This episode of The Redacted Report takes a hard, clear-eyed look at the Golden State Killer case, not by retelling the headlines everyone already knows, but by sitting in the uncomfortable spaces where the story actually lives.
We follow the arc from Joseph James DeAngelo’s earliest known crimes in 1974 through his arrest in 2018 and sentencing in 2020, with one chilling fact threaded through every phase: while California was being terrorized, DeAngelo was also an active-duty police officer. He wasn’t just hiding from law enforcement—he was learning how it worked from the inside, and that advantage shaped the way he hunted, the way he covered his tracks, and the way he stayed untouchable for more than forty years.The episode opens by naming that truth right out loud, because it changes everything.
The person stalking neighborhoods, breaking into homes, and destroying lives wasn’t a shadowy outsider. He wore a badge, carried a gun, and walked into work like any other sworn officer. From there, the story steps back to his early life—childhood trauma, military service in Vietnam, criminal justice studies at CSU Sacramento, and a marriage that, on the surface, made him look like a normal young man building a future. But behind that veneer, something darker was already forming.
We then move into the Visalia Ransacker years from 1974 to 1975, when DeAngelo committed more than a hundred burglaries and his first confirmed murder, all while serving as a police officer in Exeter. It’s the first clear look at his patterns, his boldness, and the early moments when a different kind of attention might have stopped what was coming next. Instead, the case splinters, and the window closes. By 1976, just months after being hired by the Auburn Police Department, DeAngelo begins the East Area Rapist spree.
Over the next several years, the Sacramento region is hit with at least fifty sexual assaults, each one escalating the fear and the stakes. The episode walks through how close investigators came—especially Detective Richard Shelby, who at one point was within arm’s reach of the suspect. And yet, even with the net tightening, DeAngelo keeps slipping through, aided by his knowledge of police tactics and the blind spots that come with assuming the predator is always “someone else. One of the most haunting turns comes in 1979, when DeAngelo is fired from Auburn PD for shoplifting dog repellent and a hammer.
On paper, it’s petty theft. In reality, those items match the East Area Rapist’s known methods so cleanly they should’ve set off alarms across the department. But they didn’t. The moment passed as a minor embarrassment instead of the massive red flag it was, and DeAngelo simply moved on to the next phase. That next phase takes us south into the Original Night Stalker murders, stretching from 1979 to 1986. Here, the offender escalates from rape to routine homicide, killing victims while maintaining the same signatures and controlling routines seen in Northern California.
The tragedy isn’t only the violence itself, but the fact that law enforcement agencies failed to connect these crimes to the earlier Sacramento attacks, even though the methodologies lined up like fingerprints. The episode doesn’t just describe that failure—it lingers on what it cost.The narrative then shifts to the years when the case begins to reawaken in the public eye, largely through the relentless work of Michelle McNamara. She coins the name “Golden State Killer,” brings the scattered crimes under a single identity, and spends years pushing the case back into the spotlight.
Her death in 2016 adds a painful gravity to that chapter, but her book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, leaves behind a surge of attention and pressure that helps fuel renewed investigative energy. Finally, the episode breaks down the genetic genealogy breakthrough that ended DeAngelo’s run. Investigators upload crime-scene DNA to GEDmatch, locate distant relatives, and then do the slow, painstaking genealogical work to narrow the search.
When DeAngelo becomes the focus, a covert DNA collection from a Hobby Lobby parking lot confirms it. In April 2018, he’s arrested—an ending that feels impossible until it’s suddenly real.
We close with his guilty plea, the survivor testimonies that reclaim the final word from the man who tried to steal it, and a sober look at what this case forces us to confront. It exposes the dangers of law enforcement culture closing ranks, the catastrophic consequences of fractured communication between agencies, and the complicated future we’re stepping into with genetic genealogy—where justice and privacy are now forever tangled together.
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