00:00For 40 years, a phantom serial killer left zero fingerprints across 13 gruesome murders.
00:07So how was this untraceable ghost finally caught?
00:11Through a totally mundane website used for tracing family ancestry.
00:15He studied his victims' schedules for weeks, unlocking their back doors and striking in the dead of night.
00:21But despite 50 assaults, police found zero physical clues.
00:26The investigation was completely frozen.
00:28That all changed in 20 Ixun, when desperate detectives took a massive technological gamble.
00:34They took intact DNA collected from a 1980 crime scene and simply uploaded it to a public genealogy database.
00:41The database didn't identify the killer.
00:43Instead, it returned a partial genetic match.
00:46It was a distant relative who had voluntarily uploaded their own profile online.
00:50Using this one genetic thread, investigators began reverse-engineering the killer's bloodline.
00:55They built a massive, sprawling digital family tree.
00:58Connecting thousands of profiles across multiple generations.
01:01Then, detectives started aggressively pruning the branches.
01:04They filtered out thousands of branches based on the killer's known age, gender, and geographic location.
01:09Until that colossal web of thousands of people collapsed down to one single isolated target.
01:15The distant family's DNA had just unmasked 72-year-old Joseph James D'Angelo.
01:20And the chilling reason he successfully evaded the police for 40 years?
01:24He was a former police officer the entire time.
01:26He was a former police officer the entire time.
01:27...
01:29...
01:30...
Comments