Joseph James DeAngelo junior was born in Bath, New York, on November 8, 1945, served in the Navy in Vietnam, took a criminal justice degree, and joined the Exeter police department in California in 1973 and the Auburn department in 1976. He was dismissed in 1979 for shoplifting a hammer and a tin of dog repellent from a chemist. He then worked as a mechanic at a distribution centre for twenty-seven years, married, and raised three daughters.
He was three separate cases for forty years. As the Visalia Ransacker he committed around a hundred burglaries in 1974 and 1975 and killed a professor who tried to stop him abducting his daughter. As the East Area Rapist he committed some fifty rapes around Sacramento from 1976, breaking into houses at night, tying couples up, stacking crockery on the man's back so he would hear it if he moved, and telephoning victims afterwards for years. As the Original Night Stalker he moved south and began killing, ten murders in southern California between 1979 and 1986, several of them couples beaten to death in their beds.
DNA in the 1990s established that the southern murders and the northern rapes were the same man, and the case became one of the best known unsolved series in the United States. It went nowhere for another twenty years.
In 2018 investigators uploaded the crime scene DNA profile to GEDmatch, an open genealogy database, found distant cousins, built family trees, and narrowed it to DeAngelo, then confirmed it from a discarded tissue and a car door handle. He was arrested at his home in Citrus Heights on April 24, 2018, aged seventy-two. On June 29, 2020, in a converted university ballroom, he pleaded guilty to thirteen murders and admitted dozens of rapes that were past the statute of limitations, so that the survivors could put them on the record. He was sentenced on August 21, 2020, to multiple terms of life without parole. The method that found him has since been used on hundreds of cold cases and has produced a continuing argument about consent and genetic privacy.