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Chapter 1: What is the background of the Golden State Killer case?
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So then police have to, you know, still do the old fashioned work, but it's a shortcut. And they eliminate who the killer is. Now they found a distant cousin of D'Angelo. And after, you know, eliminating, this was, you know, I think 2016, they started going back and eliminating his relatives until they found their guy.
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For more than four decades, the Golden State Killer haunted California, leaving behind a trail of terror in one of the most chilling cold cases in American history. Then, in 2018, in a twist of fate, the man behind the crimes, Joseph James D'Angelo, was unmasked not by fingerprints or confessions, but by a distant relative's DNA uploaded to a genealogy website.
Today, I'm speaking with crime columnist with the Toronto Sun and author of Inside the Mind of the Golden State Killer, Brad Hunter, to talk about how the case which mystified America came undone. I'm Chloe McPolin and this is Crime World, a podcast by crimeworld.com. Brad, you're a national crime columnist for the Toronto Sun and author of Inside the Mind of the Golden State Killer.
Obviously, this case was an unidentified serial killer case that remained unsolved in America for 42 years. But can you take us back in time to the 1970s in California and kind of give us a potted history of the crimes committed by the Golden State Killer?
Sure. Joseph D'Angelo was originally from a small town in upstate New York called Bath. Now, he was a Vietnam veteran, but he wasn't running around the jungle shooting an M-16, as he often told people. He was on a ship 20 miles off the coast. So a bit of a fabulous that way.
But he desperately wants to be a cop after he gets out of Vietnam and he goes to university, desperately wants to be a cop, and he gets hired by a small town in Northern California called Exeter.
uh he's does you know just run-of-the-mill copper stuff there uh and then he moves to uh he moves to aurora california closer to an kind of an outer suburb of sacramento the state capital and at some point he um I don't know whether he just started pushing things. He would break into people's houses and prowl and look in the windows and jump over backyards and whatnot.
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Chapter 2: How was Joseph James DeAngelo identified as the killer?
The view on that is that he had seen her at a local mall where she worked and was attracted to her. And that's really the first example of, you know, specifically targeting someone.
So it kind of took a while for, I suppose, authorities to link these kind of couple of like aliases together, you know, the East Area Rapist and the Night Stalker together. Can you tell me a bit about that and like how authorities actually ended up linking all of these to, you know, to one individual?
Sure. I guess the first... The first part of this, though, is the problem at the time. And I'd written about this actually for a story on the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez. But it was that Southern California, that area, not as bad in Northern California. There is a slew of different police forces, and they are all interconnected by freeways. The area is like completely freeway.
So you could theoretically snatch a person off the street in one. killed them in another, and dumped them in a third. So that gets to whose responsibility is this, right? I think at that time in Los Angeles, anyways, there was five different serial killers operating at the time. It was Serial Killer Central. None of the cops from any of the other police services
barely talked to each other they were very guarded of their information and of course there was another none of the modern conveniences like you know dna cell phone pinging cctv all these things were out there so this was for for a homicidal maniac this was a playground
And what was the extent of the police investigation to find this guy? We know, obviously, that, you know, DNA databases and stuff like that came later. But I suppose, how were the police attempting to track down this guy? Obviously, it was pandemonium, you know, all of these murderous sprees happening.
Sure. They started out with old-fashioned shoe leather and whatnot, which... it wasn't, you know, going, you know, as we've seen in numerous cases, it wasn't going to be enough. It wasn't that the police didn't do their due diligence.
It was more a matter of the times, you know, we're against, you know, we're against them and they were against, you know, quite frankly, a very sophisticated predator. So they, I mean, they did all the due diligence, but, You know, it doesn't, you know, till years later, decades later after, you know, the last victim, Janelle Cruz, who was murdered in 1986.
She was the last victim, you know, years after that. you know, one cop calls another cop and says, Hey, I got this guy, this thing. And, you know, it sounds a little bit like that.
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Chapter 3: What crimes did the Golden State Killer commit in the 1970s?
And he later said that the reason was because... He had kids. He was too busy, you know, taking kids to baseball games and things like that. He didn't have time to go kill people or to indulge his hobby. And around the time that Janelle Cruz is murdered, after that, D'Angelo has children now. And, you know, from all... stretches, he's actually a pretty good father. He's a very devoted father.
And all of a sudden, the killing stops. However, he is still one of the earmarks of Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, was that he would taunt his victims or the survivors of the victims years after. It would be, you know, a phone call. you know, with a sinister laugh or, you know, different things like that. You should have seen her.
And so, yeah, he kept, you know, so he kept his hand in that way. But even at that, the phone calls, I think, stopped seven years later and then nothing. And I mean, the police hadn't even figured out at that point, when he stopped making his phone calls, that these murders hundreds of miles away in Northern California, around Sacramento and that area, were
connected to these murders in Santa Barbara, in, uh, Ventura County and in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. I mean, that's a, that's a long way to go. I mean, so.
Totally. And we know Joseph D'Angelo took a five-year hiatus from murdering people. I think it was after Cherry Domingo and Gregory Sanchez. That's correct.
He took a hiatus then as well. Um, So, and, you know, that, I think, I think the turning it on and turning it off also may have thrown cops off from, from, you know, saying, oh, yeah, that's the guy. Remember that?
And... Well, presumably it wasn't kind of, I suppose, top of their radar because he seemingly had, you know, kind of diminished. But it wasn't until 32 years later that the individual responsible was kind of tracked down, of course. How did they actually find Joseph D'Angelo? How did they link him to this?
Well, they'd figured out that... from just regular DNA that yeah it was the same killer because they had the data banks up by that same killer sort of stuff but it would be in some of these instances it would be like a needle in a haystack trying to find them Chloe like up here in Canada using the same method they used to get the Golden State killer
A cop I know who's head of the cold case unit in Toronto, Steve Smith, and he's one of the most famous guys for using this technology. They got a guy who was responsible for two separate murders in 1983. And he told me if it hadn't been for genetic genealogy, it would have been one in 10 million to find him. Now you're going to ask me, what's genetic genealogy?
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Chapter 4: How did the Golden State Killer's methods evolve over time?
Totally. I mean, because it is complex. I mean, normally the journalism likes to keep itself separate from the Garda investigations. So Garda investigations go on and journalism reports on them. But obviously then you're put in this compromising position because you have guys running out visibly with handguns in their hands. And, you know, they're obviously then disappeared into the ether.
And you have... certainly you have to have a discussion about what is your civic responsibility in terms of do you help the guards, you don't want these armed gunmen to run down the street and kill another few people. So it was a complex one and people were aware straight away that the guards are going to want these pictures and want to use it for their purposes.
And we also have our purposes, which is to tell what happened and to report on the news. So there was a conflict straight away.
From my memory, as the afternoon went on and, you know, I was talking to contacts and to other people who were involved in crime journalism, etc. It became apparent that there were no guards at the weigh-in. That in actual fact, the guards didn't seem to be there at all. They were called literally by the hotel and had arrived in response to what had already gone on.
Of course, David Byrne had been shot dead in the... In the reception of the hotel we were getting photographs in later in the day which showed a very shocked looking Liam Byrne standing outside the hotel, his hands in his pockets. standing beside his cousin, Liam Rowe, another significant cartel member. There was no sign of Daniel Kinahan.
I was getting calls from people who were telling me that these professional killers had been flown into the country and had already been flown out. There was rumours, there was spin, and also there was the general, I suppose, conversations in regards to, oh my God, what is going to happen next? I mean, all anyone knew for sure was something was going to happen.
David Byrne was a very, very senior lieutenant. He was also from criminal royalty, from the Byrne family. His brother-in-law is Thomas Balmer Kavanagh. You know, his brother is Liam Byrne. And he's very much at the heart of the Kinnahan cartel. We knew from the beginning that this...
attack had occurred as part of the rivalry between the Kinahan and Hutch factions of what was once the one organisation. And I think everybody was really trying to predict what this might lead to. But nobody could have guessed.
Nobody could have guessed. And of course, those rumors straight away went around. It was straight away focused on the Hutch gang. But at this time, if you remember, while there had been other incidents, for example, an attempted hit on Jerry Hutch in Lanzarote, those incidents weren't always public. People were straight away thinking this isn't the type of normal organized crime operation.
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