The Arraignment and the Years of Legal Proceedings
DeAngelo was initially booked in April 2018 on two counts of first-degree murder — the Harrington murders in Orange County, for which Orange County was the prosecuting jurisdiction. The choice to begin with the Harrington charges reflected both evidentiary strength and the practical realities of multi-jurisdictional prosecution. Additional charges followed as the case developed.
Santa Barbara County added four murder charges for the Goleta killings. In August 2018, kidnapping charges were formally added. By the time the case reached its resolution, DeAngelo was facing charges from six county district attorney offices — Contra Costa, Orange, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Tulare, and Ventura — coordinating a prosecution that reflected the geographic breadth of his documented crimes.
The scale of the case, in terms of the evidentiary material accumulated, was extraordinary. Prosecutors described a discovery set of more than 1.3 million pages of documents. The case reflected decades of investigation by multiple agencies, evidence from more than a dozen crime scenes in geographically dispersed California counties, and the scientific work required to establish DNA connections across cases that had originally been handled by different jurisdictions with different record-keeping systems.
The decision to seek the death penalty, announced by prosecutors early in the proceedings, reflected the number and nature of the murder charges. Under California law, multiple murders with special circumstances qualify for capital punishment. The decision was contested within the legal proceedings and shaped the eventual resolution.
The Wrong Man and the Weight of False Suspicion
Before DeAngelo was identified, investigators had named and pursued at least two other individuals as serious suspects. The case of Joe Alsip, a man from the Sacramento area who matched some elements of the behavioral profile and who was investigated with some intensity, was resolved when DNA testing excluded him. The case of Gregory Gonzalez involved a different investigative approach that also ended in exclusion.