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Joe was so friendly with everybody.

He was always smiling, always laughing.

He was a hard worker.

And he was smart.

His wife's name was Sharon, and we called her Sherry.

They were very proud parents.

He took good care of his daughters.

Family was everything to him.

But Joe went off the deep end.

And if you want to see the devil at work, here's a good example.

Welcome to Very Scary People.

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

He terrorized California for more than 40 years. A super predator who stalked

women in a blind rage.

He appeared out of the darkness to torture and kill, then vanished into the

night. He cornered his victims in their homes, viciously attacked couples asleep

in their beds, all to see the terror in their eyes.

The serial rapist and murderer.

seemed to always be one step ahead of police detectives.

But he left critical evidence behind at the crime scenes, and investigators were

beginning to connect the dots.

This is part two of The Golden State Killer.

Back in the 70s, a new offender popped up.

The East Area Rapist was hitting in the Sacramento area.

He's fearless. He's callous.

He's cold -blooded. We need to do everything we can to stop him. Who was

guy? A very dangerous offender who's motivated by real or imagined wrongs

that he has suffered.

In 1976, I was 30 years old.

I was happily married, had a three -year -old son.

Early morning, 6 .30 a .m., Jane is home with her son. Her husband had just left

for work.

My little three -year -old had just climbed in bed with me for a nice

Minutes later, she hears somebody running down the hall towards her

Next thing she knows, she's looking at a masked man.

And he's shining the flashlight.

Holding a big knife.

She can hear him ripping up fabric even after she's been gagged and blindfolded.

I'm thinking, oh my God, is he going to hang us? That was so scary.

This man ends up taking her son away from her.

Then he untied my ankle.

And then I knew what he was there for.

After that, He kept going from the bedroom, telling us that if we moved, he

would kill us.

And then he'd go back in the kitchen.

He would actually stay in the house for hours.

Not only does he possess the victims, he possesses their belongings. He

possesses their house.

Eventually, her son was placed back into bed next to her.

After we thought he was gone, I was able to take my mask down.

We had five cases that all had the same method of operation.

Always confronting the victims in bed, shining a flashlight in their eyes.

He had a ski mask on. He always had a weapon.

He would turn the TV on and put the towel over it. I believe in part he's

that so he can see the woman, but he can also see the terror in her face.

It's a psychological torture.

We've got to see her rapist.

And this is a bad guy.

He was the boogeyman of the community. He was like a ghost.

The victims were very consistent in describing a white male, somewhere

'8 to 5 '10, reasonably athletic build, 160 to 180 pounds.

We knew he had a size 9 foot from the footprint.

We got all sorts of eye color, blue, green, brown.

We didn't have that much to go on.

The problem is no one knows where or when he'll strike again. We know he went

to commit murder.

His final murder and rape occurred in May of 1986 with Janelle Cruz in Orange

County.

Janelle Cruz, my older sister by one year, she was 18 and I was 17.

She was like Marilyn Monroe.

Janelle Cruz was this gorgeous 18 -year -old girl that happened to be home

alone.

This guy just sees Janelle and decides, I'm going to make her a victim.

She had a friend, a male friend, over to the house.

They were listening to music.

They did hear noises.

Janelle said, it must have been a cat.

So they closed the shutters and continued listening to music.

He ends up getting into her house through a sliding door at the rear of

house.

About 11 .15 in the evening, the young man decided, it's getting late, I better

leave. Shortly after that, the offender entered the home and attacked Janelle.

Hours later, the body of Janelle Cruz was found in her bedroom.

She had received blows to her head. She's the one bludgeoning victim where

offender hit her in the face.

He had bludgeoned her in the forehead, across the bridge of her nose.

What has caused that level of anger, or has it actually been elevated to hatred?

Because hatred and anger are not the same emotions.

There was so much fear in the community.

I was pulled to help do community meetings.

One of the big questions that was asked here last night, if we have a gun, could

we shoot him?

Knowing what I know about this man, if I had a gun, I definitely would shoot

him. What I told them was, if you're going to shoot, shoot to kill, because

was the only way this man was going to be stopped.

The Sacramento County Sheriff's Office is holding town hall meetings in the

neighborhoods where attacks were occurring.

I think the East Area Rapist was at one of the meetings.

Police believe he came hunting for victims and targeted a man who spoke up

during the meeting.

This was another challenge for him.

The gentleman stood up and he said, I don't understand how a man in the home

wouldn't be able to defend his wife.

Now he was going to prove to everybody that he was the one in charge.

And his next attack was with a man in the house.

Soon after the town hall meeting, that man and his wife became victims.

There were five people in the home at the time that they were attacked.

The rapist was so quiet and so slick in the darkness of the room.

shining a flashlight and showing that he had a gun and throwing shoestrings to

the woman and telling her to tie up her husband, having him turn over on his

stomach and tying his hands behind his back and then tying the victim up.

The fear of that gun being pointed at you, that beam of light and seeing

the shadow of face mask, it was do it or I'm going to kill you. It's like

playing cat and mouse.

This is dominant, and there's nothing we can do about it.

My heart really goes out to them.

And then, in 1986, they just sort of disappeared.

Stop murdering, stop raping.

It's very emotionally taxing to go year after year of year of putting so much

effort into it and not solving.

And then all of a sudden, Paul calls me up and says, hey, I got this idea.

The Golden State Killer was intelligent.

He was sophisticated.

We have a phrase that we use in the FBI. It's called the mask of sanity.

The reason this violent offender is able to not be captured is because they live

such a normal life, at least on the surface.

You have the wife and the children and live in a nice house.

Somebody that I thought was going to be reasonably successful, have a career.

Blend in with society.

A serial sexual killer would not want someone to see their traits, that they

could be sexually aroused by kidnapping someone or murdering someone.

Because they don't want to be caught. They want to be able to continue to

maintain that secret life.

Investigators wondered where the Golden State Killer was hiding.

and Joseph DeAngelo was waging a lifelong battle between doing what was

and his secret wild urges.

Joe's house was directly behind ours.

My family kind of referred to him as Mr. Mom because back in the 80s, Joe had

raised his three daughters.

In 73, he became a law enforcement officer in Exeter.

in Tulare County, California.

He rose to sergeant in Exeter. And in 1976, Mr. D 'Angelo

relocated to another Sacramento area police agency, the Auburn Police

Department. And when he's in Auburn, he begins not only as a patrolman, but he's

working split shifts. He's doing relief when people are on vacation.

The Golden State Killer investigation had been a cold case for decades.

But in 2018, the task force got a big break that might just finally crack the

case.

Paul calls me up and says, hey, I got this idea.

Investigative genetic genealogy.

Another revolution with DNA.

It is the greatest hope we had in solving this case.

People upload their genetic profiles into publicly accessible websites.

GEDmatch. Ancestry .com.

23andMe. Millions of people have submitted their DNA to genealogy

So they can determine if they have half cousins or siblings that they didn't

know about.

The goal was to determine if there was a distant relative of the Golden State

Killer on the genealogy website.

I just uploaded that Golden State Killer DNA profile into GEDmatch. A match

report comes back with relatives of the Golden State Killer.

Somebody within this pool of descendants that could potentially be your killer.

We were able to develop family trees, find common ancestors who were born back

in the 1840s.

Let's say a great -great -grandparent.

You've got to understand, the people born in the 1840s would have 15 kids,

you have to identify all those children, and you have to identify all their

kids. In total, we probably had 10 ,000 entries or more across all these

trees.

Somewhere on this massive family tree is your suspect, is the killer.

Mr. D 'Angelo has a relationship with a girl that he meets in college,

Bonnie.

He seems fascinated by Bonnie.

She's a brilliant young student. She tutors him in some of his classes.

Eventually we began dating each other.

I saw Joe as a happy, engaged, fun -loving guy.

He was accepted into and just kind of inserted himself into her family.

I have five brothers and sisters.

Joe was very much interested in being included.

A year after they meet, Joe proposes to Bonnie.

Nothing down on the knee, nothing like that.

I think it was more like ownership.

We're going to marry.

I belong to him.

And then one year after he proposed, Bonnie gets fed up with Joe.

He's doing things purposely to scare her.

She can tell he's excited by her fear.

Later, they're taking a class together at Normal Psychology, and he's

struggling. He basically demands that she help him cheat.

Ethically, she doesn't want anything to do with it.

My father was a high school principal. My mother had been a teacher.

I was just done.

And that's when Job repeats over and over, you will do this, you will do

And Bonnie... stands up for herself with Joe.

You are not the man I'm going to marry. We are not going to have a future

together.

She's not very happy about that.

And then a knock on the window as she opens up the curtain.

Joe was outside the window pointing a gun at me and telling me to get dressed.

We were going to Reno, that we were going to be married that night.

She goes and gets her father.

And he went out and talked to Joe for almost two hours.

He just told me that Joe was gone and I could go back to bed. And never did he

ever tell me what they talked about, if they had any kind of an agreement.

And that's literally the last interaction that she had with the

Investigators analyzing the genetic genealogy family trees were dramatically

narrowing their search for the suspected Golden State Killer.

And trying to just one by one eliminate subjects. Some people could be ruled out

easily. Some people might be dead. Some people are female.

And that's where we start narrowing in on males that potentially have a

connection to California during the years in which the Golden State Killer

active.

Names were popping up at different times.

Then suddenly, the universe of family members narrowed to one man.

There was a guy that popped up. This could very well be the guy.

The person was Joseph James D 'Angelo.

Let's see what kind of headway I can make on this D 'Angelo.

I saw a newspaper article about D 'Angelo having been engaged to a Bonnie.

I was like, well.

That's interesting.

Interesting because Bonnie was the name the Golden State killer had shouted out

in front of one of his victims in a 1978 attack.

There are several instances in the East Area Rapist phase in which the victims

report they'd hear him sobbing.

He's crying while he's sexually assaulting her. This is where he's

statement, I hate you, Bonnie. I hate you, Bonnie.

And that had always been a mystery to investigators.

But now they learn Bonnie was the Joseph D 'Angelo romance that ended in a

disturbing broken engagement.

Maybe he still had some very deep -seated fury.

Detectives were able to learn that he was a former police officer and that fit

in with the profile and some of the early theories of the case.

We really felt that it could have been somebody in either law enforcement or

military.

Detectives felt that way because of his M .O. at all the crime scenes.

It's based off little things, things that he would say as far as putting

hands behind their back, not leaving fingerprints anywhere.

He always had an escape route planned.

And I think a lot of times that is military and law enforcement training.

The geography and the timeline of the attack coincided with the events in

DeAngelo's life.

The Visalia ransackings were happening at the same time that D 'Angelo was on

the Exeter police force, just 10 miles away from Visalia.

In Exeter, he was in charge of the burglary program that was investigating

Visalia ransacking cases.

He could control those investigations.

As D 'Angelo was in training for the Auburn Police Department, he began the

Area rape attacks.

I'm going, God, this is awfully coincidental, right?

Then detectives placed Joseph DeAngelo down in Southern California during the

Golden State killer murders.

He and his wife Sharon had moved to L .A.

Sharon gets a job with the National Labor Relations Board in Los Angeles.

That's when it was like, you know what? This DeAngelo guy is adding up.

We need to get his DNA.

The law requires us to confirm that Joseph D 'Angelo was in fact the person

left the DNA behind in all these crime scenes.

We had him on surveillance for several days.

At that point, the decision was made that a trash day was coming up in his

neighborhood. We ended up picking up his garbage from the street.

The sample was collected.

The discarded tissue that he had used.

My phone lights up and the lab says they're excited.

They were able to get an absolute positive identification between the

and Joseph DeAngelo.

They were one and the same.

It's him. There's no question about it. That's the plan. Done.

Okay. We've got our person.

What next?

Welcome back to Very Scary People. I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

After more than 40 years, advancements in genetic technology have caught up

the elusive predator police called the Golden State Killer.

Now they know his real name, Joseph James D 'Angelo.

Before they close in, they watch his every move, and the phantom of darkness

about to be dragged into the light.

Joseph DeAngelo starts killing whenever he feels that he's under threat. And a

different side of him comes out, something very cold, calculating and

determined, and cannot be swayed.

You have somebody that's a serial killer, clearly, who's gotten away with

40 -plus years, but then you have the added fact that he's a former police

officer.

We did not want to...

go into his house to make an arrest.

We did not want to let him get into any place where he might have secreted a

weapon or be able to execute some plan that we may not be aware of.

There was a concern about his oldest daughter was living with him.

We don't want a Hoffman situation.

I've had so many cases where the offender, if he thought he was going to

caught, says that if he had to kill his wife or his children, he would do that.

We knew we wanted to catch him by surprise.

On the day of his arrest, a number of sheriff's detectives were in a minivan

getting ready to arrest him. Joseph D 'Angelo was outside in front of his

At that point, the sheriff's detective stepped out and pretended to ask for

directions.

I'm back at the homicide station.

We're listening over a radio, and then it goes silent.

So now it's pins and needles because here's a guy that is a serial killer.

Does he have a gun on him?

Before Joseph DeAngelo knew it, he was in handcuffs in a

minivan under arrest for the series of murders and rapes he committed

California.

We went exactly as we hoped and expected, but we were ready for

The next.

that came over the radio as subject in custody.

Then it was just, everybody is jumping out of their chairs. This is good.

D 'Angelo's brought in by the team. He's placed in the interview room, and he

goes catatonic. He literally is sitting like this for an hour without twitching

a muscle.

One of the female detectives is going, that's what he was doing in the victim's

backyards while he was watching them.

He would go absolutely motionless in the shadows and just wait until the time

was right for him to attack.

It's 11 .30 at night.

I walk into the room where D 'Angelo is being held, and it's about 10 degrees

colder in that room.

There's an immediate sense of evil in there.

I've never felt like that before.

So now I'm sitting across from D 'Angelo. I noticed he was a big guy, 215

at a rest. His hands were like bear paws.

He actually had broad shoulders and seemed naturally strong.

He could one arm reach over and knock you to the ground kind of guy.

And that shocked me because of his age.

The way I talk to people is to try to humanize.

myself and the person I'm talking to say things like, there is never too late of

a time to make anything better.

I was coming up with questions and trying to pull him out.

His eyes were going very fast, like he was trying to outthink me.

I absolutely could feel a little bit of the terror the victim

must have gone through with this guy.

I kept on looking down to make sure he was cuffed to the floor.

I'm feeling the evilness protruding from him.

I try to appeal more to, would your daughters feel better about you knowing

you helped the investigation?

A couple of agents were talking to his daughters out in the lobby, kind of

explaining what was going on. I did see them. They were distraught. They were

crying. It would be as if your parents, that you thought you knew all your life,

that you were told today that your dad's a serial killer.

And their heartbreak is so obvious.

They're wailing, and his face crumples.

You can see the pain in his face, and his voice goes very soft. To the second

daughter, he says, go away, go away.

And she leaves the room, and they close the door, and he's whispering to

himself, goodbye, goodbye.

He'd been offered water, Dr. Pepper, anything to eat or drink that he wanted,

and he'd been declining all of it.

And we realized he thinks we're trying to get his DNA.

Oh, so sad. He doesn't know we already have it.

One of the most notorious rapists.

Serial killers in California history was caught, and I happened to live next to

them for almost 40 years.

The morning Joe was arrested, there's police tape on Joe's front yard, and

there's sheriffs everywhere.

After so many years, I had this vision of what this guy would look like, how he

was living. I considered reaching out to Sherrod, but it was like they have kids

together. She potentially still has allegiance to him, and I opted not to

to her.

D 'Angelo's property was immaculate, beautifully painted, but the inside was

different story, what I would call a semi -organized mess.

But things did stand out. The big thing that I saw going into his bedroom was

his computer, and then draped over the monitor was a towel.

One of the things that the East Area Rapist would do is when he separated the

women out and got to where he was going to sexually assault them, he would

frequently put a towel over the TV to get that soft glow.

That to me was like, oh, East Area Rapist right there.

He's replicating what he was doing when he's attacking his female victims.

He's still fantasizing to this day.

We fully expected to find something that tied him to the victims.

The search we did was just exhaustive.

At one point, there was a couple agents that were standing in the backyard, and

they called up to me and they said, hey, you ever see him digging around here?

Serial sex offenders often keep trophies, things that remind them of

crimes so that they can relive those crimes over and over again.

He took the female victim's driver's licenses, has their picture, has their

address, select items of jewelry as souvenirs.

The next day they started probing that hillside.

They were using some kind of machine to look for stuff buried.

That looked like a gopher had gone through his entire yard because there

hole about every couple feet.

We didn't want to leave any stone unturned. The backyard was dug up. The

was searched.

The walls were even torn open by police.

We also wanted to make sure there was nothing that we weren't expecting, like

other homicide victims.

They found nothing.

It's impossible to know what happened to his treasure trove.

Not only did he seemingly stop committing these crimes, but he got rid

everything that even reminded him of those crimes with serial murderers,

serial... sex offenders, it is a compulsion that they either can't or

overcome. And so him getting rid of those reminders of those crimes is very

unusual.

What was he doing for those 30 years that was substituting for his committing

sexual assault and rape?

Making the phone call.

certainly could have been a way that he could satisfy some of the urges.

When you think about the things that he did, you look at Ted Bundy or whoever,

look at all of them. They were once somebody's new baby, somebody's loved

child. They were not monsters all their life. Something happened and they

snapped.

I've always wondered what created the monster.

I would look much more deeply into what was going on when he was a young boy

developing his sexuality.

We moved out here in Sacramento in 55.

Maybe we'd been there a year or so when Joe's family moved in next door.

Joseph D 'Angelo Sr.

and his wife Kathleen, two daughters, Rebecca and Constance, and two sons,

and Joseph Jr.

Joe D 'Angelo's father was in the Air Force.

And his mother was a waitress.

Joe was 13 when we met. We became good friends.

Joe was a typical teenager. He hung around with my brothers all the time.

And the boys would go out and target practice and shoot rabbits.

But he was a bit edgy as a juvenile. He certainly had trouble conforming with

the rules.

He was a chance taker. A good friend of Joe's from high school, Jim, they're

just wild boys. They're sneaking in to places they shouldn't be.

They also began breaking into homes.

On one instance, they were attacked by a German shepherd.

And that's when Jim sees something come over Joe, a reaction to threat.

He reaches into his pocket and immediately starts lighting an M -80, a

firecracker. And Joe throws the firecracker. It lands right underneath

It's not that he hated dogs.

It's how he responded to threat.

The different side of him comes out.

I remember him saying one time, we had to move back here to the United States

because my sister Connie was hurt.

And that's all he'd said.

Joe's sister Connie was molested at a young age. I was 12 or so, and she was

just a couple years younger than I was. Connie made a reference to little girls

being molested. She was talking about herself. That was about her.

Joseph DeAngelo's nephew in the HBO special I'll Be Gone in the Dark spoke

a childhood trauma that his sister underwent when they were stationed in

Germany.

My mother was a...

She was raped in

Germany when she was seven years old

by two military

officers or men in an airplane hangar.

Get through with watching.

Uncle Joe.

Now all of a sudden, violence is crossed with sexuality.

Would that create the serial predator?

Is it a form of stimulation for somebody who's already fantasizing about

committing violent acts?

I think that's a possibility.

I think a why that satisfies us in any way.

will never come. It can't. Because what justifies this kind of inflicting

terror, pain and suffering and power over another human being?

This is obviously a conflicted person, someone who was compulsively driven,

a very tragic, monstrous wreckage of a human being.

For 44 years, every time I walk through the house at night and I look out the

door, I always expected to see a shadowy figure.

And that's the one thing I will always remember is the fear.

When I learned about D 'Angelo's background and that he, in fact, was a

officer and had been in the military, it's really a sad day.

The irony is that taxpayer money paid him.

to learn skills that helped him perfect himself to becoming a better serial

predator. He had done it all. Peeper, prowler, burglar, sadist,

rapist, serial killer.

He always had an escape route planned.

We're taught always know how to escape.

When I saw him the day after he was arrested, when they wheeled him into the

courtroom, You'd think that he was fresh out of a nursing home. I'm surprised he

wasn't drooling, quite frankly.

But when you know his history, two days before... He was outside moving a boat

up and down the driveway, moving boulders in his yard, cutting his lawn.

He is not the man that people saw being wheeled helplessly into court every day.

He's a master manipulator.

We had video surveillance of him in the jail.

He's... Walking around, pacing back and forth like a caged predator.

Jumping up on his bunk, jumping up on his table, cleaning his lights. There's

also an incident where he was watching a female worker in the jail and he

started to masturbate.

He's not a crippled old man at all.

One last ploy by a serial sex offender and serial killer to try and garner some

sympathy.

After 40 years of evading capture, the Golden State Killer was finally brought

to justice. It was an electrifying moment where the victims were packed in

courtroom.

I went into the victim impact statement, and what really struck me is

the strength.

of human spirit and the resilience that I heard.

I was 28 years old at the time.

I woke up to a flashlight in my eyes. There was a gun that he put to my head.

Then he took me out of my bedroom into another room where he raped me.

Mr. D 'Angelo, I want to tell you what I was constantly thinking during the rape

itself. You are not going to get me. You are not going to get me. You are not

going to get me.

This man standing in front of the bed with a ski mask on, he said, shh,

shut up, shut up, shut up or I'll kill you. My heart was just pounding out of

chest. My name is Jane Carson Sandler, and D 'Angelo, I want you to look at me.

I have a loving husband of 26 years and two amazing, successful sons.

So you didn't destroy my life.

My mom, Sherry Domingo and Greg Sanchez. I always picture them dancing together.

This monster, D 'Angelo, he came in fully prepared, armed to the teeth.

And I think about my mom. She must have just been absolutely petrified in those

moments. My mom and Greg were killed together in 1981.

Today, the devil loses and justice wins.

Janelle Cruz is my sister. She was 18 and I was 17 when she

was killed. Now I know who killed my sister Janelle.

Joseph D 'Angelo did. A vicious rapist and murderer.

Nothing more. I hope you rock.

Bonnie was his ex -fiancé years ago and actually came to court with me. She

was not able to give an impact statement because she was not one of his rape

victims. I was able to read what Bonnie wanted to say to him.

I had written, even with a gun pointed at my face, you could not make me choose

you. and I never took my stare off of Joe. I didn't see

a blink or any change whatsoever in Joe.

After the three days of the impact statements, he is the one who insisted

he wanted to say something, and there was an audible gasp in the ballroom when

he stood.

I've listened all year.

statements, each one of them.

And I'm really sorry to

everyone I've hurt.

Thank you, Your Honor.

It was a complete shock, but he stood up without any help.

His voice was strong and audible, and this whispering person who seemed to be

nodding off all the time, who seemed totally disengaged, suddenly all of that

was an act.

As they were wheeling him out, I just walked back right up to the stage, and I

said, D 'Angelo, I just hope you rot in hell.

There was a policeman right there that was blocking me because he thought I was

going to jump up on the stage and just rip him out of the wheelchair.

I felt empowered, finally.

We now have the control. We now have the power, you son of a gun.

And I wanted him to know that.

Joseph D 'Angelo pled guilty to 13 counts of murder. Murder in the first

How do you plead?

Guilty.

13 other counts of kidnap for purposes of robbery, the rape charges, the

of limitations had run long ago, but he ultimately admitted all the uncharged

crimes as well. In exchange for that, Joseph DeAngelo was sentenced to life in

prison without the possibility of parole.

He would die in prison.

I do know that Sharon divorced him.

and made a statement that she had no knowledge about his attacks and was

her privacy respected.

Hundreds of people have been involved in this case and had an active part in

trying to see it solved.

One team would retire and another would come on and they would pick up this

case.

I think some of the greatest things to come out of this mayhem are the

development in DNA, the relationships.

the blessing of getting to know other survivors.

And there are dozens and dozens of those who have meant so much to me.

We're not alone anymore, and that's what's so amazing.

And I know it's hard for those women that have never been able to confront or

see their perpetrator go to trial, so I hope we can speak for them.

Never give up hope that if the man that assaulted you has not been caught, he

will be someday.

Since the Golden State Killer case, genetic genealogy has been used to help

solve more than 100 cold cases throughout the country.

Vicious criminals who remained anonymous and free are being identified and

captured to face justice.

And at long last, many survivors and their families say they have finally

peace.

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

Thanks for watching.

Good night.

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