On the morning of April 24, 2018, Sacramento County sheriff’s deputies arrested a seventy-two-year-old retired truck mechanic in the side yard of his Citrus Heights home. He had lived in that three-bedroom house for at least two decades. His neighbors knew him as a quiet, sometimes cantankerous presence — someone who complained about noise, who kept to himself, who had spent years in the kind of unremarkable suburban retirement that invites no particular scrutiny.
His name was Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. He was also, investigators had concluded, the serial offender known over forty years of reporting as the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist, the Original Night Stalker, and eventually the Golden State Killer — a single person responsible for a documented string of burglaries, rapes, and murders that had spread across California between 1974 and 1986 and had remained unsolved for more than three decades after the last killing.
The evidence that had ultimately placed investigators at that Citrus Heights address in April 2018 was not a witness identification, a confession, a fingerprint, or a match to any criminal database the state of California maintained. It was the result of a process that began with a DNA profile developed from decades-old crime-scene evidence, continued through a genealogy website used primarily by people searching for relatives and family history, and required months of painstaking documentary research to connect a set of distant genetic matches to a single man who had not volunteered his own DNA to anyone.
A distant relative’s partial genetic connection to the crime-scene profile — a connection the relative did not know would be used in a criminal investigation — had provided the first thread. The thread had to be followed, carefully, for months before it led anywhere.