The Golden State Killer: Gone in the Dark

For twelve years, he moved through the quiet neighborhoods of California — through Sacramento suburbs and beach communities and gated developments in Orange County — and he was never caught. He attended neighborhood meetings. He wore a badge. He raised three daughters. He retired from a warehouse job and grew old.

Joseph James DeAngelo was a serial killer and serial rapist responsible for at least 13 murders and more than 50 sexual assaults across three separate crime series spanning from 1974 to 1986. He was 72 years old when forensic genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter identified him from a family tree built through a public DNA database — making the Golden State Killer case the first in American history solved through investigative genetic genealogy. In June 2020, he entered a Sacramento State University ballroom converted into a courtroom, and said the word «guilty» 13 times.

This episode traces the full arc: the methodical Visalia burglary spree that began in 1974, the East Area Rapist attacks across Sacramento and the Bay Area from 1976 to 1979, the shift to murder in Southern California, the 44-year investigation that was derailed by jurisdictional rivalry and technological limits, the DNA breakthrough of 2001, Michelle McNamara's naming of the killer in 2013, and the forensic genealogy work that finally put a name to the crimes in 2018. We also follow the survivors — Kris Pedretti, Gay Hardwick, Jane Carson-Sandler, Phyllis Henneman and many others — who stood in court in August 2020 and refused to let their lives be reduced to case files. And we look at what has happened since: survivor-led advocacy, an unresolved compensation fight, and a federal bill that may expand the technology that caught him to cold cases across the country.