The Golden State Killer — Caught by a DNA Match 44 Years Later | True Crime

For forty-four years, he was a ghost. The Visalia Ransacker. The East Area Rapist. The Original Night Stalker. One man, three names, and a trail of terror across California stretching from 1974 to 1986 — thirteen murders, more than fifty assaults, over a hundred burglaries. And then, nothing. He simply vanished. In the 1970s, the quiet suburbs of Sacramento lived in fear. A masked intruder slipped through windows at night, always one step ahead of the police. When the attacks moved south, the name changed — the Original Night Stalker — but the pattern was the same: careful, patient, and utterly ruthless. Task forces were formed, thousands of suspects were cleared, and still the file stayed open. Decades passed. Detectives retired. Witnesses grew old. The case became a legend — the one that got away. Then science caught up. In 2017, investigators took crime-scene DNA that had waited in evidence lockers for forty years and uploaded it to GEDmatch, a public genealogy database. It was a new kind of detective work: investigative genealogy. Bit by bit, genealogists built family trees from distant cousin matches, narrowing thousands of names down to one. On April 24, 2018, police surrounded a modest house in Citrus Heights and arrested a 72-year-old former police officer: Joseph James DeAngelo. Discarded DNA — from a tissue and a car door handle — matched the killer's profile. He had been living an ordinary life the entire time, just miles from where it all began. In August 2020, DeAngelo pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life without parole. Forty-four years after the first crime, the ghost finally had a name — and a cell. Some cases are never closed. They are only waiting for science to catch up. Watch the animated video version of this story on our YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/shorts/epELIUI8mRg