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The Weight of a Name: How the Golden State Killer Was Finally Unmasked
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Golden State Killer terrorised California for over a decade as a police officer — three aliases, one monster, and forty years of failed investigations. This chapter traces the crimes, Michelle McNamara's obsession, and the genealogy breakthrough that changed cold case DNA science forever.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
One case changed the way America solves crime. Not because of a new law, or a federal program, or a billion-dollar investment.
Start with who he was before anyone knew who he was. In Visalia, California, beginning in nineteen seventy-four, residents started noticing something strange.
Sacramento didn't know what was coming. Beginning in nineteen seventy-six, a man began attacking women in the eastern suburbs of the city.
By nineteen seventy-nine, something shifted. The East Area Rapist stopped attacking in Northern California.
The investigation was essentially cold by the early two thousands. Leads had dried up.
Paul Holes had been working California cold cases for decades. He retired from the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office in March of twenty eighteen.
DeAngelo was seventy-two years old. He lived in a modest house in Citrus Heights, a suburb of Sacramento.
The case moved toward resolution during the pandemic year of twenty twenty. In June of that year, DeAngelo appeared in a Sacramento courtroom parking lot, seated in a wheelchair, wearing a mask.
The arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo didn't just close a case. It opened a method.
Michelle McNamara wrote those words in her book's final passage. "You'll be found. And then, in the end, it will be you, forever, who is afraid." She was right.
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