Former police officers who worked with the man accused of being the Golden State Killer said nothing about their co-worker’s behavior would have led them to believe he was the man who terrorized California for a decade.
In interviews with KTXL, a former Auburn police chief and corporal with the Exeter Police Department said it was hard to believe that their onetime colleague, Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., was suspected of being the serial killer authorities say is responsible for at least 12 slayings, 46 rapes and more than 100 burglaries between 1974 and 1986.
“I feel personally embarrassed,” said Nick Willick, the former chief of the Auburn Police Department, who fired DeAngelo in 1979 after he was caught shoplifting. “It’s a black eye not just on my department but law enforcement.”
After a decades-long manhunt for a suspect, authorities last week arrested 72-year-old DeAngelo at his Citrus Heights home in Sacramento County. Investigators say DNA from one of the crime scenes matched DeAngelo’s.
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