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The Night He Was Watching: How One DNA Upload Ended 40 Years of Terror
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Golden State Killer terrorised California for over a decade — fifty rapes, thirteen murders, three identities — and a single genealogy database upload finally broke the case wide open. This is the chapter-by-chapter story of how Joseph James DeAngelo hid in plain sight, and how cold case DNA science exposed him.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A woman in Sacramento, nineteen seventy-seven. She's asleep.
Joseph James DeAngelo didn't start with murder. He started with locks.
By early nineteen seventy-six, Sacramento County was reporting a new series of attacks. A man in a ski mask was entering homes at night, binding couples, and carrying out prolonged assaults.
Southern California's coastal counties, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Orange, began recording a new series of home invasion murders. Couples.
Cold case investigators cycled in and out of the files. The East Area Rapist case, the Original Night Stalker murders, they accumulated documentation, DNA profiles, theory.
GEDmatch worked differently from CODIS. It matched DNA not to known criminals but to anyone who'd submitted a sample, including ordinary people who'd tested their ancestry out of curiosity.
The legal process that followed was shaped by two realities. First, the statute of limitations had run out on the rape charges.
The sentencing hearings in August two thousand twenty were something else entirely. More than forty survivors and family members of murder victims addressed DeAngelo directly.
The method that caught Joseph James DeAngelo changed cold case investigation permanently. Investigative genetic genealogy is now a recognized field.
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