Thien Ho

Thien Ho was elected District Attorney of Sacramento County in 2022, and officially took office in January 2023. Prior to the election, Ho served in executive management as the Sacramento County Assistant Chief Deputy D.A. over the Justice and Community Relations Bureau, which handles post-conviction litigation, training, community prosecution and media outreach.

Over his 23-year career as an attorney, he successfully prosecuted sexual assault, gang, and homicide cases. He was the supervisor of the Gang and Hate Crime Unit and has personally charged and prosecuted hate crimes. Most notably, he successfully prosecuted the East Area Rapist/Golden State Killer, who committed 13 murders and over 50 sexual assaults in 11 different jurisdictions throughout California. Michelle McNamara wrote about the case in her book, “I’ll be Gone in the Dark.” The case has also been featured on CNN, HBO, 20/20, and countless news outlets across the world.

Ho is the former Vice President of the National Asian Pacific Islander Prosecutors Association (NAPIPA)'s Northern California Chapter. In 2017, he was presented with both the NAPIPA and Sacramento District Attorney’s Office Prosecutor of the Year Award.

In 2018, Michelle McNamara’s #1 New York Times bestseller, "I’ll Be Gone in the Dark" chronicled her years-long obsession with finding the Golden State Killer, a serial killer and rapist who committed at least thirteen murders, fifty-one rapes, and 120 burglaries across California in the 1970s and 1980s. Tragically, McNamara, who died in 2016—her husband, Patton Oswalt, and two writers completed and published her book posthumously—didn’t live to see Joseph DeAngelo, a.k.a. the Golden State Killer, brought to justice.

Thien Ho, the District Attorney of Sacramento, was the lead prosecutor of DeAngelo, “one of the most notorious serial predators in American history.” (Fresh Air/NPR). His book, "The People vs. the Golden State Killer," is the first official account of how the Golden State Killer was apprehended and put behind bars for life. Ho led an elite team of law enforcement from six California prosecutor's offices in the hunt for DeAngelo. They used a newly developed tool known as Investigative Genetic Genealogy, pioneered by Paul Holes (Unmasked, Celadon, 2022), to connect DeAngelo to multiple cold cases stretching back nearly a half-century.

"The People vs. the Golden State Killer" also recounts Ho’s fascinating personal journey—escaping communist Vietnam on a fishing boat as a child, working his way up from an internship to an elite homicide division, and eventually to Sacramento District Attorney. Ho also tells the authorized accounts of three of DeAngelo’s rape survivors, Kris, Gaye, and Phyllis, who recount with Ho’s help the arc of their lives from the crime to the effects on their lives in the subsequent years to the discovery of DeAngelo and his capture.