This is one incredible story! Take one super-evasive serial killer + add an obsessed writer (#mypeople) and a clearly inventive and thinking outside the box detective; simmer for 20 years and wow. What a story! I’ll link to the newspaper accounts, but simplified, the detective came up with the idea to take the DNA recovered from the crime scene and upload it to a genealogy site under a fake profile, hoping to match to a family member. AND IT WORKED! This ploy led police to Joseph James DeAngelo and ex-cop and frightening dude.
“To find the DNA match, investigators created a fake profile, posing as a user who was researching family history. But the genetic information that was uploaded in a large text file was that of the killer. Officers found distant relatives of Mr. DeAngelo’s and, despite his years of eluding the authorities, traced their DNA to his front door.”
Read the whole story here.
And more about how the book came to be here.
