The Golden State Killer
Beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing through the 1980s, a predator operating across California committed an extraordinary series of crimes that would remain unsolved for over four decades. He was known by multiple names as his crimes evolved — the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist, the Original Night Stalker — before the cases were linked and he was collectively dubbed the Golden State Killer. He committed at least 13 murders, more than 50 sexual assaults, and over 100 residential burglaries across dozens of California communities. Investigators were long baffled by the perpetrator's intelligence and discipline. He would surveil neighborhoods for weeks before striking, disabling porch lights, unlocking windows, and memorizing the layouts of homes. During assaults, he often called victims on the phone before or after attacks, taunting them. He left minimal physical evidence, and although a DNA profile was developed from crime scenes, it matched no one in existing databases for decades. Victims, investigators, and true crime researchers spent years piecing together the case with little progress. The breakthrough came in 2018 through genetic genealogy — investigators uploaded the killer's DNA to the public ancestry website GEDmatch and traced distant relatives, eventually narrowing to Joseph James DeAngelo, a 72-year-old former police officer living in suburban Sacramento. DNA recovered from a discarded item confirmed the match. DeAngelo was arrested in April 2018. In 2020, he pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first-degree murder and admitted to the other crimes in exchange for life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Golden State Killer case transformed law enforcement's approach to cold cases, sparking widespread adoption of investigative genetic genealogy as a tool. It also sparked significant ethical and legal debates about privacy and the use of consumer DNA databases by law enforcement — debates that continue today. Author Michelle McNamara, who coined the name "Golden State Killer" and spent years investigating the case, died in 2016, two years before his capture; her posthumous book 'I'll Be Gone in the Dark' became a bestseller and critically acclaimed HBO documentary.