Sacramento District Attorney Thien Ho led the prosecution of the notorious serial killer Joseph DeAngelo, who terrorized California communities for decades and was apprehended after familial DNA provided a crucial lead. Ho spoke with PW about The People vs. the Golden State Killer (Third State Books, Nov.), which provides his inside perspective on the case.

What led to your choosing a career in law?
My family and I escaped Vietnam when I was almost five years old. My uncle had been sent to a re-education camp, without a jury or judge, so when you come from an environment where there is no system of justice, no due process for anyone, you appreciate the system in the U.S. I gravitated towards the law, and law was an avenue to give back to the community. That’s why I went to law school and became a prosecutor.

You’ve read other books about this case, most notably by Michelle McNamara and Paul Holes. What makes yours different?

There was no book that captured the investigation, the arrest, and the prosecution, as well as providing victims’ perspectives. I wanted to strip away the mystery behind the monster, tell the story about the men and women of law enforcement who never gave up searching for him, and give voices to the victims who waited so long to get their lives back.

DeAngelo initially faced the death penalty. How did you feel about the decision to take that off the table?

I’ve always felt that the death penalty should be reserved for the most heinous crimes. If anybody deserved it, it was DeAngelo. I was very upset by that decision. But there was a benefit. Phyllis, his first rape victim, who suffered immensely, was always in court, always in the front row. About a month before he was about to plead, she was diagnosed with cancer. She was able to be in court for his sentencing and died three months later. If we had continued pushing for the death penalty, she would have never had that moment of closure.

Your book contains facts that had not been made public before; could you share some?

He has three daughters, whom I don’t identify by name—I felt that they were victims too. One was a psychology major, getting her master’s degree, and she was fascinated by serial killers. Also, people don’t know that when he was known as the Ransacker, early on, he was a sergeant at the Exeter police department, 15 miles away, and participated in the search for the Ransacker.

Was this the first case using investigative genetic genealogy, and were you concerned about whether it would be challenged at trial?
There was one case before, but it was used there to identify a victim of sexual assault. This was the first-ever use of investigative genetic genealogy to identify the perpetrator. We’d collected his DNA from his garbage can and the door handle from his car, but that didn’t yield a full profile. So we put a sergeant detective in a garbageman’s uniform, who drove up to his house to collect the garbage, and we found a piece of tissue that was a full profile match to him. That profile came back to match the murders in Southern California and the rapes in Contra Costa County, and we got search warrants after he was arrested to get a DNA swab directly from him.

What do you hope true-crime readers come away understanding about this horrific case?
At the heart of my book is our journey to justice. I want readers to see the resiliency of the human spirit as demonstrated by the survivors, the generations of law enforcement, and the prosecutors who never gave up.