Golden State Killer: Emotions Soar As Joseph DeAngelo's Victims Confront Him In Courtroom
SACRAMENTO (CBS/AP) — Choking back tears, Karen Veilleux confronted convicted Golden State Killer Joseph DeAngelo in a Sacramento courtroom Tuesday, speaking for her ill sister Phyllis Hennemann, who was the first victim of his infamous crime spree that terrorized the state.
Henneman was listed as Jane Doe Rape Victim No.1 on the prosecution's charges list, but was finally given a voice to speak out as three days of victim statement began and will be culminated with DeAngelo being given 11 life sentences without parole prison sentences on Friday.
"On June 17, 1976, I went to bed not knowing that in just a few hours my life, as I knew it, would change," Veilleux read from a statement by her sister who is suffering from cancer. "I was a normal, young woman of 22 -- happy and carefree. The only dark spot in my life was the death of my mother 18 months earlier. I was vivacious, fun loving and a little shy...Life as I knew it was irrevocably changed that day."
Four of the cases he has pleaded guilty to occurred in Contra Costa County.
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The scope of DeAngelo's crimes "is simply staggering," prosecutors said in a court summary released Monday: 13 known murders and nearly 50 rapes between 1975 and 1986.
Sixteen of his Sacramento County rape victims plan to confront him Tuesday in a courthouse that is otherwise still sealed from the public because of the coronavirus. A similar number will tell Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman on Wednesday and Thursday how DeAngelo's crimes changed their lives, before he is formally sentenced Friday.
"He didn't win, I'm not a lost girl," Kris Pedretti said in an interview before her testimony. "I want to make that clear."
But the attack just before Christmas 1976 destroyed the 15-year-old she was then, she said, costing her her faith and friends and propelling her into an adulthood of poor choices and failed marriages.
It wasn't until his capture in 2018 that she bonded with fellow survivors, underwent counseling and renewed her life, she said.
DeAngelo in June pleaded guilty to 13 murders and 13 rape-related charges, but publicly admitted to dozens more because the statute of limitations for sexual assaults had expired.
Defense attorneys did not respond to requests for comment and did not file a response to prosecutors' outline of the case.
All told, he admitted to harming 87 victims in 53 separate crimes scenes spanning 11 California counties in a plea deal that spares him the death penalty, prosecutors said.
That's a larger number of victims than prosecutors cited after his admission in June to 161 crimes involving 48 people, but Ventura County District Attorney Greg Totten said the higher number includes those who chose not to participate in having DeAngelo publicly admit to crimes in which he could not be formally charged.
His nicknames showed the escalation and geographic sweep of his crimes, prosecutors said: the Visalia Ransacker, thought to be responsible for about 100 burglaries and one slaying in that San Joaquin Valley farm town; the East Area Rapist; the Original Night Stalker. And finally, the Golden State Killer when investigators eventually linked the crimes that stretched across much of the state.
"Each time, he escaped, slipping away silently into the night, leaving communities terrified for years," prosecutors said.
He was only identified and arrested in 2018 by using a new form of DNA tracing.
"This has been on my mind for 44 years. That's a long time," Jane Carson-Sandler said before her testimony.
Certain triggers can still bring flashbacks to that night in 1976 when DeAngelo confronted her with a butcher knife as she snuggled in bed with her 3-year-old son after her husband left for work at a nearby military base.
She hopes to break through to DeAngelo by humiliating him with a T-shirt and reference to what she observed to be his "little penis."
"I hope that he'll be listening, but we know that during the hearing when he pleaded guilty, he never lifted his head," she said.
She is among survivors and prosecutors who contend that DeAngelo is merely masquerading as a feeble old man in a wheelchair.
Prosecutors cited "his slow gait, the distorted twist of his hands" and his halting answers to Bowman in June. But, they said, his "agile movement and behavior in his jail cell indicate an individual who is healthy and physically active."
