'How I caught a MONSTER'

THE WOMAN WHO FINALLY FOUND SERIAL RAPIST AND KILLER JOSEPH DEANGELO REVEALS HOW

It was around 3am on April 14, 2018 when Barbara Rae-Venter found a serial killer. The retired lawyer-turned-genetic genealogist from New Zealand had been working with police in California on the case of the Golden State Killer, mapping the predator’s family tree using crime scene DNA.

That morning, the tireless former patent attorney was going over new DNA test results when she learned the killer had blue eyes. Of the investigation’s possible six suspects, only one man was a match.

“It gave me goosebumps,” Rae-Venter tells WHO from her home on California’s Monterey Peninsula. “Because people had been looking for this guy for 43 years – and suddenly I knew who he was.”

He was Joseph DeAngelo, a then 72-year-old married father-of-three who was arrested 10 days later, and in 2020 pleaded guilty to one of America’s most horrific serialkilling sprees. In a case that continues to haunt California and is set to become a Hollywood true crime thriller called The Policeman starring James Franco, DeAngelo murdered 13 people and raped more than 50 women in the 1970s and ’80s.