Joseph DeAngelo, the alleged Golden State Killer will be charged Monday with the 1975 killing of Claude Snelling in Visalia, CA. The Visalia Police Chief and Tulare County D.A. will give a press conference at 11 a.m. PT. This will be the 13th murder DeAngelo has been charged with since his arrest in April of this year.
In September of 1975, a masked man broke into the bedroom of Snelling's teenage daughter and attempted to abducted her at gunpoint. When Snelling, a local journalism professor, intervened, the intruder shot him twice, killing him.
Investigators have long believed that DeAngelo is the man known as the "Visalia Ransacker" who terrorized the small California community in 1974 and 1975, committing over 100 burglaries and sexual assaults. At the time, DeAngelo worked as a police officer in the nearby town of Exeter.
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Authorities were able to link the gun used to kill Snelling to a firearm stolen earlier in another of the Ransacker burglaries.
While the killing of Claude Snelling is the 13th murder charge DeAngelo will face, investigators believe Snelling was the first person he killed.
Following the Snelling shooting, DeAngelo would allegedly go on to move across the state —from Central Valley to San Francisco to Southern California in a rampage of robberies, rapes, and murders that lasted from 1974 to 1986.
In different counties he had different monikers — the Visalia Ransacker, the Original Night Stalker, the East Area Rapist, and the Diamond Knot Killer. Writer Michelle McNamara, working in tandem with investigator and journalist Billy Jensen, helped link these various cold case crimes to one suspect called the Golden Sate Killer.
This is a developing story and will be updated.