From books to message boards, there have been millions of words written about the Golden State Killer, a serial rapist and murderer who terrorized northern, central and southern California from 1974 to 1986 and then seemingly vanished.

The newest book about the case, published Nov. 11, offers perhaps the most detailed look yet at the investigation and prosecution of Joseph DeAngelo for the Golden State Killer’s crimes, including a 1980 double murder in Ventura that produced the key evidence that led investigators to DeAngelo 28 years later.

DeAngelo, a former police officer, pleaded guilty to 13 murders and 13 kidnappings in 2020 and also admitted to scores of sexual assaults and other crimes. He is serving multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole.

The new book, “The People Vs. The Golden State Killer,” was written by Thien Ho, the lead prosecutor in the DeAngelo case. Ho is now the elected district attorney of Sacramento County. On Nov. 18, a week after his book was published, he announced his candidacy for Congress, in a Sacramento-area district that was redrawn under the recent Proposition 50 ballot measure.

Ho said his book can be seen as the third in a trilogy about the hunt for the Golden State Killer. The first book was “I’ll be Gone in the Dark,” by the true crime writer Michelle McNamara. She covered the case for years and coined the term “Golden State Killer,” but she died before the case was solved. Her book was published posthumously in 2018, a few months before DeAngelo was arrested.

Paul Holes, a retired investigator with the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office, helped connect the crimes to a single perpetrator and identify DeAngelo as the likely suspect. Holes published a book in 2022 called “Unmasked: My Life Solving America’s Cold Cases.”

Ho said his book fills a different niche than the others in a few ways. First, it’s written from a prosecutor’s point of view, so it goes behind the scenes in district attorney’s offices all over the state, as prosecutors debate where to bring DeAngelo to trial, whether to seek the death penalty and whether to accept his plea bargain.

The book also tells the stories of Holes and other investigators who spent decades following leads until they led to DeAngelo, and it follows many of the victims as they seek closure and finally confront DeAngelo in court.

“I wanted to turn the focus away from the criminal and the crimes and focus it on two things: the generation of law enforcement officers who never gave up and the victims,” Ho said. “I tried not to revel in all the prurient details of the crimes.”

Ventura Case Provided Crucial Evidence

Perhaps the key turning point in the Golden State Killer case came from the 1980 murder of Lyman and Charlene Smith in Ventura. At first, police didn’t connect it to break-ins, rapes and killings in other parts of the state. An innocent man, a business associate of Lyman Smith, was charged with the crime, and the charges were dropped a few months later.

The case went cold until 1998, when DNA testing determined the killer was the same person who’d committed rapes and murders in Orange and Santa Barbara counties. They would later be tied to similar crimes in Sacramento, the San Francisco Bay area and the San Joaquin Valley.

An assistant medical examiner named Claus Speth collected evidence at the Ventura crime scene in 1980. It was used up or discarded over the decades, but Speth was “meticulous and thorough,” Ho writes, and made it a habit to collect two sets of everything.

The extra kit sat in the bottom of a freezer at the Medical Examiner’s Office for 37 years, until Holes and other investigators came looking for a clean DNA sample they could use to find the Golden State Killer.

They used the DNA evidence from Ventura to create a profile on a genealogy website and looked for people who were relatives of the killer. Eventually, that led them to DeAngelo. Police confirmed his identity by getting his DNA from the trash outside his home in a Sacramento suburb.

“There were other counties that still had DNA, but what was unique about this case was how the DNA was used,” said Cheryl Temple, who was Ventura County’s chief deputy district attorney during the DeAngelo prosecution.

Greg Totten, then Ventura County’s district attorney, was “willing to try something that hadn’t been done before,” she said.

Without that evidence, it’s likely DeAngelo would never have been caught, Temple said. His known crimes stopped in 1986, which was the same year DNA evidence was first used to solve a sexual assault case. After that, DeAngelo either stopped or stopped leaving evidence.

“He was a cop, so he knew how not to get caught,” Temple said.

‘The Entire Community Changed’

Temple was the lead prosecutor from Ventura County on the DeAngelo case. She hasn’t read Ho’s book, but she said she remembers him as “a great prosecutor” and “very victim-focused.”

Ho took the lead because the case was tried in Sacramento, where many of DeAngelo’s crimes in the 1970s occurred. In 2018, “there was talk about the case coming to Ventura,” Temple said. “Everyone with a victim wanted it.”

But DeAngelo had been arrested in Sacramento County, and that’s where he was being held. And with the intense media and public interest in the case, plus scores of victims and dozens of prosecutors and investigators involved, it was much easier to hold the trial in the state capital than it would have been in a small city like Ventura.

“One more thing made them the right choice, and I didn’t appreciate it until we spent some time up there,” Temple said. “We went to locations where many of the assaults had taken place, and even though it had been 40 years, there were still bars on the windows. The entire community changed when this was going on in the ’70s.”

A Refugee’s Story

Ho’s book weaves together the hunt for the Golden State Killer with his own life story. He was born in Vietnam, during the war. After the fall of Saigon, Ho writes, the family’s friends and neighbors began to disappear. His uncle had been a government worker in South Vietnam, and the new communist government sent him to a re-education camp.

Ho and his parents and siblings fled on a fishing boat in 1976, landing first in Malaysia. They settled in Stockton and moved to San Jose a few years later.

“I came to this country as a refugee, and I believe in second chances,” Ho said. “I never thought I’d go to college. I never thought I’d be a lawyer. I never thought I’d be a prosecutor or the district attorney or a published author.”

Ho said he wrote the book without a ghostwriter, spending a couple hours a day on it first thing in the morning for about seven months. He’s begun a book tour and said he plans to have an event at some point in either Santa Barbara or Ventura County.

Some of the proceeds of the book, Ho said, will be donated to Phyllis’s Garden, a nonprofit that supports sexual assault victims. It was founded by two of DeAngelo’s victims, in honor of another victim, Phyllis Zitka.

In 1976, in Sacramento, Zitka was the first known victim of an attacker who was soon labeled the East Area Rapist. She died of cancer in 2020, but first she lived to confront DeAngelo in court and see him sentenced to multiple life terms.