I remember watching this press conference. It was April of 2018 and the DA came out to make

our announcement. She's standing in front of a crime lab surrounded by a bunch of cops

and she was there to say that finally, almost cinematically, investigators had found the golden

state killer, this man who had terrorized California throughout the 70s and 80s.

There were upwards of 50 rapes, 12 murders, crimes that spanned 10 years across at least

10 different counties, decades had passed. Law enforcement hit dead ends and then regrouped,

amateurs on the internet, swap theories, and then after more than 40 years, they got

him and they done it by putting his DNA profile on genetic genealogy websites.

It is fitting that today is National DNA Day. We found the needle in the haystack and it was

right here in Sacramento. Joseph James D'Angelo was arrested, pleaded guilty and he's serving

26 life sentences and his case was built as a triumph for crime solving and genetic genealogy

and it marked a seismic shift in how investigators used DNA in cold cases. Do you remember what

you thought when you heard that genetic genealogy had been such a big part of that case?

I was really intrigued because I have a biology background before I went to law school and

I never thought that you would sort of come together in this way. That's nilabala. She's

a senior attorney at the policing project at NYU Law School and she studies how technology

and policing come together. It was really fascinating to me that it had been harnessed in this

manner. I knew DNA was used to solve cases, right? That's been the case for a long time.

But suddenly this entire database was opening up so many possibilities for solving cold cases.

Later, nilabala began to realize that there were issues with the D'Angelo search. Cops

said I did the wrong person at first. They searched two commercial DNA databases covertly.

They even created a fake user profile. From nilabala's point of view, police were using

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