The profile was compared against the crime-scene profile that the Golden State Killer investigation had been built around for decades.
It matched.
The match confirmed what the genealogical work had suggested: that Joseph James DeAngelo was the person whose DNA had been found at the crime scenes. The confirmation was not a genealogical finding — it was a direct DNA comparison between DeAngelo’s own biological material and the crime-scene profile. The two profiles matched at the level of certainty that forensic DNA comparison provides.
The investigators who had the match result had what they needed for an arrest warrant. The years of investigative work, the preservation of evidence, the DNA development, the genealogy database search, the months of family tree construction, the candidate narrowing, the surveillance, the collection of discarded material, and the laboratory comparison had produced a result: the man who had killed thirteen people and committed dozens of additional crimes across California between 1974 and 1986 had been identified.
Paul Holes’s last day at work before his retirement was March 28, 2018. On that day, before leaving, he drove by the Citrus Heights house where Joseph DeAngelo lived and watched it for a time from outside. He did not approach. He did not knock on the door. He was exercising what might have been a final connection to a case he had spent twenty-four years thinking about, before his formal role in it ended.
He retired without making the arrest.
Twenty-six days passed. On April 24, 2018, deputies from the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department arrested Joseph James DeAngelo in the side yard of his Citrus Heights home as he walked out to his car.