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Before and After: The Three Identities That Hid a Monster for Forty Years
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Golden State Killer terrorised California under three separate identities for over a decade — and a retired cop named Joseph James DeAngelo hid in plain sight until a DNA genealogy breakthrough changed cold case investigation forever. This chapter traces how the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist, and the Original Night Stalker were finally revealed as one man.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before April of two thousand eighteen, Joseph James DeAngelo was a retired grandfather living in a suburb of Sacramento. He mowed his lawn.
To understand what it took to catch him, you have to understand who he was across time. He started as the Visalia Ransacker.
Sacramento didn't know about Visalia. That's the blunt truth of it.
By nineteen seventy-nine, the East Area Rapist had disappeared from Northern California. Nobody knew where he'd gone.
Into that silence came a crime writer named Michelle McNamara. She'd been following the case for years, writing about it publicly and building an audience of people equally obsessed with the unidentified killer.
The actual breakthrough came from a retired investigator named Paul Holes. Holes had worked on the Golden State Killer case for years, and after retiring, he kept working on it.
By the time investigators had narrowed their genealogical analysis to Joseph James DeAngelo, they needed confirmation. They couldn't arrest on genealogy alone.
The legal case that followed was shaped by the weight of the evidence and the complexity of the charges. DeAngelo faced thirteen murder counts.
The sentencing hearing in August of two thousand twenty gave the courtroom, and the parking lot, to the people who'd waited longest. Over forty rape survivors and family members of murder victims spoke.
What the Golden State Killer case left behind extends far beyond one conviction. Investigative genetic genealogy, the method Paul Holes used to trace DeAngelo through GEDmatch, is now a recognized discipline.
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