It’s April 2018, and suspected Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. sits in an interview room at the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office detective bureau, staring at a wall. Arrested that day, he’s dressed in shorts and a T-shirt: an old, liver-spotted man with empty blue eyes, but also a former cop who knows to keep quiet.
His silence makes Ventura County District Attorney’s Office cold case investigator Steve Rhods bristle.
Rhods (pronounced “roads”) is 62 and six foot one, with cropped white hair, rimless glasses, and an in-your-face interrogation style. The other detectives are treating DeAngelo deferentially, offering soft drinks and trips to the bathroom. So when it’s his turn to question the suspected serial rapist and murderer who terrorized California in the 1970s and ’80s, Rhods annoys his colleagues by going on the attack.
“I didn’t do any of this stuff,” DeAngelo says.
“Well, the DNA says differently,” says Rhods, referring to the case of Charlene Smith, raped and, along with her husband, Lyman, bludgeoned to death in 1980 in their Ventura home. Rhods had uncovered the decades-old rape kit that helped lead to DeAngelo’s identification and arrest.
“Your DNA is inside of Charlene.”
DeAngelo begins to cry.
“Why are you crying?” Rhods asks. “Did your victims cry like this?”
Rhods leaves the room to listen through headphones as DeAngelo, now alone, rambles for more than two hours.
“Oh, God. I couldn’t control myself,” DeAngelo says to himself, moaning and blaming someone else inside his head for his actions. “It’s so shameful.… What have I done?”
Ultimately, DeAngelo will plead guilty to 13 counts of murder, including the Smiths’.
“I made a serial killer cry,” Rhods says today.
The drive home from Sacramento, along barren stretches of Interstate 5, offers an investigator ample time to reflect. And the Golden State Killer case triggers an idea. Heading back to Ventura, Rhods wonders whether the science that trapped DeAngelo can resolve another cold case that’s bedeviling him: the gruesome homicide of an unknown woman nearly 40 years before.
Genetic genealogy had linked DNA at the Smiths’ crime scene to existing DNA profiles of DeAngelo’s relatives and led to DeAngelo himself. Now, Rhods thinks, perhaps that science can be turned in another direction.
Veteran investigator Steve Rhods helped take down the Golden State Killer. But solving the identity of his first Jane Doe murder case has proved even more vexing, and reveals a larger problem: Why does society so easily overlook missing women of color?
Already, DNA has identified the suspected killer of the unidentified woman who haunts Rhods, and that man is about to go on trial. Perhaps, now, science can give his victim back her name.
To investigators clustered at the scene in shirtsleeves on that warm Friday afternoon in July 1980, she looked young, probably in her 20s. She was sprawled on a dirt slope near a parking lot above the Westlake High School football field in Thousand Oaks, a safe, upscale suburb 40 miles north of Los Angeles. Her face, tilted to the sun, was a perfect heart shape. Her dark hair, lighter at the tips, was matted with blood, as were her white T-shirt and red corduroy pants. Open-toed, high-heeled shoes had been tossed into the brush. Blood smears suggested that the woman had been killed elsewhere, dumped from a car, and dragged to her public
