Golden State Killer Tried to Blame Murders on Split Personality: 'Jerry Made Me Do It' By Christine Pelisek

On April 24, 2018, Golden State Killer Joseph DeAngelo was taken into custody accused of a spate of killings and rapes that terrorized Californians in the 1970s and ’80s.  

After his arrest — at his home in Citrus Heights, Calif. — DeAngelo, a former police officer and mechanic, was brought to an interrogation room. There, according to Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho, the lead prosecutor handling the case, he was left alone for two hours “to stew in his own juices” while investigators watched him.

DeAngelo had an “uncanny ability to sit there for half an hour and not even move. You could barely tell he was breathing,” says Ho, author of the newly released book, The People vs. the Golden State Killer, in an interview with PEOPLE. “He had such amazing ability to be patient and sit there. You can imagine him standing in some bushes watching you through your window in the same way.”

When investigators attempted to speak to DeAngelo, he stared blankly ahead, spoke very little or muttered to himself, according to Ho.

“I’ve done nothing, I’ve done nothing,” DeAngelo said, Ho writes in his book. “I’ve dreamed about him [unintelligible mumbling] . . . I was strong.”

At one point, detectives asked him about the 1980 murders of husband and wife Lyman and Charlene Smith in Ventura County before they left the interrogation room.

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DeAngelo allegedly then “made puzzling statements about his struggle against an unidentified ‘him,’” Ho writes.

“I did all that . . . I didn’t have the strength to push him out. He made me. He went with me. It was like, in my head, I mean, he’s a part of me. I didn’t want to do those things. I pushed Jerry out and had a happy life. I did all those things. I’ve destroyed all their lives . . . I raped. So now I gotta pay the price,” DeAngelo said, according to the book.

“DeAngelo was claiming that an alter ego named Jerry made him hurt, rape, and kill his victims,” Ho writes.

While speaking with PEOPLE, Ho says DeAngelo — dressed in cargo shorts, tube socks and a T-shirt — had “a little bit of legal knowledge” from his time as a police officer and was trying to lay the groundwork for a dissociative identity disorder defense.

“Jerry made me do it,” Ho says, paraphrasing the killer’s assertion. “That Jerry was inside of him.  And so he tried to establish this split personality defense, but he did it in such an amateurish way that he defeated his insanity defense because insanity in the State of California, you only get it if you don’t understand the nature of the wrongfulness of your crimes. Obviously, he understood it, because he said, ‘Jerry made me do it. I didn’t want to do it’ so he understood the wrongfulness, but he tried to create that defense — which you don’t often see, that sort of manipulation, by a typical defendant.”

Ho says it wasn’t the first time that DeAngelo — who was also known as the Visalia Ransacker, the East Bay Rapist and the Original Night Stalker — attempted a similar strategy. According to Ho, in 1979, DeAngelo was detained at a store for stealing dog repellent and a hammer — and then allegedly faked a heart attack and screamed incoherently when deputies showed up. 

“He’s a master manipulator,” Ho says. “He started to pretend like he was crazy in front of security. He later admitted to the police that ‘I just pretended to be crazy because I didn’t want them to call the police. They might let me go.’”

DeAngelo, who was caught via DNA testing and genetic genealogy, pleaded guilty in June 2020 to 13 murders and other crimes in order to avoid the death penalty.

DeAngelo started his crime spree as a burglar in Visalia, Calif., where he is suspected of over 100 home burglaries from April 1974 to December 1975.

His first known murder was of Claude Snelling, a journalism professor and public information officer at the College of the Sequoias. Snelling was fatally shot in September 1975 after he attempted to stop the kidnapping of his 16-year-old daughter.