By August 2018, thirteen kidnapping charges had been formally added, reflecting DeAngelo’s admission to abducting individuals during the crimes. The kidnapping-to-commit-robbery designation reflected the specific California kidnapping statute under which the charges were filed; the kidnappings involved restraining victims and taking property, among other elements.
The scale of the discovery material in the case — estimated at more than 1.3 million pages — reflected the decades of investigative work accumulated across multiple agencies. Preparing for a trial would have required defense attorneys to process that material, a task that legal observers estimated would take years. The timeline estimate of potentially ten years to trial, mentioned by prosecutors in explaining the eventual plea agreement, reflected the realistic assessment of what a full adversarial proceeding would have required.
The death penalty question was consistently present in the proceedings. California voters had retained the death penalty in a November 2016 referendum, and the special circumstance allegations accompanying the murder counts made DeAngelo death-penalty eligible. Prosecutors announced their intention to seek the death penalty in the early phase of the case.
The families and survivors of the crimes were consulted about the possibility of seeking the death penalty and the prospect of a plea agreement. The consultation was not universal — the number of affected individuals was large — but the district attorney offices made efforts to inform affected parties about the legal options and their implications.
For some families and survivors, the death penalty was an important possibility; they wanted the state to seek it. For others, the concern was different: death penalty cases in California have experienced extraordinary delays, with execution not often occurring even when the sentence is imposed, and a plea agreement guaranteeing life without parole was seen as a more certain outcome than a trial that could take years followed by appeals that could take decades more.