Golden State Killer’s reign will never be repeated, investigator says
One of the investigators instrumental in the arrest of the Golden State Killer believes his reign of terror would have ended sooner if we had the forensic science of today. But while technology has changed the way we hunt serial killers, the nightmare is never over, writes David Meddows.
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Today’s forensic technology would have stopped the Golden State Killer in his tracks well before his physical reign of terror stretched into its second decade.
Not only would lives have been saved but those victims who did survive his attacks would not then have been forced to live in fear for the next 40 years as their tormentor stayed out of sight and unpunished.
So says Paul Holes, one of the investigators instrumental in the eventual arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo Jnr, who for 13 years beginning in 1973, burgled more than 120 homes, sexually assaulted 50 women and murdered at least 13 victims in an escalating reign of terror that had communities on edge across a swathe of the Pacific state.
Prowling through the quiet suburban streets of California under the cover of darkness, DeAngelo would quietly slide open windows and slip inside to unleash unimaginable terror on the unsuspecting residents. He was the thing that nightmares are made of.
Holes tells Saturday Extra that if the killer had started his crime spree 30 years later, he would not have got away with it for the four decades he did. Technology, especially the continual improvement of DNA evidence, would have stopped him before his tally of crimes reached the length it did.
“I think an offender trying to do a Golden State Killer-type of series might be able to get away with four or seven of these types of attacks but I do think we would catch that type of offender very quickly,” Holes says.
“He may have been able to get away with a handful of cases. With DeAngelo, he is consistently leaving his DNA, so that’s a big knock against what he was doing but he couldn’t account for that back in the 1970s. But also just video surveillance, automated licence plate readers, cell phone technology, even home alarm systems.”
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Holes says this rapid rise in the tools that can be called upon in a modern-day investigation has forced the serial offender to change the way they operate. In effect the nightmare has changed.
“That’s why now our serial offenders, they’re going after your higher risk victims. They’re going after the sex workers or they’re going online to meet up with people and they’re trying to remain anonymous through hi-tech versus going into a neighbourhood, prowling, doing the burglaries,” Holes says.
“Breaking into houses and driving away with their licence plates on it, it would be very hard to get away with it.”
The retired investigator, who now hosts the crime series The DNA Of Murder With Paul Holes, where he uses DNA technology to delve into unsolved crimes across the US, spent years chasing the elusive Golden State Killer and was part of a group who eventually used those advances in technology to track down the former policeman, arrest him in 2018 and finally bring him to justice last month.
As with many cold cases that are eventually solved — sometimes decades after a crime is committed — the case of the Golden State Killer was broken using DNA. But it was a highly unusual method that Holes and his colleagues used at the time, one that many in his line of work dismissed as baseless — until they hit paydirt.
For all its extraordinary scientific beauty, using DNA in crime solving is a fairly straight forward exercise. Much like fingerprints, a sample taken from a crime scene — usually in the form of blood, skin, hair or bodily fluid, is matched against a database of DNA profiles.
So accurate is the technique that a match is considered one of the best forms of evidence for forensic investigators. Conversely, a non-match has helped free condemned prisoners from death row. According to the Innocence Project, almost 400 such exonerations have taken place since the first in 1989.
But with the case of DeAngelo, Holes and his team did not have all the pieces to use traditional DNA matching.
Instead they used samples that had been collected from the crime scenes — before DNA was even a thing — and fed them into a commercial genealogy website called GEDmatch.
They weren’t expecting to find the perpetrator in their search, instead their method involved creating what is essentially a reverse family tree.
“You search genealogy databases and you get a list of people who share a percentage of the DNA with the person you’re looking for and once you get that list, then it’s a matter of doing traditional genealogy (investigation),” Holes says.
In the case of the Golden State Killer, when they found a profile that shared just a small amount of DNA with the monster they were hunting, they started the long process of tracing that person’s descendants using traditional investigative techniques and hoping for a match against a huge list of potential suspects that had grown since the initial attacks.
Eventually they stumbled on to DeAngelo’s name and knew they had their man. Traditional DNA testing — carried out without raising suspicion with their prime suspect — was then the final nail in the coffin.
This method of investigation, which Holes says has since helped solve many cold cases in the United States, was met with much scepticism when he was presenting it to colleagues in the middle of their investigation.
“Ultimately even though they were poo-pooing this technology it proved itself and identified DeAngelo and since then here in the United States we’ve had over 100 cases solved using this genealogy tool,” he says.
When the Golden State Killer was finally sentenced to spend the rest of his life in jail last month, Holes was expecting to be overjoyed and celebrate a victory 40 years in the making. But that just couldn’t be.
“I was expecting it to be kind of a celebratory and victorious type of feeling and I was very melancholy, just recognising that the evil that this man did,” he says.
“It can never be erased and even though his victims are getting justice, this is just another step in their healing process.”
Much has been revealed about DeAngelo’s crimes, often in great detail, since his 2018 arrest, but Holes quietly suggests the nightmare was even worse than we know.
“Even with what’s out there in the public I will tell you that pales in comparison to the totally of the crimes that Joseph DeAngelo committed,” he says.
* THE DNA OF MURDER WITH PAUL HOLES, NOW STREAMING ON HAYU