did they catch the golden state killer

Yes. The Golden State Killer was identified and arrested in 2018, and he is now serving life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Quick Scoop

• The Golden State Killer was identified as Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer from California.

• He was arrested in April 2018 at his home in Citrus Heights, near Sacramento, after investigators used DNA and genetic genealogy to link him to old crime scene evidence.

• In June 2020, DeAngelo pleaded guilty to 13 murders and admitted to many additional rapes and other crimes in a plea deal that took the death penalty off the table.

• In August 2020, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, and he is currently incarcerated in California.

How they finally caught him

• Investigators uploaded crime scene DNA to a public genealogy database (GEDmatch), which led them to distant relatives of the killer.

• By building out a family tree and narrowing by age, location, and other factors, they focused on DeAngelo and then secretly collected DNA from something he discarded.

• That discarded DNA matched the Golden State Killer profile, giving probable cause for his arrest decades after his crimes.

What he was responsible for

• DeAngelo has been linked to at least 13 murders, over 50 rapes, and numerous burglaries across California in the 1970s and 1980s.

• His crimes spanned multiple regions and earlier aliases, including the “East Area Rapist” and the “Original Night Stalker,” before they were all tied to the same offender.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.