Golden State Killer?

[Razors Edge ★]

I had never even heard of this serial killer. Then, the news blows up recently with his possible capture & arrest.  Then, I find out that there is a book written by Oswalt's recently deceased wife (who I didn't realize seems like a sad story in itself) and then all sort of other stuff.  Anyway, I ordered the book (I'll Be Gone In The Dark) for my nutso sister who LOVES this sort of true crime stuff. We'll see if she likes it.

Tom

[Kzoo]

I never hear of it until the other day as well.

 

[Razors Edge ★]

4 minutes ago, Kzoo said:

I never hear of it until the other day as well.

 

I wonder if our resident Sacramentoan will chime in?  He wasn't there back then, though (I believe).

Tom

[ChrisL]

I think his last murder was in the late 80's, around the time of the Night Stalker Richard Ramirez.  I remember the murders vaguely, I left the area myself in 1984 and didn't return until 1988.  A couple of murders were in Irvine which is the city  next door to me. I had 2 sisters living in Irvine at that time.

[dinneR ★]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/books/michelle-mcnamara-patton-oswalt.html?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly&utm_campaign=47a7306498-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_04_26&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0bb2959cbb-47a7306498-306044945

On Tuesday night, the comedian Patton Oswalt was in Chicago at an event to promote “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” a chilling true crime book about the Golden State Killer, who committed a string of unsolved rapes and murders in California in the 1970s and ’80s.

Mr. Oswalt told the crowd that he believed the killer would be caught soon, that his time was running out.

In fact, just hours before, Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, had been arrested in California on a warrant stemming from two of the murders. On Wednesday, the authorities identified him as the Golden State Killer, citing DNA evidence connecting him to the crimes.

[donkpow]

1 hour ago, Razors Edge said:

I had never even heard of this serial killer. Then, the news blows up recently with his possible capture & arrest.  Then, I find out that there is a book written by Oswalt's recently deceased wife (who I didn't realize seems like a sad story in itself) and then all sort of other stuff. 

Is this what life is like just outside inside the beltway?

[Dchiefransom]

The caught him through DNA on an ancestry type site. A relative had submitted DNA to the site. They set up surveillance on this guy and when he dropped something that had evidence on it they picked it up and confirmed a match.

[donkpow]

5 hours ago, Dchiefransom said:

The caught him through DNA on an ancestry type site. A relative had submitted DNA to the site. They set up surveillance on this guy and when he dropped something that had evidence on it they picked it up and confirmed a match.

So one or more of the DNA sites are feeding the government test results?

[Dchiefransom]

6 hours ago, donkpow said:

So one or more of the DNA sites are feeding the government test results?

I'm not sure how that works. I haven't seen how they got the info yet. I turned on the news this morning just as the lawyer was ending his talk. They might have sent in a sample, or maybe if they have the DNA profile they can register on the site and use that to match whatever is in the site database. I imagine someone in the task force they set up could have signed up just like a regular person. The last thing the lawyer on the news said was they might have gotten a warrant to run through a site's database.

[Green Grass]

6 hours ago, donkpow said:

So one or more of the DNA sites are feeding the government test results?

 

9 minutes ago, Dchiefransom said:

The last thing the lawyer on the news said was they might have gotten a warrant to run through a site's database.

 

So, either this guy was a suspect and they targeted him, or they were granted a warrant to check however many hundreds of thousands of people have submitted their DNA.  Not sure I feel good about the latter possibility.

[donkpow]

Okay, I heard the rest of it on the morning news. No DNA lab or business cooperated with the investigation. The police used a place that puts DNA results up for grabs. The police already had a DNA sample from the crime scene and they just asked the search engine for ancestors. They kept doing it until the results were sufficiently refined. Then they went over to the suspect and collected a DNA sample legally.

"The notorious "Golden State Killer," known for a series of rapes and murders in California in the 1970s and 1980s, evaded capture for decades, but his genes finally caught up to him. Armed with DNA that the killer left behind at various crime scenes, investigators used a shot-in-the-dark method to track him down: They painstakingly searched through numerous genetic profiles on popular genealogy websites to see if they could find DNA that matched that of the murderer's — and they just about did, according to the Sacramento Bee. In fact, the investigators homed in on the genetic profile of someone who appeared to be related to the killer. The bulk of the search was done on GEDmatch, an open-source geneology website that makes users' genetic information available for anyone to see without needing a court order, according to the San Jose Mercury News."

https://www.livescience.com/62421-golden-state-killer-dna-genealogy.html

[Indy]

Based on the Topic title, I thought this discussion was going to be about taxes.