Genealogy websites were key to break in cold case
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The Golden State Killer raped and murdered victims all across the state of California in an era before Google searches and social media, a time when police relied on shoe leather, not cellphone records or big data.
But it was technology that got him. The suspect, Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, was arrested by police Tuesday. Investigators accuse him of committing more than 50 rapes and 12 murders.
Investigators used DNA from crime scenes and plugged that genetic profile into a commercial online genealogy database. They found distant relatives of DeAngelo’s and traced their DNA to him.
“We found a person that was the right age and lived in this area — and that was DeAngelo,” said Steve Grippi, the assistant chief in the Sacramento district attorney’s office.
Investigators then obtained what Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento district attorney, called “abandoned” DNA samples from DeAngelo.
“You leave your DNA in a place that is a public domain,” she said.
The test result confirmed the match to more than 10 murders in California. Schubert’s office then obtained a second sample and came back with the same positive result, matching the full DNA profile.
Representatives at 23andMe and other gene testing services denied Thursday that they had been involved in identifying the killer.
The Golden State Killer, also known as the East Area Rapist, tormented his victims with sadistic rituals. Some he shot and killed with a firearm. Others were bludgeoned to death with whatever he could find — in one case a piece of firewood. He had many trademarks: He wore a mask, he bound his victims’ hands. He started by raping single women and then went on to raping married women with their husbands present, before killing them both.
Among the numerous serial killers who stalked America in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s — the Zodiac Killer, the Son of Sam, to name two — the Golden State Killer was among the most notorious.
Monica Miller, who was in charge of the Sacramento FBI field office from 2013-17, said that when she retired, the case of the Golden State Killer was cold. She said that Schubert “was central in leading this, convincing people this was worth pursuing.”
“For the people of Sacramento,” she added, “it was almost an open wound. People would still talk about it. He was a phantom or a ghost in people’s minds.”
In her career as a district attorney, Schubert championed DNA technology and taught courses about cold cases, creating a unit in the Sacramento District Attorney’s Office to pursue them. Eighteen years ago, she reached out to an investigator from Contra Costa County who specialized in the East Area Rapist, beginning a collaboration to re-energize the case.
Two years ago, she convened a task force on the 40th anniversary of the attacks in the Sacramento suburbs. It was the work of that group — a collaboration with counties in Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area and the FBI — that helped solve the case, Schubert said.
Paul Sanchietti, a neighbor, said he had taken an interest in the case six months ago and combed through the Wikipedia entry that listed all of the grisly and sadistic crimes the Golden State Killer was accused of committing.
“Here I was looking up the guy on Wikipedia, and he was five doors down,” Sanchietti said of DeAngelo.
Sanchietti said he had nothing more than polite interactions with DeAngelo over the past two decades, but like other neighbors, he remembered DeAngelo as having a temper.
“He would get volatile,” Sanchietti said. “Every neighborhood has some strange dude,” Sanchietti said. “But for him to be a serial murderer and rapist — that never crossed my mind.”