Thien Ho is the author of “The People vs. The Golden State Killer.” He was elected Sacramento County district attorney in 2022 and took office in 2023. Courtesy photo

SACRAMENTO REGION, CA (MPG) - For the first time, the story of a cold case that lasted more than 40 years plaguing the Sacramento area and various communities throughout California was officially recounted by the then lead prosecutor in “The People vs. The Golden State Killer” (Third State Books, Nov. 11, 2025). The book was written by Thien Ho, Sacramento County’s current district attorney. 

Joseph DeAngelo, better known by monikers such as the East Area Rapist, Visalia Ransacker, the Original Nightstalker and the Golden State Killer, wreaked havoc throughout six counties in California, committing more than 120 burglaries, more than 50 rapes and 13 murders. DeAngelo’s first victims murdered in Rancho Cordova were a couple, Brian and Katie Maggiore.

“Nothing compares to (DeAngelo’s case) for me personally of any case I've worked on and it's just because of the scope and the volume and the challenges that came with prosecuting a cold case that was 40 years old,” Ho said.  

During the time of DeAngelo’s investigation, capture and conviction, Ho was the assistant chief deputy district attorney and lead prosecutor of the team that successfully achieved a conviction of the notorious killer.

“There's one thing to arrest somebody but there's another thing to build a case and present it in a court of law,” Ho recently told Messenger Publishing Group. “And building a case is like building a house; you have to build a foundation first.”

When presenting a case for trial, Ho said, he first questions how he wants to tell the story and creates an A layer, B layer and C layer that cohesively converge throughout its duration. 

The A layer was the overarching case, Ho said, going through the investigation, capture and prosecution of the Golden State Killer. The B layer was Ho’s personal story, a Vietnamese refugee who studied at McGeorge School of Law, taught there and rose through the judicial ranks, elected to district attorney in Sacramento in 2022. The C layer was conveying the voice of the survivors, a tremendous responsibility that Ho said he felt out of respect.

“There were literally three-million pages of documents that had to be reviewed, organized and turned over,” Ho said “And so part of the challenge of any case is telling the story but before you can do that, you have to understand it and the challenge here is that this is a cold case, where the crimes happen 30 to 40 years prior.”

Facing lost witnesses, discarded evidence and faded memories, Ho said, rebuilding the case was a meticulous process that was taken one case at a time. He said that DeAngelo’s pursuit was aided by investigative genetic genealogy (IGG), a process that builds a genetic family tree to profile suspects. Nearly 1,000 cases have been solved so far because of investigative genetic genealogy, according to Ho. 

Tens of thousands of suspects were identified over the cold case’s four decades before DNA evidence eventually tied DeAngelo to the string of crimes that captivated six counties throughout California. Leaving bodily fluids and other DNA at multiple crime scenes during his criminal career, Ho said that DeAngelo’s crimes were consistent, his actions served as a signature, tying him to the nearly 200 crimes he was convicted of through his genetic family tree.

Ho outlined the obstacles to be overcome during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the creation of a courtroom at the Sacramento State Ballroom to accommodate roughly 200 people while social distancing, a term that Ho said was foreign to most up until spring 2020. 

“Those victims deserved to be there,” Ho said. “So we looked around at the Golden One Center here in Sacramento where we looked at the Memorial Auditorium. We even looked at an airport hangar.”

A makeshift courtroom during a pandemic was unprecedented, Ho said, and the ballroom’s back entrance had to facilitate an armored vehicle, in addition to 200 individuals. He said it was a challenge to protect the victims’ health as well as his own and that of his family, while continuing to move the case along in court. Ho said that a traditional courtroom fits about 40 people without social distancing, so a larger venue was sought to accommodate courtroom victims capacity while social distancing. 

Joseph DeAngelo worked as a police officer and then a mechanic while committing horrific crimes in secret. DeAngelo’s ability to meticulously compartmentalize allowed him to evade detection and reminds us that evil doesn’t always look like a monster. Courtesy photo

“If you know your why, you will find your way,” Ho said. “We knew our why, we were doing this for the victims, we were doing it to bring them justice. That was our why.”

Ho said that the prosecution team created a profile on DeAngelo from his birth in Bath, New York to his post-arrest as a camera was placed inside DeAngelo’s cell without his knowledge. DeAngelo’s cell footage showed him obsessively pacing around, Ho said, but he was rolled into the courtroom via a wheelchair to seem frail and weak. Ho said that the prosecution saw right through DeAngelo’s feeble act because his timing was too deliberate. He said it seemed as if DeAngelo was attempting to create a narrative of mental instability. 

“DeAngelo was meticulous. He compartmentalized his life with surgical precision. He was not impulsive, he planned, he stalked, he adapted. That is how he avoided capture for so long,” Ho said. “It was chilling to realize that someone could commit such evil while maintaining the appearance of normalcy. But evil does not always look like a monster. Sometimes, it looks like your neighbor.”

With modern technology, Ho said, the likelihood of serial killers living “normal” lives is not as high as when DeAngelo’s criminal career was at its peak. Ho said there’s too much forensic and electronic evidence to connect the dots of a case plus the plethora of security cameras and cellphone cameras in this modern age. 

DeAngelo’s God complex, the feeling of unstoppable control, revealed how weak he truly was in his own life, hunting his victims like prey, Ho said. DeAngelo’s actions displayed his manipulative compulsion throughout his crimes.

“He was playing God. When he tied him up and he put a bedsheet over them and glasses on top of them, he was being God over them,” Ho said. “He held their lives in the palm of his hands when he was committing his sexual assault.”

Ho writes about sleepless nights in anticipation of new developments in the DeAngelo case. Asked about the crimes’ dark nature and how it affected him, Ho said that the darkness remains a part of him but does not consume him as much.  

“Maybe it doesn't creep over your consciousness as much or often but it's always there,” Ho said.
”It's never completely gone. It becomes a part of you in some way.”

“The People vs. The Golden State Killer” is set to be released on Nov. 11 in the Nonfiction/True Crime section. Ho said he woke up at 5 a.m. to write the book two hours every day for seven months. Ho started with a 30-page outline. The book’s cover depicts the Rancho Cordova neighborhood in which the first couple murdered by the Golden State Killer took place. 

Ho will have a book launch party from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Nov. 12 at the Sacramento Public Library’s Tsakopoulos Library Galleria, 828 I St., Sacramento. Ho will also travel to St. Louis, Houston, Seattle, the Bay Area and Southern California for a book tour throughout the fall.  

To learn more about the district attorney’s book launch event at the Sacramento Public Library, visit https://engage.saclibrary.org/event/14608224. The book is for sale online at Third State Books’ website at thirdstatebooks.com, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon. 

“The People vs. The Golden State Killer” is $30. A portion of the book’s proceeds will be donated by Ho and Third State Books to Phyllis’s Garden, a nonprofit organization advocating for sexual assault survivors’ rights begun in honor of a DeAngelo survivor.