her parents’ faces.
This June, when prosecutors told Berwert that DeAngelo would confess to his crime against her, she said “a weight was lifted from my shoulders.”
“I had no idea how heavy this weight was – I had carried it for so long,” she said.
“Thirteen-year-old Maria needed justice. If only he could come back, someone could have told me with confidence that he would be caught someday,” she said. “I can not help but think of something of a difference that would have made for my future.”
DeAngelo committed 13 murders and multiple rapes and burglaries in the 1970s and 80s, and terrorized families from Northern to Southern California.
The crimes went unsolved until April 2018, when DeAngelo, a father and grandfather, was arrested in Sacramento County.
DeAngelo was the first public arrest made through genetic genealogy, a new technique that takes the DNA of an unknown suspect left behind at a crime scene and identifies him or her by tracing a family tree through his or her family members, who ‘ t voluntarily submit their DNA to public genealogy databases.
To identify DeAngelo, researchers narrowed the family tree’s search based on age, location, and other characteristics. Authorities monitored DeAngelo and collected his DNA from a tissue left in a trash can. Investigators pulled his missing DNA back into the genealogy database and found a match, linking DeAngelo’s DNA to the DNA found at multiple crime scenes, prosecutors said.
Since the arrest of DeAngelo, more than 150 other crime suspects have been identified through genetic genealogy.
ABC News’ Jenna Harrison contributed to this report.
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