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Police say the Golden State Killer has committed at least 12 murders, 45 rapes and hundreds of home break-ins all over California. This week they arrested a man they think is responsible. How has the perpetrator of such shocking crimes eluded capture for over 40 years?
Since the early 1970s, an unknown assailant had been terrorising various parts of California from Sacramento to south of Los Angeles, earning him different nicknames in each crime spree: the "Vidalia Ransacker", the "East Area Rapist" and the "Original Night Stalker".
It wasn't until the advent of DNA testing that law enforcement realised they were dealing with a single perpetrator. And even then, it took another two decades to find him.
"This is a piece of our history that generations of investigators have worked towards," says Sacramento County Sheriff's Department Sergeant Shaun Hampton.
The EAR raped over two dozen women by the time he committed his first known murder in 1978.
Katie and Brian Maggiore were out for a walk with their dog on the night of 2 February 1978, when they had a violent confrontation with a strange man. No-one knows what was said, but by the end of it, both 20-year-old Katie and 21-year-old Brian were dead from gunshot wounds. A man wearing a ski mask was seen fleeing by several witnesses.
Katie had complained in the months before that a man was stalking her at her work. Her colleagues said someone called Katie repeatedly, saying, "Your turn is coming." A strange man sitting in a blue Volkswagen would watch her for hours. After she attempted to confront him, he drove off, only to return hours later. Katie quit her job soon afterwards.
After the Maggiore murders, the EAR moved his hunting grounds to nearby Contra Costa County, committing 20 more rapes before he killed again, this time an osteopathic surgeon named Robert Offerman and his girlfriend, Alexandria Manning. Both were bound and shot in Offerman's home.
From there on, none of the EAR's victims were allowed to live. At the dawn of the 1980s, a perpetrator known as the "Original Night Stalker" began killing in Santa Barbara, Ventura and Orange counties. He seemed to develop a new taste for raping women in front of their partners before executing them both.
He murdered married couple Lyman and Charlene Smith, newlyweds Keith and Patti Harrington, and Cheri Domingo and her boyfriend Greg Sanchez. The Smiths were bludgeoned with a fireplace log.
Although law enforcement has had a DNA profile for the Golden State Killer for decades now, a matching profile was never found in any national DNA database, meaning the man had never been caught for a subsequent crime where his DNA would have been collected.
Eventually a task force joined all the affected jurisdictions together with the FBI to try to collaborate, offer new reward money and send out a call for tips to the public. Although journalists and armchair detectives have been fascinated by the case and offered thousands of tips over the years, no suspect has ever matched the DNA profile, until two weeks ago.
The break came after Paul Holes, a retired investigator with the Contra Costa District Attorney's Office and long time investigator on the case, searched a free, do-it-yourself genealogy website called GEDmatch.
According to the Sacramento Bee, the site is a place for people to find long lost relatives, and has a database of 800,000 DNA profiles. Sacramento District Attorney Chief Deputy Steve Grippi confirmed that a family member of DeAngelo's had used the service, and they were able to isolate him as a suspect and collect "discarded" DNA on two occasions. They finally had a match.
"We were looking for a needle in a haystack and we found it," says District Attorney Schubert, who has had some role on the case since she was a deputy district attorney in 2000.
DeAngelo is a former police officer with the Auburn Police Department who was fired after he was caught shoplifting a hammer and dog repellent from a hardware store in 1979. He married and had a daughter, and worked as a truck mechanic for a grocery store chain for 27 years.
Sheriff Scott Jones told the Sacramento Bee that DeAngelo was "very surprised" when he was arrested.
Since the arrest, officers from all the jurisdictions touched by the Golden State Killer flocked to the quiet street in Citrus Heights to begin an exhaustive search of the house.
DeAngelo may yet argue his innocence.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-43915187