QUOTE OF THE DAY: "He was totally off the radar till just a week ago, and it was a lead they got, somehow they got information and through checking family or descendants — it was pretty complicated the way they did it — they were able to get him on the radar,” said Ray Biondi, 81, who was the lieutenant in charge of the homicide bureau of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department during the crime spree."
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The big players in commercial DNA testing — including 23andMe and AncestryDNA — extract genetic profiles from the saliva that customers send to the company in a tube by mail. It would not be easy for law enforcement to upload a profile to one of those sites. Over the past few years, numerous smaller genealogical websites have emerged, however, giving customers more avenues to upload a DNA profile and search for relatives. If law enforcement located the suspect through a genealogy site, it could raise ethical issues, particularly if individuals did not consent to having their genetic profiles searched against crime scene evidence. GEDmatch said in its statement that it had warned those who used its site that the genetic information could be used for other purposes. “If you are concerned about non-geneatological uses of your DNA, you should not upload your DNA to the database and/or you should remove DNA that has already been uploaded,” the statement said."
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STORY: "How a Genealogy Site Led to the Front Door of the Golden State Killer Suspect," by reporter Thomas Fuller, published by The New York Times on April 26, 2018.
PHOTO CAPTION: "Investigators obtained what Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento district attorney, called “abandoned” DNA samples from the suspect."
GIST: "The Golden State Killer raped and murdered victims
across California in an era before Google searches and social media, a
time when the police relied on shoe leather, not cellphone records or
big data. But
it was technology that got him. The suspect, Joseph James DeAngelo, 72,
was arrested by the police on Tuesday. Investigators accuse him of
committing more than 50 rapes and 12 murders over decades. Investigators
used DNA from crime scenes that had been stored all these years and
plugged the genetic profile of the suspected assailant into an online
genealogy database. One such service, GEDmatch, said in a statement on
Friday that law enforcement officials had used its database to crack the
case. Officers found distant relatives of Mr. DeAngelo’s and, despite
his years of eluding the authorities, traced their DNA to his front
door. “We
found a person that was the right age and lived in this area — and that
was Mr. DeAngelo,” said Steve Grippi, the assistant chief in the
Sacramento district attorney’s office. Investigators
then obtained what Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento district
attorney, called “abandoned” DNA samples from Mr. DeAngelo. “You leave
your DNA in a place that is a public domain,” she said. The
test result confirmed the match to more than 10 murders in California.
Ms. Schubert’s office then obtained a second sample and came back with
the same positive result, matching the full DNA profile. Those
who had investigated the case for years in vain were ecstatic by the
sudden breakthrough. “He was totally off the radar till just a week ago,
and it was a lead they got, somehow they got information and through
checking family or descendants — it was pretty complicated the way they
did it — they were able to get him on the radar,” said Ray Biondi, 81,
who was the lieutenant in charge of the homicide bureau of the
Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department during the crime spree. The
big players in commercial DNA testing — including 23andMe and
AncestryDNA — extract genetic profiles from the saliva that customers
send to the company in a tube by mail. It would not be easy for law
enforcement to upload a profile to one of those sites. Over the past few
years, numerous smaller genealogical websites have emerged, however,
giving customers more avenues to upload a DNA profile and search for
relatives. If
law enforcement located the suspect through a genealogy site, it could
raise ethical issues, particularly if individuals did not consent to
having their genetic profiles searched against crime scene evidence.
GEDmatch said in its statement that it had warned those who used its
site that the genetic information could be used for other purposes. “If
you are concerned about non-geneatological uses of your DNA, you should
not upload your DNA to the database and/or you should remove DNA that
has already been uploaded,” the statement said. The
Golden State Killer, also known as the East Area Rapist, tormented his
victims with sadistic rituals. Some he shot and killed with a firearm.
Others were bludgeoned to death with whatever he could find — in one
case a piece of firewood. He had many trademarks: He wore a mask, he
bound his victims’ hands. He started by raping single women and then
went on to raping married women with their husbands present, before
killing them both. Among
the numerous serial killers who stalked America in the 1960s, 1970s and
1980s — the Zodiac Killer, the Son of Sam, to name two — the Golden
State Killer was among the most notorious. Ms.
Schubert has been central to the efforts to find the killer. Her
childhood in the Sacramento suburb of Arden-Arcade, just miles from
where the suspect prowled through houses and raped women, was marked by
the terror of wondering if she or people she knew might be next. “It
wasn’t a matter of if he was coming, it was when,” Ms. Schubert said.
Her parents were “not gun people,” she said, but her father bought a
firearm. Her mother kept an ice pick under her pillow when she slept. Monica
Miller, who was in charge of the Sacramento F.B.I. field office from
2013 to 2017, said that when she retired, the case of the Golden State
Killer was cold. She said that Ms. Schubert, “was central in leading
this, convincing people this was worth pursuing.” For the people of
Sacramento, she added, “it was almost an open wound. People would still
talk about it. He was a phantom or a ghost in people’s minds.”
In
her career as a district attorney, Ms. Schubert championed DNA
technology and taught courses about cold cases, creating a unit in the
Sacramento district attorney’s office to pursue them. Eighteen years ago
she reached out to an investigator from Contra Costa County who
specialized in the East Area Rapist, beginning a collaboration to
re-energize the case. Two
years ago she convened a task force on the 40th anniversary of the
attacks in the Sacramento suburbs. It was the work of that group — a
collaboration with counties in Southern California, the San Francisco
Bay Area and the F.B.I. — that helped solve the case, Ms. Schubert said. Many
questions remain about the suspect. Did his family or his former
colleagues have hints about his grisly past? Why did he appear to stop
his spree of rapes and murders in 1986? Did he leverage his job as a
police officer to elude detection? All
of these questions swirled in conversations among residents of Citrus
Heights, Mr. DeAngelo’s neighborhood. They awoke on Wednesday shocked to
find that their neighbor, a man who liked to tinker with his motorcycle
in front of his neat beige stucco house, had been accused of being one
of America’s most notorious serial rapists. “It’s
crazy — they were looking for this guy for 40 years and he was right
here under our noses,” said Ashley Piorun, who lives five houses down
from Mr. DeAngelo. “We were shellshocked to find out.” This
suburban neighborhood of well-kept homes, northeast of Sacramento, is a
classic California housing tract of looping cul-de-sacs and towering
palm trees. Ms. Piorun calls it a “quiet, sweet, boring neighborhood.” Paul
Sanchietti, another neighbor, said he had taken an interest in the case
six months ago and combed through the Wikipedia entry that listed all
of the grisly and sadistic crimes the Golden State Killer was accused of
committing. “Here I was looking up the guy on Wikipedia and he was five doors down,” Mr. Sanchietti said of Mr. DeAngelo. From
the outside, the house seemed meticulously maintained. The roof is new,
the garden hose is perfectly coiled, the landscaping of sod, wood chips
and decorative rocks is neat. Mr.
Sanchietti said he had nothing more than polite interactions with Mr.
DeAngelo over the past two decades, but like other neighbors, he
remembered Mr. DeAngelo as having a temper. “He
would get volatile,” Mr. Sanchietti said. “He would be out here tending
to his car and he would get very angry. There were a lot of four letter
words.” “Every
neighborhood has some strange little dude,” Mr. Sanchietti said. “But
for him to be a serial murderer and rapist — that never crossed my
mind.”"
The entire story can be found at:
See related NBC story - DNA used in hunt for Golden State killer previously led to wrong man - at the link below: "Investigators hunting down the so-called Golden State Killer used information from genetic websites last year that led to the wrong man, court records obtained Friday by The Associated Press showed. An Oregon police officer working at the request of California investigators persuaded a judge in March 2017 to order a 73-year-old man in a nursing home to provide a DNA sample. The Oregon City man is in declining health and was unable to answer questions Friday about the case. His daughter said authorities never notified her before swabbing her father for DNA in his bed a rehabilitation center, but once they told her afterward she understood and worked with them to eliminate people who conceivably could be the killer. The case of mistaken identity was discovered as authorities hailed a novel use of DNA technology that led this week to the arrest of former police officer Joseph DeAngelo at his house outside Sacramento on murder charges. Critics of the investigative approach, however, warned it could jeopardize privacy rights."
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dna-used-hunt-golden-state-killer-previously-led-wrong-man-n869796
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/c
