The Man Next Door: The True Story of the Golden State Killer

The house on the corner was quiet. Just another beige suburban home in Citrus Heights, California, with a tidy lawn and a basketball hoop in the driveway. Inside, a seventy-two-year-old man was going about his day. A grandfather. A former police officer. And for forty years, a ghost. Last week, we explored the chaotic evil that descended on Cielo Drive with the Manson family, a darkness that was loud and public. But sometimes, evil doesn’t announce itself. Sometimes, it’s been your neighbor for decades. The man in the beige house was about to get a knock on his door.

And with that knock, a reign of terror that had haunted an entire state would finally, impossibly, come to an end. It began, as it so often did, with small things. A broken window latch. A woman’s underwear drawer left open. A wedding photo turned face down on a nightstand. From 1974 onward, across California, a shadow was moving through neighborhoods. At first, it was just a string of over one hundred burglaries. Eerie, violating, but not yet violent. The intruder seemed to be learning. Watching. He’d take small, sentimental items—a single earring, a cufflink.

He was creating a private collection of his victims' lives before he ever touched them. Then, in 1976, the burglaries escalated. He was no longer content to just watch. He became the East Area Rapist. For three years, he terrorized Northern California, committing over fifty brutal rapes. His methods were chillingly consistent. He’d break into homes, usually targeting couples. He’d bind the man, place dishes on his back, and threaten to kill them both if he heard the plates rattle. Then, in the darkness, he would assault the woman, sometimes for hours.

He’d whisper. He’d taunt. After he left, the phone would sometimes ring. It was him. His voice on the line, a final act of psychological torture. The communities were paralyzed with fear. Gun sales soared. People pushed furniture against their doors at night. But the attacker was a phantom. He left behind terror, and he left behind DNA, but he never left a name. In 1979, the rapes in the north suddenly stopped. And in Southern California, a new predator appeared. The Original Night Stalker. This time, the attacks were fatal. Couples were tied up, just like before.

But now, they were being murdered. For seven more years, the Night Stalker killed. Ten people, in their own beds, in the safest place they knew. And then, in 1986, as suddenly as he had appeared, he vanished. The phone calls stopped. The murders ended. For decades, the cases went cold. The East Area Rapist. The Original Night Stalker. Two separate monsters, two terrifying chapters in California history. Or so everyone thought. The first hint that the story was bigger came in 2001. DNA technology had advanced. Investigators took the preserved semen samples from the East Area Rapist crime scenes and compared them to samples from the Original Night Stalker murders.

They were a MATCH. It wasn’t two men. It was one. One man responsible for a thirteen-year crime spree that spanned the entire state. A serial killer, a serial rapist, who had somehow operated for over a decade and then just… stopped. The case was given a new name, one coined by the late author Michelle McNamara, who refused to let the story die. She called him the Golden State Killer. The name stuck. But the man himself remained a ghost. By 2018, the case was ice cold. The trail was forty years old. The DNA profile from the crime scenes had been run against every criminal database in the country for years.

Nothing. The man wasn't in the system. To the investigators who had spent their careers on this case, it felt like a dead end. But then, a new idea emerged. A long shot. It came from a different kind of DNA, and a very different kind of database. For years, millions of people had been spitting into tubes and mailing them to companies to find long-lost relatives or explore their ancestry. They uploaded their genetic profiles to public websites, like one called GEDmatch. They were building vast, public family trees. The investigators had the killer’s DNA.

What if, instead of looking for HIM, they looked for his family? They uploaded the crime scene DNA profile to GEDmatch. And they got a hit. Not a close match. A distant one. A great-great-great-grandparent. A team of genealogists, including an expert named Barbara Rae-Venter, got to work. They took that distant ancestor and started building a family tree forward in time, through generations of births, deaths, and marriages. They were hunting for a ghost on a timeline of American history. They narrowed it down to a few family branches, searching for a man who fit the profile—the right age, living in California during the crimes.

The tree kept growing, branching out, until finally, it led them to one name. Joseph James DeAngelo Junior. He was seventy-two years old. He lived in Citrus Heights, a suburb of Sacramento, right in the heart of where the East Area Rapist had been most active. He was a navy veteran. A father. And from 1973 to 1979, he had been a police officer. He had hidden in plain sight, carrying a badge by day and terrorizing communities by night. But they needed definitive proof. A genetic family tree wasn’t enough for an arrest warrant. So the police started watching him.

They followed him to a hobby lobby. After he went inside, they swabbed the door handle of his car. Not enough DNA. They tailed him again. They watched him discard a tissue in a trash can outside his home. An investigator quickly retrieved it. In the world of law enforcement, when someone discards an item in public, they abandon any privacy interest in it. The police can collect it without a warrant. The tissue was sent to the lab. The results came back. The DNA on the tissue was a perfect match to the DNA from the decades-old crime scenes.

They had him. On April 24th, 2018, police surrounded the quiet house on the corner. Joseph DeAngelo was arrested, utterly stunned. The ghost had a face. In 2020, to avoid the death penalty, DeAngelo pleaded guilty. He admitted to thirteen murders and thirteen kidnappings, and confessed to dozens of rapes that were past the statute of limitations. He was sentenced to multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole. In the courtroom, dozens of survivors, some now in their sixties and seventies, finally confronted the man who had stolen their peace four decades earlier.

They learned their attacks weren't isolated incidents, but the work of one of California's most prolific serial killers. They found a strange, resilient community in each other. The case was one of the most consequential in modern American history, not just for the scale of the crimes, but for HOW he was caught. That long-shot idea—investigative genetic genealogy—has since been used to solve hundreds of cold cases. But a new documentary series released this year asks a chilling question. The official record is horrifying. But is it the whole story?

It raises the possibility of earlier crimes, unsolved murders, and a timeline of violence that may not have ended in 1986 after all. We have a name for the ghost now. But we may never know the true size of his shadow.