0:00 The house on the corner was quiet.0:02 Just another beige suburban home in Citrus Heights, California, with a tidy lawn and a basketball hoop in the driveway.0:12 Inside, a seventy-two-year-old man was going about his day.0:17 A grandfather.0:19 A former police officer.0:21 And for forty years, a ghost.0:23 Last week, we explored the chaotic evil that descended on Cielo Drive with the Manson family, a darkness that was loud and public.0:34 But sometimes, evil doesn’t announce itself.0:38 Sometimes, it’s been your neighbor for decades.0:42 The man in the beige house was about to get a knock on his door.0:47 And with that knock, a reign of terror that had haunted an entire state would finally, impossibly, come to an end.0:57 It began, as it so often did, with small things.1:01 A broken window latch.1:03 A woman’s underwear drawer left open.1:06 A wedding photo turned face down on a nightstand.1:10 From 1974 onward, across California, a shadow was moving through neighborhoods.1:17 At first, it was just a string of over one hundred burglaries.1:22 Eerie, violating, but not yet violent.1:25 The intruder seemed to be learning.1:28 Watching.1:29 He’d take small, sentimental items—a single earring, a cufflink.1:34 He was creating a private collection of his victims' lives before he ever touched them.1:42 Then, in 1976, the burglaries escalated.1:45 He was no longer content to just watch.1:48 He became the East Area Rapist.1:51 For three years, he terrorized Northern California, committing over fifty brutal rapes.1:58 His methods were chillingly consistent.2:02 He’d break into homes, usually targeting couples.2:06 He’d bind the man, place dishes on his back, and threaten to kill them both if he heard the plates rattle.2:15 Then, in the darkness, he would assault the woman, sometimes for hours.2:21 He’d whisper.2:22 He’d taunt.2:23 After he left, the phone would sometimes ring.2:27 It was him.2:28 His voice on the line, a final act of psychological torture.2:33 The communities were paralyzed with fear.2:36 Gun sales soared.2:38 People pushed furniture against their doors at night.2:42 But the attacker was a phantom.2:45 He left behind terror, and he left behind DNA, but he never left a name.2:51 In 1979, the rapes in the north suddenly stopped.2:55 And in Southern California, a new predator appeared.2:59 The Original Night Stalker.3:02 This time, the attacks were fatal.3:05 Couples were tied up, just like before.3:08 But now, they were being murdered.3:11 For seven more years, the Night Stalker killed.3:15 Ten people, in their own beds, in the safest place they knew.3:20 And then, in 1986, as suddenly as he had appeared, he vanished.3:25 The phone calls stopped.3:27 The murders ended.3:29 For decades, the cases went cold.3:32 The East Area Rapist.3:33 The Original Night Stalker.3:36 Two separate monsters, two terrifying chapters in California history.3:41 Or so everyone thought.3:43 The first hint that the story was bigger came in 2001.3:48 DNA technology had advanced.3:50 Investigators took the preserved semen samples from the East Area Rapist crime scenes and compared them to samples from the Original Night Stalker murders.4:03 They were a MATCH.4:05 It wasn’t two men.4:06 It was one.4:07 One man responsible for a thirteen-year crime spree that spanned the entire state.4:14 A serial killer, a serial rapist, who had somehow operated for over a decade and then just… stopped.4:23 The case was given a new name, one coined by the late author Michelle McNamara, who refused to let the story die.4:32 She called him the Golden State Killer.4:36 The name stuck.4:37 But the man himself remained a ghost.4:40 By 2018, the case was ice cold.4:43 The trail was forty years old.4:45 The DNA profile from the crime scenes had been run against every criminal database in the country for years.4:54 Nothing.4:55 The man wasn't in the system.4:57 To the investigators who had spent their careers on this case, it felt like a dead end.5:05 But then, a new idea emerged.5:07 A long shot.5:08 It came from a different kind of DNA, and a very different kind of database.5:15 For years, millions of people had been spitting into tubes and mailing them to companies to find long-lost relatives or explore their ancestry.5:27 They uploaded their genetic profiles to public websites, like one called GEDmatch.5:34 They were building vast, public family trees.5:38 The investigators had the killer’s DNA.5:41 What if, instead of looking for HIM, they looked for his family?5:46 They uploaded the crime scene DNA profile to GEDmatch.5:51 And they got a hit.5:52 Not a close match.5:54 A distant one.5:55 A great-great-great-grandparent.5:58 A team of genealogists, including an expert named Barbara Rae-Venter, got to work.6:05 They took that distant ancestor and started building a family tree forward in time, through generations of births, deaths, and marriages.6:16 They were hunting for a ghost on a timeline of American history.6:22 They narrowed it down to a few family branches, searching for a man who fit the profile—the right age, living in California during the crimes.6:34 The tree kept growing, branching out, until finally, it led them to one name.6:40 Joseph James DeAngelo Junior.6:43 He was seventy-two years old.6:45 He lived in Citrus Heights, a suburb of Sacramento, right in the heart of where the East Area Rapist had been most active.6:56 He was a navy veteran.6:57 A father.6:58 And from 1973 to 1979, he had been a police officer.7:03 He had hidden in plain sight, carrying a badge by day and terrorizing communities by night.7:10 But they needed definitive proof.7:13 A genetic family tree wasn’t enough for an arrest warrant.7:18 So the police started watching him.7:21 They followed him to a hobby lobby.7:24 After he went inside, they swabbed the door handle of his car.7:29 Not enough DNA.7:30 They tailed him again.7:32 They watched him discard a tissue in a trash can outside his home.7:38 An investigator quickly retrieved it.7:41 In the world of law enforcement, when someone discards an item in public, they abandon any privacy interest in it.7:51 The police can collect it without a warrant.7:54 The tissue was sent to the lab.7:57 The results came back.7:59 The DNA on the tissue was a perfect match to the DNA from the decades-old crime scenes.8:06 They had him.8:07 On April 24th, 2018, police surrounded the quiet house on the corner.8:13 Joseph DeAngelo was arrested, utterly stunned.8:17 The ghost had a face.8:19 In 2020, to avoid the death penalty, DeAngelo pleaded guilty.8:24 He admitted to thirteen murders and thirteen kidnappings, and confessed to dozens of rapes that were past the statute of limitations.8:35 He was sentenced to multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole.8:42 In the courtroom, dozens of survivors, some now in their sixties and seventies, finally confronted the man who had stolen their peace four decades earlier.8:55 They learned their attacks weren't isolated incidents, but the work of one of California's most prolific serial killers.9:05 They found a strange, resilient community in each other.9:10 The case was one of the most consequential in modern American history, not just for the scale of the crimes, but for HOW he was caught.9:21 That long-shot idea—investigative genetic genealogy—has since been used to solve hundreds of cold cases.9:30 But a new documentary series released this year asks a chilling question.9:36 The official record is horrifying.9:39 But is it the whole story?9:41 It raises the possibility of earlier crimes, unsolved murders, and a timeline of violence that may not have ended in 1986 after all.9:52 We have a name for the ghost now.9:55 But we may never know the true size of his shadow.
