## Final Accounting
Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. is serving thirteen consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, plus eight years, at California State Prison, Corcoran. He entered his guilty plea at age seventy-four. Under the terms of his sentence, he will die in prison.
The case that produced this outcome ran from March 1974, when the first Visalia Ransacker burglary is documented, to August 2020, when the sentence was imposed. The span is forty-six years.
During that span, thirteen people were killed, more than fifty others were sexually assaulted, and the communities where those crimes occurred were changed in ways that took years to recover from.
The technology that enabled the final identification did not exist in anything like its current form until roughly a decade before the investigation used it. The investigative application of that technology was novel enough in 2017 and 2018 that no established legal or ethical framework specifically governed it. The case resolved before those frameworks were fully developed.
The question of whether the resolution was just is not a simple one. The legal resolution reflects the standard of justice the criminal legal system provides. Whether it corresponds to what the survivors and families of victims would recognize as justice, in the fullest sense, is a question each of them has answered differently.
Jane Carson-Sandler, with her effective life sentence and the scars that outlast the healing. Kris Pedretti, with the lost girl who was not, in the end, lost. Gay Hardwick, with her forty-two-year sentence for a crime she did not commit. Victor Hayes, with his unanswered questions about institutional accountability. Jennifer Carole, with the silver linings she chose to find. Elizabeth Hupp, with forty-five years without her father.