Elizabeth Hupp, the daughter of Claude Snelling, addressed the court. She had been sixteen when her father was killed protecting her in 1975. She was now sixty-one. She had spent more than four decades as the daughter of a man killed in the first documented deadly crime attributed to DeAngelo.
On August 21, 2020, Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman sentenced Joseph James DeAngelo to thirteen consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus eight years.
DeAngelo, speaking at the sentencing, told the assembled victims and families: “I’ve listened to all of your statements, each one of them, and I am truly sorry to everyone I’ve hurt.”
The statement was received differently by different people in the courtroom. Some survivors have said publicly that the apology felt insufficient. Others have said that hearing the words was meaningful. The range of responses reflected the range of experiences that the people in that courtroom had had — crimes that occurred in different years, different contexts, different phases of what the investigation had established about them, and different decades of living with the uncertainty of an unresolved case.
DeAngelo was transferred to California State Prison, Corcoran, in the months following sentencing. He is held there under a sentence that means he will not leave prison.
The Technology: What GEDmatch Was and What It Has Become
GEDmatch was founded in 2010 by Curtis Rogers and John Olson, both of whom were amateur genealogists rather than professionals in genetics or law enforcement. Rogers was a retired businessman; Olson was a transportation engineer. The site was designed as a tool for genealogy enthusiasts who wanted to compare DNA data across platforms — someone who had tested with 23andMe could upload their raw data to GEDmatch and find matches with people who had tested with AncestryDNA, because the different companies’ databases did not communicate with each other.