Cruz, an 18-year-old restaurant worker, invited a friend over, who later recalled being startled at

Cruz, an 18-year-old restaurant worker, invited a friend over, who later recalled being startled at least twice by strange noises outside and in the garage. But the teenager dismissed the sounds, and her friend left near midnight.The next morning, a real estate agent coming to show the home discovered Cruz in her bedroom. She’d been raped and bludgeoned to death, her teeth shattered and her face bloodied beyond recognition. There were tennis shoe prints in the soil outside the house and a heavy wrench missing from the backyard.Investigators initially homed in on the last people to see Cruz alive and her former boyfriends, but the case went cold. Although police assembled a rape kit, DNA testing of crime scene evidence was in its infancy, and the kit was placed in storage for many years.They didn’t know it in 1986, but Janelle was the last known victim of the Golden State Killer, ending the decade-long crime spree of one of the most sadistic serial killers and rapists in American history.Since the early 1970s, an unknown assailant had been terrorising various parts of California from Sacramento to south of Los Angeles, earning him different nicknames in each crime spree: the “Visalia Ransacker”, the “East Area Rapist” and the “Original Night Stalker”. He often selected single-storey homes, accessed them by climbing through windows, and bound his victims’ hands. He blinded women with a flashlight and threatened to kill them. He took trophies from his victims - pieces of jewellery, cufflinks. Before he raped a 13-year-old girl, he placed dinner plates on the back of the girl’s mother in a separate room, and warned he would cut the daughter’s fingers off if he heard the plates clatter.  Janelle Cruz had been dead for a decade when it was discovered that the DNA sample from her body matched DNA from the Harringtons and Manuela Witthuhn. Over time the DNA profile also matched with the Domino and Sanchez murders, and the Smiths, as well as to two Contra Costa County rape cases from the late 1970s. Although law enforcement has had a DNA profile for the Golden State Killer for decades now, a matching profile was never found in any national DNA database, meaning the man had never been caught for a subsequent crime where his DNA would have been collected. According to the Sacramento Bee, the site GEDmatch  is a place for people to find long lost relatives, and has a database of 800,000 DNA profiles. Sacramento District Attorney Chief Deputy Steve Grippi confirmed that a family member of the killer had used the service, and they were able to isolate him as a suspect and collect “discarded” DNA on two occasions: once they collected multiple samples from a trash can outside the killer’s home in Citrus Heights. Some other time, as the killer walked into the craft store, police swabbed the driver’s side handle of his car.  They finally had a match. Is name was  Joseph DeAngelo Jr. He is accused of killing 12 and raping at least 50 women in total. -- source link
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