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Guilty Plea, Parking Lot Justice: The Day DeAngelo Faced His Victims
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
From petty burglar to serial killer — the full arc of Joseph James DeAngelo's crimes across six California counties, and the cold case DNA breakthrough that finally exposed him. This chapter traces how one man hid behind three names and forty years of investigative failure.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before April two thousand eighteen, Joseph James DeAngelo was a retired grandfather living quietly in a suburb of Sacramento. He mowed his lawn.
It started with petty theft. Or at least, that's what it looked like.
He left Tulare County in late nineteen seventy-six and turned up in Sacramento. And what he did there was something else entirely.
In nineteen seventy-nine, the East Area Rapist disappeared. No more Sacramento attacks.
The investigation never fully died. It just changed shape.
Paul Holes retired from his investigative career in March two thousand eighteen. Before he left, he uploaded the Golden State Killer's crime-scene DNA profile to GEDmatch, a free, publicly accessible genealogy database.
The legal proceedings moved slowly, partly because of DeAngelo's age and health, partly because of the sheer complexity of coordinating charges across multiple counties. Then the pandemic arrived and slowed everything further.
The Golden State Killer case is now studied as the turning point for investigative genetic genealogy. After the arrest, the FBI created a dedicated team to apply the same methodology to other cold cases.
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