Detective McGowen, the Visalia investigator who had confronted the suspect in December 1975 and been shot at, had died before the arrest. He spent years after his retirement continuing to follow the Visalia Ransacker case.
Michelle McNamara, who had brought the case to a new audience and coined the name that defined its public identity, died in 2016, two years before the arrest.
The case’s resolution was partial, not because it was incomplete in any legal sense, but because the community of people who had a stake in the outcome had been diminished by time. The legal resolution happened to those who remained, and on behalf of those who did not.
This feature of long-unsolved cases is not unique to the Golden State Killer case. It is a recurring feature of cold cases, where time itself is part of the harm. The decades between the crime and its legal resolution are time that cannot be recovered: years without answers, years of living with uncertainty, years lost to the people who carried the cases.
## The Legacy in Law Enforcement Practice
The Golden State Killer case has had a demonstrable impact on how cold cases are investigated in the United States. The specific technique of uploading crime-scene DNA to a genealogy database and conducting family tree research to develop investigative leads has been applied to hundreds of cases since 2018.
Law enforcement agencies have developed institutional infrastructure for the method. Training programs for genealogical investigators have been established. Commercial service providers, notably Parabon NanoLabs but also other companies, have developed specific offerings for law enforcement clients.