On June 29, 2020, the language changed from charged to pleaded guilty.
The Orange County District Attorney's announcement reported thirteen pleas to first-degree murder and thirteen to kidnapping to commit robbery. It also described admissions to additional uncharged crimes. After the identification, arrest, and combined complaint, the defendant had formally accepted responsibility in the resolution being announced by the six counties.
The announcement did not present the decision as a way to avoid the history. It described an effort to bring that history into a public acknowledgment. Prosecutors said they had consulted victims and families, considered the ages of the people involved, and faced the loss of some key witnesses through death. Their explanation included the prospect of a proceeding extending for years.
I had reached the plea with the same impatience that had made the arrest seem like a sufficient ending. Find the man, assemble the case, obtain the result. The public rationale interrupted that convenient sequence. A prosecution could have strong evidence and still involve choices about the burdens of obtaining an outcome. More time was not an abstract price paid by a file.
The earlier chronology made that visible. Snelling had been killed in 1975. The Maggiores in 1978. The Southern California murders extended into 1986. Some people had lived with this history for most of an adult life before the defendant stood accused under a single case number. A further long proceeding would take place within lives that had already absorbed those decades.
The prosecutors' release described more than 1.3 million pages of discovery and anticipated that the prosecution could take as long as ten years. Those were their figures and assessment, offered to explain the decision. They were not a countdown I could treat as certain. Their importance was that the public explanation made the possible duration part of the reasoning rather than treating a plea only as an abrupt shortcut.
The decision also had to work across the joined case. The counties were prosecuting one defendant, but the events had different dates, evidence, and people affected. The same result would enter different family histories. Consultation could be reported without pretending it produced one shared emotion or unanimous agreement about what the outcome meant.
The pleas themselves supplied a firm change. Earlier documents had accused DeAngelo of specific crimes. The June announcement reported his acceptance of guilt on the charged counts. The terms of the story could now change accordingly, without requiring an invented jury verdict to make the ending sound more decisive.
It was tempting to use the total of twenty-six as a summary of everything. But the formal counts did not measure the whole reach of the acknowledgment. The announcement expressly included additional uncharged conduct. The legal outcome therefore had a defined charged case and a broader admitted history. Following both would become necessary before the story could turn to punishment.
The Snelling event already showed why. His murder was a charged count; the kidnapping of his daughter appeared under a different heading. One event had left more than one kind of harm and more than one legal entry. A reader who followed only the murder total would lose part of what the proceeding had acknowledged.
The same was true of the McGowen confrontation. The detective had survived an attempt to kill him, and the offender had escaped. That event remained in the account even though it did not enlarge the number of completed murders. A history built only from the most familiar headline would leave it at the edge.
The plea announcement let the narrative move toward a conclusion, but it also required the account to become wider before it closed. I set the date beside the arrest, then added a separate space for the admitted conduct. The question was no longer whether the named defendant would accept responsibility on the charged case. It was how much of the history that acknowledgment actually encompassed.
The next page began with someone identified only by a protected designation. Her place in the proceeding was as specific as a named murder count, even though the public record preserved her privacy.