Technology and Things that Go Bump in the Night
How technological advancement has stopped killers cold
In the 1970s and 1980s, one man terrorized Californians by prowling residential areas and committing over 50 rapes, and ultimately 12 murders. Residents slept with weapons under their pillows, took turns keeping watch at night, and stopped walking their dogs at night. Somehow, despite dozens of reports of encounters with the predator, police and investigators could not track down the man responsible.
The terrifying ‘Original Night Stalker’, who struck in the dead of night, sneaking up on people who were sound asleep, and committing horrible acts on them, has roamed free for the past 40 years.This was before the time of internet searches, or social media, and most of what authorities had to go on was various conflicting reports on his appearance, shoe prints, and rough sketches.
I’ve been inexplicably fascinated with serial killers since high school. This is not something I bring up very often, as it isn’t the most socially acceptable interest to have. As a chronic worrier, I think it’s a fair fascination — perhaps it has to do with feeling like the more I can get inside their minds, the better I can prepare myself against a similar fate that has unfortunately befallen their victims. But I also think it has to do with a deep interest in human deviation and how I can get an education, get married, have a career and go through the motions of an ‘expected, normal’ life, while someone else can go through the same motions, but carry this dark, horrifying secret of how they define normal. Why do some not feel compelled to live life under the same social norms society has accepted?
Oddly enough, I began reading Michelle McNamara’s investigative novel, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark under a week ago. In the novel, Michelle obsessively digs into each victim’s encounter, follows every hint, every lead — this obsession came from the murder of a girl on her street growing up as a young girl. Unfortunately, Michelle McNamara passed away in April 2016 in her sleep and never got to see the Golden State Killer put behind bars. It honestly now gives me chills to say that this past Tuesday night, April 2018, her husband was promoting her book and speaking of how it wouldn’t be long before the killer was caught. Even he didn’t know, that that very day, an arrest had finally been made, after 40 years.
Joseph James DeAngelo, age 72, was arrested just this week as the suspected Golden State Killer. After all this time, it wasn’t his footprints, his sketches, victim’s descriptions, or any of the other small M.O.’s this killer had that put him behind bars. It was a DNA test. After all this time, DNA that had been stored for decades finally came back with a match. The DNA didn’t match to a terrifying monster, it matched to a seemingly normal elderly man who was married with daughters and a former police officer. The next door neighbor to many of the same people he terrorized.
The advancement of technology in criminal investigations has no doubt been one of the most influential implementations of technology over the past few decades. It took the guesswork and human error (for the most part) out of forensics and introduced scientific fact. First developed in 1985 by geneticist Alec Jeffreys at the University of Leicester, DNA has since helped put millions of offenders behind bars. In 1987, Colin Pitchfork of Leicester became the first man ever arrested by DNA testing for the murder of two teenage girls.
DNA has brought seemingly permanent cold cases back to life. In 2005, Dennis Rader, aka the ‘BTK Killer,’ was in custody for the murders of 10 people in Wichita during the 1970s-early 90s. What finally did him in? A floppy disc he sent in to police that allowed them to ultimately confirm DNA testing. In 2001, Gary Ridgeway, the infamous ‘Green River Killer,’ was arrested in Seattle. He ultimately admitted to the murder of 48 women in the Pacific Northwest area during the 1980s. A 14-year old saliva sample was the key that finally connected him to the killings.
Today, two days after the arrest of Joseph DeAngelo, we see another shift in the use of technology to catch a killer. Decades of stored DNA were plugged into an online genealogy database and investigators were able to work backwards from DeAngelo’s ancestry.
One can only hope that the thousands of cold cases that remain can continue to be cracked with the continued advancement of technology. This week’s arrest has proven the true power of our technology, and of the dedication of so many officials and civilians who spend their lives tracking down these criminals and seeking justice for their victims.
As I finish Michelle McNamara’s novel, I am saddened she could not see this day. “I’m in wildly speculative territory, I know. But I’ve always thought it might indicate that he operates behind a front of respectability,” she writes in the book. If only she could see now that she was correct, that he was a former police officer, a war veteran, and a grandfather. I hope that this arrest, though it can never erase the crimes and pain he caused, gives some closure to his victims and those affected.
