The exclusions are important to note because they illustrate both the rigor and the fallibility of investigation under pressure. The behavioral profiles pointed in specific directions. The investigation followed those directions. When DNA comparison could definitively exclude someone, it did. The risk in the years before direct DNA comparison was available was that an incorrect identification could have severe consequences for a person who had nothing to do with the crimes.
The KQED reporting noted that at one point, an earlier search connected to the case had briefly identified an incorrect suspect — pointing to the serious stakes of this kind of work. The methods available before investigative genetic genealogy — behavioral profiling, geographic analysis, witness descriptions — could narrow a field but could not provide the kind of individual-level biological identification that DNA comparison could.
The survivors and families of victims spent decades aware that an incorrect identification was as possible as a correct one. The weight of an unresolved case — the ongoing uncertainty about whether the person responsible would ever be identified — existed alongside the awareness that investigators would pursue specific candidates who might turn out to be wrong. For the people who had been attacked and for the families of those who had been killed, the decades between the crimes and the 2018 arrest were not an abstraction. They were lived time.
The Victims Before and After
The documented crimes attributed to Joseph DeAngelo killed thirteen people, assaulted more than fifty others, and affected a far larger number of people through the extended fear and the decades of the cases remaining open. The full scope of the harm cannot be captured in statistics or a list of incident dates. But the people at the center of the cases were specific, and some of them have spoken publicly about what those years meant.