For twelve years, a masked man climbed through California's windows in the dark. He tore apart homes but stole almost nothing. He raped more than fifty women and murdered thirteen people, and for decades, no one realized they were hunting a single man.
Then, in 1986, he simply stopped. And vanished.
When they finally caught him thirty-two years later, he wasn't a drifter or a phantom. He was a grandfather in the suburbs, a retired mechanic, a former police officer, arrested at the age of seventy-two. The thing that undid him wasn't a witness or a confession. It was a distant cousin who had never met him, and a genealogy website neither of them ever meant to share.
This week, we go over three aliases, forty-four years, and the DNA breakthrough that changed how cold cases are solved forever.
Content warning: this episode discusses sexual violence and murder.