For over four decades, the man responsible for at least 13 murders, more than 50 rapes, and over 120 burglaries across California operated under three different names invented by investigators who didn’t know they were chasing the same person: the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist, and the Original Night Stalker. It wasn’t until 2001, when DNA testing confirmed the East Area Rapist and Original Night Stalker were a single offender, that the true scale of the case became clear. It would take another 17 years, and a technique that didn’t exist when the crimes were committed, to put a name to the DNA.
The DNA That Waited
Investigators had a pristine genetic profile years before they had a suspect, recovered from a duplicate rape kit connected to the 1980 murder of Charlene and Lyman Smith. Traditional forensic DNA searches work by comparing a sample against existing criminal databases like CODIS, which only returns a match if the offender’s own DNA is already on file. DeAngelo’s wasn’t. He had no serious prior convictions requiring DNA collection, so the profile sat unmatched for years despite being genetically unambiguous.
The break came from a different kind of database entirely. Investigators, working with genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter and FBI attorney Steve Kramer, uploaded the crime-scene profile to GEDmatch, a public genomics site built for hobbyist genealogists tracing their family history, not for law enforcement. Rather than searching for an exact match, the site returned something more indirect but ultimately more powerful: 10 to 20 people who shared great-great-great-grandparents with the unknown suspect.
Building the Tree Backward
From there, the process stopped being genetic and became genealogical. A team of five investigators, working alongside Rae-Venter, constructed roughly 25 separate family trees branching outward from those distant genetic matches, tracing marriages, births, and migrations across generations until the trees converged on a shared set of ancestors. One tree alone grew to include 1,000 people. The investigators then worked forward from that shared ancestry toward the present, narrowing the field of possible descendants using ordinary demographic filters: age, sex, and known place of residence at the time of each crime.
That process of elimination pointed to one name: Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., a former police officer and truck mechanic living in Sacramento. Genealogy alone doesn’t make a legal case, though, so investigators still needed a direct biological sample to confirm the match. Rather than approach DeAngelo, they surreptitiously collected his discarded DNA twice, once from a car door handle and once from a tissue in his curbside garbage. Both samples matched the crime-scene profile. He was arrested at his Sacramento home on April 24, 2018, at age 72.
What the Case Proved, and What It Didn’t
DeAngelo pleaded guilty on June 29, 2020, to 13 counts of murder and 13 counts of kidnapping as part of a deal to avoid the death penalty, and was sentenced on August 21, 2020, to 13 consecutive life terms without parole, plus 8 years. At his sentencing he offered a brief apology to those he’d hurt.
Not everything about the case resolved as cleanly as the science did. Prosecutors floated a motive rooted in power and control, but that remains an interpretation rather than an established fact. DeAngelo himself, in a recorded interrogation-room monologue, described having “pushed” a separate persona named “Jerry” into committing the crimes, a statement prosecutors have treated as a possible manipulation tactic rather than a genuine account. He was also investigated for four additional murders between 1974 and 1978, but DNA testing ultimately cleared him of those.
Why This Case Changed Forensic Science
The Golden State Killer investigation is now the reference case for forensic genetic genealogy, a technique that has since been applied to hundreds of other cold cases. What made it possible wasn’t a new kind of DNA test, it was a new way of searching: treating a genetic sample not as a name to look up, but as a branch of a family tree to trace backward, generation by generation, until the branch led somewhere no database search ever could have.
Three Names for One Man
Investigators didn’t know they were hunting a single offender for most of the 1970s and 80s. Between 1974 and 1975, a burglar dubbed the Visalia Ransacker committed roughly 120 break-ins around Visalia, California, escalating on September 11, 1975, to the murder of Claude Snelling during a botched kidnapping attempt targeting Snelling’s teenage daughter.
The attacks stopped in Visalia and resumed roughly 80 miles away in the Sacramento area, where a new pattern emerged: home invasions and sexual assaults targeting couples and single women, eventually numbering more than 50 rapes. Press coverage at the time named this offender the East Area Rapist. On February 2, 1978, the pattern turned lethal again with the murders of Brian and Katie Maggiore in Rancho Cordova.
By 1979, the attacks had moved again, this time south to Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Orange counties, where a string of ten murders targeting couples in their homes earned the unidentified attacker a third name: the Original Night Stalker. The last of these killings was Janelle Cruz, murdered on May 4, 1986. For 15 years, three separate task forces in three separate jurisdictions treated these as three unconnected cases. It wasn’t until 2001 that DNA testing confirmed the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker shared a single perpetrator, and the Visalia crimes were later connected to the same person.