00:00For 44 years, he was a ghost, a masked prowler, who slipped through bedroom windows in the dead of night
00:08and vanished before dawn.
00:11They called him the East Area Rapist, the original Night Stalker.
00:17Then in 2018, a knock came at a quiet suburban door, and the ghost finally had a name.
00:25It began in 1976, in the suburbs east of Sacramento.
00:31A masked man would cut phone lines, pry open a sliding door, and tie up a sleeping woman before she
00:38could scream.
00:40Then he began hunting couples, waking them at gunpoint, stacking dishes on the husband's back, and warning that if the
00:48dishes rattled, everyone would die.
00:51He taunted the police with whispered phone calls.
00:55By 1979, he had moved into Southern California, and started killing.
01:01Thirteen murders, more than 50 assaults, over a hundred break-ins in a decade.
01:10Detectives suspected a man who knew police procedure.
01:13Sketch artists drew him.
01:16No one recognized him.
01:17The case went cold in 1986, but the DNA was preserved in freezers, waiting for science to catch up.
01:26For 30 years, every database came up empty.
01:30He was a phantom with no past.
01:33Then came investigative genealogy, the same science that identified long unknown victims like the Lady of the Dunes.
01:41In 2017, investigators uploaded the killer's DNA to a public genealogy database.
01:49Genealogists built family trees branch by branch, ruling out thousands of names.
01:56One name kept surviving every cut.
01:59Joseph James D'Angelo, 72 years old.
02:03A former police officer, fired from the Auburn Police Department in 1979, living quietly in a Citrus Heights suburb.
02:13His neighbors knew him only as a gruff old man, who yelled at kids to stay off his grass.
02:20Detectives watched him for days, then lifted a discarded tissue from the trash.
02:26The DNA matched the crime scenes.
02:29A second sample from his car door handle matched again.
02:32The ghost had been found, and he had no idea.
02:37On the 24th of April, 2018, police arrested him in his driveway.
02:43In August of 2020, he pleaded guilty to 13 murders and was sentenced to life without parole.
02:5144 years of silence ended with a family tree.
02:55DNA does not forget.
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