#Joseph deangelo photo police free

They verified the match with a direct sample from DeAngelo following his arrest. They confirmed they were on the right track after DNA taken from the handle of a driver’s side door on DeAngelo’s vehicle matched the evidence left at multiple Golden State Killer crime scenes. The couple were found slain by Bruce and Keith Harrington’s father when he arrived at their home for dinner.ĭeAngelo became a suspect in the Golden State Killer case after cold case investigators tried a novel approach to solving the crime - taking DNA evidence left behind by the killer and comparing it to DNA profiles shared to public commercial databases by people hoping to find relatives they were not aware of.ĭetectives were able to narrow down the DNA profiles they found on GEDmatch to close relatives of potential suspects, including DeAngelo. Harrington’s brother and sister-in-law, Keith and Patrice Harrington, were two of DeAngelo’s alleged victims in 1986, 10 years before his arrest in the gas station incident. The process became routine statewide after the 2004 passage of Proposition 69, a law pushed by Bruce Harrington. The newspaper reported that Sacramento County officials did not begin collecting DNA samples from suspects arrested for felonies until a few years after DeAngelo's 1996 arrest. 'He was very pleasant when he was talking to me.' 'I'd seen the guy on TV, but I never made the connection,' Wright told the Bee.

He said he remembered “Joe” as a nice guy who was “very upset about this gas station business.” Wright expressed shock upon learning Friday that his client in 1996 was the Golden State Killer suspect. William Wright, who sued on DeAngelo’s behalf, told the newspaper he could not remember details of the settlement. The $1 million suit was eventually settled out of court, the Bee said. 'Eventually, the case was dismissed and the court entered an order finding plaintiff factually innocent and sealed the record,' the lawsuit said, according to the Bee. The attendant, who the records alleged did not speak English well, reported him as an attempted robber after he demanded cash back for the gas it failed to pump. There was no way for us to identify this person by him simply being in our jail for a few hours.'ĭeAngelo later sued the gas station manager for false arrest, claiming the gas pump had malfunctioned before he finished pumping the gas for which he’d already paid. 'I don't think there's any way we could have known.

'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. Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office officials said there was no way to know in 1996 that DeAngelo was the murder suspect they and several other law enforcement agencies had sought for so long. He was jailed and released, and the charge against him was later dismissed, the court records showed. The targets were told they could pick up the tickets at a Sacramento office.ĭeAngelo was one of the people who responded to the ruse, the Bee said.

#Joseph deangelo photo police free

DeAngelo, then 50, was arrested in an April 16, 1996, sting operation in which law enforcement officials in Placer County targeted people with outstanding warrants by notifying them that they had won free Super Bowl tickets, the Bee reported.