The Golden State Killer: How Genetic Genealogy Solved a 44-Year Cold Case - Example Timeline | Boromlia
The Golden State Killer case step by step: the 1974 Visalia burglaries, decades of dead ends, and the investigative genetic genealogy search through GEDmatch, FamilyTreeDNA and MyHeritage that identified Joseph James DeAngelo in 2018.
Visalia, 1974: A Hundred Burglaries That Read Like Vandalism
From April 1974, homes in and around the College Area of Visalia were broken into at a rate that eventually passed one hundred. The intruder took little of value. He emptied drawers, rearranged rooms, took single earrings and small amounts of cash, and left expensive items untouched. Detectives called the unknown man the Visalia Ransacker. Because almost nothing of worth was stolen and most entries involved no confrontation, the reports were spread across ordinary burglary files rather than worked as one escalating series. No suspect was identified. The series was still open when it stopped in December 1975.
The Ransacker Kills a Journalism Professor and the Burglaries Stop
In the early hours of 11 September 1975 the Ransacker entered a Visalia home and tried to abduct a teenage girl. Her father, a journalism professor at College of the Sequoias, confronted him and was shot. He died of his injuries. Investigators tied the killing to the burglary series through ballistics: the handgun had been stolen in an earlier ransacking. It was the first homicide attributed to the series, and it stayed unsolved for forty-three years. Prosecutors charged Joseph James DeAngelo with this murder in 2018, after his arrest in a different case entirely.
A Detective Corners the Ransacker in a Visalia Driveway
On 10 December 1975 Visalia police staked out a house they expected the Ransacker to enter. Detective William McGowen saw a masked man leaving with stolen property, fired a warning shot and held him at gunpoint. The man dropped the items and pulled off his mask as though surrendering, then drew a handgun and fired. The round struck McGowen's flashlight. He was not injured, and the man escaped over a fence. The Visalia series ended that night. Nobody connected it to what began six months later about 200 miles north, in Sacramento.
Rancho Cordova, 1976: The First Attack Attributed to the East Area Rapist
The FBI dates the first known assault in Sacramento County to 18 June 1976. Over the following twenty months an intruder entered homes at night in eastern Sacramento County and neighbouring towns, binding the occupants and raping women and girls. Investigators noticed that clusters of assaults in a neighbourhood tended to follow a wave of burglaries in the same streets, and that the intruder took coins, jewellery and identification rather than valuables. The FBI's published case summary attributes approximately 45 rapes to the same man between 1976 and 1986, with victims aged between 13 and 41.
Two Shots on an Evening Walk in Rancho Cordova
On 2 February 1978 a Rancho Cordova couple out walking their dog were chased and shot at close range. Both died. According to the FBI's case summary it was the first killing attributed to the East Area Rapist series, and it turned a sexual assault investigation into a homicide inquiry. The attacks in Sacramento County stopped soon afterwards. Investigators had no way of knowing whether the offender had died, been jailed for something unrelated, or moved. Assaults attributed to the same man continued in the East Bay through 1979.
Goleta, 1979: A Couple Break Free and the Attacker Runs
The FBI's case list records an attempted homicide in Goleta on 10 October 1979. A couple who had been tied up in their home got free and raised the alarm, and the intruder fled the neighbourhood. It was the first incident attributed to the series in Santa Barbara County. Nobody in Southern California was yet treating these crimes as connected to a rapist who had operated near Sacramento three years earlier. Santa Barbara County investigators worked their files, Sacramento County worked its own, and the two would not be joined by DNA for another twenty-two years.
Ventura, 1980: The Murders That Would Eventually Solve the Case
The FBI's published case summary dates a double homicide in Ventura to 16 March 1980; some accounts give 13 March. A married couple were bound in their home and killed. At the autopsy the pathologist collected two sexual assault kits rather than one, handing the first to law enforcement and keeping the second in the coroner's office, where it was forgotten. Over the following decades investigators repeatedly drew on the first kit until little was left. Paul Holes later said the forgotten second kit turned out to hold the intact DNA that made the 2018 search possible.
Laguna Niguel, 1980: A Second Couple in Orange County
On 19 August 1980 a couple were killed in their home in Laguna Niguel, Orange County. The FBI's summary describes the southern homicides in the same terms each time: both occupants were bound, the woman was raped, and both were killed. Orange County Sheriff's investigators handled the case. Because the killings crossed four county lines and several police jurisdictions, the physical evidence sat in separate property rooms under separate case numbers and was analysed by separate laboratories. No suspect was charged.
Goleta Again, 1981, and Then Five Years of Nothing
The FBI dates a further double homicide in Goleta to 27 July 1981. After that date no incident was connected to the offender for five years. Investigators had no way to tell whether the series had ended or paused. Santa Barbara County ultimately recorded four homicides and two attempted homicides attributed to the man, more than any other single agency in the case. The gap between July 1981 and the next attributed crime is the longest in the series and remains unexplained in the public record.
Irvine, 1986: The Last Crime Attributed to the Series
The FBI's case list dates the final attributed homicide to Irvine on 5 May 1986; other accounts give 4 May. An 18-year-old woman was raped and killed in her home. No later crime has been connected to the same offender. The FBI's totals for the whole series stood at 12 homicides, approximately 45 rapes and more than 120 residential burglaries, a count that did not yet include the Visalia burglaries or the killing there in 1975. For the next fifteen years there was no arrest and, formally, no single case.
Two Criminalists Compare Profiles and Find One Man
In 2001 the northern and southern series were joined by DNA. Mary Hong, a forensic scientist with the Orange County Sheriff's Department, had developed profiles from the Southern California rape-homicides and grouped them under the name Original Night Stalker. Paul Holes, then a criminalist with the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Department, held profiles from East Area Rapist assaults in his county. Holes contacted Hong and the profiles matched. Twenty-five years of separately filed crimes became one offender. The match produced no name: searches of CODIS, the national DNA index, returned nothing, because the man had no qualifying conviction.
A Writer Gives the Case a Name and an Audience
The March 2013 issue of Los Angeles Magazine carried "In the Footsteps of a Killer" by Michelle McNamara, an account of her own research into the unsolved series. The offender had collected several names across jurisdictions, among them East Area Rapist, Original Night Stalker and Diamond Knot Killer, which made the case hard to discuss as a single thing. McNamara proposed one name, the Golden State Killer, and it was the name that stuck; the FBI used it in its own press material three years later. McNamara died in 2016, two years before the arrest.
The FBI Puts $50,000 and a Billboard Campaign Behind a 40-Year-Old Case
On 15 June 2016 the FBI, the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department, the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office and the Contra Costa Sheriff's Department announced a $50,000 reward and a national publicity campaign. The timing was deliberate: 18 June was the fortieth anniversary of the first known Sacramento assault. Digital billboards ran nationally, and the appeal asked the public an unusual question, whether they had ever come across a hidden hoard of coins and jewellery among a relative's belongings. The release warned that people who knew the man might not believe him capable of the crimes. It produced no identification.
A Judge in Oregon Orders a DNA Sample From the Wrong Man
Holes had built a Y-chromosome profile from one of the few surviving rape kits and found a partial match on a free genealogy site, Ysearch.org. With the FBI he obtained a federal grand jury subpoena for the account holder's details. In March 2017 an Oregon police officer, acting for California investigators, persuaded a judge to order a DNA sample from a 73-year-old man in a nursing home, citing a rare genetic marker he shared with the offender. He was not the offender. He was a relation so distant that investigators calculated no shared ancestor for roughly 900 years. His relatives were asked to help extend the family tree and were then eliminated.
The Investigator Who Had Used Up His Own Evidence
Holes had spent two decades consuming the Contra Costa samples. Each new technology took more material: first DQ Alpha and Polymarker typing, then STR profiles for CODIS, then six years of Y-STR genealogy work that led nowhere. By 2017 he had none left. He and FBI lawyer Steve Kramer canvassed the southern counties for surviving evidence. A Ventura County investigator went looking and found the sealed 1980 coroner's kit that had never been opened. In December 2017 the Ventura County District Attorney's Office recorded written consent for what its investigator called a genetic genealogy investigation.
A Second Cousin Appears on a Site the Team Was Not Cleared to Use
The forensic profile was searched against FamilyTreeDNA, where the FBI was given an account, and against GEDmatch, an open upload site. Both returned only third cousins, more than a dozen of them, whose trees had to be traced back to the 1700s. In February 2018 the genealogist working with the team, Barbara Rae-Venter, uploaded the profile to MyHeritage using her personal account and found a second cousin. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2020 that a Ventura County District Attorney's summary noted this search violated MyHeritage's privacy policy. Rae-Venter said an FBI lawyer had approved it.
Six Male Cousins, and Only One With Blue Eyes
About a month after the MyHeritage match, FBI agents approached one of the newly identified cousins, a woman in Orange County, and asked for her DNA. Her sample cleared her own brother, who had briefly been the prime suspect, and showed Rae-Venter that the offender descended through the women in the trees the team was building on Ancestry.com. That narrowed the pool to six male cousins. A search of California driver's licence records showed that only one of the six had the eye colour in the profile Rae-Venter had built: Joseph James DeAngelo, a 72-year-old former police officer living in Citrus Heights.
Ten Days of Surveillance and a Garbage Truck
DeAngelo was identified as the investigative lead on 19 April 2018 and put under surveillance. Investigators did not seek a warrant for his DNA. Over roughly ten days they collected what he discarded: a swab from the handle of his car door, taken while he was inside a shop, and a tissue from his kerbside bin, retrieved with the help of a garbage truck driver. Both were compared with the crime scene profile and both matched. Genetic genealogy had produced a lead, not evidence. The discarded samples were what turned the lead into a case.
Arrest in Citrus Heights, and Eight Counts to Start
DeAngelo, then 72, was arrested at his Citrus Heights home on 24 April 2018 and charged initially with eight counts of first-degree murder. Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert announced the arrest, saying investigators had known they were looking for a needle in a haystack and had found it in Sacramento. Charges were added over the following months across six counties, including the 1975 Visalia killing, which had been linked by ballistics and method rather than by DNA. It was the first publicly announced arrest obtained through investigative genetic genealogy.
The Rules Arrive After the Technique
The arrest set off a wave of cold case genealogy work and a corresponding retreat by the databases. In May 2019 GEDmatch reversed its default and required users to opt in before law enforcement could search their profiles; by that November about 185,000 of roughly 1.25 million users had done so. The United States Department of Justice interim policy on forensic genetic genealogical searching took effect on 1 November 2019, limiting federal use to unsolved violent crime where CODIS had returned nothing. In December 2019 GEDmatch was bought by the forensic genomics firm Verogen. Maryland passed the first comprehensive state statute on the technique in May 2021.
A Guilty Plea in a University Ballroom
On 29 June 2020 DeAngelo pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances and 13 felony counts of kidnapping to commit robbery. He also admitted dozens of offences that could not be charged because the statute of limitations had long expired, including rapes. Prosecutors put the total admitted at 161 offences against 48 victims. The plea was taken in a ballroom at Sacramento State, converted into a courtroom so that about 150 people could attend at a distance during the pandemic. The plea took the death penalty off the table.
Eleven Consecutive Life Sentences
Sentencing followed several days of victim impact statements in Sacramento. On 21 August 2020 Judge Michael Bowman imposed the maximum the law allowed: 11 consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole, plus a further life term with additional years. DeAngelo was 74. Because the plea resolved counts across six counties, prosecutors from each of those district attorneys' offices took part. The case never went to trial, so no court ever ruled on how the identification had been made.
A Newspaper Reports That the Public Account Was Incomplete
In December 2020 the Los Angeles Times published an investigation by Paige St. John, drawn from interviews and court discovery records, reporting that the search had also used two for-profit databases, FamilyTreeDNA and MyHeritage, in ways both companies had denied at the time. Ventura County chief assistant district attorney Cheryl Temple had written to the FBI in January 2019 that the public account left a false impression. Temple said she had no concern about the legality of what was done, only about disclosure before trial. Sacramento prosecutors maintained the investigation was lawful in every respect.
Corcoran, Protective Housing
DeAngelo was transferred on 26 January 2021 to the protective housing unit at California State Prison, Corcoran, a maximum security facility in the San Joaquin Valley. The unit holds prisoners judged to be at risk from the general population, and each unit is self-contained, with its own canteen, chapel, laundry and medical services. Names of those held there are not usually confirmed publicly. He is serving the sentences imposed in August 2020 and is not eligible for parole.
The Prosecutor Publishes the File
On 11 November 2025 Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho published The People vs. the Golden State Killer, the first account of the prosecution written from inside it. Ho had led the case through the plea and the sentencing. The book covers the genetic genealogy work and the decision not to pursue the death penalty. Its publication, more than five years after sentencing and more than fifty years after the Visalia burglaries began, is the most recent formal addition to the public record of the case.