Gay Hardwick, who was attacked with her husband Bob in Stockton in 1978, described forty-two years of living with the memory of that night — “a life sentence served by people who did not deserve it.”
Victor Hayes, attacked with his then-girlfriend in 1977, said in public remarks that he was angrier at institutions than at DeAngelo personally — specifically about the failure of investigators to arrest someone with a law enforcement background and the specific procedures that background implied. His statement reflected the frustration of someone who had lived with the case for four decades and who had specific questions about what the investigation had and hadn’t done.
Jennifer Carole, the daughter of Lyman Smith and stepdaughter of Charlene Smith, who were killed in Ventura in 1980, focused in her public remarks on the bonds formed among survivors and the possibility of finding meaning within loss. She said she wanted people to “find a way to do good.”
The Plea
On June 29, 2020, Joseph James DeAngelo entered a courtroom in Sacramento, now seventy-four years old, and pleaded guilty to twenty-six counts: thirteen of first-degree murder with special circumstances, and thirteen of kidnapping to commit robbery.
The guilty plea resolved the death penalty question that had been at the center of the case’s legal proceedings. In exchange for removing the possibility of a death sentence, DeAngelo admitted guilt on all charged counts and agreed to admit to hundreds of additional uncharged crimes involving sixty-one additional victims. The uncharged admissions covered a range of crimes across multiple counties, including assaults, burglaries, and other offenses that had not resulted in formal charges but that were documented in the investigative record.