0:00 In 1979, an Auburn, California police officer was fired for shoplifting a can of dog repellent and a hammer.0:09 This isn't just a story about a bad cop—it's about the monster he was hiding.0:15 It’s a quiet morning in Citrus Heights, California.0:19 April, 2018.0:20 An old man is puttering around his yard.0:24 He’s seventy-two.0:25 A grandfather.0:26 A retired mechanic.0:28 To his neighbors, he is Joe.0:30 A little cantankerous, maybe.0:32 A little odd.0:34 But ultimately… just a guy.0:36 He yells at people who drive too fast down his street.0:40 He potters in his garage.0:42 He lives a small life in a small house on a quiet suburban block.0:48 This man, this unremarkable fixture of the neighborhood, is a ghost.0:53 And for forty years, he has haunted an entire state.0:58 The haunting began in the mid-1970s.1:01 First, it was just a whisper.1:03 A shadow.1:04 They called him the Visalia Ransacker.1:07 A phantom who would break into homes, not just to steal, but to rearrange.1:13 He’d move photo albums.1:15 He’d take a single earring.1:17 Small, intimate violations designed to tell you one thing: I was here.1:23 I can get to you.1:25 Then, the whisper became a scream.1:28 In Sacramento, he became the East Area Rapist.1:31 A predator who stalked his victims for weeks.1:35 He knew their schedules.1:37 He knew their homes.1:39 He’d call them, breathing on the line, before he came.1:43 And after.1:44 Sometimes for years.1:46 He’d bind them.1:47 He’d terrorize them for hours.1:50 He was methodical.1:51 Patient.1:52 Cruel.1:52 The police were helpless.1:54 He was a ghost.1:56 He left behind a trail of terror, but almost nothing else.2:00 He knew their procedures.2:02 He knew their response times.2:05 He knew how to disappear.2:07 He knew because he was one of them.2:10 Joseph DeAngelo was a police officer during the first years of his reign.2:16 He wore a badge.2:17 He carried a gun.2:19 He swore an oath to protect the very people he was hunting.2:24 Then, as suddenly as he appeared in the north, he moved south.2:29 And the rapes turned to murder.2:31 Now he was the Original Night Stalker.2:35 Ten people, bludgeoned to death in their own beds.2:39 The last murder was in 1986.2:41 And then… silence.2:43 The ghost vanished.2:44 For more than thirty years, he was a legend.2:48 A boogeyman.2:49 The Golden State Killer.2:51 A single monster with a dozen names.2:54 Decades pass.2:55 Detectives retire.2:56 Victims grow old.2:58 The files gather dust.3:00 The ghost, it seems, has won.3:02 But science is patient.3:04 And a new kind of detective work is born, not in a police academy, but in a laboratory.3:11 Forensic genealogy.3:13 Investigators take the killer’s DNA—preserved for forty years from a crime scene—and they upload it.3:21 Not to a criminal database.3:23 But to a public ancestry website.3:26 The kind you use to find a long-lost cousin.3:30 And they get a hit.3:31 Not on the killer.3:33 But on a relative.3:34 A great-great-great grandfather.3:37 It’s almost nothing.3:39 A needle in a haystack the size of a continent.3:43 But it’s a start.3:44 Investigators build a massive family tree, branching out over two centuries.3:50 Thousands of names.3:52 They trace descendants forward in time, looking for a man of the right age, who lived in the right places, at the right times.4:03 And slowly, impossibly, the thousands of branches narrow.4:07 They prune away possibilities until only one branch is left.4:12 And at the end of it… is one name.4:15 The name of a seventy-two-year-old man who lives in Citrus Heights.4:21 An old man who yells about people driving too fast.4:25 They watch him.4:26 They wait.4:27 They grab a tissue he discards in his trash can.4:31 They test the DNA.4:33 And the ghost has a face.4:35 When they came for him, he was in his bathrobe.4:39 Surprised.4:39 He had a roast in the oven.4:42 The monster who haunted a generation was an old man, worried about his dinner burning.4:49 This is the chilling truth of men like DeAngelo.4:53 There isn’t another life.4:55 There is only one life, with a wall built down the middle.5:00 On one side, a father and a husband.5:03 On the other, a predator.5:05 He wasn't two different people.5:07 He was one man who was an expert at playing a part.5:12 The science that caught him didn't just identify a killer.5:16 It exposed the terrifying reality that the most monstrous among us can be hiding in the most ordinary places.5:26 They can be your neighbor.5:28 They can be the man who swore to protect you.5:32 And sometimes, for forty years, they can get away with it.5:36 Until a strand of DNA unravels a lifetime of lies.
