We watched DeAngelo say ‘I admit’ to horrible crimes. DA Schubert was born to make him say it
If there is one person who has been the heart and soul behind a decades-long effort to hunt, identify, arrest and prosecute Joseph James DeAngelo, the admitted Golden State Killer, it is Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert.
You could almost say Schubert was born to catch DeAngelo.
She was born to be at the ballroom at Sacramento State on Monday for the allocution of DeAngelo, 74, in what may go down as the most surreal criminal court proceeding some of us will ever witness. There they all were, prosecutors from up and down the state, and the families of DeAngelo’s victims, all gathered in a normally happy space at Sacramento State.
It was only chosen because it is big, we are in the middle of a pandemic, and the enormity of DeAngelo’s crimes required a cavernous space where all the parties could be accommodated while maintaining safe social distancing from each other.
Actually, the bizarre proceedings fit right in with the narrative of DeAngelo’s crime spree and the effect it had on Schubert, who can mark the formative years of her life by the timeline of DeAngelo case.
The Sacramento-born prosecutor was haunted by the unspeakable spree of rapes and murders taking place in suburban Sacramento neighborhoods just like hers when she was a young girl in the 1970s. Striking his first victim in 1975 and finding many others over the ensuing 12 years, DeAngelo pleaded guilty on Monday to 13 counts of murder and 13 counts of kidnap for robbery. He also admitted to 62 rapes and other crimes.
Watching a feeble and doddering DeAngelo plead guilty to count after count of the most vile, most vicious, most depraved crimes one human could commit against another in his high pitched growl of a voice, you felt the cumulative horror of his crimes. It was overwhelming.
What unbelievable achievement of tenacity and fortitude it was to bring the most notorious rapist/killer in U.S. history to justice more than 40 years after he began ruining countless lives, getting away with it for decades.
He had settled down in our midst, right in Citrus Heights, with his nice house and manicured lawn that he was attending when he was finally taken into custody in April of 2018.
Schubert’s support of DNA evidence
Schubert announced the momentous arrest of DeAngelo to the world.
In the late 1990s, Schubert was at the forefront of championing DNA evidence when it was still in its infancy. She embraced this breakthrough method of tracking long-sought killers and rapists by matching the genetic codes of evidence they left.
“In 2000, it was Schubert’s idea to file an arrest warrant for a notorious rapist, though neither she nor Sacramento cops had a suspect name to put on the warrant. The statute of limitations was about to expire for the “Second Story Rapist,” who broke into the second-story apartments of women and raped them,” I wrote in 2013.
“So on the arrest warrant Schubert listed only the genetic DNA of the ‘John Doe’ suspect retrieved by police at the crime scene.
Three weeks later, Paul Eugene Robinson was arrested for the crimes. His DNA matched that listed on the warrant. Robinson was subsequently convicted and the case went to the California Supreme Court – where Schubert’s side prevailed.
In 2002, Schubert formed the Cold Case Prosecution Unit, which deployed DNA evidence to try and solve cases that had gone cold decades before. Always, the “Golden State Killer,” a.k.a. the “East Area Rapist,” was the case above all others for Schubert . This case changed Sacramento. It stripped Sacramento’s growing suburbs of the veneer of small-town safety.
When I first met Schubert a decade ago and we talked about this case over coffee, she seemed like a hopeless dreamer to me. As we got to know each other better, she seemed to enjoy scaring me with details of the case that were already public.
In 2018, I wrote this: “So as she was telling me about how the rapist overpowered men he encountered, bound them and put plates on their backs and evil admonitions in their ears that he would kill his rape victim if a plate hit the floor, Schubert snapped out of her emotional detachment when noticing the horror on my face. She was reciting horrific details like numbers out of a phone book. I was projecting myself into the place of a male East Area Rapist victim – bound, helpless and blackmailed into staying perfectly still while listening to his wife being raped by animal.”
In 2016, the FBI launched a campaign to try and revive the DeAngelo case that seemed hopeless, at least to me, when I wrote about the effort.
Pulling together prosecutors
But it wasn’t hopeless. Behind the scenes, Schubert connected prosecutors from different regions to work with each other instead of against each other. She created a new sense of momentum and belief that the case could actually be solved.
She did all this with a cinematic life story that sets her apart from any other elected official in Sacramento – or anywhere else, for that matter. She was first elected in 2014, and was opposed by much of Sacramento’s gay community even though she is gay – the first openly gay person to be elected to a major office countywide.
The gay community opposed her because her older brother Frank ran the Proposition 8 campaign that outlawed gay marriage in California for a time. Schubert refused to condemn her brother publicly. They are a part of a large Catholic family with deep roots in Sacramento and Schubert, while privately hurt by her brother’s words and actions, was not going to politicize her relationship with her brother to get elected.
She is raising two boys in a world that changed while she’s been in office. Her predecessor, Jan Scully, had stopped reviewing police-involved shootings and it was not controversial. Schubert began reviewing them at the same time video of cops shooting Black suspects became a rallying the Black Lives Matter movement.
Schubert has never prosecuted a cop in her tenure, even some terribly controversial ones. The fallout caused her to erect barriers around her office after BLM staked it out. Some local Democrats who endorsed her in 2018 have paid the price for it. Sacramento City Council members Eric Guerra and Steve Hansen were booted off the central committee of the local Democratic party for their Schubert endorsement.
And earlier this year, Hansen was defeated in his re-election bid by an opponent whose supporters tagged Hansen as a Republican sympathizer. After she won in 2018, Schubert announced that she was switching from Republican to no party preference.
I know she’s been hurt by columns I’ve written criticizing her for not prosecuting any cops for killing Black suspects, but to her credit, she has remained accessible and respectful. That’s more than I can say for Sacramento Sheriff Scott Jones or Sacramento Police Chief Daniel Hahn.
If investigating cops were removed from her duties and given to a statewide unit as some legislators are proposing, there might not be a better DA in California than Anne Marie Schubert.
Because of what she has accomplished, and for who she is, Schubert has been one of the most consequential public officials in the Sacramento region of the last quarter century.
If her life were a movie, charging DeAngelo and putting him away would surely be her crowning achievement. She believed it was possible when few else did. She championed the methods that got DeAngelo arrested. She rallied others to the cause when few others believed. A vast network of people played a hand in the effort that culminated in DeAngelo meekly admitting his crimes on Monday.
But Anne Marie Schubert lived those crimes as a child, had nightmares about them, and then played a major role in solving them. What a story, what a life.
This story was originally published June 29, 2020 at 2:07 PM with the headline "We watched DeAngelo say ‘I admit’ to horrible crimes. DA Schubert was born to make him say it."
