RTThu, 26 Apr 2018 12:18 UTC
© Max Whittaker / Reuters
Former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, was arrested on two counts of murder by Sacramento police on Wednesday morning, reported
NBC News.
Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert and Sheriff Scott Jones announced the arrest at a press conference Wednesday afternoon, revealing a little bit more information about the arrest and investigation.
"The answer has always been in Sacramento," Schubert said, adding that DNA evidence is what led the authorities to the suspect.
Also known as the "East Area Rapist," the killer stalked the Sacramento area between 1976 and 1978, before moving on to the Bay Area and later Southern California. The killer's activity mysteriously stopped in 1981.He targeted and raped women who were home alone or with children, and murdered women and men together, according to police.
Four decades after his first attack, the FBI offered a $50,000 award in 2016 for information leading to his arrest. The killer's story was popularized by Michelle McNamara's book
'I'll Be Gone in the Dark,' published in 2016. McNamara had researched and reported on the investigation for much of her career.
After her death, McNamara's husband, actor and comedian Patton Oswalt, hired another journalist to help finish the book."I think you got him, Michelle," Oswalt said on Wednesday in a
video posted on Instagram.
Comment: The LA Times
reports more on what led to the arrest:
Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., 72, a former police officer, was charged with eight counts of murder.
Throughout Wednesday, authorities scoured his beige, single-story home in Citrus Heights, removing two cars, a boat and a motorcycle from the garage.
Four initial charges are for the slaying of two married couples - Brian and Kate Maggiore, who were killed in Rancho Cordova in 1978; and Lyman and Charlene Smith, who were killed in Ventura in 1980.
Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones said the task force had been conducting surveillance on DeAngelo and secretly retrieved his DNA from a discarded item, such as a soda can. The DNA matched the samples left by the killer. Authorities would not say how they initially came to see him as a potential suspect.
Sean Ragan, special agent in charge of the FBI's Sacramento office, said DeAngelo was a police officer decades ago, first in Exeter, Calif., near Visalia, and then in Auburn, near Sacramento. "The time frame of the crimes supports that the suspect was a police officer when he committed some of these crimes," Ragan said.
A front page article in the Auburn Journal dated August 29, 1979, says DeAngelo was dismissed from his position as an Auburn policeman for stealing a can of dog repellent and a hammer from a Sacramento drugstore.
Comment: The LA Times reports more on what led to the arrest: