Guns

•This information was given to Inspector Shelby at the Sacramento Sheriff's Department in early 1977, and he agreed with Vaughan that they should focus on recent law enforcement transferees between the jurisdictions. Unfortunately, their cutoff date was two months before DeAngelo moved from Exeter PD to Auburn PD.

•Eventually, the Super Vel and Smith & Wesson led to a case match between the McGowen shooting, and the 1979 Offerman/Manning murders in Goleta. That case became more urgent for Sheriff's investigators after the killer returned to Goleta in 1981, and committed the Domingo/Sanchez homicides. 

•In March, 1982 Santa Barbara detectives travelled to Visalia to discuss their case with Vaughan and McGowen:

•Although they had a unique ballistics match between their cases, neither jurisdiction had a viable suspect, and all attempts to identify a person of interest who had been in the Visalia area from 1974-76 and Goleta from 1979-81 failed. Neither Visalia nor Santa Barbara investigators had any idea that the Maggories had been killed with a Miroku revolver identical to the one used in the Snelling homicide. 

•Two years later, in June, 1984, Santa Barbara made the information about the Super Vel public, and offered a $25,000 reward in the Offerman/Manning case:

•The Robinson knife had been used in the failed October, 1979 Goleta EAR attack. DeAngelo brought that knife to the scene in a sheath attached to his belt. He dropped it when he fled the scene while being chased by the victims' neighbor—an FBI agent. 

•Unfortunately, this was not the only DeAngelo gun match seemingly ignored for 40 years. On September 11, 1975, Claude Snelling was shot twice in the chest with a .38 caliber Miroku “Special Police” revolver (modeled on the Colt  “Detective Special ”). The ammo used was jacketed hollow point, with a 6 left-handed twist.

•In early 1977, the CII computer system matched the Visalia Ransacker and East Area Rapist cases as sharing both physical description and MO. That caused Sgt. Vaughan to contact SSD Inspector Shelby to discuss the case, and share information:

•On Feb. 2, 1978, Brian and Katie Maggiore were each shot once at close range by a man who had tried to tie them up, presumably to kidnap and assault Katie at a nearby empty house he had left open (gate & back door). Brian was shot in the chest on the ground after falling, and Katie in the top of the head as she cowered by a locked gate. The murders occurred in the center of the EAR's Rancho Cordova attack area, and a pre-tied shoelace was found dropped at the scene.

• As with the Snelling homicide, the ammo was jacketed hollow point .38 caliber, with a 6 left-handed twist, fired from a Miroku “Special Police” revolver.

•Rather than share the identification of the Miroku with other jurisdictions, SSD investigators continued to hide the information while quietly looking for the murder weapon:

•From 1978-2025, SSD actively hid their knowledge that the Maggiores had been killed with a Miroku— likely the exact same gun that had killed Claude Snelling after being stolen by the Ransacker in Visalia. SSD did not send the bullets removed from Katie and Brian to the CalDOJ crime lab for comparison with the Snelling slugs, they did not tell Visalia PD about the possible match, and they actively lied about the possibility of the VR being the EAR.

•In 2013, FBI profilers reviewed all of the EAR/ONS and VR case files and determined that they were the same single offender, and that the best course of action was to focus the investigation in Tulare County. However, someone had withheld the SSD Biondi report, and all of the later reports that identified the Maggiore murder weapon as a Miroku. That linking forensic match was unknown to the profilers, and the FBI workgroup. 

•The removal of just a few pages from the case file made the entire cold case investigation useless, and allowed Paul Holes to claim that he and the FBI had eliminated all possibility of a VR/EAR connection. It was always a lie. 

•It was not until 5 years after DeAngelo’s guilty plea that the prosecutor disclosed that the best forensic evidence linking DeAngelo to the Sacramento cases was the Miroku:

 Just like the EAR, the Ransacker also took a single earring from a pair, leaving behind the other one to remind the victim of what was taken. Alavezos recounted the fateful night of September 11, 1975, when the Ransacker tried to kidnap Beth Snelling and killed her father, Claude. My mind jumped ahead of the presentation. How did we know it was in fact the Ransacker who kidnapped Beth and killed Claude Snelling? As if reading my mind, Alavezos stated, "A little over a week before the Snelling murder, the Ransacker stole a Miroku handgun during a burglary. The gun owner had gone to target practice and fired multiple rounds from the pistol into a tree stump. Investigators later recovered the bullets from the stump and compared them to the one removed from Snelling, and it was a perfect match."

I nearly jumped out of my chair when I heard Miroku. I knew it was an uncommon pistol. I had just read in the Maggiore investigative file that the bullet removed from Brian's body had been analyzed by the Crime Lab's ballistics expert. From his examinations of the striations and markings on the bullet, he speculated that it had been fired from either a Colt or Miroku pistol. Without DNA evidence connecting DeAngelo to the Maggiore murders, I needed every piece of circumstantial evidence I could find.

Ho, Thien. The People vs. the Golden State Killer (p. 223)

•DeAngelo also killed Cheri Domingo and Greg Sanchez with a .38/.357 revolver in Goleta in 1981:

...and tried to kill Rodney Miller in Sacramento in 1978 with a 9mm Luger:

•The Luger did not match any of DeAngelo's other charged cases, but a 9 mm Luger was used in the unsolved double shooting of Mike Mageau & Darlene Ferrin at Blue Rock Springs, Vallejo, in 1969.

•DeAngelo displayed a handgun in almost all of the EAR attacks, and he was charged with, and admitted 13 kidnappings to “carry away” girls and women using various large caliber firearms including .357, .38, 9mm, and .45: