How Detectives Caught the Golden State Killer—and Unleashed a Catastrophe for Civil Liberties

In 1980, Lyman and Charlene Smith were found bound and bludgeoned to death in their Ventura County home. Charlene had also been raped, and investigators managed to retrieve semen from the crime scene. It would take 38 years to find the killer.

“It was a sensational, godawful murder in a small town,” recalls Jennifer Carole, Lyman Smith’s daughter. The way they had been murdered “had a lot of feeling and emotion behind it,” she recalls. “There was a lot of reason why you would think that someone they knew did this.”

Carole would eventually learn that her father and stepmother had been victims of a notorious serial rapist and killer who had 87 individual victims at 53 separate crime scenes from 1975 to 1986.

Known as the Golden State Killer, the assailant avoided detection for decades.

In 2018, police finally identified and arrested the killer, a retired police officer and truck mechanic named Joseph James DeAngelo. They solved the case thanks to the advent of online genealogy databases, in which individuals voluntarily share their DNA online to obtain information about their personal health and heritage and to connect with family members.

These databases were what allowed investigators to bring DeAngelo to justice, and they went on to be used to name suspects in dozens of other cold cases across the United States, ushering in a new technological leap that the law is still catching up with.

The Golden State Killer story was told in magazines, books, podcasts, an HBO series.

But the capture of the Golden State Killer also has troubling implications for civil liberties. The use of genealogical databases for crime fighting makes it possible for the government to search through personal information of innocent citizens—their genetic code—in ways that violate privacy norms enshrined in the Constitution.

Police had DNA from the Smith crime scene genotyped in the same way customers would, using a single nucleotide polymorphism test. They compared the raw data with that of other people who had uploaded their data to genealogy websites, including YSearch, MyHeritageDNA, FamilyTree DNA, and GEDMatch. Connections between family members revealed a family tree that would lead to DeAngelo.

“The idea is not that the police are supposed to indiscriminately rummage through the lives of citizens looking for crime,” says Erin E. Murphy, a law professor at New York University and the author of Inside the Cell: The Dark Side of Forensic DNA. “They’re supposed to have probable cause, targeted suspicion to believe somebody involved in criminal activity and then from that suspicion perhaps develop reason for arrest or prosecution.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, investigators believed their genealogy searching was legal. “We were entirely confident that it would pass legal muster,” former Golden State Killer investigator Paul Holes told the Times. “But we understood that there could be a fallout in terms of public perception.”

“Rifling through the lives of thousands of innocent people, people you know are not the perpetrator of the crime, is a pretty serious thing to encourage law enforcement to do,” says Murphy.

Shot, written, produced, edited, and motion graphics by Paul Detrick; additional camera by Zach Weissmuller.

Music credits: Kiss of Death by Kadir Demir; Hope and Heisenberg by Spearfisher; Psycho Bill by Jordan Hatfield; Speed Freak by Evgeny Bardyuzha; Null by Neshza

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