Sacramento, CASacramento, CA—One woman wants to show how she overcame and healed.
Another still searches for answers and reparation.
And another, unable to exact emotional revenge on her attacker, seeks to at least humble him.
The victims of Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., the former police officer whose violent crimes through the 1970s and 1980s terrorized Californians across the state and earned him the moniker Golden State Killer, finally got their say in court Tuesday, the beginning of three days of impact statements before he is sentenced on Friday.
DeAngelo, 74, has admitted to killing 13 people, starting with a Visalia college instructor seeking to thwart the abduction of his daughter in 1975, and ending with the rape and murder of a teenage girl in Orange County in 1986. His plea deal includes 53 attacks on 87 victims in 11 counties, including 50 rapes, but leaves out two sexual attacks and a shooting that also have been blamed on him.
Tuesday’s hearing began with the first rape DeAngelo has admitted, that of Phyllis Henneman.
With Henneman unable to attend because she is ill with cancer, her statement was read by her sister, Karen Veilleux.
“I went to bed … not knowing my life would change,” Veilleux read, halting for a moment to choke back sobs.
She described Henneman’s years of anxiety and fear that followed her June 1976 rape.
“When I found out this devil has been captured I felt relieved,” she read, but the arrest revived the feelings of anxiety and dread.
“The roles have now been reversed,” Veilleux concluded. “He deserves to spend the rest of his miserable life in prison. I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”
Another woman, who identified herself as Peggy, was 15 when DeAngelo attacked her and her sister at their home in 1976. She was raped repeatedly.
“It hurt to brush my hair because he hit me so many times on the head,” she said. Her hands were left numb for months because he had tied them so tightly.
Peggy said her “safety and security were taken away” that night, and that, even decades later, “I still always look over my shoulder when someone approaches me from behind.”
However, she also talked about finding a way in 2004 to forgive her rapist, “for me, for my peace of mind, so I could move forward.”
“I have learned a lot these past 44 years. I am strong, resilient, empathetic and insightful,” she said.
She described becoming an activist, speaking out at political rallies against rape and sexual attacks on women.
“Now, finally, the end of this trauma is here,” she said. “He is a horrible man, and none of us have to worry about him anymore.”
DeAngelo, wearing an orange jail jumpsuit and a white face mask, stared straight ahead as the victims spoke, keeping his eyes fixed on the wall across from him.
His eyes momentarily shifted — though his countenance, largely hidden by the mask, did not — as Patti Cosper read a statement from her mother, Patricia Murphy, who was 29 when she was attacked and repeatedly raped and sodomized in September 1976.
“Did his little penis drive him to be so angry all the time?” Cosper read. “Did he study criminology so he could carry out his evil deeds as a bad cop without getting caught?”
Murphy “longed for things to go back to how they were” before the attack, Cosper read, and “pretended life was fine. But it wasn’t. It was exhausting. It was hard to find joy.”
“Some people are wired wrong, and DeAngelo is one of them,” Cosper read. “Luck finally ran out for this messed-up human being — at least a poor excuse for one. It is my hope that you punish him to the full extent of the law for the horrific crimes he committed. He admitted that he caused all the suffering and misery to so many victims. … He truly is an evil monster with no soul.”
At the start of the violence, DeAngelo served as a small-town police officer in Tulare and Placer counties. He became a father, married to a woman who became a prominent women’s rights lawyer. He eventually was fired from policing after being caught shoplifting dog repellent, and he took up a quiet life as a truck mechanic in the Sacramento suburbs.
As part of a plea deal, DeAngelo is to be sentenced to 11 life terms without the possibility of parole, to be served consecutively, plus 15 life terms and eight years.
The extremity of requiring 11 of those life sentences to be served back-to-back, though physically impossible, takes advantage of a 1979 California tough-on-crime law. And it puts DeAngelo in a rare criminal class that includes Mafia bosses and serial murderers, such as the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, who is serving 49 life sentences for 49 murders, plus 480 years.
The prospect of delivering an impact statement was daunting, said Kris Pedretti, who was raped by DeAngelo while home alone in 1976, when she was 15.
When it is her chance to speak Tuesday, Pedretti said she seeks to show that she overcame not just the assault by DeAngelo but the social attitudes and family dictates that forced her to live as though the attack had never happened.
“This pressure … one chance. One shot. When I walk out, I don’t want to wish I had said something different,” Pedretti said. “I want it to hit all parts of this journey.”
For Jane Carson-Sandler, one of the first victims of the serial rapist to go public, Tuesday is another chance at piercing through the expressionless facade that has masked DeAngelo since his arrest in April 2018.
She said she has fantasized over the years about holding a knife on DeAngelo, the way he did to her, to inflict fear.
At his June plea hearing, Carson-Sandler approached the ballroom stage where DeAngelo sat, and egged on a jeering audience as a prosecutor read aloud Carson-Sandler’s original statement to police about her attacker’s small penis.
DeAngelo showed no expression.
This week, she said she’ll try again.
“I can certainly never, ever, ever cause him fear again, but I certainly can humiliate him,” she said.
DeAngelo’s slack expression in court hearings, and his current use of a wheelchair, have also needled prosecutors, who on Monday asked a judge for permission to play in court jailhouse videos that show that the 74-year-old inmate is both animated and agile. Judge Michael Bowman refused them.
Media presence within the Sacramento County courtroom is limited by COVID-19 physical distancing requirements, but scores of outlets are covering the finale of the 45-year-old case, including film crews from HBO and “20/20,” which is renting hotel rooms for the out-of-town victims in exchange for capturing their stories.
A small number of case detectives also plan to attend.
Among them is Carol Daly, a retired Sacramento County sheriff’s detective who took crime statements from the first rape victims. She has been asked by several victims to appear with them in court, and for one, to read her victim’s statement.
“I don’t know if satisfaction is the right word, but certainly I have been blessed and my life enriched by all the survivors who continue to want me with them,” Daly said. “They are an amazing group of women.”
