More than 30 years after his last crime, a suspect has finally been arrested in the infamous Golden State Killer case. The suspect, a 76-year-old former police officer named Joseph DeAngelo, is believed to have committed over 50 rapes and 12 murders in California between 1976 and 1986. How did police solve a crime spree that ended more than 30 years ago? (Drum roll, please.....) DNA analysis, that's how!
It turns out that police had DNA samples from the Golden State Killer, collected from several of his crimes many years ago. But they had no suspects to try to match them to. Companies like 23andMe have lots of DNA samples, but they are not searchable by the public or the police. However, there's a small company called GEDmatch that analyzes DNA samples and makes them available for free for research purposes. Police detectives searched the GEDmatch database recently, and identified a DNA sample that was close enough to the killer's DNA that it had to belong to a relative (for more on how that works, see this article). Studying that person's family tree led them to Joseph DeAngelo as a possible suspect in the Golden State Killer case.
To find out for sure, the police covertly collected a DNA sample from Mr. DeAngelo (it wouldn't be hard to do - we discard DNA every day on coffee cups and soda cans, for example). It was a match to the killer's DNA samples that they'd had on file for 30 years!
Case closed, finally.
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