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five thirty this morning. Her husband was tied up nearby and had to listen. When you look at what the East Area rapist was doing, he committed fifteen attacks where he's predominantly going into houses. Women would be asleep inside their houses. Sometimes these were mothers and their kids were another room. This is a retired forensic scientist and cold

case investigator, Paul Holmes. He spent over twenty years obsessively searching for the Golden State Killer, who was also known as the East Area Rapist, the Vassilia Ransacker, and the Original night Stalker. One man thought to be responded for over fifty rates and a dozen murders in northern California, and he would always have a ski mask on. He would go to these women as are laying asleep in the bed, get them flipped over toward their face down,

and tie their hands behind their back. As he's doing this, he's talking through clenched teeth and telling them you need to do what I say or I'm gonna kill you. He planned his attacks, he employed solid tactics. He often would have approached the house from one direction and leave the house in a different directions, so if there were witnesses seeing him coming, they didn't see him going, or vice versa. He would park his car many blocks away.

During the canvas, of course, law enforcement is going out and talking to neighbors and hey, did you see any strange vehicles parked out front? Nobody ever really saw his vehicle because it was so parked, so far away, so very tactically sound. A man in a mask robbed, tied, and stabbed them, leaving them for dad. Subjects stated, I want to report a murder, no a double murder. I did it. A man who wore an evil style executioner's hood, carried a knife and gun and intended to use them.

They have an arrestipe because they can't cove it, I'm not damn Zodiac? Who is the Zodiac and where is he? From My Heart Radio, How Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. This is Monster the Zodiac Killer. How investigators solve cases is constantly changing with improved technology. The most recent game changer forensic genealogy. The technique uses a mix of genetics and family trees. It's helps solve a growing list of

decades olds. The capture of the alleged Golden State Killer has made forensic geneology famous, and it's this case has breathed new life into the hunt for the Zodiac Killer. For several years, Paul Holes had almost no success with the Golden State Killer case. Every suspect and every tip would eventually lead to a dead end. It wasn't until Holes was working a completely separate case that ended up

connecting to another case that he encountered. Forensic genealogy holds takes us back to the very beginning of that sequence with the murder of unsuon June. She was killed by her boyfriend Larry Vanner in February at two thousand seventeen, this is that five months after my last prime suspect was eliminated I'm in the doldrums, but I have a conference call in another case that I had been involved with.

It was a two thousand and two homicide and Asian female had been bludged to death, buried underneath her house with kitty litter piled on top of her. We had always referred to it as a kitty letter case. And very quickly after this case, her living boyfriend, Larry Vanner, had been arrested. Larry Vanner was interesting in that we can never identify really who he was. Larry Vanner wasn't his real name. He had ten different names and we couldn't tell which one he had been given at birth.

He had many different birthdays that he had given law enforcement over the years, different social Security numbers. He was a mystery man. Then investigators connected Larry Vanner to a different case, the bear Brook murders, and it was on this case that Paul Hols learned how forensic genealogy could work. It was two fifty five gallon barrels, one found another found in two thousand and one. Barrel was an adult female and a little girl, and the other barrel was

two little girls. So that was a family that had been killed. But the other child in that second barrel wasn't related to this family. Well, through d n A, they showed that that other child was a biological child of Larry Vanner and then ultimately he's caught killing unsun June in two thousand and two in Contracost County. Amazing case. But I'm going I got to figure out how this technique has done. How can I use this to catch the East Air rapist a k a. The Golden State Killer.

Forensic genealogy is a layered technique. At the base, it's a map of an individual's DNA profile. Private genealogy companies begin selling personal genetic profiles in the early eighties. At the time, it was a niche market, but it's grown in popularity in recent years. One of these companies, twenty three and Me, now both surround five million customers worldwide. So the team and I visited their headquarters to learn

more about their product. My name is Kate Black. I'm the global Privacy Officer and Senior council at twenty three and Me. Twenty three and Me is a consumer genetics testing service, so anybody can order a test online, spit in a tube. It's quite a large bit of spit.

It takes about thirty minutes to fill up the whole tube, send that off in the mail to one of our laboratories, and then within usually eight weeks, get a account rich with reports and information about their DNA selves, everything from ancestry like your ethnicity breakdown where your ancestors were from, as well as some health and wellness related information like traits, how you may respond or react to caffeine consumption, and more of the serious health results like whether or not

you have the genes associated with late onset Alzheimer's. Our mission is really to give people you know, full access to understand their genetics and their genetic self, and that absolutely requires an enormous amount of trust in us. As a brand and a company, we take privacy very seriously.

We want to make sure that we are not only upholding our own kind of ethical standards and privacy requirements, but also that we're meeting the expectations of our customers and understanding that they're not just a customer or data point. They're really a person with a variety of different things that may have brought them to us, and that we can fulfill that journey for them in a way that

won't be surprising or unnerving or have unintended consequences. Around the same time, twenty three and me got its start, so did forensic genealogy. I think DNA is the most conclusive evidence we hang out at the moment. This is Colleen Fitzpatrick, owner and founder of Identifyingders International. It's a company that uses DNA for a number of sir. This is including finding missing persons in assisting law enforcement. If anyone knows about DNA, it's her. Well. I'm the founder

of modern forensic genealogy. I wrote the book, and when I wrote the book in two thousand five, it created a revolution. It went forward into the forensic community itself to mean the application of genealogical techniques and support of the legal system. At first, I was having fun with the hobby side, identifying old photographs, helping people look at their records and squeezed juice out of them that they

didn't know it was there. But then because of my science background, I was starting to be hired for some real cases, some really interesting cases. I was contacted by the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory to help them identify a frozen human arm and hand in a glacier, Alaska, and that became the hand in the Snow case, which I was very important in solving. And then from there, you know, went into the Titanic Baby and Amelia. Ever at those kind of cases became you know, really more

accessible and interesting with DNA developments. I worked about seventy cases in thirty countries and I got almost all of them. Paul Hole has learned about forensic genealogy during the bare Brooks case and he used the technique to catch the alleged Golden State Killer. But how exactly does the process work? We gave him a call. What we were working with was a semen sample off of the victim's vaginal swab.

Right there. The DNA that we're interested in is contained within the sperm heads of the semen and it's mixed with the females d NA. So now you need to have a law enforcement lab, those forensic analysts who are very well versed at this process. You need them to go in and separate out the Golden State Killers sperm DNA from all the victims DNA that's on that vaginal swap. Once the Golden State Killers DNA was isolated, it was sent to a private lab, and at the lab, a

SNIP profile was created. SNIP profile s n P for single nucleotide polymorphism just basically a a testing process that looks at hundreds of thousands of single points of DNA across the genome in order to kind of map the genome out in a partial way. Turnaround time can be anywhere from two weeks to two months, depending on the lab. Hole says it's still faster than some forensic labs, which

can get caught in backlogs. The information is then uploaded into jet match, a public online database that compiles info from multiple DNA sites. Jet Match also shows relationships between DNA profiles. That's because the original purpose of jed match was for people to research genealogy and build family trees, but since it's public, it also means law enforcement can

use any of this data in their investigations. Jed match tells you it takes generally twenty four to eight hours for their servers to an essence to the algorithms I found with the Golden State killer that within twenty four hours after upload, I had my initial search results. How closely or distantly are related is dependent on how much DNA you share. Our top results only shared less than one percent of their DNA, which was on the order

of roughly a third cousin. From here, traditional genealogy work kicks in, like hunting down birth certificates and death records to trace family lineage. There's five of us on our team on the law enforcement side, and then we had the genetic genealogist Barbara ray Venter, who was the one who was kind of guiding us. The five of us were the ones that were really building the trees, and Barbara was kind of, you know, checking in the tree that we ultimately linked together where we found to the

Golden State killer, Joseph de'angelo um. You know, the common ancestors had been born in the eighteen forties. Once we started identifying all their descendants, that family tree very you know, quickly grew to having well over a thousand individuals entered into this tree. Most of them were long dead because they're just ancestors. But you have to identify everybody. You don't want to miss the one person who could potentially

be the parent of your offender. It took us four and a half months, you know, from the time we got the initial DNA search results to the time that de Angelo was taken into custody. Holes is adamant that this genealogy provides an investigative lead. He says, once a suspect is identified, law enforcement still needs to secure a direct DNA sample. Then that direct sample is compared to the original sample used in the forensic genealogy process. This is done in case an error was made while building

out the family tree with the Angelo. Even though we kind of identified him, he has some circumstantial evidence that seemed to corroborate that he could be the guy. It was like he got to get that direct DNA sample, So he was put under surveillance and then the first DNA sample was collected and it was enough to basically tell us he's the guy, but we needed to get a second sample due to some of the complexities of the first sample. The second sample left no doubt he

matched to the Golden State Killer's DNA. As I was working through this case, I'm looking to see while is there DNA had this newf angle DNA technology, and I was able to find three cases out in Contracost the county that still had evidence the DNA evidence that have been collected from the women's bodies from back in the day, and I was able to get DNA from each of those three cases, and and the DNA profile from those

three cases was the same. I'm sitting at p F Chang's and Kirk Campbell from Zack d A's office calls me. And Kirk opens up by saying, Paul, you absolutely cannot tell anybody this. So immediately I knew, Okay, this is going to be a different phone call. And then he said, I don't know exactly what the lab has, but they're really excited. And I was asking him more, what did they tell you? What did they say? They said, well, they got a partial DNA profile, something about twenty markers,

like it's m Kirk, it's head. And so now we're sitting in our rental cheap Cherokee and the p F Chang's parking lot. It's it's an oh my god type of mo moment. And then Steve Kramer, my partner from the FBI, calls and he's on speaker in the jeeps, so my wife is hearing Steve and I now strategizing about what are the next steps and what are we going to do? Now? Do I need to get on the next flight out of here. For over forty years,

countless victims have waited for justice. Yesterday, in arrest warrant was issued, a complaint was filed charging that individual with two counts of murder. The answer was and always was going to be in the d N A April, authorities arrest and charge seventy two year old Joseph James D'Angelo with eight counts of first degree murder. As of this recording, he's on trial for the crimes attributed to the Golden

State Killer. Since d'angelo's arrest, almost two dozen other cases have been solved with the help of forensic genealogy, and that number is steadily climbing. However, this new technique is already stirring debate. Most people, of course that are are against it. It's a privacy concern Fourth Amendment unreasonable search

against their genetic information. People in the genealogy databases did not explicitly consent to allow law enforcement to search their genealogy DNA profiles in order to help solve a case. Companies like twenty three and Me and Ancestry have policies to keep law enforcement from directly accessing their private databases, but for public databases like jet match, there aren't any

laws regulating searches. There's a lot of people out there that, of course, are are very upset about law enforcement utilizing this tool. But I think because of the kinds of cases that are being solved with it, that there's a balance in terms of people's perception society's acceptance of the tool being used. Paul Holes says, what people are afraid law enforcement has access to is very different compared to

what they actually have access to. I never had access to anybody's DNA profile the database and ordered for me to see their genetic information. For me to kind of invade their genetic privacy, I have to have access to their DNA profile and I never had that. All I got were search results of people who shared a percentage of DNA, and the results only tell me how much DNA they shared. Still, some privacy advocates are worried that this technique will cause more innocent people to be targeted

as possible suspects. At least that's the reasoning behind a bill Maryland lawmakers introduced in January. If it passes, it would completely block Maryland law enforcements ability to use forensic genealogy. More specifically, investigators would be banned from using DNA databases to identify unknown DNA found at crime scenes, but Paul Hols argues forensic genealogy is less invasive than typical police work.

Through the use of genealogy in the Golden State Killer case, we saved hundreds of men from having the government take possession of their DNA. Considering traditional law enforcement investigations, we were having women calling in saying, you know, my ex husband looks like this hand drawn sketch of the Golden State Killer from eight I think he might be the guy. And then we would go on to her ex husband's house, knock on his door, and actually asked for his DNA.

We took possession of his DNA sample. Through the use of genealogy in the Golden State Killer case, we saved hundreds of men from having the government take possession of their DNA. As though it is, it's sort of that balancing act of Okay, yeah, we're searching a genealogy database where identifying people who are relatives based on their DNA, But the intrusion is is minuscule compared to how legally

law enforcement works. Every single day across the nation. Holes also argues forensic genealogy isn't a tool to be used regularly. Use it on your homicide cases, your your sexual assault, your serial sexual assault cases, or if you have that active public safety threat. You know, this guy has killed somebody, you don't know who he is, he's left his DNA, and he is out there potentially going to kill other people.

And that it's that's the type of thing where you bring in this tool sort of as the last resort. It's sort of like, you know, you think of it as as the nuclear weapon, and you go and you try to figure out who this guy is using the genealogy in order to get him in custody before can rape and or kill somebody else. Holes does see where concerns could rise if law enforcement expands its use into

everyday crimes. I think that's where you'll see sort of the balance shift where people are going to start getting uncomfortable with it, and that's where you know legislation will come in and restrict law enforcements use. But Holes says, at the end of the day, people who are decision makers need to understand what the investigative genealogy technique is and what it isn't before they pass laws based on perception. In the spring of confirmed Zodiac letters were sent to

a lab for DNA testing. The hope is to pull enough DNA for a full genetic profile and then use that profile for forensic genealogy. This isn't the first time law enforcement has turned to DNA for answers. In the Zodiac case, the prime suspect, Arthur Lee Allen, died in August of authorities seized that opportunity to preserve some brain tissue for further testing. This is Zodiac expert Michael Butterfield.

Several years later, in the late nineteen nineties, the San Francisco Police Department submitted suspected Zodiac communications to the crime lab for DNA analysis. According to retired Inspector Vince Rippetto, DNA was found on a Zodiac communication and that DNA did not match Arthur Lee Allen. Several years later, in two thousand two, San Francisco Police inspectors Mike Maloney and Kelly Carroll submitted suspected Zodiac communications to the crime lab

for further DNA testing. Dr Cindy Holt of the San Francisco Police DNA lab examined the Zodiac letters and envelopes, and she stated that a partial genetic profile was found on an envelope sent with the Zodiac communication in November of nineteen sixty nine. According to Holt, that sample was sufficient to exclude suspects, but not sufficient to positively identify anyone. However, some critics didn't believe law enforcement had found a partial

DNA profile. They believed it was all for show. I was shown the DNA profile that they obtained when I went out to San Francisco p D at one time, so I saw what they actually got. So they did get a low level DNA profile, but hold says there were other concerns as well. There's no confidence that you could say was actually the offender's DNA. If the Zodiac, for example, licked the stamps, licked these envelope flaps of the letters that he sent in, why can't they get

his DNA. But you also have to be concerned about, well, whose DNA is actually on those items they're sent in after the fact, they're not present at the crime scene where you know the offender wasn't at I had, you know,

an old time BLO detective. He had some involvement in Zodiac back in the day, and he goes, you know, I remember growing up, you know, as a kid going into the post office to mail letter back in the late sixties, and you hand the guy an open envelope, but he would lick the envelope and he would lick

the stamp. Well, who's to say that didn't happen with these particular envelopes and stamps that were sent in, right, So how can we say for sure that if they do get DNA from the secondary or peripheral items of evidence, that it's actually Zodiac DNA. I would have greater confidence if they get the same DNA profile from multiple items like that, then it looks like it's probably the originator of that evidence versus a secondary person that handled that evidence.

I sure would like to see primary evidence in the Zodiac case produced a DNA profile. Well, with DNA, you never know, you just never know, and you never know the power of your what you're testing is. But if it's kind of a degraded, a low level sample, you know, you can be surprised. This is Colleen Fitzpatrick again. One of the cases she worked on was the so called Unknown Child of the Titanic. We had to do multiple

rounds of testing on that. We really didn't have a lot of DNA to start with, and at the end somebody told me or my understanding was there was enough DNA for one cell of that child's body left and that's what did the trick. So that was using ninety year old, nine year old DNA that had been in the ground in Halifax, Nova Scotia and had been exposed to acid rain for as long as that's been around, and yet there was enough DNA in that baby, a

baby's body to make the identify action. Here's another example of degraded and contaminated DNA that was still usable. We had Buckskin Girl under the DNA dough project. That was from a blood sample that was thirty seven years old. It had been doped with hepperine to keep it from coagulating, and it had not been refrigerated for thirty seven years, and it worked like a charm. So you know, when you don't think it's gonna work, it does. So you never can tell with DNA, and with the zodiac and

the stamps, you never can tell is worth trying. We wanted to know more about these stamps does a small amount of saliva typically provide a good DNA sample? This really interesting question. I don't think there's enough data in recent months to say one way or the other. I'd say definitely maybe, because again you never know. You know, I know I had talked to a lab extensively at one time about somebody, I'll grab a coffee cop can

you get the DNA off that? But basically they said that's a low probability, high risk, whereas if you had DNA like from fingernails or under fingernails, that was a higher chance in a lower risk. And I think this stamp is probably medium because you never can tell where the stamp has been. As Paul Hole has said earlier, it takes more than DNA for these cases to be solved. But I'd like to point out that nobody is really

just convicted on DNA evidence. Even if the DNA matches, there's other things that come in, like, you know, was the guy in that area? You know? Did he have a criminal record, did he leave fingerprints? Is that his shirt? Is that his a tennis shoe size? There's a lot to it. It's not just DNA. Now at eleven, the new hunt for the Zodiac Killer. Tonight, Bay Area police may have found the key to finally cracking the case.

Good Evening, I'm Elizabeth cut and I'm Kendasita first the suspected Golden State Killer because the Zodeiac Killer be next KPI X five Andrea Boorba joins us from the newsroom with the decades old evidence getting new attention Tonight, Andrea well Ken Elizabeth the Zodiac Killer is responsible for at least five murders in the late sixties and early seventies. Tonight, the case that was considered all but unsolvable may have

new legs. The Zodiac Killer, who's killing spree in ciphers around the Bay Area draw worldwide attention to this day, maybe weeks away from being unmasked. The Sacramento Bea reports that Ballejo police have submitted letters and envelopes from the Zodiac Killer to a private lab to obtain a DNA profile the hope that those envelopes he looked closed years ago might be the final piece to crack the case.

The lead Ballejo detective in the Zodiac case told the Sacramento be he hopes to use the same open source DNA database technique that helped identify Joseph D'Angelo as the suspect in the Golden State Killer case. Now, those DNA results are expected in a few weeks. In the newsroom Entrea four, But KPIs it's been almost a year since investigators sent the Zodiac's letters to a lab for DNA testing. Well, this is promising. It's been hard for us to find

much new information. Here's Officer Ryan rails Back of the Riverside Police Department. This case is still technically open even though it occurred back fifty years ago. Plus it is still open because it hasn't been solved. We haven't had any real updates on this case in many years. And here's Lieutenant Joseph Kono Fileo Police Department's Detective Division commander. The case is open, so yeah, we will. We will not release specifics regards to where we are just because of,

you know, obviously the investigative integrity of the case. San Francisco reporter Kevin Fagan rodan or dticle about the Zodiac for the fiftieth anniversary in December. In it, an anonymous police source says, quote, with the Golden State Killer, they had a full strand of DNA not Zodiac. We have chrons and not good ones end quote. Paul Holes agrees the critical step in that case is they need to find DNA from the Zodiac as of you know, the

best information and the most recent information I have. They were still looking. Everybody's saying, oh, investigative genealogy is going to solve Zodiac. Well, first you have to have the Zodiac's DNA as of you know, the information that I know, and it's dated. They hadn't recovered that yet. And as for the DNA found in the early two thousand's, Paul

Holes explains, it's the same problem. What I saw was it was so scrappy that I probably with DNA interpretations today that they may not even be allowed to use such a low level DNA profile for comparison purposes. It's so low level. Is it due to some environmental contamination either on the outside and the surface of the stamp? Somebody has handled it during the DNA testing process itself and has nothing to do with the Zodiacs DNA. They need to get a better sample, in my opinion, than

what they actually obtained back in the day. Holes is talking about federal regulations placed on testing DNA the FBI and the Scientific Oversight Committee governs all forensic testing labs UH and how they do their DNA testing and how they interpret the DNA results, And in many ways, it's to help standardize the interpretation of these DNA profiles that often are very complex, and so over time these interpretation sidelines have become more and more strict because just you know, I,

you know, learning from real life case examples, they solved where the more lax interpretation guidelines could cause misinterpretations to occur, and so they said, we can't have that, and we need to be as conservative as possible because we don't want to falsely incriminate somebody by misinterpreting a DNA result. Investigators have been working on this case for decades. Everyone wants to see it solved, but ultimately everything hinges on the DNA. If they find a Zodiac d n A,

then it becomes a solvable case. If they don't find his DNA, the chances of it being solved become almost zero. Next time, un Monster Zoe yet killer. And of course there's been theories over the years that they invented the zodiac to sell more newspapers. Send the letter to the paper he said to prove that I was it kills him.

I'll tell you only things that I know and the police. No. But if you go through and read the police, of course, it's almost verbatim on what the police said and the police of courts, and exactly what I heard the police say on the radio that night. Popular culture about serial killers is not dedicated to making us ask difficult questions. Instead, it gives us easy answers. That's what we find appealing

about it. There's nothing fun about Earnie and you know, wacky ciphers and letters that you know taunt and say, I like hunting the most dangerous game. Yeah, great, the guy belongs to freaking prison. If I could go back and give myself some advice when I was first starting out, be skept to goal of everything. Monster the Zodiac Killer is a fifteen episode podcast produced by I Heart Radio,

How Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Donald Albright and I are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV, alongside producers Meredith Stepman, Mason Lindsay, and Christina Dana. Jason Hope is executive producer on behalf of How Stuff Works, along with producers Trevor Young, Miranda Hawkins, ben Kybrick, and Josh Thane Scott Benjamin provides additional voice talent. Matt Frederick is our host.

Original music is by Makeup and Vanity Set. If you haven't already, make sure to check out the first season of Monster called Atlanta Monster, about the Atlanta child murders from the late seventies to the early eighties. Download the ten episode season right now. Have questions or comments, email us at Monster at how stuff works dot com, or you can call us at one eight three three two, eat five six six six seven. Thanks for listening. H