What the resolution provides is the one thing the legal system can provide: accountability, and the removal of the person responsible from the community. Whether that is sufficient, and what it means in relation to the losses it addresses, is a judgment that belongs to the survivors and families rather than to any observer.
Victor Hayes, who spoke publicly about his frustration with how the case had been handled over the decades, illustrated that the resolution of a case at the criminal level does not necessarily produce satisfaction or closure for everyone affected. His anger was not at the DNA technology or the genealogical method. It was at the institutional failures he believed had allowed someone with specific knowledge of police procedures to operate for years without detection. The resolution of the case through DeAngelo’s arrest did not answer his questions about those institutional failures.
Jane Carson-Sandler’s formulation — that wounds heal and scars remain — is a description of a lifetime rather than a moment. The arrest happened in 2018. The plea was in 2020. The sentencing was in 2020. The scars predate all of those dates by more than forty years.
After: The Broader Impact of the Method
The Golden State Killer case did not invent investigative genetic genealogy. The method had been developing among genealogical practitioners before 2018. But the case brought it to public attention at a scale that changed how law enforcement agencies thought about applying it to cold cases.
In the months following DeAngelo’s arrest, reporting documented that police departments and prosecutors’ offices across the United States were exploring the use of genealogy databases for cold cases where biological evidence was available. A number of cases that had been unsolved for years or decades produced arrests within months of the Golden State Killer arrest becoming public. In some of those cases, investigators had been working with genealogy database matches before the Golden State Killer case was resolved; the arrest simply made the method public. In others, the case directly inspired the investigative approach.