Golden State Killer: Writing My Victim Impact Statement

[Update Aug 25, 2020: I got it done, here’s the final statement. This guy is behind bars for life. Hallelujah.]

I typically don’t struggle to find the words. I enjoy writing and I’ve worked in marketing my whole life: using words is what I do. But as the sentencing hearing of Joseph DeAngelo, the now convicted Golden State Killer grows near, my statement is due and I don’t even have a first draft.

If you look at how the legal system works, Victim Impact Statements play an important role (see Ventura’s guidelines). They are intended to help the judge to understand three things about the victim, relative to the crime: the physical, emotional, and financial effects of the crime. From there, the judge may use that information to determine sentencing and financial restitution. We address our remarks to him, not the defendant.

My dad, Lyman Smith and his wife, Charlene Smith the Christmas following their wedding, 1975.

After forty years, this is not an easy task.

DeAngelo sadistically raped and then tortured and killed my stepmother and my father in Ventura, California in 1980. I was just 18 and my brothers were 15 and 12. My younger brother was the one who found them, three days dead, in their bed. It was like a bomb went off in our young lives. For twenty years, we thought it was a horrific murder in a small town.