On June 29, Joseph James DeAngelo pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first-degree murder, with special circumstances in a number of them—such as murder committed in the commission of a burglary or rape—and 13 counts of kidnapping. Four of those murders occurred in Santa Barbara County in 1979 and 1981.
All the county’s murders happened in Goleta, though Santa Barbara County District Attorney Joyce Dudley confirmed in an email to the Sun that 1979 victim Debra Alexandra Manning was a Santa Maria-based psychologist.
Known widely as the Golden State Killer, DeAngelo also admitted his responsibility for 161 crimes involving 48 individual victims and 32 crime scenes, Ventura County District Attorney Gregory Totten said during a livestreamed press conference after the hearing. Those additional crimes, Totten said, “could not have been charged because of California’s statute of limitations.”
The hearing took place in Sacramento and involved prosecutors from multiple counties where DeAngelo’s crimes took place. During the hearing, Santa Barbara Chief Deputy District Attorney Kelly Duncan described DeAngelo’s local murders in gruesome detail. DeAngelo pleaded guilty to all of the local murders—Robert Offerman and Manning in 1979, and Cheri Domingo and Gregory Sanchez in 1981—and admitted to the special circumstances of the murders, including rape and burglary.
Dudley also spoke at the press conference after the hearing, and acknowledged the daughter of one of the murder victims.
“I saw so much in the eyes of the crime victims,” Dudley said as she looked at Domingo’s daughter in the audience. “I know many of them rightfully believed that this day would never come. But today did come, and even though their pain is still raw, and their wait was painfully long, most of them are appreciative because they saw justice today. I know that’s true for Debbie Domingo, Santa Barbara County victim, and for all of the other crime victims.”
As a part of his plea deal, DeAngelo will face life in prison rather than the death penalty. Ventura County District Attorney Totten explained why prosecutors went this route.
“In the end, I and my colleagues concluded that seeking death did not serve the best interest of the victims in this unique and decades-old serial rape-killing case,” Totten said at the press conference.
A death penalty sentence, Totten said, would lead to inevitable delays, lengthy litigation, and a high probability, given the defendant’s age, that he would die before his trial and “certainly before any execution could be carried out.”
“For those victims whose crimes fell outside the statute of limitations, they would never have been given an opportunity to see and hear the defendant, as he did today, admit what he did to them,” Totten said. “Simply put, they deserve to see the defendant die in prison as a convict, and not simply the accused, and that is the reason we chose this result, which I think is a just and a fair result in this horrific case.”
This article appears in Jul 2-9, 2020.