The thing the survivors remembered most was the silence.

Before he was the Golden State Killer, before he was the East Area Rapist or the Original Night Stalker or even the Visalia Ransacker, he was a sound in the next room. A creaking floorboard. A breath that did not belong to anyone you loved. He had been in your house for hours, sometimes for days. He had walked through every room while you were at work. He knew where you slept. He knew which child was in which bed. He had a flashlight on you before you knew anyone was there at all.

For thirteen years, between 1973 and 1986, this one man terrorized a quarter of the population of California. He committed at least 120 burglaries, raped at least fifty women, and murdered at least thirteen people. He left a trail of evidence that should, by every theory of policing, have made him easy to catch. He was, for part of his career, a serving police officer himself.

And then, in April 2018, after forty-two years, he was caught — not by a tip, not by a confession, not by a fingerprint, but by a website built to help people find their lost cousins.

The man who could not be one man

For most of those forty-two years, California law enforcement did not realize they were chasing one man. They thought they were chasing three.

The crimes began in Visalia, a small farm town in California’s Central Valley. Between April 1974 and December 1975, a man broke into more than 120 homes there, methodically rifling through dressers and stealing small, personal items — single earrings, photographs, a coin from a piggy bank. He was nicknamed the Visalia Ransacker. On September 11, 1975, he tried to abduct a sixteen-year-old girl from her bedroom; her father, a college professor named Claude Snelling, woke and confronted him. The intruder shot Snelling dead in the doorway and fled.

Six months later, the Visalia burglaries stopped. They stopped because the man had moved 200 miles north, to Sacramento, and was about to begin doing something much worse.

Between June 1976 and July 1979, the Sacramento area was paralyzed by a serial rapist who became known as the East Area Rapist. He hit at least fifty women, usually in upper-middle-class suburban neighborhoods. He preferred women who lived alone, but he was equally willing to attack couples. When he found a couple home, he would tie up the man face-down on the floor, stack dishes on his back, and tell him that if the dishes fell while he was raping the woman in the next room, he would kill them both. He often was right.

He took small souvenirs. He sometimes called victims at home weeks or months after the attack to whisper threats. He vanished from Sacramento abruptly in 1979.

That same year, in Goleta, near Santa Barbara, a new killer appeared. Police called him the Original Night Stalker. He bludgeoned victims to death in their beds, almost always couples, almost always in wealthy beach communities along the Southern California coast. Robert Offerman and Debra Manning, in December 1979. Charlene and Lyman Smith, in Ventura, in March 1980. Keith and Patrice Harrington, on a quiet street in Laguna Niguel, in August 1980. Manuela Witthuhn, alone, in February 1981. Cheri Domingo and Greg Sanchez, in July 1981. Janelle Cruz, an eighteen-year-old girl alone in her family’s home in Irvine, in May 1986.

Thirteen murders in seven years. Then the killings stopped.

The journalist who put it together

Sacramento and Southern California are separated by more than 400 miles. Different police departments, different jurisdictions, different working cultures. For nearly three decades, the connection between the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker was missed.

In 2001, advances in DNA testing finally allowed Orange County crime lab analyst Mary Hong to match semen evidence from the Witthuhn murder to other Original Night Stalker scenes — and, crucially, to evidence collected from East Area Rapist scenes hundreds of miles to the north. It was one man. One killer with two names.

A Los Angeles-based true-crime writer named Michelle McNamara coined the name that finally united all three identities. In a 2013 feature for Los Angeles magazine, she called him the Golden State Killer. McNamara spent the next three years obsessively building a database of every known fact, witness statement, and forensic trace. She corresponded with detectives. She mapped suspect cars. She built timelines on the floor of her home office.

She died in her sleep in April 2016, at age forty-six, before her book was finished. Her husband, the comedian Patton Oswalt, hired a colleague to complete the manuscript from her notes. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark was published in February 2018. The arrest came two months later. McNamara never lived to see it.

The cop in the killer’s mirror

What the genealogy database revealed, in April 2018, was almost too on the nose. Joseph James DeAngelo, the man arrested in his Citrus Heights driveway at age seventy-two, was a former police officer.

He had served as a patrol officer for the Exeter Police Department in California’s Central Valley from 1973 to 1976 — the exact years and the exact region of the Visalia Ransacker burglaries. He had then transferred to the Auburn Police Department in the Sacramento area in 1976 — the year and place where the East Area Rapist attacks began. He was fired from Auburn PD in 1979 after being arrested for shoplifting a can of dog repellent and a hammer from a drug store. The East Area Rapist attacks ended in Sacramento later that same year. He moved to Southern California shortly afterward. So did the killings.

By 1986, DeAngelo was working as a mechanic at a Save Mart distribution warehouse. He had a wife and three daughters. He coached Little League. He hosted barbeques. The killings stopped, the survivors aged, and for thirty-two years he lived an entirely unremarkable suburban life within a half-hour drive of dozens of the rapes he had committed.

The same year his second daughter graduated from high school, the Original Night Stalker killed Janelle Cruz. He was forty years old, on his way home from a shift at the warehouse.

The trial that did not happen

DeAngelo’s arrest was the largest cold-case break in modern American history. Prosecutors in six different California counties spent the next two years coordinating the charges. The full indictment, when it was finally filed, included 26 felony counts — 13 murders, multiple kidnappings, and a handful of related crimes — with most of the rapes legally untouchable because the statute of limitations had long expired.

In June 2020, in a hearing held outdoors in a college ballroom because of the COVID-19 pandemic, DeAngelo pleaded guilty to all 13 murder counts. As part of the plea, he admitted in open court — his hand visibly shaking, his voice barely audible — to dozens of rapes that could no longer be prosecuted. The admissions were heard by survivors who, in some cases, were attending the same hearing remotely from hospice beds. The plea allowed prosecutors to spare survivors the years-long trial that would otherwise have been required, and allowed survivors of the rape victims who could not be charged criminally to hear, on the record, that they were believed.

At the four-day sentencing hearing in August 2020, dozens of survivors took turns at the lectern, addressing DeAngelo directly. He sat slumped in a wheelchair in an orange jumpsuit, head down, claiming to be physically unable to respond. (After his sentencing, jail officials confirmed that he had been walking and talking normally in his cell for years.) Survivors told him their names. Their stories. The objects he had taken from their homes. The decades they had spent unable to sleep with the windows open.

He was sentenced to multiple consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. He is held at California State Prison, Corcoran, where he will stay until he dies.

What the case changed

The Golden State Killer case is the reason forensic genetic genealogy exists as a recognized field of policing. It is the reason private companies like Othram and Parabon NanoLabs have full-time backlogs of cold cases from American police departments. It is the reason that, in the eight years since DeAngelo’s arrest, hundreds of other cold cases have been resolved using the same method.

It is also a quiet cautionary tale about the limits of pre-2000s law enforcement. The Visalia Ransacker had been identified by surveillance officers as a man who looked startlingly like the early sketches of the East Area Rapist as early as 1976. Auburn PD records show that DeAngelo had been disciplined for stealing items from the department’s evidence room before he was fired. His own ex-fiancée, in a 1972 newspaper announcement, had recounted that he had punched her after she broke off their engagement. None of those breadcrumbs were ever traced through.

It took an outside writer obsessing in her living room and two retired hobbyists pulling cousin trees from a free website to do what every agency he had ever come into contact with had failed to do.

The names that mattered

For more than forty years, the killer had a half-dozen names. Visalia Ransacker. East Area Rapist. Original Night Stalker. EAR-ONS. Golden State Killer. DeAngelo. None of those names were the point.

The names that mattered were the ones in the case files. Brian and Katie Maggiore, shot to death while walking their dog in Rancho Cordova in February 1978. Robert Offerman and Debra Manning, beaten to death two days after Christmas in 1979. Charlene Smith, who had just become a stepmother. The Harringtons, married five months. Janelle Cruz, eighteen years old, who had been planning to leave for college.

And the fifty women who never made the murder count, who lived with what he did for thirty or forty years, who finally got to walk up to a microphone in a California courtroom and tell him to his face who they were. They were, for once in the case’s long history, not the ones being silenced.

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Sources: Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office case file; Orange County District Attorney’s Office sentencing transcripts, 2020; Michelle McNamara, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (Harper, 2018); Paul Holes, Unmasked (2022); HBO documentary series I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (2020); Los Angeles Times and Sacramento Bee archives, 1976–2020.