On April 23, 2018, the Sacramento County District Attorney's crime laboratory tested a sample associated with DeAngelo.
The prosecution's factual-basis introduction reported a match with profiles from three Contra Costa sexual-assault cases and eight Southern California murders. After the long movement from preserved evidence through a new investigative avenue to a candidate, a comparison now connected the named person to material from the crimes.
The significance lay in what the comparison added. The candidate's background had offered places and periods to examine. The family-tree work had helped bring him into consideration. The reported laboratory result addressed the connection between that individual and profiles already associated with the offenses. The sequence had crossed the space that the public appeal could not close with a name alone.
The April result also met an older history of testing. The Orange County cases had been linked in 1996; Ventura followed in 1998; Contra Costa in 2001; the Santa Barbara connection in 2011. Those earlier comparisons had brought evidence together while the person remained unidentified. Now the reported comparison brought an individual to part of that established network.
Reading the dates in order changed the apparent speed of the breakthrough. The final turn was quick. The foundation beneath it had accumulated for years. Material associated with an event in 1980 could matter in 1998, again in the proposal of 2017, and again in the testing described in 2018. No single date could stand in for that whole history.
The following day, authorities arrested DeAngelo at his residence in Citrus Heights.
The public question had changed. The older appeal could be updated; a defendant could be named. Yet the investigation and legal work did not become finished merely because the identity hunt had reached an arrest. The evidentiary account used for the later resolution still needed to address particular cases and particular charged acts.
One detail in the factual basis showed that continued work. It recorded a further reference sample obtained from DeAngelo on March 12, 2020. Sections concerning the Harrington, Witthuhn, and Cruz cases reported comparisons with that sample. Those dates were almost two years after the arrest. They belonged to the preparation of the case that would reach guilty pleas, rather than to the original discovery of a candidate.
I had nearly treated all the DNA references as one result. The dates stopped me. The profile developed for genealogy in January 2018, the April comparison described before arrest, and the March 2020 reference comparisons occupied distinct positions. Each entry served the history at a different point. Combining them into a single miraculous test would erase the work between identification and the eventual resolution.
The three Orange County case sections also returned the comparison to named people. Patrice Harrington, Manuela Witthuhn, and Janelle Cruz had already appeared as individuals with lives outside this record. The later material was not a fresh set of anonymous laboratory problems. It concerned evidence retained from those particular losses and examined again within a prosecution directed at a particular defendant.
The reported comparisons joined a case that also depended on witnesses and circumstances. Their dates showed how the work continued after identification, toward a prosecution addressing particular offenses.
By the time of the June 2020 plea, the case had therefore moved through more than finding a man who seemed to fit. The official account described a lead developed through genealogy, corroboration before arrest, and later comparisons within the charged case. The chronology made accountability a process with successive obligations, not the automatic consequence of a compelling headline.
I set the March 2020 entry near the end of the laboratory column. In the neighboring column, the legal record had been changing too. The arrest began with a much smaller set of charges than the eventual joint complaint. Six counties would have to bring their cases into one prosecution before the twenty-six guilty pleas could appear together.
The next change was written in a document that carried one case number above crimes from widely separated places.