Exclusive: Sacramento cops arrested Golden State Killer suspect in 1996, then let him go
MARCH 15, 2019
"Authorities arrested Joseph James DeAngelo last April as the Golden State Killer/East Area Rapist suspect, and they said the former police officer had never before been on their radar as a suspect.
But DeAngelo had been arrested 22 years earlier and held in the Sacramento County Jail for three and a half hours on unrelated charges before being released and sent on his way, The Sacramento Bee has learned.
DeAngelo, who was 50 at the time, was arrested in a sting operation on April 16, 1996, that targeted individuals with outstanding warrants and notified them that they had won free Super Bowl tickets they could pick up at an office in Sacramento. DeAngelo was one of the suspects who responded, and ended up jailed on allegations he had held up a gas station.
At the time, officials say, they would have had no way of knowing that one of the nation’s most sought-after criminal suspects was in their grasp. No DNA samples were routinely taken during bookings back then, and there was nothing out of the ordinary about the arrest, a Sacramento sheriff’s spokesman said.
“We had no way of knowing at the time who we actually had in our jail because the evidence wasn’t there, the technology wasn’t there,” Sgt. Shaun Hampton said Friday. “I don’t think there’s any way we could have known, there was no way for us to identify this person by him simply being in our jail for a few hours.”...
At the time, DeAngelo’s only known brush with the law came in 1979, when he was fired from his job with the Auburn Police Department after he was charged with shoplifting a hammer and a can of dog repellent from a Citrus Heights drug store.
But newly unearthed court records from Placer County Superior Court and an interview with DeAngelo’s attorney at the time detail the nearly comical series of events that led to his 1996 arrest.
The court records, originally sought by The Bee on April 30 following DeAngelo’s arrest, were recently located and provided Friday.
The records stem from a $1 million civil suit DeAngelo filed in 1996 against the owner of a Sacramento-area gas station over what he considered his false arrest...."
Exclusive: Sacramento cops arrested Golden State Killer suspect in 1996, then let him go