Every so often in the course of our show, we have been able to make certain observations and predictions. Tonight's classic episode is about one of those observations and predictions. On the heels of our unfortunately ongoing series examining serial Killers on the Loose, we looked into the long delayed identification, arrest, and conviction of a killer known as the Golden State Killer or the original night Stalker.
Oh yeah, because this guy, James DiAngelo. He's only the first of a huge group of serial killers and other criminals who have been caught through the use of this type of DNA sequencing, you know, going through a family tree and finding out a relative. We're going to get into the episode. It's fascinating stuff, So let's jump right in.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. Is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nolan.
They call me Ben. We are joined with our super producer Paul Michig controlled Decan. But most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know this episode is going to be an update on something. It's an update that we hoped but never truly thought we would ever have the chance to do. This is very much a what a what a time to be alive sort of show. You may recall longtime listeners that a while back, when.
Was it Matt May twenty sixteen.
May twenty sixteen, we did an episode on what is known as the original night Stalker or the Golden State Killer, And in this episode we looked at the current research and investigation into those at the time unsolved crimes, the various theories, the various leads that were taken up and later rejected by law enforcement and armchair investigators on specialized crime forums on Reddit, all over the internet, and including some of the authors who made it their life's work
to hunt down this killer. Today, however, we're telling a very different story. Today. We are making it official. After decades of dead ends, tantalizing theories, and frustrating leads, justice may have finally caught up with the Golden State Killer. Before you listen to this episode, if you would like a deep dive into the crimes and the past investigation of the crimes of the Golden State Killer, or East Area Rapist as they were also known. Do check out
our episode from May twenty sixteen. We'll wait.
Oh man, that was a good one, wasn't it?
Kind of a bummer? Really?
Yeah, but it was a fact filled episode and lots of lots of avenues to investigate, but.
We get a happy ending here was what this amounts to, right.
Of sorts. Yeah, there's definitely a light at the tunnel, at the end of the tunnel.
That's a better turner phrase.
We'll see, we'll see, we'll see. We hope we as a society make it to the light. Quick background for everybody who just sat quietly the way the three of us did in the studio while your fellow listeners were
checking out that episode. From at least nineteen seventy four to nineteen eighty six, California was plagued by a serial break in artist, a burglar, later a rapist, and then finally a murderer who is known by several different names and was believed to be several different people for a time, the Visalia Ransacker, the Diamond Not Killer, the Golden State Killer, the East Area Rapist, and also the original Nightstalker, nowadays more often referred to as the Golden State Killer.
I believe yeah, because the Golden State Killer encompasses all of these different crime sprees.
And eventually, in the course of their investigation, law enforcement and independent investigators began to connect the dots and they said, we believe this is all the work of a single individual.
So not copycatters, not a group operating in concert, although we do have a bit of a rabbit hole about that, but a single man, a man who might never be apprehended until that is on April twenty fifth, twenty eighteen, when authorities announced the arrest of a suspect named Joseph James DeAngelo ju a seventy two year old retired police officer.
He was rested on eight counts of first degree murder based on DNA evidence, and more than forty years since his criminal career began, the original Knightstalker would finally maybe be held accountable. This is the accumulation of countless of hours of police work, contributions, and analysis by thousands and thousands of people, several of whom are doubtlessly listening to this podcast today, and in a very real sense, a lucky break. So what happens. Can we look back over
some of these original crimes. I think we must, Well, here are the facts that maybe we start with the Visalia ransacker, and we do have to say we are only at this point talking about documented crimes. As we've seen in previous shows, is an unfortunate fact in the US that many, many, many crimes do not get reported.
Do you think that, because of what's come to light that we'll find out about more or do you think that's unlikely?
You know, ideally, ideally there wouldn't be more defined, but realistically there are probably some. It's just a safe thing to guess. The question then becomes if we're talking about pre nineteen seventies stuff, right, were the authorities at the time collecting DNA? Does anything remain? You know, so it's tough,
but who knows. Also, if it turns out we should say d Angelo has not been convicted yet, but if it turns out that he is, that he is convicted, and he already from what we understand, confessed to several things, he may just go on and start naming more names and instances because he is, frankly at the end of his life one way or the other.
Yep, maz can often happen with these kinds of legacy crimes.
Yeah, unfortunately, Well, the vizailureansacker was a master burglar and break in guy, believed to be responsible for more than one hundred crimes. Again, only the ones that we know of. The first ransacking that was recorded was on Tuesday, March nineteenth, nineteen seventy four, and one thing that stood out to people was that he passed over a lot of high value items, a lot of electronics, a lot of keepsakes and stuff, and instead he stole about fifty bucks worth
of coins from a piggybank. That's what he took.
Clearly something else at work here other than desire for monetary gain.
Right, right, Because there are pawnshops everywhere. He could have taken something and then pawned it and made much more than fifty dollars.
Is the keyword here, ransack right because it is about going through people's private things.
Yes, just so, he was tearing houses apart, knocking over furniture, cutting stuff up, going in the c it's throwing out things. But he would only actually steal a few small items trinkets, cuff links, keepsakes, keepsakes, and he would also probably the creepiest thing you would do is he would arrange items and what appeared to be almost a ritualistic fashion, you know, like women's underwear. He did steal weapons. He stole six weapons.
He was prolific. He committed multiple break ins in the same area on the same day, and he also set a record for that too.
Yeah, he broke into twelve different homes in a single day on Saturday, November thirtieth, nineteen seventy four.
And at this point, other than the strange arrangement of items, it looks like a really creepy burglar, right until that is. On September eleventh, nineteen seventy five, a man who is strongly believed to be the ransacker, broke into the home of one Claude Snelling at five point thirty two Whitney Lane. It's now South Whitney Street if you're familiar with the neighborhood. Claude caught someone trying to kidnap his daughter in their car port, and this still unnamed person shot Claude twice
and Claude died and the assailant fled. This became the first known murder linked to what we call the original nightstalker, and this murder prompted him to leave town.
So he's escalated already from ransacking to child snatching.
Mm hmmm, yeah, it seems set. It seems like that was the course. It's it's pretty safe to say that if the daughter had been successfully kidnapped, she would have at the very least been assaulted.
And then the murder, though, was a byproduct of being caught.
Yes, the murder was more than likely a moment of panic too, or perhaps in some sense meant to erase a witness. It's probably not the primary intent.
But the story of this man is one of escalations. I just wanted point that out. And that's interesting that this particular killing. I wonder if it's like, what kind of gave him the taste or something like that, and he's like, maybe I want to add this to my repertoire.
I have to wonder too, because we find often in serial murders, like in our previous episodes on Uncaught serial Killers, we do see this escalation. You know, someone starts with fires, someone starts with mutilations, right or running by and slashing someone or choking somebody, and then it builds and builds, but this killer was at this point still lucid enough to realize the dangers if they chose to stay in Visalia.
So in mid nineteen seventy six he moves to Sacramento, and that's where he progresses fully from burglary and murders, perhaps unintentionally, to sexual assault.
So around June nineteen seventy six, our person here of interest moved to Sacramento, and this is when he's really progressing from burglary into sexual assault. Although you know, he originally targeted these women who were alone. Usually that's what his victim would look like. They would be in their homes, sometimes they would be with their children, and he would
later prefer couples. Somehow it switched from just alone victim that he could attack to perhaps, like we were saying, the escalating thrill and whatever he was getting out of this escalated to where he needed to have a partnered couple, to where there is a male and female usually.
And perhaps some of that is tied into his perception of the unattainable nature of someone already in a relationship. Perhaps some of it is a power move on his part to someone else witnessed helpless. It's spooky and disturbing stuff. His standard procedure smacked of prior training. These may have been crimes of passion when he got there, but he
did a lot of homework. He did extensive research. He would typically break in through a window and awaken someone with a flashlight and a gun so they can't clearly see him as well, and then bind the victims, blindfold them, gag them with towels from their own house, and he would typically force the female victim to tie up her male companion before he tied the female victim up himself.
And he operated that way for about a year June to seventy six to May seventy seven, and he had a three month gap and then he returned in Sacramento and other counties. He had another three month gap, and then he was operating in other counties until nineteen seventy nine. And from what the timeline shows, from June eighteenth, seventy six to July fifth, nineteen seventy nine, he committed overall
fifty one crimes as the East Area rapist. As the original Nightstalker, he committed seven known crimes with multiple homicides that Marx has moved from break inspe to murder, So stay tuned. After a brief break for our sponsor, we will return and give you a grim introduction to the man known as Joseph James D'Angelo junior.
So there are a lot of great timelines that have come out so far, a lot of them pretty brief, but we stumbled upon one on reddit that been found and we're just going to kind of go over this and hit some of the high points and low points in this man's life.
Yeah, you can. You can find this on the East Area Rapist Original Knights Stalker subreddit posted by a user named Sacred Geometry. And I know it might sound maybe a little cursory for the three of us to be citing this sort of source, but this person has done their homework extensively and we found quite a quite a thorough, robust timeline here that follows from the birth of D'Angelo to the arrest. He was born November eighth, nineteen forty five, in Bath, New York.
Yeah, and just to jump on there with what Ben was saying, I linked up some of these dates just as a fact checking exercise, and the Sacramento Bee has much of the same exact stuff on it, so.
And shout out to the Sacramento Bee. They've been really leading the charge on reporting here.
So he's born nineteen forty five. Then in nineteen sixty four he wins the Navy. He enlists there and he goes into naval training that same year in San Diego.
And this is where he would have, as part of his training, learned a lot of knots that the average person would not would either not be aware of or would not be able to do on command.
Specifically, like that diamond knot.
Specifically, like that diamond knot, Matt, is that like a sheepshank?
Was that some kind of like specialized sailing knot?
Yeah? Yeah, And it was found at several of the crime scenes.
Well I knew that, but I just you know, is it a particularly tricky one?
Not tricky, just you wouldn't you wouldn't think to make a knot one that way.
It's super interesting too, and you you know, it's such a long timeline of crime and now we have a person to associate with it. This timeline that we're looking at has photographs of him throughout his life, which is really interesting just to visually trace his you know kind of progression and think about what he was doing at the time those photos were taken. So he did, in
fact serve in the Vietnam War. And then in August of nineteen sixty eight, he goes to Sierra College in Rockland, California, and fascinatingly got an associate degree in police science that could come in handy.
Yeah, he also attends later the year. After he graduates with an associate degree in police science, he goes to CSU and Sacramento, where he spends a year earning a bachelor's in criminal justice, and the same year he gets out of there, in nineteen seventy two, he spends the next approximate year, sometime during nineteen seventy two and nineteen seventy three, he completes an internship in the Roseville Patrol.
This is interesting because at the time, if we look at the context, many police officers and law enforcement professionals did not have college education or higher education to this degree, not to mention an internship. So it's somewhat strange that we'll see this as his career continues. It's somewhat strange that he goes to smaller police forces. You know, he could have maybe ritten a ticket to Los Angeles or Chicago, but for some reason, he stayed in these smaller areas.
The same year wherein we believe he completes his internship, he joins the Exeter Police Department on their burglary task force in May of nineteen seventy three. May of nineteen seventy three is also when experts believe the Visilia Ransacker crimes began.
When's that crazy? Yeah, the burglary crimes. Hey, I'm on a burglary task force?
In such a trope in fiction, right, like the what was that movie about the crime scene photographer Nightcrawlers? Who starts perpetrating crimes? Does he not? Really?
Kind of? Yes, he does. He that's true, he does.
That's very true. At first it starts off that he's he's looking for the big scoops, and then in order to get them, he kind of starts behaving in a monstrous way. He escalates, or like Dexter for example, not sure it's like a good show exactly, but you know blood expert who is also a serial kill.
Or would Jude Law from Road to Perdition be an example?
I oh wow, I don't remember.
It's been a minute.
What was he?
What's his deal?
I feel like we may be on the verge of a spoiler alert.
It's okay.
If we say it okay, then it's okay.
All right.
Just don't don't get Tom Hanks angry at us for spoiling his movies.
Road to Perdition spoiler coming in three two one.
Jude Law's character is a photographer who is also killing people to get the best photographs of crime scenes. Yep, wow, yeah, but this and it's a solid film.
If you haven't seen, Oh, it's coming back to me. I haven't seen it since it was in the theaters, but now I'm having flashes of it and it was quite good.
One thing to point out here, in nineteen seventy Joseph was engaged and then he got married in nineteen seventy three as well. If we're imagining, so he's got his professional life, then he's also got his personal life that's going on. So he's engaged, and then three years later he gets married in the same year that the Facilia ransacker.
Is right, but he doesn't marry the woman who was originally engaged to. No, he marries someone different. Correct, And in seventy five, As we said, Claude Snelling is murdered during the attempted kidnapping. There's an attempted murder of an officer McGowan in December of the same year when the police got close to handing the ransacker. And then this is when not only does the ransacker disappear from Visalia, but someone in Sacramento begins committing the East Area rapist crimes.
For DiAngelo's part, he has relocated to the Auburn Police Department. So again these relocations, at least timing wise, begin to match up.
And then in nineteen seventy nine, he gets caught and he's shop but not for any of these major crimes. He gets caught shoplifting. It's a hammer and what was the other thing?
Oh it was not tape, but yeah, he got shop, got caught shoplifting small items.
Yeah, specifically, I know a hammer was one of the major things.
Was is the kind of items that you maybe wouldn't want a record of you having purchased.
I don't know, it's it definitely seemed a bit strange, specifically with that hammer. But the police department finds out because he is actually found guilty of shoplifting, and then he gets fired from the Auburn Police Department in August of seventy nine.
And many people will tell you that there was a slight pausing crime at that time. That's not entirely true, because in October of seventy nine, we know that there was an attack that went wrong on the ear side on what would be classified as the original Nightstalker crimes, and tried to break in and assault and murder a couple, but he botched it. Then, as the original Nightstalker, there is the murder of Robert Offerman and Deborah Manning in
December of nineteen seventy nine. The next month there's a pause. March of nineteen eighty Lyman and Charlene Smith are murdered. In August, Keith and Patrice Harrington are murdered. During this time, DiAngelo buys a home in a neighborhood called Citrus Heights. February nineteen eighty one, a woman named Manuela Wittun is.
Murdered, and then to jump back into his personal life, his first child is born in September nineteen eighty one, another huge change in his life. And then you see that there's a bit of a break, A big gap here that happens after September nineteen eighty one.
Right, a five year gap in May of so the murder before the child was Sherry Domingo and Greg Sanchez in July nineteen eighty one. Matt, as you said, September nineteen eighty one, DiAngelo as his first child and.
In Los Angeles, but he wasn't living there, was he?
His child was born in Sacramento. And then Matt, as you said, radio silence for five years, at least as far as we know. In May nineteen eighty six, another murder is associated with the original Knightstalker. Thats Janelle Cruz.
And then that same year in November, he has his second child in Los Angeles, but did he live there for an extending the amount of time It seemed like he was sticking to the smaller areas well.
We know that the murders, at least the documented ones, appear to have stopped at that time. Interesting and as we look, he continues on for a while to have a relatively normal life, despite what some of us might assume about killers, and despite how we would assume having a criminal record for shoplifting would screw up your job prospects. He seems to have continued.
He stayed working at the same place until retirement, the save mart, which was I guess he was like a loader or something in a distribution center.
Or he definitely worked at the distribution center, and I'm assuming after working that many years, he probably moved up the ladder, but we don't have that information.
Yeah, from August nineteen eighty nine, he was working at that distribution center Noel mentioned in Rooseville, California, and he worked there until what twenty seventeen until last year.
Yeah, it's retirement.
Age, so he was settled in and everything seemed to indicate that this guy would retire and relative obscurity. He was living with one of his daughters at the time and her husband, So.
That would put him today at in the neighborhood of seventy two years of age.
And that would put the assuming there's a big assumption that's probably incorrect, Assuming that all the crimes that occurred are the crimes we know about, then that would put him at a murder rate of twelve to thirteen people, forty five to fifty sexual assaults more easily more than one hundred and twenty homes broken into.
Yeah, and that's, of course, if he actually did all of these crimes.
And that's a very good point to make. If, of course he actually did all of these crimes.
He's being charged for several murders right now as we're recording this, but it's not all of them.
Well what's that based on? Guys? What do we actually know?
Well, answer what might be the most important question in today's episode. After a word from our sponsors, here's where it gets crazy. This man d' angelo was associated with these crimes, not through a bunch of people digging through microfiche or hunting down old leads alone. No, this man was apprehended due to a lead they derived from DNA,
a DNA database. So one of the first questions is how did they find this DNA Because clearly, like in the nineteen seventies, for instance, they wouldn't have had the sophistication in terms of technology to investigate this. You can find a loose leaf notebook or something, but you wouldn't automatically be able to pull that info off of it.
Oh totally. And when I first saw this case the story, I assumed that they had a sample of his DNA that ended up in one of these databases. But that's not quite how it went down, is it.
No, not quite. It turns out that they took crime scene DNA which they had had from the time of the crimes, and ran it through various databases where all of a sudden, ding ding ding, it showed a match to what would turn out to be one on DiAngelo's distant relatives, someone who was who had their DNA in
a public database. So let's look at that arrest, though it isn't until March of this year, as we record this March twenty eighteen, that he has identified as a suspect in these in these decade old crimes via a public database. And what's strange about it happened in twenty eighteen for a lot of people, is the idea that WHOA and authorities would hold on to this information for
decades and not do anything. In nineteen eighty six, DNA was just emerging as a criminal investigative tool, and according to the experts, D'Angelo, as a former police officer, would have probably according to them, have known that this thing was on the way, or there was a possibility at least, So when they started looking for this. A lot of the stuff we read about says that they found a match that was a distant relative. But what does that mean.
Oh well, it means that they took what they did have as far as DNA evidence from this killer and they threw it into one of these databases called GEDMatch dot com, and they found a fourth cousin of D'Angelo. Now they have no idea at this point who D'Angelo is. They just know that this DNA matches this person at least in some way, and this person had used this
ged match program already and the service. And then they start looking through this person's family tree, this fourth cousin, and then they start trying to match up people's backgrounds from that family tree, and does anybody match up? Do they live in Vasiliador around this time? Do they live in Sacramento around this time? And they start picking out a few people to look at, and they eventually come upon mister DiAngelo. And it's a really strange process. How that just happened to work.
Well, remember, on the Here's where it gets a crazy episode, we talked about this whole thing, and there was a story about this very same process that led them to like a fault positive. That can happen too, because they they got a hit, but the guy didn't match the criteria for the crime they were trying to to solve. So they looked at like his son or something like that, and it atched a little more and so they went with that and then ended up not being true. Yeah.
Well, in this case, the investigation is fascinating because they got this match with the fourth cousin. Then they actually start looking at this guy and they start staking out his house.
For like six or seven days, yeah.
Exactly, and they're looking at his trash. I mean, they don't they don't state specifically how they got the DNA samples, but they do say it was probably from a container that he had drunken. He had taken a drink out of right, and they would watch him come in and out of his house, and they, you know, then they took that DNA sample and they tested it with the other DNA that they had from the previous case, and they went, oh, boy, guess what. Somehow we got the guy. It's him.
Yeah, and the match was not something that was contested. We can't be more clear about this. Yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't like, oh, oh, this is a pretty good indicator. Let's see. No, this this, this was something they've been under investigation in a while for some time. A criminologist in Contra Costa County way back in two thousand and one had linked two sets of cases to the same individual thanks to DNA evidence. They just didn't know who it was.
And that was the East Area rapist and the original night stalker cases.
Yeah, and to the point that you made know when they get the DNA, it led them to a number of people, right, and they had to separate timeline, so they had to spend this time surveilling this guy and going through his trash most likely, although they don't say it that way because I don't think they want that image of law enforcement to be you know, they want to be presented as people digging through your trash.
No, but they will, Yeah, but they will have to.
Well, and they you know, they're there is a beyond ninety eight percent likelihood, beyond ninety nine percent likelihood that they have the right guy. This is the US, so technically he's innocent until proven guilty.
Digging through trash is just good police work, my guys.
I would agree. I would agree, and this is where the story stands. As the story emerges, we're going to hear new updates. Well, we can go ahead and call it. We're inevitably gonna hear I think the conviction of this criminal. On a side note, the neighbors said the same things that you would hear about serial killers in works of fiction. They said he was kind of a recluse. We didn't think he was a killer or a monster. They did say he was prone to violent public outbursts. Did you catch that?
But somehow you've maintained it and kept it under control for years and years and years after his children were born, except for one case right after first daughter.
Again that is and less more stuff emerges, like we have pointed out earlier, Unless it comes out that he is implicated in other stuff, I would be at this point, I'd be surprised because if there were DNA leavings from other crimes, they would have also pinged on those databases, right, yeah, because those databases work together pretty well. And this leads into the larger implication, which is a big question for
us today. What does this mean for not just the like the DNA of criminals and these human monsters like serial killers. But what does this mean for you right now? Listening your DNA. We talked a little bit about this with an excellent post in our community page. Like you mentioned, Noel, here's where it gets crazy. And sometimes the three of us are usually on the same page about a lot
of things. I mean, and get along famously, but we might have some differing opinions about DNA testing, like a number of people, and this is just personally, I've held off on some DNA testing due to privacy concerns.
Yeah, that's a good call, and that seems to be a sentiment shared by many.
Oh yeah, yeah. And Noel, you had earlier mentioned that you had experience with DNA testing from our earlier show Stuff of Life.
I did, and I kind of just threw myself into it like a big dummy, thinking this will be cute and it's free, so why not. Kind of regretting it a little bit after digging into some of this stuff a little bit more. Not that I have anything to hide or that I'm worried about, you know, the government making a clone army based on my pristine DNA.
I would do it if I could.
Oh buddy, that's really sweet.
But here's the deal, Noel. Yeah, what we found with this case is that it doesn't even matter if you have or have not submitted your DNA.
Oh exactly. That's that's why I said earlier. When I first read the details this, I'm like, oh, I guess he did one of those and then they got access to it somehow. No, it was somewhere way down the line. You can't control. We haven't even met our fifth cousins. Ben and I did an episode about lineage in our other show, Ridiculous History, and the idea of knowing personally a fifth cousin was sort of.
Absurd, well at least for us, for our Yeah.
That's what I meant between between us, Ben, I think you said you were aware of some fifth cousins, but you certainly aren't, you know, taking in a movie of a weekend.
Yeah, I come from a strange place, but but yeah it Matt. You make an excellent point that in other cultures, in place around the world, it's quite common to know your extended family or even live with them, or you know, maybe you're all in the same town or the same region. Not a lot of people here in the US are that close, and there are these implications that you mentioned. It's not somebody. It's not always going to be a case of someone signing up directly. We know that military.
As we mentioned earlier, we'll take DNA samples. Now, if you are involved in law enforcement on the wrong side, if you get caught, then your DNA will go into a system. But the implications are that even if you say it like let's say Matt may is you as an example, No, okay, let's say that Paul doesn't it has never never been to jail, because he's a paragon of upstanding, young gentlemanness. And let's say he was also
never in the military or something like that. And let's say he also additionally never signed up for something like twenty three ae meters or ancestry dot com or anything like that. If, however, one of Paul's relatives signs up for this thing, or if one of his relatives joins the right kind of organization, or if God forbid, they get in trouble with the law, then they will end up in the system, which means, by extension, he has ended up in a system, whether or not he agreed to be there.
And in this case would be probably metadata on Paul, it wouldn't actually have his DNA or anything, right, I mean, that's how this whole thing would work. It's just you're in the system now because you are related in some way, right.
Yeah. And we talked a little bit about how this data is supposed to be made anonymous. I can't pronounce it. Can you help me out?
Anonymized?
There we go, hold on one. Yes, anonymity, anonymity, my enemy's anonymity and enmity. And enmity means many things to me if we're just going to finish the poem. But the strange thing here is that we you know, we can't help but think of the comparison to big data and Facebook or the so called frictionless sharing.
Right.
We have friends who have never been on Facebook and never want to be for various reasons of their own, but because they know us, or because if you have friends like this, they know you. Facebook has a shadow profile on them. And again, for anyone who heard our Cambridge analytic episode, Facebook doesn't like us to call them shadow profiles. It sounds spooky, yeah, but literally everybody else except for Facebook calls them shadow profile.
I don't know what I think, what their internal nomenclature is for it.
I don't know. Maybe they call them like head start profiles, fun pages, fun pages, party profiles. So right now, there's no escaping that this stuff has made life massively better or at the very least provided some sense of closure for people who are survivors of victims of these horrific atrocities. But that doesn't mean that we should forget the implications. At least that's what a lot of critics are saying
about this stuff. Once you give that data way, you yourself have little to know legal protection regarding what happens to that information, and you have no control over where it ultimately ends up. We found an interesting take on this from the Parallax, which does a pretty solid job of painting the backgrounds here of the current industry and where it seems set to go.
Yeah, there are a lot of possible positives, yes, that are here in this industry. So it says, quote, the consumer DNA market is poised to become the ten billion dollar business by twenty twenty two. Dozens of companies sell home DNA kits, Some like ancestry dot Com and family Tree DNA allow you to divine your ethnic background and
connect you with different distant relatives. Others like twenty three and Me can also identify genes linked to ten diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Celiacs.
Mine didn't do any of that stuff.
See twenty three and me is pretty cool in that regard, and I mean it's pretty great. You can see ads for these services. They talk about how millions of people are already using them. Why don't you join in and let's find out? Say, well, I mean yeah, because they gotta get that much. But what they don't tell you is that unlocking your genetic code could also get you
into trouble, legal trouble. Specifically, you can also prevent you from getting life insurance if you find something in your DNA that you didn't know was there before, and now your insurance company is all like.
Uh yeah, yeah, man. It's at least if you like lie on your insurance papers and say you don't smoke, and then they like ransack your Facebook page and find a picture of you smoking, Okay, that's all in good fun. You know, they they gave good chase whatever this is like, you know.
Yeah, this is it. Yeah, Well, here's the worst one for you. What if you, let's say, do twenty three and me, then you find out, Oh wait, that's not my dad. That would be.
Pretty messed up, right, are you my dad? Matt.
I'm just saying, oh, well, you'll find out one day soon. Uh so, Uh nope, daddy. No, But like, this is a genuine thing that I'm assuming has happened. I haven't seen it reported, but surely like.
You, you you understand the risk of finding out something like maybe you don't though. Maybe that's the thing they think that just pops up as a notification, like your dad.
Maybe they send like a very lung killer guy to come in and break the news to you while he takes your fishing or something.
That's one of these things too. If we start like really like we're going down a rabbit hole here, but getting into the territory of targeted ads, what if you start getting ads targeted at you because of your DNA information?
Right, Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, it is completely it used to be possible. We're about two years from it being plausible, and it's a spooky escalation.
Like in the same way that person got an ad for a baby product right before knowing no the father I think.
The household received an ad for in the mail for expectant mothers, and that's how they found out that their daughter was pregnant. Target literally knew.
Before they do it's ray. They called Target.
Boy no kid man. And now whenever I don't know about you, I don't want to ruin this for anybody who still receives those circulars and those you know, those slightly better quality than straight up newspaper coupon books. Yeah, when I receive those. Now Ever, since we did that episode and looked into that stuff, I always get a little freaked out. And I always try to treat it like a magic eight ball or some tea leaves for
the believers in prognostication. You know, I always wonder, like, what what do they know about me that made them think I need a deck?
At this point, I just kind of wish they would deliver my mail directly into the trash. Now saved me as a trip.
I use it for art projects.
It's cool, you're a very enterprising and earth friendly individual.
Cheap is another way to put it in.
Yep, that's yep.
But her thrifty, brave Cleyon Reverend, if you get that right, in there's a real world example of this stuff happening, at least the life insurance stuff happening. In twenty sixteen, a writer named Christina Farr, writing for a fast company, gave us the story of someone identified as Jennifer Marie, not the real name to protect their privacy, although the horse may have already left the barn there at the time. She was thirty six, gamefully employed, and had no current
medical issues. But on September fifteenth of twenty fifteen, her application for life insurance was denied. And here's the quote they used. Unfortunately, after carefully reviewing your application, we regret that we are unable to provide you with the coverage because of your positive BRCA one gene. The letter reads. In the US for background far Rights, about one in four hundred women have a BRCA one or two gene and it's associated with an increased risk of breast or ovarian cancer.
Wow. So she was denied that because she had done one of these tests.
Because the insurance company had access to that genetic information. So now does that qualify as a as a pre existing condition? Does you know? Is it something where we would have to say from the life insurance company. And you know, of course the US this privatized insurance. From the life insurance company's perspective, is it a matter of in the long run, protecting the rest of their customers.
So they don't go under you mean, right?
Is that part of it? How do they how do they address that? How do they process that?
Stop being private companies selling health insurance? That's how that's how they fix that.
A lot of people would make that argument, but there is there is hope in form of the Genetic Non Discrimination Act, which we mentioned I think previously as well, and also known as GINA. It is meant to prohibit employers and health insurance from using your genetic info against you. However, it is full of loopholes, and Congress is going to swiss cheeze it a little bit more. And this goes back to that question we asked before, and we received a fantastic comment regarding the the idea of how to
prioritize technological progress and potential gains. Right, if we're risking ruining the lives and the livelihoods of a few people, certainly maybe more than we think, is that worth the potential of saving maybe hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives down the line. I mean, this becomes a very deep dilemma very quickly. I don't know, what do you guys think. We talked about it a little bit about this earlier.
I definitely see the side and mentioned this in the other episode that we were just recorded. Just I do see this as being a great thing potentially in the long run, specifically fixing a lot of these genetic disorders, just by having enough data, because that's one of the biggest problems is not being able to track DNA over time and looking at how these specific sequences actually change a human beings development. I think it could be huge, and it could be exactly what we need.
But is it for everybody? Though? Like it is it going to mean that the wealthy are going to be prioritized and be able to, you know, extend their lives and the lives of their offspring by having access to this because of their wealth.
Certainly, Yes, that's what will happen until there's some big change. And here's the here's the other thing. What happens when let's just say, the wrong group of people ends up getting in power somehow, and there are all of these databases that can be found and someone in power wants to, let's say, get rid of certain types of DNA in
the culture, right, mass eugenics or something. You've got literally all of the data that you would ever need for that, if you know, it's compulsory, and everyone eventually one day signs up for something like this because you kind of have to.
And instead of present your papers the way it was in various world wars, it's spit into this tube and stand here.
Yeah, wait, I.
Mean that's it. That's a terrifying thing. We'd all like to think it's it's far it's far off right, or that it's not actually going to happen sort of a nimby process and not in my backyard. But at this point, you know, again, if you haven't written into us about this, we we we want to hear from you. Where do you fall on this side of the line, And we want to end today's episode with, first off, a clear
admission again, Joseph James DeAngelo has not been convicted. He is he is talking from what we understand, and he is confessing, but that doesn't he hasn't had the core time yet. Although it's it's pretty much a clear cuta. Do we know anything about his mental state? Apparently, aside from the violent outburst, he does appear lucid interesting, which
is which is interesting. And you know right now, given the time that it's elapsed, if there are other crimes or murders, he is literally the best chance of finding them.
Oh yeah, And every day we're finding out new things. I would follow the Sacramento Bee online if you can, you have the time to do it, and you're interested in this case. There are all kinds of new little stories about maybe he had an accomplice during some of these crimes, maybe it was a breakup that sent him
on that first raping spring, unsuccessful engagement. Yeah, I mean there's all there was all kinds of interesting things coming out, and I just have to say, like we said before, the Sacramento Bee is the place that I'm finding them the soonest.
And we have one other thing here, not a conclusion. There's not really a conclusion to this story yet and not a shout out corner, though we will be returning that segment soon. We have something that when we were talking about this off air, we were all texting each other as we were working on this, and Noel, you pointed out to us another recent development involving DNA and killers.
And the Sacramento b They I believe, were first on the scene to report that police in the Laho have obtained DNA supposedly linked to the Zodiac killer and that it's being processed in a lab and we could see results any day now. This was on May the second, And.
They're probably going to do a lot of the same things here, or at least potentially doing the same things, finding that match, linking that up, and then going from there, familial searches, looking in that trash again, maybe.
Maybe going through belongates. Yeah, you know, there's not really a different way to phrase it. But today this ends our episode. From now our update on the Golden State Killer aka the Diamond Knot Killer, aka the Original Nightstalker aka the East Area Rapist, and the Salia Ransacker. We would like to hear from you. What do you think will be the results of this What do you think of a world wherein for the greater good, everyone's DNA is considered part of this large database. Would do you
think the benefits outweigh the negatives? I mean, in this case, it seems pretty clear cut that they do.
I propose that it's very similar to requiring you, this is going to be controversial, maybe to register your car. Your car has to be in a database because it could either allow you to escape from a criminal act or you could even use it as a weapon. It is a very powerful thing, and you can't have a car unless you register it. You can do all those
things with the human body. So yeah, that logic. I mean, I'm not saying that I necessarily support that, but I could see law enforcement surely thinking that this is something that would be very helpful and important to solving crimes, but at the risk of of what privacy? And uh, it's my DNA.
You also have a requirement to have a license to operate a car, would you have would that lead into having a license to reproduce? I mean, I'll double down on controversy here. Uh, there are inevitably some some of you listening are are going to see the potential parallel thread between registering a car, registering DNA, registering a firearm. If we're going to go controversial, right, yeah, I don't
I don't know. I mean, that's a really interesting argument, Noel, Because you can't have an unregistered car yeah.
But you're right though, when you start going, you know, taking that and taking it too, well, what if then you need a license to reproduce? Or then we start entering when we start when we start putting our physical forms into the into the equation and treating them as though we as though it were a motor vehicle or a gun or something like that, that really opens up a lot of a lot of worm It is interesting.
Bat your bags, I am. It's so weird. I would have been so against this, like one thousand percent against all of this, and for some reason, somehow, as I'm getting older, oh gosh, you guys, I'm kind of like, well, get everyone a DNA scanned and put it on a tattoo and then their arms and they're registered. And if anyone doesn't, no no, we will find you a no no yes for you, no no, then we get you.
I love this voice. It sounds like he's either got loose dentures or he's also eating cottage cheese. I'm not sure.
The cottage cheese is one of the finest foods you can eat. I would recommend it early in the morning and late in the afternoon and also early at night.
Well, you know what, Matt, I have to say, thank you so much for giving us a note of levity, gracing us, Yeah, gracing.
Us, goodness, gracious, that was saying, I can't smiling at that old man.
Man.
That's what happens too. You get old, you start to decide you want to give up all your civil liberties, or at least the young whipper snappers should, right, I agree with with with those realizations. Also, your voice changes and you start to sound like a very very old man.
Yeah, it's mostly the testicular group, I think is what causes that. I keep trying to get a rise out of Paul mission control decking, and he's just not even No, that's not sure him.
From the angle that I'm seeing him, he had a Yeah, he's got a smirk. He's got a bit of a glimmer of a smile.
All right, And there's always one to thank you for tuning in. You are the most important part of the show, and we would like to hear from you.
Tell us what do you think about DNA collection and all of this stuff. Do you think they got the right person? Do you think there's someone else out there? What else do you think about the East Area rapist. Have you ever lived in any of those places? How did these crimes affect you growing up? Just anything you
want to talk about. Is there another serial killer that you think we need to jump and jump into a little bit deeper, or maybe information about the Zodiac Killer, because that may potentially be an episode coming up with all the things happening right now with that case, talk to us, let us know.
You can hit us up on Facebook most of the social media's We are Conspiracy Stuff on Facebook, we are Conspiracy Stuff show on Instagram. And if you have a cool story, a little missive something about growing up in one of these areas, we would love it if you left us a voicemail.
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