Guns

Judge Curry, March 18, 2009   Transcript Page 6275

•Paul Kovacich’s service weapon (which was sold by PCSO while being held as evidence, and was unavailable for testing) was a Smith & Wesson Model 686 revolver which fired both .357 Magnum or .38 Special cartridges. For service carry, it was typically loaded with jacketed, hollow point rounds.

•One of the crimes admitted by DeAngelo, but unable to be charged due to the expiration of the statue of limitations, was the attempted murder of Visalia PD Agent Bill McGowen. 

•DeAngelo hit McGowen’s flashlight and he had to have surgery to remove a piece of shattered glass from his eye. Luckily, he had been trained to hold his flashlight away from his body for just that reason. 

• The gun used by DeAngelo in that instance was a .38 or .357 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver with Super Vel ammunition.

•The crime lab had actually found that although the bullets were .38 caliber Super Vel, they could have been loaded into into .38 Special or .357 Magnum cartridges—Super Vel made both. Because the cartridges are not ejected from a revolver, that also meant that the gun could have been either a .38 or .357 Smith & Wesson revolver:

•The use of the Super Vel seemed to confirm something that Visalia PD Sgt. Vaughan already suspected—that the Visalia Ransacker was a member of  law enforcement. That ammunition was marketed and sold only to police departments, and VPD had no reports of any thefts of it in the area. 

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

•It appears that DeAngelo wanted law enforcement to give him public “credit” as a serial killer, because in December of 1979, he again used a .38/.357 Smith & Wesson revolver loaded with .38 Super Vel bullets to kill Drs. Offerman and Manning in Goleta:

•There is nothing in the case files, or the later charges against DeAngelo that shows that the McGowen and Offerman/Manning ballistics were ever compared to each other—something that should have been done in January, 1980. There was a direct MO, and possible forensics connection between Visalia and Goleta, and somehow it got missed.

•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: