Golden State Killer, Crypto Convict, Genetic Genealogy - Megyn's "True Crime" Mega-Episode

the least.

“Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly show and today's true”

crime mega episode. We have a great one for you beginning with our original deep dive on genetic genealogy from years ago with the expert on this subject, CC more. Then our look into the golden state killer and how this guy was

eventually caught. And finally one of our fraud week episodes on the crypto

convict with the man himself who many of our staff thought was very hot. Just going to tell you that a front. Enjoy it. I'll see you on Monday. Idaho murder suspect Brian Colberger in court just a short time ago waving his right to a speedy preliminary hearing. He will get a preliminary hearing, but it will not be ASAP. The judge setting a court date for June 26th, this will be

“the point at which prosecutors can present the evidence they have trying to”

convince the court that this case should go forward. They will almost certainly get it and we will go forward with a trial. June 26th, of course, more than five months from now. We know that DNA played a role in helping to identify Colberger as the accused suspect in connection with the murder of these four Idaho college students on November 13th. They were murdered. According to the affidavit between

4 a.m. and 4 20 a.m. in the middle of the night was basically a 16 minute window of time in which someone went into their home. Went up to the third floor where they murdered two girls went down to the second floor, murdered one girl and her boyfriend. And left the other two women reported to be sleeping in that house as roommates alone. One we now know from the affidavit says she did see him. She laid eyes on him as he left

the house saying he had a surgical mask on the kind we were during COVID that she remembered he had bushy eyebrows, medium build. And that was basically what you remembered about him dressed in black. There is reporting that something called investigative genetic genealogy may have played a part in actually napping this guy. And today we are thrilled to have one of the world's top experts in that field join us for the show.

What started as a hobby has literally changed lives. C.C. Moore is now bringing justice to victims and getting violent criminals off the streets by the hundred. I mean wait until you're the numbers. Often helping solve crimes that have baffle police for decades and we will discuss some of them and how this method of crime fighting has become absolutely integral to putting criminals behind bars. C.C. Moore says there will be no more serial killers because

of this. When I first interviewed her back in 2018, she had just started working on criminal cases. At the time, six cases she worked on had led to arrests. Today that number has ballooned over 250 solves. About 200 of those have identified violent criminals. The rest involve unidentified Jane and John Does, many of whom were victims of violent crime think about it. Sometimes they find bodies including young young victims, teenagers who have gone missing,

who are on milk cartons and so on. And we never know what happened to these kids. Well C.C. Moore

is helping put some names out there in connection with these victims and giving families the closure they need. Never mind spotting the actual perpetrators of the crimes. C.C. Moore is a genetic genealogist and founder of DNA detectives. She is also chief genetic genealogist at Parabon, Nano Labs, the incredible lab that helps solve these crimes. C.C. Wellcome, great to see you again. Thanks for having me on the show. It's been a long time.

Yeah, it's been going on five years now since I first interviewed you and your practice

“was sort of in its infancy. I mean, you would just join Parabon. I think for three months”

at that point when I interviewed you in May of 2018. Wow, it's been quite a wild ride since then. You know, I've been in genetic genealogist solving mysteries for many years by that point. But I had just started working with law enforcement. Right, right. And so let's just give the audience I love this piece of your story. The background of how you got into this. It's not like you

got a PhD in criminology. It's you had never been a cop or an FBI agent explain how you got into this

and sort of help discover this. Well, I had always loved genetics and genealogy, two separate things.

called Family Treaty DNA was offering DNA tests for people who wanted to use it to learn more about their family history. And so I started reading about what they were doing. And at the time, I didn't have a lot of money to test. So I didn't start testing immediately. I just kept up with the brand new field and what people were learning about it. I was building my own family tree using paper records, the paper trail we call it, which is how all of us started. All of us who are

interested in genetic genealogy started by building our own tree. That wasn't something I had done when I was really young. I was extremely busy with all sorts of different pursuits. It was something that I did when my niece, my oldest niece, was about to be married and I was trying to think of what would be an interesting gift, a unique gift. So I thought that was a good gift.

Family tree. All right. Famous last words. Never finished it. She never got that gift.

“But that's what got me into it. And the combination of two things that I was really passionate about”

was so fascinating to me. And so that was really the beginning of my involvement in genealogy and then genetic genealogy. So how did it turn to crime fighting? Well, that's a long story. I guess we have quite a bit of time. But very early on when I became involved in this, I was aware that there was a huge amount of potential. When we first started with genetic genealogy, we were only using more limited type of testing. The Y chromosome testing,

which traces your father's father's father's line, and mitochondrial DNA testing, which traces your mother's mother's mother's line. And it was quite limited. And a few of us started asking, could we use autosomal DNA? So autosomal DNA is the type you get from... Let me stop you. All done. Hold on. Because I want to make sure I understand it. So when you were just doing those two types, tracing the Y and tracing the X,

how were you doing? Before we get to the more advanced, what were you doing? What kind of crime fighting or examination were you doing with those? And how did you even get access to those? So it was all about family history at that point. Women had to test their father for the Y chromosome to learn about their father's line, or you could test a brother or a cousin.

I tested my mom's first cousin, so I could look at her direct paternal line, my maternal

grandfather's line, tested my dad. What you're trying to do is see the orbit. And when you say that, forgive me for an intervention, make sure everybody understands. When you say test them, like I don't have my brother tested for his Y chromosome, what does that mean? What do they do? Like a sheep swab, or would they test it?

“Yeah, it was a sheep swab, and you have to convince one of your relatives to do it,”

and they think you're crazy, of course, back then, because no one had ever even heard of this type of testing at that point. Okay, let's go. Keep going. So mitochondrial DNA is your mother's mother's mother's mother's line, and both of these types of DNA change really slowly. So you're looking at deep ancestry. You're looking at the origins of your direct paternal line and your direct maternal line, but you're not examining the inner parts of your family tree. And so autosomal DNA

is a difference. Okay, like again, before we get to that, let me just ask you a couple more questions before we're still like in the infancy stage. What do you get back? So you mill it into some company, the cheek swab, and then when you get back, you know, generations back on the Y chromosome, the Y line on your dad's side, what are they saying to you? Your great, great, great, great grandpa was this guy? Like what what comes back? What comes back is a list of men with the Y

chromosome that would have similar or identical Y chromosome signatures. Now, because in many societies, surnames are passed down from father to son, father to son, just like the Y chromosome, you often will see surname continuity. So many of us started these volunteer surnames projects. How do they know? Like, let's say, you know, my dad's last name was Kelly, and so was his dad, and so on. But how do they know whether, you know, my great, great

grandfather is linked to me, because my great great grandfather wasn't putting DNA into anything

“and sending it to cheap swab. So how do they know? Well, they don't know. You have to interpret it.”

So in my case, I tested my dad's brother to make sure they have the same Y chromosome, same father.

I tested a second cousin to make sure his Y chromosome was the same, and I finally tested a fifth

cousin to confirm that my dad's great, great, great, great grandfather was the person that the

you know, generation generation. So I could keep going back in that tree, confirming my grandfather is the correct person. My great now. I don't need to be dense. I helped me out, but I want to understand. So my dad was Ed Kelly. They, they don't have Ed Kelly in the system. You know,

that does this testing, because he never did any DNA testing he died a long time ago.

So what would my thing come back saying Ed Kelly was your father, and how would they know that? Like, that's kind of where you come in. I realized to figure out family tree, but like, what, how would they know who on earth I'm related to just based on my brother's DNA? How

“would they be able to link it to somebody who wasn't in their system? They don't. That's what you do.”

So you would get a list of people who say shared your brother's Y chromosome, or it was very similar to his Y chromosome. Modern day. Yes, and probably a lot of them would have the surname Kelly. That is only if there was no break in your direct paternal line, meaning no adoption,

misituated paternity, that type of thing. And so you might get a bunch of Kelly's, but if there

was an adoption, or a break in that line, maybe you'd get a bunch of Smiths. And then you really have a mystery. Then you say, okay, why is my brother or father's Y chromosome connecting to Smiths instead of Kelly's? And so it's just a way of confirming or learning more about that direct paternal line. And like for instance, in my family, there was this argument whether our mors were from Germany or Ireland. So that was one of my interests was trying to prove which it was. Is it a Irish origin,

“Y chromosome, or a German origin, Y chromosome? And so when we were first using genetic genealogy,”

it was looking at this very deep ancestry. It wasn't looking at anywhere near present day. Now it could help. So if you did you get back something that said, like more, more, more, more, more, yeah, thousands of mors, like I would Kelly, of course, is very common. I can imagine I'd get back hundreds of thousands. I mean, it would be so many that it would be, it would feel useless. But so where do you start? There were different origins for both of our surnames,

more in Kelly, because they're so common. And so you would only match those Kelly's or mors in my

case, that have the same origin. You know, more is from all over the world basically. Now Kelly,

you're probably looking at Ireland. And so you might get lots of Irish people, not necessarily with the last name Kelly, because the Y chromosome goes back so far. You might connect before they even adopted the surnames. But you're only going to match that group, not all the other Kelly's in the world. And my dad's more line was actually really unique. When I first joined the more surname project, he didn't match any of the mors. And there were already quite a few people in it

even in the early days. And so it'll tell you which group of those mors, which group of those Kelly's your line fits into. And you wouldn't have thousands of matches typically. I mean, when I started, you had almost no matches. You were lucky if you got a match. Mm-hmm. And so that's based on, so they were, they're looking at mors that are roaming the earth right now who have submitted DNA, try to give you as much info as they can. And they can see that your dad, your dad more,

has similar DNA to these other mors who have also participated here and given a cheek swab. And we can glean something about their ancestors just to get you started. That's, it's really just a start. Right. So much of it is building trees, building your own tree, building other people's tree, trying to find where they converge. How far back can you find that common ancestor in the tree? And so it's not one of these things where it's done for you. You're doing all the work.

You're just getting the clues. Okay. There's a man in Michigan who shares my dad's

“white chromosome. There's a man in Germany who shares my dad's white chromosome. Why?”

We've got to figure out why they do. Okay. And that's now I get it. So these are modern day men who have also sent in their DNA. And so it's a start. Somehow there's a relation between this guy and my dad and maybe that this guy and me. And this is where your family tree building comes in. And so let's go to that because that's like an investigative piece. That is like newspaper articles. Oh, bits. I remember we talked about this on NBC, but it's like

anything you can get your hands on to tell you the story about that guy and then you build it out around him. Like a tree. Like this is like an actual tree. Like what branch goes here and what branch goes there? Right. So when we were working with white chromosome, we would only build the father's father's father's father's father's father. What you're talking about now is what we're doing

mention. Okay. So you used to just do sort of this investigative work and trying to figure out the

“dad vertically the mom and now take it to where you wanted to take it with what how it's changed.”

So that was really fascinating and wonderful. And we started thousands of certain projects doing that. But for those of us that were hungry for more, we really wanted to be able to explore those ancestors in the middle of our tree, not just those lines. And we started asking some of the scientists could we use a type of DNA called autosomal DNA, which is auto, like the car, zomal. And that type of DNA even women inherit that from their fathers. So we wouldn't have to

test a brother or a father cousin. We could test our own DNA to learn about our father's side.

You get 50% for each of your parents. You get on average 25% for each of your grandparents,

about 12 and a half percent for each of your great grandparents. So that seemed really exciting. But scientists told us back before 2009 that it couldn't be done. That you could not use autosomal DNA for genealogy because it recombines so quickly. We were used to using very static type of DNA, type of DNA that mutated very slowly. But now asking about autosomal DNA, the traditional belief at that time was that it

changes too quickly. And therefore you wouldn't be able to use it in genealogy. But that turned out not to be true. That's right. So a very groundbreaking company

“called 23 in me introduced an autosomal based test for health purposes. I think most of us”

have heard of 23 in me now, but back then it was brand new. And just as an FYI, the woman who started that and runs it still, I think, is Ann Wojeki, who's the sister of Susan, which is G-I know that the last name spelled tough. Yes. And the sister of Susan, who runs YouTube, and there's another gunner of a sister in that family. And the mother was a gunner. It's a very interesting family. And it used to be married to one of the Google founders, Sergei Brune, I think.

Okay. I'm really testing my memory. In any event, she, on her own, decided to start this company, very interesting called 23 in me, which most people now have heard of. And it's correct me from wrong CC, but I thought it started off as like a health website. You know, it's like you could send it in. You people who wanted to know, am I going to get Alzheimer's or what am I prone to,

“would use 23 in me to figure out based on your genetics, what you're, you know, necessarily”

guaranteed to get what you're prone to get. And now she's branched out, well, beyond that. Right. So Ann wanted to democratize our access to our own genetic information, which her purpose was different. It was for health information. She had worked on Wall Street in that sector, and was discouraged about profit making on our health, and wanted to give people the power to be able to work with their own genetic information and learn about their own health and take charge of that.

And so her goal was very different than mine and my field, but we saw what she was doing and said, well, wait a minute, can we test our own autosomal DNA at her company and see if we can use it for genealogy? And so that was really early adopters, people that had been engaged in genetic genealogy with these other types of testing and wanted more. We just wanted to see if we could learn even more. And there's, so you were, you were asking 23 in me if they would help you out on that in the goal,

or we didn't have to at first. We just had to buy what was a very expensive test back then.

And in that case, you spit into, this is saliva collection instead of a cheek swab and mail it in. And back then, you could share with anybody, you could share your information, and you could check and see if you shared any DNA with someone. So we started looking for shared segments. So long, identical segments of DNA, those ATCs and G's lining up in a row. Because if you had that, it meant you likely had a common ancestor somewhere in your family tree. And it opened up the

inner branches for exploration. Now, we didn't know if it would work at first. But at the same time, they had a very forward thinking scientist named Mike McPherson at 23 in me, who created a beta test of a tool called relative finder. And they're, they compared everyone in their database against each other to see if they could find those long segments of identical DNA. Interesting. Yep. Yep. And they did. So that's, it's really interesting because, you know,

some people find 23 in me and says she'd come controversial. They're worried that

enough credit for being sort of seedlings for crime fighting in the way you're talking about.

“Now, now they don't work with law enforcement. We'll get to all that. It's now, it's just that”

their innovation should be credited for helping give birth to this new lane of DNA exploration, which is putting tons of criminals in jail. Right. I don't think they want credit for it. But they certainly deserve some credit for it. You know, I went to them very early on just shortly after that time that I'm discussing now and asked if they would be willing to accept crime scene DNA into their database and they schooled me very quickly and set me to her general council

Ashley, gold at the time. And we had about a three hour long conversation about why that wasn't something that they wanted to do, why that wasn't part of their business plan. And so very, because you know, people are paranoid about this. People, they know like, people, it's, it's for all sorts of reasons, not like everybody's a criminal or worried that their brothers are criminal. But there are some of those, but it's also just distressed of government and just, they're not

government. It would 23. But it's just like distrust of having your information out there and then 21st century and where it could go. So I can see why they don't really want to be the assistant on this. And we should just make clear now. We'll get to it later. But it's a different database that you use for your analysis and your crime fighting. It's not 23 and me. It's not ancestry.com. Though I will say some of my favorite stories on NBC were the 23 and me stories of the ancestry.com

stories were people because it's well beyond looking into your health history now. It is finding long loss relatives. And like the identical twins, you know, that those were some of my favorites, or you think of going to 23 and me, you get your results back and it says, you have an identical

“twin. And we did some reunion shows of some of these women. It was, I'll never forget that's”

on a great stories. Yeah. I mean, it's just an amazing tool for any type of family mystery, missing

family members. It's incredible. But at that beginning, it was very clear that we would never

fulfill that potential unless we got lots of people to take the test, which is obviously one of the reasons they didn't want to involve law enforcement, especially at that early time. And that made a lot of sense to me as well. Now coming from media and marketing, I knew that the only way that we were going to be able to build these databases to where we could actually solve mysteries was by sharing positive DNA testing stories. And so I started working with 23 and me and on my own independently

to promote positive DNA testing stories. So if someone made an amazing discovery or even an upsetting discovery that led to a more positive outcome, these were things that we were, I was starting to pitch

“to the media on my own. But 23 and me was also getting in craze and they would send them my way”

a lot of times. We would have meetings with, for instance, a very early meeting with the 2020 producer. She reached out to 23 and me and they said, hey, CC, come on up so you can tell us some of the stories of the things you're finding in this database. And so that was, sometimes it goes a different way. Sometimes it's like, why is there no link between me and my dad? Right, so that's awkward too. And that's happened in millions of people now. You know, there's over 40 million people

that have taken these direct to consumer DNA tests. And it's a pretty high percentage, surprisingly, that have found out that their father was not there biological father or their grandfather. One of their grandfather's was not. And so I don't know if people realize just how many people have made that shocking discovery from direct to consumer DNA testing. Oh, what a tangled web. We've, right, some of those secrets women in particular. In these cases are keeping maybe you'll feel

it's better left on said, maybe not, maybe because of the chance to connect with somebody who's

genetic background or other background would be really interesting and helpful to you. You never know.

It's a personal choice. So just to move it forward, you wind up, you're using a website not 23 mean not answer should I come, called GED match. And my understanding is the way you populated this GED match, because you point out you need as many samples on there as possible, is by encouraging people who are into this, who would like to connect with other relatives to take their 23 and meet their ancestry dot com results and upload them to GED match and to to widen the chances

that they'll connect with somebody. Right. So GED match was started by two friends in mine, Curtis Rogers and John Olsen back in 2011. And of course, when it started, there was no one in there. So we had to convince people to download their raw data from one of the other sites,

small site kind of a playground for more advanced genetic genealogists. It was where we could try out new tools. We could do cross company comparisons. So if you tested it 23 in me and I tested at family 3 DNA or later ancestry, we could both upload there for free and then compare our data looking for those long identical shared segments. Okay. Now, and by the way, the criminal database, you know, like if you get arrested for I don't know how long it's been going on in America that

they they do a DNA test of you if you get arrested for felony. How long is how long have you

“know how long they've been doing that? And but and are those results also uploaded to GED match?”

They are not. So law enforcement has their own database, which is based on a different type of DNA marker than what we use in genealogy. So they're not comparable. They've been doing it for about well it depends what state and which jurisdiction. So about 25 years some started earlier. I've helped identify two serial killers who were put to death in Texas in 1999 and neither of them were in the law enforcement database, which seemed shocking to me, but I've since learned that it was

kind of hit myth at first. You know, it took some time to get it off the ground and get collect those

samples from violent criminals. And so we can't hear what's crazy. Yeah, we can't hear what's crazy. The and we're going to get to some of the cases that you solve, but some of them are using DNA from crimes in the 70s, you know, and that's semen or blood or what have you. And it really was very forward thinking of law enforcement back then before they had any idea what we'd be able to do in 2023 to save all that stuff and not sadly in every case. But in a lot of the cases making

crime solving 50 years later possible. Yeah, we owe them a huge debt of gratitude because they couldn't have possibly understood just how valuable that physical evidence was going to be. I've actually worked cases back to 1958 now. Whoa. Yeah, quite a bit before it was even born. And so

it's just amazing what can be done. And in those cases where the crime scene investigators

were so forward thinking, they collected things, they couldn't have imagined how powerful they would

“be today. How long does DNA stick around, you know, like 58? I mean, I think there's probably a”

hierarchy on the samples, right? Like, you'd rather have semen in a rape case than, I don't know, touch DNA, you tell me. But how long does it last? Well, that's a really good question. I mean, we can analyze ancient remains, right? When they dig up some old royalty and things or accidentally run into the one under the car park, they're still DNA there. So it just depends on the environment, how something was stored or where somebody was buried as to how long that DNA will survive. But

it can survive for hundreds of years in some cases, even thousands. I mean, look, they've been able to to analyze the genome from the antithels. So DNA lasts a very, very long time, but it absolutely depends on the environment. And so back to the crime fighting element of this. So now you're getting more advanced. You've got the new, uh, the jet match, which is getting bigger and more useful. And now can you just briefly describe how you do start filling in the tree, how it's

become, this is the tool that now that you're using to fight crime. Yeah, let me also mention we have one other database that we can use with law enforcement. And that's family treaty DNA, the original pioneers of genetic genealogy decided that they wanted to help law enforcement as well. Now, it is the smallest database. Unfortunately, even though it was the first one, it's the smallest one. And so the database is we can use or the two smallest in the field. That's jet match,

which has about 1.5 million people in it. And family treaty NA that has about 1.25 million

“people in their autosomal DNA database. They have how many in jet matches? How many in jet match?”

A jet match has about 1.5 million, but that's only about a third of those are opted

into law enforcement matching. So we can only use about 500,000 to identify violent criminals. That's incredibly small. I mean, I'm even more impressed that you've solved all these crimes with such a small sample size. So it's like 2014 when I was first trying to solve family mysteries, adoptions and things like that. It is very difficult, it's very challenging.

So we get the unknown individuals DNA from the crime scene. It might be seeming blood, saliva,

“even touch DNA. And we have to send that to a private lab. So none of the crime labs have the”

capability to create the type of DNA profile that we need. The law enforcement databases as I mentioned are based on a type of genetic marker called an STR, single nucleotide. I'm sorry, a single tandem repeat. And we use SNPs, which is a totally different type of genetic marker, a single nucleotide polymorphism. And so we have to start from scratch. And that means there has to be DNA left from that crime scene. If they've used it all up, then we cannot do genetic genealogy. So it goes to a

private lab where it is analyzed and just like they would analyze it at say ancestry DNA or 23 in me. We need it to be compatible with those profiles because that's the type of profiles we're going to compare against. So it's about 700,000 to 800,000 genetic markers across the genome. And then it goes to our bioinformaticists, our scientists. Now because these are degraded mixed contaminated samples,

“these are not like if you spit in the tube and you have this perfect DNA sample, these are non-optimal”

samples. And so we need something called bioinformatics, which we have an amazing scientist,

Dr. Ellen Gray-Tak and Dr. Ellen Katie, sorry Dr. Janet Katie, it's parabon, that worked with that degraded DNA to try to repair it and make it as similar to a file as if you and I were to spit in the tube and mail it in. Once we have that, we upload it to Jedmatch and to our family tree DNA, it's compared against all the people there that are up, did into law enforcement matching, and we get a list of matches. Now those matches are typically going to be really distant relatives,

and that's because these are really small databases we're working with. So the chance of a close relative of a suspect are very small. So we're lucky if we get a second cousin or a few

second cousins, sometimes closer, but mostly we're working with third, fourth, fifth,

sixth cousins and beyond. And we can predict what the likely relationships are based on how much DNA someone is sharing with that unknown person. You can see the percentage. Okay, so this is fascinating. And then you draw the family tree. So you've got a sixth cousin. You've got to start drawing a family tree. And this is actually funny for me because I know who my sixth cousin is, at least one of them. And it's somebody famous. It's somebody famous. That's the reason I know

because somebody actually did the family tree and were like, "Oh my God, we're related to her. It's Loretta, SWIT, Hullips, Hullahan, you're around my age." So I know you know who that is of MASH fame. So she and I related. It was so fun. She did a Barnes and Noble book signing up on the Upper West Side when I lived there. And I popped in and told her we were long loss cousins. She could not have been nicer. But anyway, so let's say I committed a crime, but you didn't

know it was me. And Loretta had uploaded her DNA to Jed Match. So now you're looking for me. You don't know it's me. But you find Loretta SWIT is the sixth cousin of this person. And you start doing these concentric circles around her. You just start to do like who are all the people she's

related to and her aunts and uncles are related to. And you've got to that's so much work to finally

get to the possible. So there's a little bit more efficient way to do it, which is I'll say okay who's not who's I've got the list of who's sharing DNA with the suspect. But who on that list shares

“DNA with each other? That's really important. So it's not just who's sharing with the suspect,”

but who is sharing with other people on that list. So say MASH is one three and five share DNA with each other. If I can build all their family trees, I should be able to identify their common ancestor. The only reason two people would share these identical segments of DNA is if they inherited them from somebody in the past. They have to have common ancestry. And so if I can identify where that DNA comes from, who you know, which of the great great grandparents or further back,

then that gives me one piece of my unknown person's tree. And so I create what's called genetic networks. I'll group the matches into networks of people that are sharing DNA with each other or clusters. And each of those clusters will represent one branch of the unknown person's family tree. So we start piecing it back together that way. Maybe I'll have one set of great great-grandparents, one set of great-great-great-grandparents. Maybe if I'm lucky, I can identify great-grandparents.

And then I have to find that one person or set of siblings that is related to all of those matches

and eventually their identity based on their ancestors. And then do you get to the step of,

let's take the Idaho murders? Where it's like, okay, I know it could be, you know, somebody in this cluster or this cluster or this cluster. But hey, there's a guy in this cluster who

“lives within 10 miles of the murder site. Do you use evidence like that to help narrow it down?”

Are you only in the genetic genealogy field? It depends how much data you have. If you have enough matches that you can connect to someone's mother's side and their father's side, maybe three or even four of their grandparents' lines, you can narrow it down to just one immediate family. But because these databases are so small, we often don't have that. So say we could I only identify one set of his great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents. In that case,

we would have to then do what's called reverse genealogy identify all of their descendants and look for their descendants who are the right gender, age range, maybe live in the right area, drive a wine car. And so we do look at those other things. And that's something I think a lot of

“people don't realize is that with investigative genetic genealogy, the DNA just gets us started”

without someone's family tree. It's meaningly. Without trying to be enabled identify the descendants of the common ancestors, we identify it's meaningless. So we're looking at location locations huge. We look for the one branch of the tree that maybe moves closer to the crime scene. And 99% of the time, we find someone who lived right there within 10, 20 miles, sometimes within one mile.

And so that's a really powerful part of it. And then we use phenotyping at Paravan, where they can

predict eye color, hair color, skin color, even shape face. And so we use a lot of different factors to narrow down further when there isn't enough in the database to point us at just one person or one family. So that phenotype, that's very interesting because that's something you can do

“even if there's no match, right? Like if you get DNA and you run it through jet match and there's just”

nothing, like nothing comes up, the DNA is still useful to you. That's right. So we don't have many families or individuals in jet match or family treaty in a that are recent immigrants. And so it's really difficult to identify someone if they were born in another country or their parents, or even grandparents or great grandparents were. And so there are some cases where it's not viable to perform genetic genealogy, but Paravan can still perform the phenotyping and still create

this image of what someone might look like. Now, it's not meant to be photographic, but it's meant to give you their traits. And so it is used in quite a few cases where they're just aren't enough

matches, aren't enough data for genetic genealogy. But what's amazing about is where it's most powerful

is in conjunction with each other. So maybe I narrow it down to 10 males who all descend from these common ancestors. And then I can look, which ones have blue eyes brown eyes, which ones have blonde hair, maybe red hair, and that can really help to narrow it down. Because we want to give as few people as possible, right? We want this to be efficient and we want to keep innocent people out of these investigations. So I work very hard to try to narrow things down

using all different types of information. So I'm not sending law enforcement on a well goose chase and sending them after innocent individuals. The moral of the story is don't leave your DNA to crime scene. Don't leave it. Even if not in the system, even if nobody you know is in a system. CC Moore is going to get you. All right, stand by a squeeze in a break. There's so much to discuss. And I want to pick up the Idaho case because they're saying that this was used

to catch Brian Coleberger. We'll talk about it next. So let's talk about Idaho. This is, of course, on everybody's minds. And they have reported there have been reports that genetic genealogy was used in napping this suspected killer Brian Coleberger, 28 years old, 10 miles away from the murder site, pursuing his PhD in criminology at the University of Washington, the four victims from the University of Idaho. They have only told

us so far that DNA was detected on one button of the knife sheath that they tell us in the supporting FDA for the warrant for arrest was found next to one of the victims. One button on a knife sheath. So that's kind of interesting. It's kind of surprising. I would think there'd be more DNA

little button as opposed to on the body of the four victims on the bed post on the door handles.

“Right? What does it tell you? Well, I think that he went to great lengths to not leave DNA. He”

likely had gloves on. He was, you know, educated about this. He would think he certainly would have made sure he wasn't leaving DNA behind. But he must have handled that knife sheath earlier when he didn't have gloves on. That's my guess. But I also want to point out that they don't have to reveal everything they have in the FDA. And you know that, of course. And so I think it's very possible. They have additional DNA. And even if they didn't, they might buy now because I'm sure

they've been going through all of that physical evidence batch by batch sending that to the Idaho Crime Lab and trying to detect any additional DNA. So I don't think we'll really know what they have until this case progresses. And hopefully they will find more DNA or already have. It might be more complex, meaning there might be mixtures of blood. And cases I've worked where there was a

frenzied stabbing almost always the knife has slipped and cut the suspect as well. But then

you have a mixture and you might even have a mixture of three people in this case. Maybe you have his blood plus two of the victims blood for instance. And they have to do what's called de-convolution where they extract out the victims DNA and are left with just that suspect DNA. And so it's possible that that could have taken more time, which is possibly why they were focusing on this knife sheath for the affidavid. I am asking them because they say they say that that was what was found on that

button was single source mailed DNA. So what does that mean? It means there was just one DNA contributor. So that's a much more straightforward DNA sample than if they have a mixture otherwise,

which could be why they focused on that for the affidavid because it's the most straightforward.

Now that was likely touched DNA unless he happened to leave a little bit of blood on that, but I would guess it's touched DNA. And that is just a few skin cells most likely. So that's not very much DNA and that really illustrates how far technology has come. Yeah. So what, you know, my feeling is a lawyer in discussing this case is if I'm the defense and best case scenario for Brian Colbergre, that's all the DNA they have of his at the scene. I'm thinking I'm good because maybe

Brian Colbergre went to the store wherever they sold that knife in the sheath and he touched it. He picked it up and it was still left on there. So how long does one's touch DNA last? You know, that'll be relevant. It will be and I agree with you. Touch DNA is not the optimal DNA sample that you would want to have in this case. Let's hope maybe it was a drop of blood instead.

“And I'm wrong about my supposition that it was touched DNA. But I think that the prosecution can”

argue that if he had handled it, then somebody else would have had to have handled it and their DNA should also be on there. And you would see a mixture or you would see their DNA as the primary DNA. Now they can certainly argue that maybe the next person to handle it were gloves and they were trying to set them up. So they transported it to the crime scene and left it there. So I do think there is some room for argument there and it's very fortunate that they have other evidence.

And that's really important because DNA, as you well know, should not be the only evidence. In a case, you certainly hope they will be able to support it with other types of evidence. This is, I mean, we're going to get into this on our illegal panel tomorrow. But this is why all the surveillance tape of the car and so on is relevant. But I will say not a, it's not open and shut. It's definitely not open and shut. There's all sorts of things around that crime scene.

There's a Walmart. There's a 24/7 grocery store, you know, if I'm his lawyer, I'm going to

“say that's why he was over there. That's why you see him going by there. He's an insomniac, his”

own neighbor testified to that testified, but said it to reporters. Anyway, we'll get into that tomorrow. But wouldn't there be, if there was touch DNA on the button, CC, wouldn't there be typically touch DNA on the rest of the knife, she's? Well, not if he wiped it down or I think the knife sheathed was leather. It's maybe less likely to retain that touch DNA than the button. It's touch DNA. It's transferrable. It's easy to wipe away.

You can shake someone's hand and you get their touch DNA on your hand and you can then transfer it to a different item. And so it is more, you know, transitory or transferrable. And it's harder to detect. So I'm not sure they would find it on the leather and also he might have wiped that down.

button. So if they found, and we don't know what the order of events was. We don't know if they found the white hundraeilantra and linked to debris and coal burger or if they got onto him from this touch DNA. But if it was the latter, they have a couple of, let's say it's touch DNA, a couple of skin cells that the lab tech sees miraculously and good for him or her. And they

run them into their law enforcement database first, I would assume. Let's say there's no hits.

As far as we know, there was some sort of, well, I don't know. Like, Brian Colberg doesn't have a criminal record as far as we know. I don't know that his father, anybody else does. So then what? Where do they go from there? Well, they're had to be enough DNA extracted by the Idaho crime lab that they were able to split that and send some of it to the private lab that would have created the genetic genealogy profile. And so there must have been, you know, enough.

But even that could be a tiny amount. So they would have created their profile, their law enforcement, corded-missible profile at the crime lab, and then sent out what was remaining to a private lab.

“They would re-analyze it from scratch and create that genetic genealogy profile, which I believe”

was likely sent back to the FBI investigative genetic genealogy team. So I think it's very likely they did the genetic genealogy in-house. We saw how closely involved the FBI was in this case, and they've been training agents all over the country since you and I met to do this work. So for almost five years, the FBI has been training their agents to do it. I suspect strongly they kept this in-house, but they would have had to use a private lab to create that profile.

Okay. So that's, and I want to ask you what you mean by create that profile. If you mean, I'm going to take a break. But if you mean, create the, this is what the suspect looks like, or create the, he's got relatives in here. They are. We're going to pick that question up right after this break. Love going through it, line by line because it's really fascinating. And it's absolutely going to dominate the new cycle over the next year as we go to that preliminary hearing.

And then ultimately, the trial CC Moore stays with us on this and other cases coming up.

“And remember folks, you can find the Megan Kelly show live on series XM Triumph channel 1111”

every week. Did it, New East? Full video show at YouTube dot com slash Megan Kelly along with clips. Audio podcast wherever we get your podcasts for free. Go check it out at Apple spot if I've been door a stitcher. And there, if you go, you will find our full archives with more than 465 shows in the feed fast thing stuff. So CC, the question we left lingering before we went to break was if they get, let's say it's touched DNA, some skin cells from the button of that

sheath. And they don't get a hit in the criminal database. Then they send it most likely to a private lab and come up with a profile. And my question to you was, do you mean the kind of profile I'll say, well, it looks like he has brown eyes and brown hair and is about, you know, this descent or the kind of profile that says, here's his dad. Actually, neither. It is a profile of

genetic markers somewhere between probably 500,000 and a million genetic markers of those snitch,

those single nucleotide polymorphisms that I mentioned earlier. And so it doesn't tell you any

“thing on its own. It's only going to give you important information if you either compare it”

against others, their own genetic files, or phenotyping. Now, I have no information that they performed phenotyping in this case. I don't think they did because they didn't work with Parabon and they're really the ones doing that work. So they would have created that SNP profile that looks just like if you spit in a tube at ancestry or 23 in me and mail that in and got your own raw data file. All right. So that, but if they don't have a hit in the database, you know, in any database,

private or otherwise, to connect the DNA to, then they're at a lock unless they can

zero in on a particular source of DNA and do a comparison, right? Right. And so you're always

going to get matches in the genetic genealogy database. But if they're way too distant, if it's too small amount of shared DNA, then you're not going to be able to perform genetic genealogy on it. So everyone has matches, but maybe not close enough matches. And then you're right. If you could not use genetic genealogy to point forward that suspect, they would have to try to find them in other ways and then collect his DNA or a close relative's DNA and compare it against that original

profile that was created by the crime law. We don't know what results they had if and when they ran it through the private lab. We don't know whether somebody in Colbergres family had given DNA it uploaded yet. We just don't know the answer to that yet. We are told that they collected a sample of garbage outside of Brian Colbergres' father's home. He went back and stayed with his mother

tour with his dad. I mean right home. By the way, latest reporting is that the FBI was telling

“him as of that date. Still denying that they were behind those two traffic stops in Indiana,”

but the FBI now CBS reporting was telling him and was telling him via, you know, the easy pass. And they said fixed wing aircraft. So it's possible there was an aircraft following him. Fixed wing would mean not a helicopter and through other means. So they were on to him by December 15th according to this report. So they go to the dad's house and they say that they got the garbage outside of the Colbergres house and that there was a match to the dad. In other words,

they had DNA. They compared it with the DNA from the knife sheath button and what they were able to tell was with 99.9996 accuracy. This DNA on this knife sheath belongs to the father of the killer. Do I have that right? Right. And so this is pretty common when investigative genetic genealogy has pointed law enforcement toward a certain individual or family. And they'll do what's called a trash pool. If they can't just follow that person and pick something up that they dropped,

then they'll typically resort to waiting for that person to put their trash out on the curb. And most states allow this. It's considered abandoned at that point. And then they go through the trash and try to find an item that might have DNA on it. But when it's a home like this, a household where there's multiple people, they don't know exactly who's DNA they're going to get. So in this case, they found a male sample of DNA and tested it and it wasn't the suspects. However,

they were able to perform what is basically a standard paternity test comparison to the profile

from the button on the sheath and determined that that individual's DNA from the trash was the father

“of the individual who left his DNA behind at the crime scene. How certain do you think they'd be?”

And they're saying 99.9.9. How solid is that? Well, it's been accepted in courts for decades to establish paternity. It is extremely confident, as we saw by the number 99.9998%. So that means that there's basically no one else on earth that could be the father of that individual. OK, so the real challenge for the defense lawyers is to say, well, I mean, they will try to say wrong. It wasn't him. You messed it up. You did something wrong at the lab. Your lab procedures are

faulty. But the best line of argument is probably we don't know how that got there. Now, by this point, that would become irrelevant because they would have collected his DNA upon arrest and done the direct comparison, the one to one against that fort admissible genetic profile that is the one they originally compare it against the law enforcement databases. Once they got the one to one match, the paternity match wouldn't matter any more

or any genetic genealogy that was done previously would all become irrelevant because they'd have that one to one match. And that's when we hear those numbers like one in 300 trillion chance that it's anyone else in the world. And then still, my comment stands out because the defense lawyers would be faced with saying, well, that DNA, first of all, you're testing stinks,

“they'll attack the testing. Remember, OJ, they'll still attack it, very check all that.”

But then they'll also just say, even if it's correct, we don't know how that got there. Maybe Brian Goldberg would touch that knife in a store that sheets an idea in a store that in the

killer body used gloves never touched it. It is interesting, like this guy is a criminology student.

He may have been wearing gloves. He may have been suspicious that somebody was telling him and be and watched what he threw out in his, because now that we know the FBI was on to him and following him, and they identified the car as of November 29th as his. And from that point forward, who knows, maybe they were waiting for him to throw something away and he wasn't, wasn't till I got back home. And there's one report. He moved the trash from his dad's house

over to the neighbors. Right. Right. Yeah. And I'd want to circle back around to something when we talked about whether there was any other DNA left behind. When I first learned he was a criminology student, I thought he would have suited up like Dexter, you know, to make sure he didn't leave any DNA behind. But we know from the eyewitness, the roommate, DM statement, that she was able to see at least his eyebrows. And she said he had bushy eyebrows, which means he didn't cover them.

And the mask that she has described is like you said, just when we would wear for COVID, it doesn't sound like he had his full head covered. Now, there's quotes going around that I said his head wasn't covered. I didn't say that. I just said, if he didn't cover his eyebrows, maybe he didn't cover his hair. And if he didn't, you know, there's it's very likely he left a hair

Like are the eyebrows, are they falling out all the time? Yeah. I mean, we lose hair all the time,

all the time. And we've even seen one single hair from someone's leg, be able to be traced back. And that is really because of advanced technology, it used to be that you couldn't use hair for this type of purpose. But only in the last couple of years have we been able to do so. I've actually helped. I have to have the real on it. You know, does it have to do so without by the route? No, thanks to the brilliant doctor Ed Green from UC Santa Cruz. It doesn't have to have the

“route anymore. That's what's so exciting. And it's opened up a lot more cases for us to work.”

I was able to help identify the killer of a kindergarten using rootless hair and also another murder that hasn't been announced yet. And so I've been able to use just a single hair

thanks to Dr. Ed Green's amazing technology. He's, you know, their lab is the one that is

processing that and creating that profile for me to use. So without these brilliant scientists, we wouldn't be able to even do what I do. Have you ever seen a murder? You see, that's this up close and violent at which there was no DNA left behind? Now, and that's why I was a planning early on. I just couldn't imagine him not leaving DNA behind because it's such a violent crime scene. He stabs four people multiple times and the chances of either the knife not

slipping and cutting him or one of those victims fighting back and potentially getting his DNA under their fingernails or just dropping a single hair seems highly unlikely to me. So I guess, you know,

“time will tell, but I think it's something that people need to think about. If you are, you know,”

considering perpetrating this type of intimate violent crime, you will leave DNA behind. No matter how hard you try, I mean, Brian was clearly educated about this and yet he still left his DNA behind. Now, I will say people are talking about how smart he was. I don't think he was the sharpest tool in the shed. It does not sound like he planned this out. Nearly as well as we would expect from a PhD student and criminology, but, you know, it's just virtually impossible not to leave

your DNA behind in this type of frenzy, very intimate violent attack. Hmm, you know, there's speculation online that he posted under different names commenting on this crime and we don't know that it was him, but there is one posting under this suspected name again, unconfirmed in which he talks about the sheath of the knife trying to find it here. It's by somebody named inside looking and the post under that guy's name, it was all about their Idaho murders. This Facebook group,

they were, they were, they were discussing it. And one of the many things he posted this inside looking was of the evidence relief, sorry, proper Rogers. There's there's a couple of different ones. Inside looking was one of them in any event. They post of the evidence released. The murder weapon has been consistent as a large fixed blade knife. This leads me to believe they found the sheath, my god, that's just, I mean, my god, like who, that doesn't lead anyone other than the killer

to believe that. Like who would go there? So I've been a member of that group from early days.

I've been following this case from I think the very first day it happened or the day we found out

about it. I don't know what to think about that. You know, I mean, there's a lot of speculation, but that was something that really does make it seem like this person had some inside information, or it was just a really good guess. I've read both sides of the heart and they found the sheath. Right, you'd say they looked at the wounds and determined that. That's a, that's a, I'm sort of on the side that it very possibly was him. But, you know, like I said, it's all speculation, but I'm,

well, for us, right, a law enforcement knows they know by now whether that's him because now that's a good problem. They have a search warrant for his home in Washington State where he was living in going to school and that now that's been sealed. They're not allowing us access to it for now, though they say in March, we may get it. They've, they've searched all of this. They're going to have record. You can't keep that stuff a secret. So they'll know and that would be great evidence, too.

You mentioned, you know, the victims were likely to fight. They, they say there were defensive wounds

“on the victims. So they did, they did fight. You know, that's what's one of the things that's”

so crazy about it is, why didn't anybody hear anything? Where were the screams? You know, why weren't they, you know, just, they have the one roommate who lived who wasn't attacked saying, I heard what's sounded like crying coming from one of the rooms, but crying is not exactly consistent with being brutally stabbed to death next to either your boyfriend or your friend. So many questions still

Right, I agree. I think when you're fighting for your life, you're conserving your energy,

possibly they didn't scream. You know, maybe they were just focused on trying to survive and focused on trying to fight him off without yelling or something that would have been heard by the roommates. Mm, God, so horrific to think about is they just on Friday, right? This crime happened in November 13th. The arrest was December 30th. Here we are July 12th. This is today. Our January 12th, they were seeing just this past Friday, the sixth taking two bloody matrices out of the crime scene

along with a bed frame and a box, which is strange to me. I don't know why the bloody matrices were still there. I'm sure they've done some analysis on them prior to now, but in your experience of DNA analysis, like how would it be collected, but they have done like a scraping of the mattress on, let's say, day one, and then maybe this is a more in-depth look, or what do you make of that? Yeah, I thought it was very odd as well, and particularly since the judge

“had, I thought, frozen the crime scene until February 1st, I believe. So it must have been”

either the defense or the prosecution taking that away. Some people were saying maybe it was the roommates, the surviving roommates bed, but I think you could clearly see that there was a blood stain on one of those matrices. I think they would have swapped it. Now, of course, there were sheets,

right? They would have collected the sheets first, and maybe a mattress pad. They would have swapped

it, sometimes they'll cut things out. I don't know if they would do that on a mattress or not, but they are probably putting that mattress into storage, and for future testing or maybe even to use in the courtroom. So we've been very focused on finding his DNA at the crime scene, but there's another lane here, which is finding the victims DNA on anything related to him. What do you think the odds are of that, right? Understanding, okay, he covered up, but like, I'm sorry, he's not super

human. There would be blood on his clothes. There would be, we don't know what he did with the clothes. We know they're going to analyze the route he took home, which is reportedly a little odd. It's not the straight direct line back to his apartment. I'm sure they've poured over every inch of it looking for anything that's been discarded, but they seized his car, right? They're going to be tearing that, like, what are the odds he see in your experience of finding the victims

“DNA someplace around him if he in fact committed this crime? I think it's extremely high,”

like you pointed out, he would have had to have been covered in their DNA, and then he must have gotten in that car, still in those clothes. I don't think he stripped down there on that street, and so you cannot clean that completely out of a car, even though we know he took great effort cleaning that car based on reports, there still would be DNA left behind, very likely blood, maybe hair, and maybe even transferred into his home, right? When he went into his home,

he might have brought some of that with him as well. So I think there's a good chance. They'll be able to tie the victims, one or more of the victims DNA to his property, his car or his home. That's key, right there. Even if he was meticulous, other than leaving the knife sheath behind at the crime scene, there's just he for people were murdered up close by knife. There's no way he wouldn't have their DNA on him, and now that we have our suspect,

most of that battle is just knowing who's car to search, who's apartment to search, who's computer to search, they've figured that out, thanks to the button and things to the surveillance of the White Hyundai Alondra, so that's very promising for law enforcement. I wanted to ask you, could this, would this case have looked very different to you, had it happened 15, 20 years ago? Yes, some of the detectives I've worked with have told me that they don't need

me to perform investigative genetic genealogy on many of their cases, their active cases, because they have so much technological evidence. They have cell phone data. They have computer data. They have GPS data. And so that is going to be a huge part of this case. And like we don't

know, of course, if the car was what first led them to identify him or the genetic genealogy,

“but also just having computerized systems where you can search cars, you know, who owns cars?”

When we go back to the old cases, we often are not able to find that information. It just doesn't exist. It didn't make it into the digital age. And so the whole method of crime solving of investigation has advanced to such a degree that it's already extremely difficult to get away

I grew up in the 70s, like you, I remember being terrified of Son of Sam, who was in the news that that case terrified me, because my nanolipped in the New York City area,

and it was all over the news. You never know what's seeping into your child's head, you know,

just based on the news coverage. Of course, there was Ted Bundy, there was a Hellside Strangler.

“I remember when you say Richard Ramirez, he was in my area. I was, yes, and when we even covered”

the big ones like BTK and Zodiac, I've heard you say you don't think we can have a serial killer anymore. Like that's the odds of that happening now are next to Nill. Why? Well, first of all, what we just talked about, the technological evidence. But if even that fails, we always will have investigative genetic genealogy going forward now. And so unless someone is killing people from a distance with a gun, and even then we might be able to see snipers, DC snipers. I've been thinking

about them this whole conversation that you get nowhere. I mean, I'm not recommending how people commit murder, but they got nowhere near their victims. It's one of the reasons why it was so hard to detect to it was. Well, then they better wear gloves when they handle the bullets because you can pull DNA from bullet casing as well. And so it's just going to be virtually impossible to be the type of serial killer and certainly a serial rapist that is perpetrating these very

intimate upclosed and personal crimes because you will leave your DNA behind. And if you do, we will identify you. Even if it takes months or years, I recently worked the faith hedge-peth case out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It took us three years to identify the DNA contributor, her killer, her alleged killer because he was born in Guatemala. And so, even those cases, we will get there. It just takes additional time. And as the database is grow,

it's going to get more efficient and quicker and quicker as time goes on. And we're getting

“better at what we're doing every day as well. And so, you know, that's why I don't think that we”

will have serial killers. There won't be Ted Bundy's or Golden State killers or Zodiak who's still unidentified 50 years later because of investigative genetic genealogy. This is a good incentive for people to actually upload their DNA results. If you're at all so inclined, I understand a lot of people aren't, but if you are inclined, do it and do it at jetmatch, too, take your results when these other private companies and do it. Not saying you're a serial

killer or your family member, but like, there could be this the Loretta Swit. She's not a serial killer either. You could have the sixth cousin who you have no love for connection, real connection to who's done something wrong or wouldn't it be nice to have helped law enforcement nap that person. It's one of the reasons why your name came up in discussing the John

“Bene Ramsey case. We had John Ramsey on the show not long ago. And he's like, I'm 78 years old.”

I, you know, I don't have much time to see this case solved. And he said CC, he wants someone like you to analyze what they say is a teeny tiny bit of DNA that is left in that case. And I don't know why there's not more because apparently they have, they have John Bene's pajamas, they have her underwear. They have the, the implement used to strangle poor John Bene and the instrument. And it's been tested repeatedly and there's been no match. And I guess what he's being told is

basically there's only one more test in here. Like, if we do this again and we don't get the

guy, it's done. There's so little left. So just to update our viewers, he wants the governor of Colorado to allow him as the child's father. There's been ruled out as a suspect by the prosecutor to take this DNA and give it to somebody like you to take it to a private lab that is the best of the best, and this seems to make so much sense to me. But he wasn't able to get the governor, Governor Paul is to even respond to him. He told us this right before Christmas when he came on.

So during that interview, he told us as an update for our viewers, CC. He tells about a letter that he wrote to the Colorado governor, Jared Paulis, and he wrote written it like two months earlier, October. He asked him for a face-to-face meeting because so far he'd been getting the stiff arm from the governor from the state law enforcement. They created this sort of, oh, we're going to refer to our cold case unit and he was like, that's a PRC YA cover. That's not real.

And he wanted to tell the governor personally the different steps he wants taken in the investigation including this new DNA testing with somebody like you. So it would cost the state nothing. He said

he and his supporters would pay for it. Well, John came out and told us the governor never even

dad? After the interview, we promised John Ramsey that we and our in our viewers. We're going to

reach out to the governor and demand answers. Why are you ignoring this man? Why are you ignoring John Ramsey and his concerns? No response for us either. We told our listeners and our viewers to do it. They did as well. Reach out to the governor's office directly, demanding action on behalf of John Ramsey. Respond to the man. Do something. Now, we don't know what exactly flip that switch, but John just told us he's heard back from the governor after two months of being ignored.

And now the governor has asked him. John Ramsey to contact the Colorado Director of Public Safety and he's done that. No face-to-face meeting yet, but John is telling us he's now feels encouraged by the response. So yay. That's great. All of our viewers and our listeners for helping and amping up the pressure. And now, C.C. what we need to happen is for someone like you, ideally you, to get this evidence analyzed. So how higher the risks given how little DNA there is.

Just backtracking a little. I don't know if you remember, but you asked me almost five years ago what case I'd like to work. And I mentioned John Vene. And I have received emails where messages on social media every single day. Since that time, asking me to work this case. I certainly would love to have the opportunity to do so, but I doubt very much that they would let me work it. I would expect maybe the FBI will work it if anyone is allowed to do so. As far as the risks,

yeah, once you use up that DNA, that's the end. So you have to make sure that it's being sent to a well-tested team, a lab that has been able to create profiles, genetic genealogy profiles from tiny amounts of degraded DNA and that has scientists that are really highly skilled at working with that degraded DNA. And we can assume it's degraded after all these years.

“With Touch DNA, which I think that's what this is in this case, my understanding. Again,”

you just have a tiny bit of skin cells and it can be very quickly consumed. So I understand older police hesitation to use up that last little bit because you never know what's coming around the corner. Nobody predicted investigative genetic genealogy outside of

our little community. And so I always hesitant to second gas law enforcement. I've been

involved in some pretty high profile cases where people were out there criticizing law enforcement and had no idea what was going on behind the scenes. Yeah, just like Idaho. That's exactly right. Now in that case, I didn't have insight information, but I strongly suspected they were trying investigative genetic genealogy, but there's been other cases where they've never even released that they did use that tool. And you know, I've had to keep quiet and listen, watch all these

people criticizing law enforcement for years. It happened in the Chapel Hill case in Bay Thedgepest case as well, kind of bite my tongue. And so you just don't know what they

are doing behind the scenes and what their reasoning is. And so I really do hesitate to second

“gas like I said, but I think it is the time to go ahead and do it. They can get a whole genome”

sequence done on that DNA if it's viable. Meaning you could not just look at the 700,000 markers that we use for genetic genealogy, but they could look at the entire genome and then have all of that information for the future. And I think that's probably the best bet in this case. There's two different ways you can do it. The one is called microarray, where you just look at those 700, 800,000 genetic markers, that the direct consumer DNA testing companies also use,

or you can do this whole genome sequence where you get every bit of the genome information that is available in that sample. So from touch, from touch DNA? Yes, absolutely. You know about 10% of the cases that we've helped solve or been able to create profiles for have been touched DNA. We published a paper in 2019 talking about that. And so people in this case are saying, oh, it's so new if they use touch DNA for genetic genealogy, but it's actually not. We've been doing

“it since 2018. So it's totally doable, and I think, you know, John's getting older as he keeps”

pointing out, and now is the time, but I do understand their hesitation. It is risky. Could you get, when you say you can get the whole genome, would that allow you to do both lanes of investigative work you were telling us about, like, figure out the family tree potentially, and at a minimum get, this is what the person is likely to look like. This is what the hair color probably is. You could do both of those off the same tiny cells. Yes. And so that's one thing that's interesting

And the files that they created for that are exactly the files that we use for genetic genealogy, which is why when I joined forces with them, I had about a hundred cases right off the bat because they had already created those files. They'd already gone through the lab process, and all we had to do was get permission to upload those to Jedmatch. And so, yes, it absolutely has the same information in there that you would need to predict eye color, hair color, and

cestry. It is a really powerful amount of information. And you see, in my crazy, and the made this may have been a different company, but I feel like when I was at NBC, Andrea Canning had this done, on herself. And there was a, do you guys do a sketch off of the impact back? I mean,

I just think they were never seeing a sketch of Andrea. I think that was pretty good.

“That was before I was part of the company, but I think you're right. I do remember seeing that”

on their site. I think it's so I can imagine it. We could potentially get a picture of the jump in a killer. Pretty quickly. If there's enough cells on this thing, that's how quickly things have advanced in the DNA line. And that's, that case captured the attention of the nation. Everybody would like to see whoever did that brought to justice. Okay, there's more, because we've got to talk about this case out of Pennsylvania. This is right where my husband's from. So he was

very interested in this as well. Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and wait until you hear how C.C. more solve this case. One a week, she's not going out. You guys, she stays with us for our last segment. Don't go away. So C.C. We've got to talk about this case in Pennsylvania. You recently solved this case as of July of 2022. Let's go back before that, though, to 1975, when the murder of then 19-year-old Lindy Sue Beechler took place, she was stabbed to death,

19 times in her apartment on December 5, 1975. She was found lying on her back with a knife sticking out of her neck. Decades went by without an arrest in the gruesome crime. They had no idea. Police were not able to solve this. I understand it happened in Pennsylvania, and it was just a cold case. So

“you got involved in this. How did you get involved in this all these years later?”

Well, Lancaster Police had worked with Parabon before I even joined forces with them to create this investigative genetic genealogy service. So they had an established relationship with them. So when I came on board, they asked Lancaster Police if we could perform genetic genealogy

first on the Christy Merak case, which they had done a phenotype for. And so we uploaded that to

Jed Match. And on that case right away, we had good matches for me to work with. Now, when I became really familiar with that case, I learned that Christy's brother and Lindy Sue's brother had taken out billboards together asking for tips on their sisters. And so I was able to help law enforcement solve Christy Merak's case way back in 2018. It was one of my very first ones.

“But I felt like Lindy Sue's case was hanging over my head for years, because I really felt”

that they both needed to be solved. They were sort of like sister cases to me, even though they were so many years apart. And I wanted Lindy Sue's family and brother to have those answers

as well like Christy's family finally did. But when we performed the analysis on that crime scene

DNA and uploaded it to Jed Match, there were no good matches. They were all very, very, very distant. So we recommended they upload to family treaty in A as well, the second database. Again, no good matches. And I was just so disappointed because I so desperately wanted to help law enforcement identify her killer as well. Okay, so then what do you do? Well, because we didn't have any close matches. So the closest match we had only shared 30 cinema organs. 30 cinema organs

can be a false match, even. That's so distant. It could be a tenth cousin. But I was determined to try to help on this case. So just behind the scenes without even telling the law enforcement agency I was doing it, I started building trees of these really distant matches. And instead of coming back, oh, going back into the 1600s. And I didn't expect I'd find common ancestors because of the distance. But I did find that they were all converging on this small town and southern Italy.

behind on Lindy Sue, so her killer or alleged killer at this point, had all of his ancestral roots

“go back to this one small area in South Italy. So that's pretty specific. So I started researching”

the migration history of Lancaster Pennsylvania. Where did the people come from? Okay, Italy. I found that there was a club, a sons of Italy. And I started looking through their membership cards, which are digitized online thankfully. And I found that the most of the people, most of the Italians who came to Lancaster, came from this small town called Gasparina. Well, Gasparina is the town in Italy that the trees were going back to. Aha. So that meant that Lindy's killer,

likely had roots in Lancaster going back. This wasn't someone who just was passing through.

This is somebody whose family had been in Lancaster for probably a couple generations and had come directly from Gasparina. And he was going to be fully Italian with full ancestry from there, based on the family trees, as well as the ancestry predictions we were able to create. And so I needed to find someone who had four grandparents from Gasparina, all eight great grandparents from either there or close by in that region, that had come to Lancaster

and settled there. And so I went through all of those cards and then started building the family trees for each of the men, that's who was in that club, men. Each of those men who came to Lancaster, I built their trees forward to see who did they marry. And then I would build their trees backward to see if they also had ancestry exclusively from Gasparina or nearby. And so I needed to find somebody who's ancestors intermarried with people from their hometown. And we also had done a

snapshot phenotype in that case and he had a little bit unique traits. I'm not sure I can go into

that right now. But he had, first other in Italian, he had sort of unusual physical traits.

And so I was able to look at that as well. And it wasn't that many people who came to Lancaster from that town. I mean, there was a fair amount, but it was a very defined migration route. And it was a small percent of the overall population. So I figured if there was only, you know, a few hundred who came over, then that was doable. It was just going to take time. Anyone who intermarried with someone from a different population group, their descendants were out. So I just kept

building these trees and seeing who would fit. And then as I was doing that, each of those descendants who would be a candidate, I started to do a newspaper searches on them. And one of them

“turned out had the same address as Lindy. I found a, I think there was an engagement announcement”

in the newspaper. And I was just blown away. What are the chances of doing this for months and months, years, actually, of behind the scenes, building these trees. And it leading right to the same apartment building that Lindy was killed in. Oh my God. So then this is chilling. So then you got to close the loop, got to figure out now you have a name. I mean, that's the big thing. Now you have a name who you think could potentially be the guy, what's the, what's the next step? There's a

couple of other things about them that we're compelling, but because this is still an active case, I won't go into those. But I felt pretty confident, but I didn't have any solid evidence, like I normally have. Normally, I can connect my person of interest to multiple matches through common ancestors. But I couldn't connect any of these people directly to his family tree, just to that hometown of Gasparina. So it was really nerve-racking. But I still felt like it was a good

enough lead to pass it on. And so we reached out to Lancaster Police and let them know that I've been working on this, which they weren't even aware of, and set up a meeting, and I shared his name with them. At that point, it's just a tip. It's a lead generator. No one's going to get arrested based on what I say. So they have to perform their full investigation on this individual,

“just like they would have had to do on Brian, Colbergre, if that's how he was identified. This is”

not evidence that's going to be used against anyone in a court of law. So they started looking into this individual. And they eventually selected sort of tissue DNA, just like they didn't

That's the one that is used for evidence. They can't arrest somebody until they've done that or gotten a close family member like they did with Brian's father. In this case, they got DNA directly from the suspect or the person of interest. And he became a suspect because they got that one to one exact match, which when they told me was huge, because this was a novel technique that I had just created. And it was nerve-wracking, right? If I can't even connect one match to someone's family

tree, I feel very hesitant to point them out to law enforcement. Like I said earlier, I don't want to send them after innocent people. But there was just certain things, circumstantial things about him and about his life that made it too compelling not to pass it on. So when they told me it was a match, it was just tremendous. So they, according to what I read, they found him in the airport

“in the Philadelphia airport. And I think that's where they got his February 2022. They recovered”

a coffee cup. He used him through away at the Philadelphia International Airport. Labs later confirmed the DNA on his coffee cup, matched the DNA from the semen on Lindi Sue's underwear, all these years later. Again, the crime happened in 1975. They also found that DNA in blood left on her pantyhose was consistent with the semen and so on. Like they were matching it in a couple of fronts. Now this man's name is David Senopoli. He's been arrested. He has pleaded not guilty. But this guy

did apparently live in her apartment building at the time in 1975. He would have been I think 18 by my calculation. He's now 68 years old. This guy went on as far as we can tell to lead a relatively normal life. I mean, it's it's kind of crazy, right? So you see, do you know anything

about like what he did over those next 50 years? Oh yeah, I did a lot of research as I always do when

I have identified a potential person of interest. I dig through social media, through newspaper articles, through the traditional genealogical records. I use all types of different resources to learn about someone before I turn their name over. I write a really complete report with a lot of information for law enforcement in my cases. So yeah, married. Yeah, he doesn't have three kids at the same time that Lindy was a newlywed. They both were. Oh my gosh. I mean, it's just so creepy to think that

if this is true, this guy committed a heinous brutal murder. And then went on to live with the secret for 50 years. Probably always wondering, especially as DNA techniques got more developed, right? It seems like it seems like we're identifying a new type of criminal with investigative genetic genealogy. We see so many of these cases where this individual seems to have perpetrated

“one really horrible violent crime and then gone on with their lives. And that's why they're”

cool cases, right? They were never arrested for another crime. They never got their DNA in the system.

These are people that were never on law enforcement's radar at all. So, you know, who knows what else these individuals may have done, but it certainly appears that we've identified many of these types of individuals that did something like this once and then faded back into society and lived what appeared to be a normal life. They say his friends were shocked. I mean, his family shocked. They can't believe it. But I mean, the truth is DNA doesn't lie. Well, especially when

audience was on a, you know, rap homicide victim. I do just want to become a point, which is that the DNA has actually allowed me to speak about this case. Normally, I wouldn't be doing so when it's still working its way through the court system. But the DNA specifically asked me to speak at the press conference and explain my methods. And so I'm speaking out of turn. Got it. This has been used by you to, as I mentioned, the intro, identify murder victims who, you know, Jane Does,

John Does, giving closure to so many families who just had their child disappear and never knew

what happened to them and just assumed the worst, but there's some closure in knowing this is how they died. They were the victim of this person. They've, certain deaths tied to this killer or that killer. I mean, it's upsetting, but it's, I'm sure most, most families are relieved to be able to

“bury their loved one and so on. Another important lane of what you're doing. And just for the record,”

we went back and checked all the cases that you'd been working on when you came on and we interviewed you on NBC. There was one case involving a little girl April Tinsley who'd been murdered in December

There was another case. By the way, that was the first conviction of somebody identified through

“investigative genetic genealogy. Wow. Another guy, this is in, let's see, this is in connection”

with the 20 year old J. Cook in 18 year old Tonya Van Columberg in 1987, Canadian high school sweetheart's visited Seattle and we're killed. You helped identify the accused killer William Talbot. He had pleaded not guilty at the time we interviewed. Found guilty in June of 2019. And that was the first jury trial to find someone guilty who has identified through IGG

investigative genetic genealogy. So these are all big first. Yes. Oh, and it was absolutely amazing.

I mean, we talked about seven, six or whatever cases, every single one, the person either pleaded guilty or was found guilty in a court of law. So your records were really good. Yeah. So in the time we have left 40 convictions now. We have already convictions in our cases. Some are lagging because of COVID took longer to get these and we still have lots in the pipeline. But yeah, our track record

“and genetic genealogy's track record record and this is really phenomenal. Pretty stellar.”

Where is this going, CC? Right? Like 20 years ago, probably nobody could anticipate where we are today. What do you think? Like if he had to predict the future, where's going? I mean, if you had asked me a month or two ago, I would have said we will start working more active cases. It'll start stopping criminals in their tracks, keeping serial killers from ever developing. And here we see with Idaho exactly what I would have told you what happened is what is going

to happen. And I am one of the reasons I've been out there talking about this Idaho case, even though I was not involved in it, is because it is a fantastic example of what I've been advocating for, is using investigative genetic genealogy early in a crime. Soon as they don't get that hit in the law enforcement database because it can save lives. And this is where we can have the real impact on public safety. We can keep people from losing their lives and being victimized.

And we can really help law enforcement be more efficient with their investigations. Instead of investigating something for years or decades and spending public funds on this and involving innocent people in these investigations, we can probably even help avoid wrongful convictions by keeping the focus off the innocent from the beginning. Because one of the real powers of investigative genetic genealogy is the ability to rule people out. For every one of these, we focus

on the arrests, but I have ruled out dozens or hundreds of persons of interest in all of these cases when I start working them. Many of those have already been under suspicion for years or decades.

I've heard from lots of people thanking me for finally lifting that burden off of their shoulders.

“And so I think that's where we're going. They don't, you know, when they run out of avenues,”

they try to all the technological advances and they still don't have this individual in their sites, they will turn to investigative genealogy now. It's another reminder by the way that when the police process a crime scene, they ought to be dressed like in hazmat suits. Given this touch DNA, they can't go anywhere near it without suiting up from head to toe to make sure that they don't disturb anything. Think of it. I mean, it's like you're right because we have had some cases

that trace back to law enforcement officers or people that were involved in the case. And so that's unfortunate when that happens. Yeah. And I'm sure that they're paying attention to latest

developments and realizing how critical that is more than ever to make sure they touch nothing

with their bare hands or, you know, their own DNA getting on a site, which is how you point out is so easy for people to do it. Can't go in with exposed eyebrows. I mean, there's a lot to think about. CC Moore, you're a genius. You're a heroine. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your work. You are so kind and I'm so happy we got to speak again. Likewise, and saying a prayer that it works out between you and the Jombinate Ramsey Investigation. They need you all the best.

The sun was setting behind the ranch style home in citrus heights, a suburb in Sacramento County, California, a Volvo and a fishing boat occupied the driveway. The landscaping was impeccable. A nice house in an idyllic neighborhood. And on that April 2018 day, the police were there too. They were there to finally. A rest of man named Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. now known as the Golden State Killer. After four decades and advances in DNA technology

investigators were finally able to identify the serial rapist and killer. The grandfather,

for his heinous acts. Former Cold Case Investigator Paul Holes has been

“had been waiting for this day to come for 24 years. He was integral in cracking the Golden State”

Killer case and documents his experience tracking down DeAngelo in a new book just out called unmasked my life solving America's Cold Cases. And he is with us here today. Paul, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. This is such an amazing story and we owe you such a

dead of gratitude. The nation does because you just never gave up. I know it was a team after

for sure. It was and that's nice and humble of you to say. And it was a team effort. I know that's genuine. But you were the person who just couldn't pull yourself away from this thing long after other people were like, you know, seems to have died off. Let's move on. Your family, like, hey, would love to spend more time with you. You couldn't stop. And it's to your credit because even though when he was finally found, he was 72 years old and we think had stopped the crime

“spray by then. We never would have known. It's important to know and it gives us such insights into”

why and how and how we can attack new cases differently and so on. So before we kick it off, I just wanted to give you my own personal thanks and an express to the audience. How much we should appreciate what you and your colleagues did? I appreciate the kind of words. Thank you very much. Of course. Okay. So let's go. So wait, you look like such a young man. But you've been at this for so long. You can't be that young. Do you mind if I ask you how old you are? I am 54 years old.

Yes, you're a baby. That's very fair. Yeah. You know, and I don't know if you realize this, but you actually had a role at the end as we were closing in on the Angelo. Wait, I know we covered this case on NBC and we spoke with the genealogist and then it was like then you guys caught him a month later after we did a big show on him and we found this on the show.

“Yeah, I remember that. I was on the show with Jane Carson and Debbie Domingo and I moved up my”

retirement date in order to fly out to New York to appear on the show and I had already sat in front of his house and later on that evening I told these two victims. I think we're close and I'm looking at an Auburn cop and that was after talking to you that day. Oh my gosh, that's that's really cool. It's it's cool to just now we had any sort of horrible. I remember we were all so into the story and it was just so puzzling and it's crazy as a reporter to do that and then like a month later,

he's caught. It's like, wait, what do you mean after all this time, almost three decades of not being able to find him boom, there he is and you're at your questions answered. So this is a long and amazing story from a long forcement perspective, from a serial killer perspective. There's just so much to get into. And it was basically took place over a 10-year period if I had my facts right 76 to 86. Well in terms of, you know, when he kind of evolved into a full-blown

rapist and killer, that was between those years, but in the years prior to that, he was a fetish burger and had already killed a father of a 16-year-old girl down in Bicelia before he started as a serial rapist up in Sacramento in 1976. So we know that now at the time,

do we know that now because we know his identity, right? In part, there was always so down in

Bicelia, 1974, 1975. There was a burger that hit over a hundred times in the Bicelia area right around, closer to around the college of the Soyuz. And he was going in and going into the women's undergarment drawers, tossing the women's clothing around, pulling out women's photos out of the photo albums and stealing blue chips stamps and single earrings, and was very prolific about, after about 85 attacks, he goes into a house, in the middle of the night, and tries to pull

16-year-old Beth Snelling out of her bed. She's kicking and screaming. He actually gets her outside when her father Clyde Snelling, a professor at the college of the Soyuz, tries to come to her rescue. The Angel drops Beth, shoots Claude Snelling, three times killing him, and then runs off.

And so now, at this point, he's actually killed, and six months later, he ends up basically

up in Sacramento and is now breaking into houses and raping women.

odd. I mean, is that unusual to see, or is it more typical to see somebody with an MO that they just

“carry through to the end? Well, you know, in terms of the evolution of the serial predator,”

you know, we often see them learning how to do the steps to get up to where they are going to be doing the violence on people. You know, they have to get comfortable, being on somebody else's property, breaking into the house and get good at breaking into a house with somebody's there. And that's what the Angel was doing. And then eventually, they go hands on with with a victim. And with the

Angel, he was sexually assaulting the women. And then ultimately was attacking couples

before he evolved to just committing homicides. So this is a almost a textbook example of the evolution of a serial predator from a serial burglar to a serial killer. It makes sense in a way. I mean, it's tough to make sense of any murders serial killings. But it does make some sense to see him graduating to more serious crimes as his confidence builds and as weird as this sound, sounds he was very good at what he did. I mean, he was very good at covering his tracks

“right from the get go. That that was something that he was always excellent at, no?”

Well, no, you know, he he was a criminal justice major. And then, of course, he was a cop

down in Exeter, which is a city right next to Vice Ali. And when he's first starts

as if I say Ali Iran's hacker, he was not very good. He struggled to get into houses. He was seen left and right by people with either victims, residents that lived, where he's peeping, or people in the neighborhood. But as he is developing in his law enforcement career, he ends up becoming part of a burglary task force and goes to burglary investigation school. And now he's learning how law enforcement is investigating these cases as well as how burglars

commit their crimes. So the public money that went into the law enforcement field basically paid to the Angela's way to become a better predator. And so when he moved up to Sacramento, he realized all the mistakes he made. And this is what makes him somewhat more but sophisticated and intelligent offenders, he learned from his mistakes. And he incorporated methodology strategies and tactics for now as a rapist, which up in Sacramento, he was known as East Area rapist.

He is employing these methods strategies and tactics and is very, very good at avoiding being seen, avoiding witnesses and breaking into houses. So he basically evolved. Now knowing who he is, you know a lot about him. Is he above average intelligence? Like how would you describe his level of smarts? You know, in terms of the Angela, I would say yeah, he's above average intelligence for this type of offender. You know, he, as a cop talking to a sergeant down in the Exeter,

or actually up in Auburn, when he was a cop up in Auburn, starting in 1976, his sergeant said, you know, he wasn't a good cop. He didn't employ good tactics. So, you know, I can discern, you know, in terms of what he employed during the commission of his crimes, that he's a deep thinker and he was a forward thinker, and then he utilized, you know, what he learned, you know, in his law enforcement aspects, in order to be able to commit these crimes. But he's not very

books smart, you know, in fact, his ex-fiancy Bonnie, who I become, you know, great friends with, you know, she went to school within that sack state, as he's studying criminal justice, and they took some classes together, and he was constantly cheating off of her just to be able

“to pass his classes. When, when was he engaged to Bonnie? In 1970, yes, I can't remember if it was”

at the end of '69 and '70, but it was circa 1970, and that's, you know, we had a case in Davis, California that occurred in June of, actually, it was beginning of July of 1978, or as he is literally raping this woman, he's sobbing, and he's saying, I'm going to kill you Bonnie,

I'm going to kill you Bonnie, over and over again. So we always knew there was a Bonnie in his

was this wife, et cetera, and then once we identified him through genealogy, I'm looking through his past, an analyst up at Sacramento found a newspaper article announcing the engagement of Joseph DiAngelo, two Bonnie, and there was one of those check marks. Oh, he's got a Bonnie in his life. Well, that's interesting, but of course, that doesn't prove that he's a golden state killer,

“but it was one of those facts that they, there's something here. What did she say he was like?”

I'm curious, because that was before the 10 year serious rape and murder spree that he's known for 76 to 86. How does she describe the then relatively young DiAngelo? You know, the primary characteristic that she really emphasizes is that rules didn't apply to you know, he didn't demonstrate anything to her, at least through the course of the relationship until the very end of that. There was anything criminal about him in terms of indicating

that he was capable of violence, but he just didn't care about rules. You know, he would speed, he would go and trespass, you know, in the Wilson Lake area, or on the old rocket dying property in Rancho Cordoba, and then he would, you know, he was a thrill seeker. So he had half her on the motorcycle and tried to scare her, you know, as she's holding onto him, as he's bombing, you know, off-road, you know, and purposely just trying to intimidate her that way. So, you know, it was an

interesting but short relationship and then when, you know, they got engaged when she broke it off. That's when he shows up, knocks on her window at night and when she opens up the drapes, deAngelo standing there with a gun pointed at her. It basically tells her, you're coming with me,

“we're going to go get married. I think to in Reno, she closed the drapes, got her dad, her dad”

goes out front and this is up in Auburn, the Auburn area and confronts him and deAngelo ends up

leaving and Bonnie never talked to him again. Wow, she must consider herself so lucky.

She does, you know, absolutely, but, you know, she was so courageous. She, you know, the victim that was on your show, Jane Carson, I introduced folks to Bonnie and Jane and Jane actually had Bonnie in the courtroom when Jane gave her impact statement and Bonnie stood up. Couldn't say anything but she was there and let the Angela know, I'm here, you know, so she showed tremendous courage to be able to let him know that she recognized that she really was a victim

of his, just fortunately, he didn't physically attack her like he did the other women in the series.

“Oh, that moment of her standing up and while Jane was there, giving the chills, like the,”

it finally had their say and he was alive to hear it. That's thanks to you, you know, so often, it's like even the Jeffrey Epstein case, you know, he killed himself, whatever he died and his

victims only gave these impact statements that he never really got to hear. It was to the frustration

of the victims and those circumstances is terrible and these women managed to avoid at least that piece of the terror. They got to confront him, but it wasn't easy. You know, I saw one of the San Jose victims. She had a large contingent of her family in the courtroom with her. She gave her statement. I happened to be out in the lobby outside the courtroom and she walked out and she literally collapsed after getting her statement. Her family had a hold her up. So, you know, this really

underscores, you know, to this day, you know, how traumatized, you know, these families are these victims who were personally attacked, as well as the families that lost their loved ones. He was so cruel in the way he pursued these attacks. He clearly, a sadist, I mean, he enjoyed the torture and harming of others and the suffering seemed to be part of what he enjoyed the most, not just of the women

he was attacking and the men who he ultimately added to the mix, but even of the children who were

there in the homes that he wouldn't, he couldn't care less if he bumped into a three-year-old or a seven-year-old pa. No, well, he used the children against the adults. You know, he knew due to his surveillance, either prior to entering the house or while he's in the house and walking around,

everybody in this house. I'll kill everything in this house. That was a common phrase that he would say, but also when when you start talking about the sadistic aspect of him, he wasn't a physical

“sadist by classic definition. He was a psychological sadist. You mentioned the fear. That's what”

he wanted to invoke in his victims. And so he would do things while he's got his victims bound, just to get that fear response. And then he would continue. After he's attacked them in left, he would call the victims. We have one victim who was attacked in 1977, and in 2001,

24 years later, he calls that victim and tell and basically says, "Remember when we played."

You know, so he was still wanting to have that victim live in fear after a quarter century. We have one example of one of his phone calls and you can hear the torture and how scary this would have been, especially to someone who had been attacked by this guy and lived only to hear him

“revisit her. Take a listen, this is, again, 1978.”

My God, it is still scary. It's right. I'm looking at my assistant Abby, we both like just get the chills like done your spine at that. And that was the point. Yeah, well, and that's exactly what he's doing. That's where he wants that victim to know. He's still around and to be scared. That phone call, that victim that he called. In that call,

was a very first victim that we know of when he was East area rapists, which occurred in June

1976. And just let him jump every second poll, hold out that, because they call him East area rapists first because he started with rapes for the most part. I mean, we talked about the Berkeley,

“but that was sort of what they dubbed him East area rapist or EAR while he was primarily focused”

on rapes. So if you may hear different names for this guy over the course of this interview, we're talking about the same guy, Golden State Killer. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, and I probably actually clarify that. He had multiple monocards over the course of his career in East area rapists. When he starts attacking in the East area of the Sacramento suburbs,

that's when he got to that moniker. And with that first victim in June of 1976, that recorded

phone call came in January of 1978, 18 months later. So he kept on top of his victims. You know, and that victim that he called 24 years later, she had remarried, moved all the way across town. So, you know, now she's living in a different location, different last name, her phone number was under her husband's name. And yet, the Angelo had that victim's phone number to call her after the sacramental B published an article in the newspaper about how DNA had linked the

East area rapists in Northern California to an unsolved series of homicides down south, committed by the original night stalker. It turns out it's all the same guy. I cannot imagine going through that where, you know, you've been attacked. You've survived. You've dealt with it. Hopefully, you know, with the help of therapists and friends in God. And then 24 years later, the guy resurfaces to spark the terror all over again. You know,

the kids today use that term triggering. This is true triggering. Sure. And, you know, these victims, you know, they suffered a ton of trauma during their attacks. None of them at that point, up until 2001 realized that their attacker would blossom into a serial killer. And, in fact, the rumor on the street that many people, when I was doing the investigation, when I was talking to victims or other people in town at the time of the attacks thought, well, he got killed when

he tried to break into house. That was the rumor. They just thought he was gone. And then now, the phone call comes in and he's with that one victim. He's now letting her know. I'm still around. And letting law enforcement know, too. I mean, right, because after 86 was there a question about whether this guy was still alive that the crime spree seemed to be over. Yeah. And, no, absolutely.

management, if you will, is, you know, I had my boss at the DA's office was saying,

"Oh, Paul, he's dead. Why are you spending so much time on this case?" You know, and I was pretty convinced. No, I think he's still out there and turns out he was. In fact, when I was on your show, I mentioned to your audience. He could be sitting here watching this show right now.

“I remember that and we were all freaked out. It is very possible that he is still alive.”

He's still monitoring the investigation. He's possibly even still watching this show. He could be. He could be in this audience. Oh, well, that's chilling. So, why did you think he was still alive? Why did you believe that? Because before the phone call, you didn't really have any evidence of that. No, and that phone call was, you know, at that time,

you had occurred 17 years prior. You know, there's always a possibility he could have died.

Or, you know, Ben and Custody, but in taking a look at the age range he likely was at the time he was committing these attacks. He, most certainly was, you know, at an age that he easily could still be alive at the time that I made that statement. But also, in assessing this offender and him stopping, you know, 1986 for me that we know of. But I felt that he actually psychologically stopped in 1981 after the last Santa Barbara attack. I thought, no, this, this is an

offender that has stopped committing these crimes and is living a normal life. And just like

“the guy that I think is most similar to the original, Dennis Raider, BTK, you know, I felt the same”

thing that he just blended back into his life. He was getting older. He couldn't commit to these types

of attacks anymore. And, you know, the fact that after was at 15 years after his last known attack, he reached out and contacted a victim. Okay, this guy can go quiet for a long period of time. And that's where I kind of just put my eggs in that basket going. He's still alive and quite frankly, he's still a threat to the public and we need to find him. It's just shocking to think that somebody this committed to this level of depravity could stop, could just turn it off one day.

And that's something, you know, the myth out there is that, you know, serial killers once they start, they don't stop. But we've seen as some of these notorious serial killing cases have been

“solved. Well, these killers do stop. You know, we can go to Gary Ridgeway, Green River Killer,”

or as I mentioned before, Dennis Raider with BTK, and in interviews with those killers, you know, they had reasons for why they stopped Gary Ridgeway said, well, I got married. Dennis Raider said, you know, in my last attack, there is a man inside the house that I didn't realize was going to be there. I got into a fight and I left scared. I thought I could have been hurt, killed, or captured, and I didn't want any of that, and I was getting older. And that's

part of why I thought with the Angelo, you know, in this last Santa Barbara attack in 1981, possibly stopped because he got into a physical fight with six-foot three-grade resanches. So as these cases have been solved, we're starting to see that there is the possibility that some of these offenders. Not necessarily all, but some of them, after committing the most horrific crimes imaginable, have the ability to go ahead and start living a normal life,

the compartmentalizer past. They continue to fantasize about that, but they are now the family man. The Angelo is the Doding Grandfather at the time of his arrest. If my math is correct, he would have been born in 46. 4546, yes. Okay, so when he was committing these crimes, he was between 30 and 40 or so. Of the easterior rapist attacks, yes. Yeah, you know, but we were pretty confident, Ken Clark from SAC homicide, who was also, you know, part of the

core easterior rapist task force, the Golden State Jailer Task Force, he's pretty sure that the Angelo in 1973 was the Cordova capber, you know, breaking into the houses while people were inside the houses in the very same neighborhood where the easterior rapist starts up in 1976. On, I know, actually, from a high school friend that called in after the Angelo is arrested

high schoolers in that very neighborhood. So the Angelo has been committing crimes at least as far back

“as being a teenager. But my, my point in raising the 30 to 40 year old range, which was 76 to 86,”

is that's, you can see it like that's when a man would be probably at his strongest, you know, feeling his most confident, you get in your forties, you know, things start to change a bit, and you could see consistent with what you just told me, maybe the confidence level going down. Well, and as he's there, rapist, that even as the original night stalker, DeAngelo, his crimes are very physical. He liked to prowl around the houses and go through backyards,

and then moved through neighborhoods by jumping fences. If he was being pursued and there's multiple times during the series, in which law enforcement actually gets into, you know, foot pursuits with East Air rapist, you know, he is running and jumping fences is very adept at it. But, you know,

“I know, you know, now that I'm, you know, 54, I've gone through from the late 20s into my 30s,”

being very physically capable, and as I got older, me jumping offense today is going to be a lot or effort when I was in my late 20s. So that's part of, you know, DeAngelo, you know, self-assessing, can he continue to commit these crimes and get away with them? And as he's getting older, the risk elevates because he's realized and he's no longer as physically capable. So because on the, we just, we did a show on the zodiac killer, or who are guests to believe

says the zodiac killer. And we did a show on the DC snipers, you know, those two guys. And in both of those cases, it seems pretty clear that the person wanted to be caught. The zodiac wasn't actually caught. But, you know, leaving clues and then the sniper case, you know, leaving clues, the taro card, the notes, and calling, like, it just seemed like it was cat and mousey, but this seat case seems very different. DeAngelo, to me, seems the opposite did not want to be caught at all.

No, absolutely the opposite, you know, and, you know, I've, I've actually looked into zodiac, that, you know, zodiac cases were in my backyard and I would like to talk to the victim.

I would drive by, you know, the first zodiac crime scene on my commute and to work every day.

So, you know, I very familiar with the zodiac case. Now, the zodiac, you think about, you know, first, the styles of attacks, you know, with the exception of Lake Various, with Lake Various and Napa, you know, he's, he's, he's like a David Berkowitz out there in New York. He's walking up on young couples that are parked inside a car and shooting him. This is about as cowardly, a type of crime that can be committed, but the communication is demonstrating sort of that narcissistic

ego driven attitude, just like BTK, BTK was communicating, you know, with law enforcement and that's ultimately what got him caught. DeAngelo did not want to get caught. He probably communicated at times during the course of a series to law enforcement, calling in dispatch, but he recognized that was too risky to him. And so when he is arrested and sitting in that interview room, he is so shocked that he got caught and so dejected. He just wanted to live out his life. He's not seeking notoriety,

like Zodiac or Raider was. Do you think if you hadn't caught him, he would have left a note, you know, and taken credit in that, or he would have gone to his grave with the secret.

He would have gone to his grave. I mean, to this day, he has never said a word to us about anything

related to the attacks. So only he has answers to so many questions that all of us has and he hasn't divulged anything. I don't think he likes the idea that now he's being seen as a golden state killer. And this is what's so important in terms of assessing him for potential, you know, interviews is how does he self-identify? Dennis Raider, BTK, when he's caught, you know, he was the president of his church, was married, he was active in his son's voice

“out, but he goes, that's that's just a facade. I'm BTK, that's how he identified in this world.”

And I know when we caught the answer was like, well, does he identify as the grandfather, or does he identify as golden state killer? And to this day, we don't know. But right now, he's not like saying, hey, you know, look at me. I'm the golden state killer. He just wants it to be quiet.

and they seem to suffer from a God complex. I mean, the elder, you know, in particular, Mohamed,

“who was driving it, suffer from a God complex and really felt powerful in committing these murders.”

DeAngelo seems to have been driven by something very different. Yeah, you know, at very complicated, in terms of assessing what is mode of this, true, you know, intermotive. Some of these killers that God complex is very real, you know, they control if this person that they're attacking dies and when that person dies. And there's numerous examples of such a Samuel little, or even a just person, the smiley, happy face killer, where they would

strangle these women's to the point of unconsciousness and let them come back alive. Only to do it over and over. And this is what they said, gave them that power. The Angelo, there is a true, there's an indictiveness to him. There's also, you know, that the sexual assault on these women, many of these women was driven by sex. And that's often, it's often a misnomer that it's all about power and control. Now, there's a sexual aspect to why these offenders are attacking them.

“They have, they have sexualized violence. But the vindictiveness is where I think it gets interesting,”

because I truly believe that many of the couples were attacked because DeAngelo had some sort interaction, prior interaction with the man and decided, there was a negative thing and decided,

I'm going to come back and show you who I am. And basically took control over that man,

he masculated that man and then took his wife a girlfriend out into the other room and sexually assaulted her. And this is a vindictive act. But until he talks, we don't know exactly why, you know, he's choosing any of these victims in this series. There were some clues. He made small statements to various victims that would peak your curiosity and so on. Like, I watched you or somebody, he said something to one woman who was like, do I know this person? You know, how do I,

“there were little clues, but they weren't meant for you. It was just, you know, slips of the”

tongue where he had revealed a little too much. Well, actually, this is going towards the sophistication of DeAngelo. Those weren't slip of the tongue. What he was doing is verbal staging. So you think about typical, when we say a crime is staged, you know, this is where evidence has been changed at a crime scene in order to make, let's say, a homicide looked like a suicide. So the off, the offender isn't, you know, draw the attention of the investigation. What DeAngelo was doing was

making statements to these victims, knowing that they were going to talk to law enforcement. So he was planting seeds. And anytime somebody stages a crime, whether it be the physical evidence or the verbal aspect, that is to try to push the investigation away from themselves. So DeAngelo would say certain things like, you know, I was an example, you better not tell the cops you saw my van parked outside. And he said in van, over and over and over, throughout the, the, the second

half of the, you know, the East Air rapeseers guarantee never drove a van to any of these seeds.

Probably an emergency, driving a motorcycle or another vehicle. Or, you know, I killed two people down in Baker's field, you know, prior. You know, so he's trying to push. I've already killed, you know, down in Baker's field. I'm going to do that to you, but he's also wanting to victim to relay that, you know, he is from the Baker's field area, which he wasn't. And most notably, one prime example is when he's asking this victim where husband was at, that she said Roseville, which is just

a city just north of Sacramento, he says he asks where's Roseville? Like he doesn't know the areas from out of town. But DeAngelo was a police intern for Roseville PD. So this shows how this staging was working in his mind to try to throw off the investigation. Again, I mean, absolutely cunning. That's why I asked you what level of smarts to this guy have because he sounds, I don't want to say brilliant, but he sounds very intelligent. It's interesting to hear you say, not really. It's just he studied

this particular field. He worked in this particular field and he made himself a bit of an expert

off the charts on an IQ test. But I'm not saying he's done. You know, I wouldn't say probably to anybody. He's he's of average intellect based on just me kind of assessing him as a person.

“But as a criminal, as a predator, he is he's savvy. And I think he used the term cunning,”

absolutely. And he was trained. He was a law enforcement officer. And he was smart enough to draw upon that training in those tools in order to be a better criminal, a better predator. Now, those investigating him did suspect law enforcement ties, right? Like there was enough proficiency at the crime scenes that I've heard some of the former investigators say, yes, we did wonder whether he could have a connection to law enforcement or possibly a military background,

which he also did have, if I'm not mistaken, he was a 27 year old Navy veteran in 1970,

the rate. I served in the Navy. He served in the Navy back in the 60s. He never, it was during Vietnam

war, but he never saw combat. He was on a ship. But over the decades, there was always a suspects that came up that were law enforcement for military. And there was some thought, you know, could he have that type of background? I took the position that because of, and this was kind of later during my investigation, once I kind of was like, aha, I know I've got a better read on who this fender is now. That the position I took was that the tactics he was employing

would be tactics that a an intelligent offender would naturally want to do to try to prevent themselves would be in caught. I could not say, you know, for sure, anything he did demonstrated specialized military training or law enforcement training. It just was, he doesn't want to get caught,

“and he's employing those strategies. Like he wore gloves at every crime scene, right?”

That we didn't do a very well on the fingerprints. He always wore gloves. He would take the gloves

off, you know, when he's sexually assaulting the women from time to time, but we don't have any latins across any of the cases that have matched back to the Angela. Of course, every house that you process, have latent prints all over. So it's kind of tough to say, you know, leading into the identification of the Angela, whether you have the offenders print or not, but it turns out no, you know, he never left the print that we were able to tie back to him once he was caught.

But he's also, you know, back in the 70s, you know, he's wearing a ski mask all the time, but even while wearing a ski mask, so they couldn't see his face. He's shining a flashlight in the victims eyes, blinding them, and he's telling them, don't look at me or I'll kill you. So he's put in multiple, you know, layers to prevent the victims from seeing his face. So that's, you know, part of my entire pursuit of him, I only knew this guy as a, as a masked man,

and then finally, once the Angela's identified, and he's in handcuffs, walking into Sacramento,

“homicide, it was like, well, there you go, you know, I've unmasked him, and that's what he looks like.”

So that's, you know, he, for the types of evidence that could identify him and the types of witness statements that could produce a composite, you know, for back in the day, he prevented all that from happening, what he didn't prevent and didn't know about was, you know, he was leaving his DNA all over the place. Oh, yeah, no, we'll get to that. We'll get the DNA in just a bit. But how do we have composite sketches of him then? You know, I remember when they arrested him,

the DA was standing next to three of them, which showed a younger, the Angela in sketch artist form. So how do we have that? Yeah, all of those composites that were produced back in the day were produced by neighbors at saw strange men walking in the neighborhood. I can't say that any of those composites are actually the Angela today. Some of them may look close to the Angela, but I have no confidence in any of those composites. I did wonder because as you describe him

jumping over the fences and racing around in people's backyards, and I remember you saying once that he liked neighborhoods that had mostly one story houses. He wasn't a big fan of the two story houses. My question was, why didn't the neighbors see him? He struck so often. It's not like one crime every five years. How has he not seen spotted and had the cops called on him?

you know, victim selection, you know, he though we don't know how he's selecting all his victims.

“He's multi-modal. Some victims he likely followed homes, some victims. He's in a neighborhood”

prowling and runs across him, some victims. He may have had an interaction with and decided that they fit his needs. But he did choose neighborhoods that had certain characteristics that would

minimize the threat of him being seen. And that very first neighborhood that he attacks in in June

of '76 in Rancho Cordova, this Cordova Meadows neighborhood. Single story houses, you know, five foot fences, which are relatively easy to get up and over. There was no streetlights in that neighborhood. The houses, the windows on the houses and between the houses were situated to where he could easily just walk between these houses and nobody could see him. They're like dark alleys. So this

“was a perfect prowling neighborhood and I believe he chose that neighborhood because he's familiar with it”

and he knew that it was tough for people to see him if he employed those types of strategies. But we have examples of neighbors outside seeing a man kind of walk past them, you know, towards a victim's house later on that night and then they as our front and they look and to see, well, where did this man go? He's absolutely just disappeared into the shadows. So he was very stealthy and he knew how to use lighting to his advantage. Now I know you have three adult children

of your own at this point. As while we're here, is there any sort of advice you want to offer to people and like where should we live? Where shouldn't we live? What like we shouldn't live in a

“neighborhood like that if we can avoid it, right? I mean, just like what are your thoughts on that?”

The general safety aspect of that? Well, you know, it is tough comparing today to the 1970s in terms of, you know, how are these offenders going to be attacking? You know, most certainly

with with my kids, you know, going to college, avoid, you know, the first floor, you know,

or there's the first floor window or the doors right there, you know, it's just offenders today have to do different things in order to be able to attack victims. It's relatively rare to see a predator consistently breaking into houses over and over again and getting away with it for any period of time, just due to technology, you know, cameras, alien systems and, you know, you know, so there's so much that really limits the type of series that the actual was doing,

but predators are now doing different things. You know, in the 90s in my jurisdiction, you know, they really grabbed as the serial predator was gravitating towards the sex workers, because now these women are voluntarily getting into their cars, but then eventually once the stroll area started to dry up out of fear, then they go on mine. You know, now you have the Craigslist killer or the escort services where they call in and then they have the victim meet them

someplace where they have now isolated that victim. So that's part of how the predator is evolving, based on how technology and security consciousness has changed. That is just terrifying. So back to DeAngelo, so he committed several rapes and he, as you point out, he had studied criminal justice. He got a criminal justice degree from California State University, and it seems to

me he was actually, he was a cop when he was committing the rapes and even what the first two murders,

he was still an active duty police officer. Yes, he was a, he was a law enforcement officer for everything that happened in Bicellia, all those burgrees, including behind the side of Claude Snowing. In fact, he was a sergeant at the time that he left the police department down in Exeter. And when he's hired on by Auburn police department, he is now becoming the eastern rapist and for every single attack in Oregon, California, you know, from Sacramento down to

the Desso, Sacramento down to San Jose, 50 attacks. He is an active law enforcement officer. And that's part, and the double homicide, Katie and Brian Magiori up at Sacramento. He is a law

and he's put on administrative leave and then ultimately terminating, does he go down south

“and every attack after that, he is wanting to kill or does kill his victims. So that change from,”

you know, having authority as a law enforcement officer, going down south, where that authority has been stripped. You know, now he becomes a serial killer, just straight up, but he's not even trying to do anything else. And we, and when you say, down south, we're still obviously in California,

hence Golden State Killer, it never, never left California. Right. So in 1979, after he disappears

up north, he turns out in October of 1979, he shows up in Galita, Santa Barbara area. Galita's a small town next to Santa Barbara city in Santa Barbara. Does a classic East area rape a style attack from up north, but once he's got the, you know, the woman out in the family room and the man bound in the bed, the woman here is in pacing back and forth. I'm going to kill him. I'm going to kill

“him this time. I'm going to kill him. Well, DeAngelo at this point had already been terminated”

as a law enforcement officer. That attack actually goes sideways, because the victims end up kind of, you know, freaking out once the woman hears this and then he ends up getting chased by an off through the FBI special agent who hears the screams in his neighbor's house. But two months later, DeAngelo's back just a block south of that sideways attack and kills a couple bear in Santa Barbara. Then he goes down to Ventura, budgets, live in Charlie Smith to death. Then he's down in

Lagoon in the Gal and Orange County or he bludgens a couple to death bear. He goes to Irvine a couple times, kills two women there. He goes in the tax another couple in Santa Barbara. You know, so he is now moving through southern California and killing. Then in 1986, after his last attack on beautiful

“19-year-old Janelle Cruz, he stops. You know, and that's one of the mysteries. Why does he stop?”

And I have my theories, but until he says, you know, why we just don't know. So what you mentioned the couple. So he started off as we discussed burglings and raping, but there was a point at which he graduated to going into homes to rape women where their boyfriends or their husbands were present. And this is, I guess, right before he crossed over to just murdering too. And it was almost like a challenge to him after I think it was the Sacramento

B. Road in article saying he had never done that before. He'd only attacked women sleeping by themselves

in their homes at night. And to speak to that, because it almost seemed like he felt as though he'd been dared or his courage had been questioned. No, no, absolutely. You know, Sacramento B has an article. And in essence, it says he has never attacked when a man is his home. And the attack number 16, up there as he's here, rapist. He goes into a house with a woman and a man. And this is where he breaks in, the couple's sleeping. He wakes them up. He blinds them with a flashlight. He tells

him he has a gun. He's going to, you know, spatter their brains all over the wall if they don't do what he says. And he has, he tosses bindings to the woman and makes her tie up the man face down in the bed.

And then he goes and ties the woman up once the man is so much secure. And then ultimately,

you know, he would go out and get dishes and put dishes on the man's back as an alarm system and tell the man if he heard if the angel or heard these rattle, he would kill everything in the house with the economy phrase or cut off a piece of of his wife and bring it back to him or, you know, cut off the fingers of the kids, whatever. And then he would take the woman out into the family room and sexually assault her. He was challenged by that Sacramento be article. But the interesting

thing is is that he proves in that very first attack with the man in present, he could do it. But then two thirds of the attacks from that point on have been present. So this really underscores that that victimology is something that satisfied him. He'd really liked the idea of having that power control over the man while he is being able to sexually assault that man. So a wife or girl for it. And so this is where it gets interesting from a psychological standpoint.

Does he didn't start doing that? But think about the risk he was taking to break into a house

willing to take that risk in order to be able to commit to this style of crime. So I believe in

“turnily. He realized I get more personally out of attacking with a man present than just sexually”

assaulting a low female. And the thing with the dishes is bizarre, too. I mean, it was this alarm system, as you point out, like if he heard the rattling, he threatened to escalate it. And as far as I understand, all the victims comply with that. I mean, they took him very seriously and they tried not to rattle those dishes. The D'Angelo is so commanding and threatening. All these males ended up saying, you know, I had no choice. You know, my fear was that if the male tried to struggle against

his findings and the dishes rattled that he would harm their wife or girlfriend, their wartimes,

when the men would get uncomfortable because it is very uncomfortable. There, you know, their hands would hurt from the tight bindings or ankles would hurt from the bindings. They're laying absolutely still. They don't know what's going on. And there were several times when the men would shift with this alarm system, the dishes on their back and the dishes would rattle or fall. And D'Angelo was immediately in that room with the gun to the back of the man's head. He would

cock the hammer and say, do that again and I'll kill you. So these men were helpless at this point.

“They had no control over what was going to happen to them or their wife. The only thing that they could”

control was I have to stay still. And this is part of something I've been very outspoken about is of course all these women that were sexually assaulted, you know, extraordinarily traumatizing but a lot of people forget about the victimization of the man. These men, I interviewed several of them and I had several of these men crying either on the phone or in front of me face to face after 35 years they were attacked. So these men were victims too. You think about just

remove the sexual assault and the woman out of the crime and just think about a mass man breaking into a house, tying a man up, putting a gun to the back of his head and pulling the hammer back and saying I'm going to kill you. In many states that practically can qualify as a life sentence in terms of the type of crime. You know, so this is a serious crime in and of itself. So he's really tortured. He's really tortured. Yes, you know, psychologically, emotionally

tortured and the answer will do that. In fact, one man in Danville, California who was a very large man relative to the antelope, you know, the antelope of tell this man was not liking and wanting to, you know, liking the predicament and wanting to do something and the antelope tells him. Essentially, you don't like this, do you? Well, there's nothing you can do about it. You know, so this is where the antelope is expressing. He has power and control over

“that man. He loves that. That's what the badge gave him and then that's what, you know,”

victimizing these couples gave him because now he was basically asserting himself as being more

of a man than these men who were victims. Well, it makes sense from his perspective because otherwise he would just kill the man. I mean, I'm understanding a better listening to you because one of my questions is why I need to just kill the men, but he wanted to torture them. He enjoyed that piece of it. He didn't want to just end it for them. No, and that goes to, you know, this is where the sadistic aspect of him, you know, that, that, that, that, that, getting gratification out of the suffering

of others, you know, it's psychological. I mean, he wasn't beating these men, you know, he wasn't doing anything that was physically going to hurt that, but he was instilling fear as he was doing with the women. So, you know, this is where he is a complex offender from a psychological standpoint. And when he goes down south and he's starting to kill and, and it's really when he's budgeting the couples to death, the evolution gets to where he is in essence. He's taking control of the man, but then

likely killing that man very early in the attack to minimize that threat. And so he changed in terms of what he needed to get out of the, the crime, the fantasy of the crime, once he is a full blown killer. Well, no, wait, so before we get to that, we, you mentioned he lost his cop job around that time

and like, why would he do this, you know, this, this well-trained criminal who had managed to

“avoid capture and all these other crimes, what happened to him? Well, July of 1979, up in citrus heights,”

Sacramento, he's off duty playing clothes, he goes into just a local convenience store there, and shoplifts, dog repellent, and a hammer, and is caught, and Sacramento Sheriff's response, he's arrested, and of course, that reported back to his police department, Auburn Police Department, and he's now put on administrative leave. So, as you'd expect, so now they are investigating the shoplifting and during their internal affairs investigation, they go inside the Aglo's house,

which was up in Auburn at the time. And the police chief told me, we found all sorts of stolen commercial property, like power tools still in their, you know, boxes, like he had just taken

him out of a store, but had never opened it up or tried to sell him. But that was never, you know,

part of the the case in chief, it was always the shoplifting, and it's like, why is he taking the risk of, you know, shoplifting, you know, when he's the serial killer, but this goes back to Tabani's assessment of the auntie's personality, rules don't apply, he got to screw a lot of doing these little things. Yes. And he probably was doing it all the time. It's just he got caught this one time.

“In no way, do I mean to compare, we know no writer to this guy, but remember when she got arrested”

for shoplifting, and it was at the height of her fame, and everyone was so confused. It's like, why would this very rich, very successful celebrity shoplift? She could afford anything in that store, and there were a lot of reports on why people do that, and it did relate to the thrill of it. You know, there's something there's a Jones from like doing it and getting away with it. No, absolutely, you know, and and that is really, you know, you talk about when we're not a

writer case, you know, that psychology really is also kind of a foundational psychology for the actual doing that kind of thing, as well as escalating up into committing the burglaries, and then he's recognizing he's got fantasies of committing violence against people, which now takes them out,

“you know, well above the psychology of the no writer. Yeah. But fundamentally, it's at gratification,”

you know, they, it's at thrill. So I read something about the police chief shortly after firing the angel out, like he, the angel showed up at his house. He was almost an intruder. Like, what is that story? Well, this is where when I, you know, we were marching down on genealogy and the angel's name came up. And now I was skeptical that this full-time police officer could commit all these crimes across the Northern California, like the East Air rapist did.

I ended up tracking down the police chief that buyer de Angela, Nick Willick, and Nick, you know, was telling me about, you know, Nick was the one that was the angel's sergeant

with the angel first. He came on board up in Auburn, but also ultimately became the police chief.

It was chief when the angel was shot lifted. So Nick is the one that put the angel on administrative leave and started the IA investigation. And while DeAngelo is on admin leave, Nick told me the story that during this period of time, which would have been in that July August 1979 timeframe, he's asleep in his house and his daughter comes into his room and says, Dad, "There's a man standing outside my window shining a flashlight in turn." And Nick goes,

"I'm all I'm rabited out of my bed and went outside and I could see shoe impressions in the dirt all around the perimeter of the back of my house." And he goes, "I know for sure that was DeAngelo." Now, he did it identified DeAngelo, but he was confident that that was DeAngelo. And when I'm talking to Nick, I'm not letting him know. I'm looking at the East Air rapist or the Golden State

Killer case. And once I heard that, I mean, that was where, you know, basically the hairs on my arms

stood up. And I was like, "Yeah, that's exactly what the Golden State Killer would do. If he was being terminated by his employer, that being addictive aspect, I'll show you who I am."

State Killer. It didn't mean he was. But it was like, "Well, that was DeAngelo." Because he was on your suspect's list. Is that what you're saying? But you didn't, you had a lot of people on your suspect's list. At this point, we were working the genealogy angle. And his name came up. And I had just eliminated a guy in Colorado or the team that just eliminated a guy in Colorado. That's when I turned to DeAngelo going, "Well, I might as well look at this this former

cop." And as I dug in, you know, I try to reach out to Bonnie and researching him. I'm visiting

“all sorts of things where he had. When I talk to that police chief, I think this was a phone call.”

I was just checking the box. It's so painful. It's so painful, because it's like, "I'm sure this poor cop is just kicking himself or not looking into it more back. How could he know," right? But it's like those missed opportunities. Yes, yeah, no, you know, and that's just it. There is no way could have, at that point in time, because DeAngelo shoplift that he should be considered. And I know there had probably that the chief received some public criticism after DeAngelo's

rest at As The Golden State Killer. And I publicly said, "Absolutely not." You know,

basically, he did what he could do to DeAngelo based on the facts. And there's just no connection

between the shoplifting and the East Air rapist attacks that that chief could have even.

“Yeah, but I'm talking about the moment that he saw somebody had come outside of his house and had”

shine the light in at his daughter. You know, like, no, again, not in any way blaming the guy, but it's just like, "Oh, God, what if he had followed up? What if he had all these moments in time he'd like to go back to and have another look at?" No, sure. Absolutely. I mean, and that was part, you know, DeAngelo is very good at what he did. And then that is the primaries of why he his series was as long as it was. But there were multiple times within the series where he just

flat out got lucky. And that was one of those times. Yes, right. So now he goes south in California and he escalates to just murdering. And when he started just murdering couples, what did he get rid of the sexual assault altogether? No, he still still sexually assaulted the women. There's only one attack while two attacks down in Southern California where we don't have his DNA. And that's the first attack that went sideways, where basically he's being chased by the off duty FBI agent in

Delita. And then the second attack, which also happened in almost that same neighborhood in which it appears at the male, slipped his bindings and got up and rushed him. And DeAngelo had to shoot the

“male out of if you want to call it self defense. And then went over and shot the female in the”

top of the head while she laid face down on the bed and ran off. So because that attack also kind of

went sideways on him, he never got to the stage or sexually assaulted. But down in Ventura,

the next attack and every attack after that, he has sexually assaulting the women and also killing the women and men in the cases where men are present. So that and that's where it stood straight through to 1986. And then what happened? Just in 1986, he dropped off the face in the earth. You know, nobody, there's no other cases that we can attribute to him. He's married, at the time of the last attack, his wife was two months pregnant with their second daughter, I believe. And he

ultimately, they are back up in, up in citrus heights, you know, living in the house where he was arrested in the back of 2018. So it wasn't becoming a father necessarily because he was already

a dad at the time. His wife got pregnant with their second child, obviously. Right, you know,

in fact, so the second to last attack in July of 1981 in Santa Barbara, Gregory Sanchez and Sherry Domingo, his wife is, you know, seven months pregnant with her first daughter. You know, and then he commits this attack at five years go by and we have nothing in those five years. And then we have May of 1986 in Irvine. That's when he pledges 19-year-old Janelle Cruz to death. And his wife's pregnant again, two, seven months pregnant with the second daughter.

why is he not doing anything, you know, but as we talked earlier, at 1986, he's 41 years old. So now he's getting older as an offender. His life circumstances have changed. You know, he's got two daughters moving back up to Sacramento's. I think, you know, this is where he is really slipping back. He's slipping into that mindset. I've got to put the serial predator part of

me aside. And I'm now going to be, you know, a father, a provider. And then ultimately, you know,

he's just coming to truck mechanic and enjoying life. He's out for this world's buddies.

“That's what I was going to say. How did he pay his bills after he got fired on the police force?”

Stick mystery. We don't know. He hasn't told us what he was doing. We haven't found a job that he was doing during the years as the original night stalker. Wow. His wife was an attorney. And I forget exactly when she actually starts making, you know, money versus going to school. But he may have been living off of her for a period of time. Now, I believe that there's

enough evidence to suggest that the Angelo, even as Easter or rapist, was moonlighting as

a security guard on construction job sites. And now I've had a relative from down south indicate that when the Angelo is living in Long Beach seeing, you know, a couple of security guard style shirts, as well as a gun and a holster hanging in the Angelo's residence. So I think he's

“probably still doing security work, which would make sense psychologically for him because now he's”

still has sort of that, you know, that power to 40 that he had as a full blown piece officer, but just not like to get groceries to her. And that may be something that I just don't know about.

And one of the things that I did after this case was solved, I was so burnt. I literally pushed

away and I know there's been a lot of investigation into the Angelo sense. And there may be some aspects of the Angelo that I have not been updated on. Yeah, it's fine. I mean, you got your man, that's the thing. I want to get into how you caught him because that's probably, I don't know if it's the most interesting, but it's one of the most interesting things of the story. But before we do that, can I just ask you a couple of psychological issues on him? I know in one of the attacks, he

the victim survived because this is how we know this. He sat at the end of the bed and started crying and talking about his mommy, like mommy, I don't want to be bad or mom. I can't remember what it was. Do we, what do we make of that? You know, well, it actually is, it, it is one of these oddities. It wasn't just in one case in which victims hurt her, him crying or sobbing, you know, after the sexual assault. And, you know, we don't know for sure, you know, was this an act was,

was he trying to just like with the verbal staging, was he trying to portray himself differently. But then when he's being interviewed, that night that he's arrested and he's being left alone, he's got his head hung, I'm looking at him and at one point, I almost see him looking like he's about to cry and he's talking to himself. And then his neighbors would say that, you know, Joe,

“crazy Joe would be talking to himself. So I think it is possible that, you know, at a certain point”

in these attacks, some of the statements he's making to himself is what he does and the crying from a psychological standpoint. The an interesting aspect about the Angelo is, I'm not sure he would be characterized as a true psychopath. Everybody assumes he's a psychopath. He doesn't experience empathy. I saw enough acts that he did to his living victims over the course of 50 attacks where I'm going, you know what, he is showing that he is caring about how these victims

are feeling. And part of it is MMO, if they are getting uncomfortable because they're getting cold, you know, because sometimes they're complaining about being cold, you put a blanket on him, a pillow under their head, is this just to keep them appease? So they don't become a problem? Or is he actually truly, you know, showing a level of empathy? And if that's the case, then I question whether he's a psychopath. And then at as time went on during the series,

it almost looked like he was struggling with what he was doing. It was almost like he was compelled

the attack, that's when this emotional release would happen. And the crying would happen. What about his wife and his daughters? You know, what have they said? Who? Well, the daughters were absolutely clueless about his past life. You know, they didn't even know that he had been a cop. So obviously, the edge low and their mom kept a lot of what was happening before the daughters were born secret from them. The wife, Sharon,

you know, she, she, they end up getting married in 1973. She becomes ultimately at the

force attorney. And, you know, she has not really engaged with the investigation through the fullest extent. And I have to be careful about how I describe this. The Sacramento

“D.A. asked me not to be too blunt about my thoughts. You know, the only thing that I will say”

along those lines is, you know, the Angelo and Sharon separated in 1991, yet they were still technically married 2018 when the angels arrested and Sharon's a divorce attorney. So it's really odd that that's spousal connection. And how privilege was kept intact. Rividing information, Sharon, what accountability does she have? What did she know and when did she know it? That's awful. I mean, you got to feel for these daughters who at some point, you know,

were delivered that the news that their father... I saw prolific suicide. I saw the, I saw the middle daughter, you know, the two younger daughters. They were at Sacramento homicide that night.

And they, I saw them sobbing, an FBI agent had been assigned to basically tell them why their father

was in custody. And they both were allowed to go in separately to talk to their dad and he, he basically kicked them out. So, I don't know. I've said, you know, they really are victims of his. You know, it's so sad. And you know, what's what's pitiful is that they've received death threats. You know, and it's like, they have nothing to do with what the Angelo did. He is solely responsible for these attacks. And, you know, now these two to girls are having to, you know, figure out how their

wife is going to work moving forward. By back to the wife, Sharon, I'll just speculate. This isn't

you, but it does make you wonder if in 1991 she found something, you know, usually these serial

killers keep some sort of treasures from their crime scenes. They can't let the entire thing go because

“they're important to reliving the sick moments. And it does make you wonder whether she found something”

that led her to get out of there, but was smart enough not to, well, I don't know, not smart enough. I don't mean that. I mean, most of us would run to the police to say, my God, but she had children and it at some point grand children, and that does complicate it. Yeah, you know, and I would say 1991 is probably, you know, whatever happened in 1991 that caused them to separate is probably just a tip of the iceberg in terms of the Angela and Sharon's relationship.

Well, did Bonnie shed any light on weird sexual predylictions with, you know, anything about that? No, you know, outside of his, his ability to be able to repeatedly have sex in a very short time frame.

“That was really the only thing that she brought up that seemed to really stand out to her, which is consistent with”

what happened during these crimes. It wasn't just one rape and he was out of there. He repeated the assault of the woman sexually. That is right. You know, sometimes, you know, sometimes he's attacked with what lasts over the course of hours, but sometimes he's repeatedly sexually assaulting, you know, to the point of ejaculation within a very short time frame. So there is some consistency from a physical aspect with what Bonnie's recollection of their interactions were like.

But she does not, she did not, she does not remember anything that would indicate that he enjoyed violence, you know, during the course of sex. And quite frankly, DeAngelo, when he's sexually assaulting these women, obviously, it's an act of violence, but he is not the type of a rapist. That is

And there are times when it appears that he's enjoying and engaging in more of a

consensual type of sexual encounter than in actual rape bodies, making the women put high heel shoes on and having her straddle them, while he's up on the sofa like he's living out of fantasy, of being with her versus, you know, these really assertive rapists are using derogatory terms and striking the women or holding knives against their throats, you know, outside of having to control these, doing things to control the women. DeAngelo was like that.

Forgive me for going back to this. I don't know if there are any lessons that we can extrapolate

because every crime is different, but I want one, you know, I want one for myself and for my loved ones

and for all the people out there. Is there any lesson from this series of murders on don't comply? You know, run, scream, or no, because it seems like whatever you did with this guy, it was going to end badly. Yeah, you know, and this is, and I've been asked this type of question, like I'll talk at citizen's academies and the women will say, what do I do? I'm being in fact. Yeah. And it really comes down to, you do have to fight. There's no question from the very

“beginning, you have to fight, you have to make noise, but recognize that there is a type of a fender”

that that is what he wants and that is your sexual sadist. So a sexual sadist is somebody who gets more amped up, the more you fight, the more you scream, the more pain that a fender can inflict on the women. And so there are examples, in fact, of a 1969 victim. You know, she was being attacked. She was trying to fight in the front seat of a car and she realized she was going to be dead. And she's looking out the window at nature and the sunlight. And she starts stroking the

back of the guy's neck as he's raping her and the guy literally just stopped. He didn't want that. He wanted her fear and her fight. And there is another case example out of the Pacific Northwest of a guy who's using a knife going to pick up truck on a woman. And she realizes she's dead. And she just lays there and he pushes up and walks out. This is your sexual sadist. Once the woman

goes limb, he's not getting what he wants. So my recommendation is always fight fight fight,

but if that is not working, if this guy is too powerful and he just seems to be amping up the more you fight just briefly, you know, do the opposite. Give it a try. Give it a try. But if that doesn't work, then you've got to fight for your life, you just have to be a difficult victim, be a difficult victim, especially in the case of abductions. You know, do not go along. You've got to gun, get in the car, do not do that. Run zigzag, serpentine, yell, try it right there, not get in that car.

Yeah, I tell my kids, if somebody grabs them and starts pulling them to a vehicle, you know, and I don't care if they've got a gun or a knife, you know, you do everything to prevent yourself from getting to that vehicle. Doesn't maybe being shot or stabbed there is going to be so much better than what they're going to do to you once they get you to the location they want to take.

“Yes, do not comply. The, it does make me wonder about his childhood. You know, what do we know?”

Abuse sexual abuse, torture, like what happened during his childhood? You know, I don't have a lot of information on his childhood and I don't think there's a ton of information out there. What we do know was when his dad was military stationed over in Germany, and DeAngelo and his younger sister Connie were walking into soldiers, abduct them, and DeAngelo watches these two soldiers, rape his sister.

He's 10 years old at the time, obviously a very traumatic event for a 10 year old boy to see. But in terms of the family dynamics, I have not been updated to see if there's been anything that has been discovered. Yeah, I would explain it. Bonnie's, you know, Bonnie's dating

“DeAngelo, she's younger. She, I think, was 19 and he's, you know, in his 20s, but she knew”

you know, his mom, and I think at this time, it's his stepdad. And she said, did it see anything

So it wasn't like the prototypical, you know, the, you know, the overbearing mother and the, you know,

“drunk alcoholic abuse of father. Bonnie didn't see that at this point in DeAngelo's life.”

Okay, so let's go forward to the end. I should spend one minute on Michelle McNamara. So people may remember this, this piece of the story. She was married to Pat and Oswald and she died suddenly and he came out and talked about her and her work. And I think that, that got a lot of our attention. Like, what's he talking about? This is famous guy, his wife suddenly died and he was talking about her work on this case. And you came to know her very well and had spent a lot of hours working with

her, she was a writer. I mean, she wasn't a cop on this case. And I thought what you said about

it was she died of a drug overdose. It looks like, you know, potentially even an inadvertent drug overdose, right, just taking a bunch of self-medicating, I should say.

“And yeah, I'll let you speak to it. But I know you've said, you have to understand what's going on”

in her life to get the full picture of her death. Right. And that, you know, with Michelle, you know, she initially, she was a true crime blogger. You know, she'd love to write. She was blogging about cases. She found out about this unsolved case and eventually wrote an article

for Los Angeles magazine and lead up for that article. She reached out to the task force,

and, you know, interviewed each of us. And Michelle and I, you know, initially, I just treated her as, you know, just another journalist and I was very kind of stand-offish, the Joe Friday type. But then as time went on, you know, I recognized, she's very bright. She knew the facts of the case. And I really enjoyed, you know, our, at that time, our phone conversations. And, and eventually, divulge, I, what I was doing, investigatively to her, but off the record. And was so scared about,

when her Los Angeles magazine article came out, you know, did she burn me in terms of what I told her, as she didn't. And she earned by trust. And then we just developed a closer, working relationship, of any closer relationship, where when she's contracted to write a book about the case, she asked me if I thought that was a good idea, as she reached out to some of the other investigators. But then she came up and we drove around. I drove her to crime scenes. And we spent all this time

together in a car chatting about the case, but chatting about our personal lives. And that's when we really, really bonded. And then at that point, I was wide open with her, what I'm doing. She was, and I'm just writing a book. So you know, kind of got sucked into the radical and we're starting to do the investigations. And this is where, you know, this case, it's such a rollercoaster ride of emotions because, you know, you work so hard to develop a suspect and you get excited. You get

high that I've got this case. I've got this guy only to have DMA show that it's not the right guy. And the shell started to experience that rollercoaster ride, you know, which is, which is tough, but also she's talking to the victims, you know, the compelling members. She's recognizing the trauma. She's thinking about these cases and had access to case files. So she knew exactly what this guy was doing. You know, and so now she's experiencing the trauma, you know, that law enforcement

“experiences when they're working these types of cases. And this is where I think, and I didn't know”

this, but it appears, you know, now she's, you know, self-medicating and, unfortunately, it caught her. And one of the, one of the drugs in her system was fentanyl unfortunately. Mm-hmm. It deemed an accidental overdose from a lethal mix of adorals and accent fentanyl. No one was aware that she was self-medicating, but I know you write in the book. Few people know the pressures of the woeful world of homicide. It's a dreadful place,

and not one to be entered lightly. No one leaves unscathed, not even the hardened professionals. Michelle was a wife and a mom by day and living among psychopaths and their victims in the dark of night. That's chilling. It says so much, so much, Paul. Well, and, you know, one of the last communications I had with Michelle as an email, she said me. And she is taking her young daughter to a girl scout camp, just north of Santa Barbara. And she emailed me, you know, letting me know,

my daughter and the car, driving past the same exits that the Golden State Killer would have taken

for as a tax in Santa Barbara. And if I could only envision the show with her cute little girl, looking at these exits and starting to visualize the attacks, you know, and you don't want to be with your little girl and think about what happened to those victims. You know, and this is part of

“those interconnections, you know, that you make. Or now your family life is crossing over with your”

professional life. And it is tough, you know, and, and there's, you have to, you cope with it. However, you cope with it. And, you know, for me, I, I, I, I have my own coping mechanisms and Michelle had hers. Yeah, like how do you go out after a day? And I've spared the audience the most gruesome details of his crimes because they truly are dark marks on your soul once you've read them. And I'm sure once you've read them at your level. How do you go out and have a dinner with your

family? How do you watch a sitcom and manage a laugh? Well, that, you know, like, that's where you

detach. That's where I detached, you know, because for me, when I was working, you know, I'm always

thinking about the case. But you, you mentioned the, you know, enjoying a sitcom. You know, to this day, I can't get myself to read a book or sit down and watch a movie right now. It's where I have just completely tuned, turned away from trying to pursue things that are just entertaining. And, and that's where I have to get myself back, you know, to where I can start enjoying just a normal activities in life. And it is, it is hard. You know, that's for people. It's not everybody

that gets into this field. But for people who really care about the cases care, about the victims,

those are the people that are the most strongly affected. Because every minute of the day that you're

not working on the case, you could be working on the case. And working on the case is hugely important. That's just a, you know, I, I've been called on that before, you know, hey, you're, you're no longer at work. Well, you know, if your daughter was just killed or sexually assaulted,

“and now the investigator is punching out at five o'clock and going home, I think it'd be a”

little upset. You're expecting this public servant, the investigator, to do everything possible, as fast as possible, to find out who did this. And that, that's the hard part. That's the balance of working this type of work is, I've got a family. I've got a personal life. But I've also got this commitment. And that commitment, when you really get attached to cases like for me with golden state kill or in other cases, you know, that commitment ends up becoming overriding of everything else.

When he stopped with the, with the, with the spree, the murder spree in 86, you were, uh, in your late teens, you were not a cop working this case. That would come later. That would come later where you picked up a cold case file. And the next thing you knew, quarter century had passed and he who had devoted the vast majority of your life to this thing. That's right.

“In fact, 1986, I was a senior in high school. Yeah. So, you should get, you got to read the book.”

Would you can see the picture of it behind Paul now unmasked to find out like his early thoughts on DNA from these crime scenes? And how could they be helpful? And like, let's get a, let's get him in the system. Just in case this guy gets arrested. So there'll be a hit. And stuff like you'd been working all of that from the moment you got involved in this as a law enforcement officer. But let's jump forward to, you know, close to the end when you had a different idea. And then

you started studying nonstop, of course, because you're you about genealogy. And what it's not working, we're not getting a hit on this guy just by having the DNA in the system. What's another way we can use the DNA to advance the case? Right. You know, I go back a little bit even further with genealogy. I started pursuing a type of genealogy in 2012. They could just possibly could solve the case. And after five years it had it. And I was frustrated, then just out of a

sheer coincidence. I had another case with an unidentified little girl. She was alive. But we didn't know who she was. We're sure she had been abducted from somewhere.

identified her. And it was like, how did you do that? And he had gone to a website called DNAAdoption.com

“and worked with the genealogist that was doing a completely different type of genealogy”

process with DNA than what I had been doing the last five years. So now I reach out to that genealogist, Barbara Reventor, and I ask, hey, with what you're doing to identify that little girl, would it work to identify unknown offender? And she was like, no, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't. And I sent her what I had, but she didn't know what case it was. But then she stopped

communicating. So I always left to my own devices to try to figure out, well, how was this process

working? And that's when myself and then I had a partner on this. Steve Kramer from the FBI, we're doing a deep dive. And since I had the DNA background, and I'm literally watching YouTube videos and reading website information, I'm going, oh my god, this is powerful.

“Yeah, I go, I got excited. This is how this case can be solved. And that's what we pursued. And then”

we just had to get DNA and I had to get DNA from an agency down south with homicide case where they still had their evidence. And then ultimately, even toward the A's office stepped up and gave us a sample of the Golden State Killer's DNA. So we could do this genealogy process. Okay, so now you've got it. And you've been working with it for a while. You'd been earlier on. And again, people should read the book, but looking at the rape kits that have been taken

from his victims that were no longer prosecutable. So it was okay to, you know, test them and deal with them. But respectful of the DNA samples and all that. You've been thinking about the DNA for quite some time. So now you're at the point where they give you a sample. You know this is the killer's DNA. And what year is this? 2017 or 18? We are right at the end of 2017 and the

beginning of 2018 when we get our first DNA results. Okay, so what do you do with that DNA? You

like what what's done to it? That's different than what was normally done to it. So forensic DNA testing used by law enforcement uses a DNA tool that looks at discrete areas on the DNA that's known as short-hand and repeats. It's just right now they're they're looking at 21 different markers that are going up into the FBI's DNA database, which is called codis. The genealogy process is the process that's a major genealogy websites do in the background

like ancestry in 23 and me where you send your saliva sample in. And instead of just looking at 21 markers, they're looking at hundreds of thousands of points across the entire genome. And then once that type of profile, which is now called a SNIP profile, is put up into a database and searched against others, it's able to look for other people that kind of cross-over and share DNA fragments with you. And the more DNA they share with you, the more closely related they

are and the opposite is true, the less DNA they share with you, the further related they are. And you can get a sense on how close or how distantly related by how much DNA is shared.

So you can tell, well, this is likely a first cousin, this is pretty close to me,

or this is a fourth cousin, this is very distantly related. So now with that type of information and a list of potential relatives, it's a matter of just doing traditional genealogy, building family trees back in time until you find where these potential relatives intersect. They're descendants of a common ancestor. But they require them, it required some of the golden state killer's relatives to have gone through the 23 and me or ancestry.com process.

Or other websites, yes, yes. These are, you know, with with the Angelo, our initial searches, the closest relatives were third cousins. So they're related at the great, great, grandparent level. And for somebody of his generation, these were individuals,

“the common ancestor were individuals born in the 1840s. Oh boy, that's not that helpful. So then what?”

But now it's, you get this common ancestor, it's like, okay, the golden state killer is a descendant from this great-great-grandparents. So you have to identify everybody that, you know, are offspring

in the 1840s would have 15 kids. Some would, you know, die at first, some would make it to, you know,

“where they're actually having children themselves. So this tree, as we're building, identifying”

all the descendants becomes huge. But we know something about the golden state killer. He is a man between, born between the years 1940 and 1960 by best estimates. We knew his physical size. And we knew his geographic footprint, you know, from Sacramento down to Southern California. So as we're building these trees, we're now identifying men who had a California connection. And then it's just investigation 101. Could this person, you know, match up sort of substantially with the person we're

looking for. And that's where we get into just a small handful of individuals that required a little

bit further investigative work. And after eliminating each of these other individuals who do this day have no idea they were being eyeballed. That's when I turned to the Angela. He was sort of the last one on the list. And what was that like for you before the arrest, before all that, when you you got this one last name. As you say, you start to check boxes and it's like, um, Bonnie,

“law enforcement, like you start checking the boxes. What was that feeling like?”

Well, I also had the pressure I was entirely. So I'm not going to get this figured out before an entire, um, and I had been there before. I had multiple suspects. I had other men that had Bonnie's in their past that were eliminated with DNA that were also rapists who had geographic connections to some areas. So some of this circumstantial stuff that I'm using to evaluate the Angela while I had other suspects who had been eliminated that also had that circumstantial

stuff. So you kind of become, I was a little bit numb to that. It was just like, okay, there's enough here that requires me to be much more involved than just sitting behind a computer. And that's when I start reaching out and and driving up the Sacramento and taking a look at the locations with the Angela's Act, researching, you know, going into the Sacramento records office and looking

for, you know, deeds and worries purchase houses or what properties it keeps on. And then ultimately,

you know, reaching out to the Auburn police chief who fired him. And once I kind of gathered all that, I was like, oh, this guy now is, it's very interesting, circumstantially, we got onto him because of DNA. And he's now what I would classify as a prime suspect where it's now, we should get DNA for him. And my, my bloodsteed framer was in full agreement. But now I am, I'm retiring in two days. So Monday, no, I couldn't, I couldn't, I made the decision, you know, six months prior and

“I had to do with personal financial, and I think that's a big deadline. Okay, you just say,”

I'm just going to do four more. I'm like, I'm seeing this case through to the end. What is it even matter, even if you retire? Can you no longer work on it? Well, from a retirement standpoint, you know, just the way the pension system works, they really encourage you to retire at age 50. You know, from a sheer financial purpose. Yeah. But I had made the decision. I'd already been out to Colorado with my wife or shopping for homes, you know, and we had a schedule to go out. My kids

were going to be transferring schools. And so everything in my personal life really was like, this is the time I need to retire, even though we were so close on Golden State killer. But weren't you allowed to continue working on it, even post-retail? Like, what would, what would change from Friday or Friday to the Monday of I no longer work here? Yeah. I wouldn't have peace officer privileges in terms of the accessing criminal databases, you know, going out and being able

to identify myself as a, you know, a storm investigator, if I'm talking to people. So I'm a civilian once I retire. There's no like, you know, day pass. Go for a day. Well, the way it worked out though is that once I did retire, the genealogy team that I was working with, which was a group of six of us, they kept me on board. They kept communicating with me as if I was still active. You know, then that's why we're here. The expert on the case, they needed your expertise. They needed you as much

and then ultimately, you know, when the Angela's arrested, I helped author the, the arrest warrant

“and provided information for the search warrant, you know, up in that sack homicide. And again,”

I was so appreciative that Sacramento Sheriff saw this, you know, kept me involved in the case. So I was here the grateful ones. They're, they're the grateful ones. All right, wait, let back up, though, because we got to get to arrest. So now something big needs to happen. You got your prime suspect, but you don't have his DNA. I mean, you may, you have an old sample of it. You need a present day sample from this man. You've identified as DeAngelo. And it tells what happened there because

there were two passes at it. So, yeah, so I, I had driven up to his house and, you know,

seen his car in the driveway knew he was living there. And that was the last, literally, the last thing I did. And debated if I should get a DNA sample, just knock on his door and say, hey, Joe, this is Paul Holmes, blah, blah, you know, can I get a DNA sample and, and eliminate him. But I decided there was too much on him and drove away. I then retired the next day. But then, once I retired, we get him under surveillance. So Sacramento, homicide, and FBI start surveilling him.

And at a certain point, he drives to a hobby lobby. And he actually had a hobby of building

these remote controlled airplanes out of wood. So he's going there. Hobby lobby, as he's building

another plane. And while he's at the hobby lobby, an undercover agent swaps his car door handle. And that's submitted to the Sacramento lab. I happened to be in Colorado Springs buying a house during this time. And I'm getting updated on how the surveillance is going. And the PF chains with my wife, celebrating put on the offer on the house. And Lieutenant Kirk Campbell from Saktier's office, he was calling me. I figured it's another update on the case. I excuse myself.

“I go stand outside, it's snowing. And instead of the typical salutation, hey, Paul, how's it going?”

It's Paul, you can't tell anybody this. I'm going to say, oh, this is, here's something. And Kirk tells me, hey, I don't know exactly what it means, but we got that car door handle, the DNA results back. And the lab's really exciting. There's a lot of markers that are matching up with the Golden State Killer. And Kirk's not a DNA guy. And I said, okay, how many markers? He said, well, they got 21 markers.

Kirk knows the Kirk attempt. So now we finish up that conversation. I go back into the restaurant. And I'm now, you know, kind of kind of in this weird state. I've been on this case for 24 years. I now know the angels of the Golden State Killer. And so I'm in this numb space emotionally. I sit back down. My wife is super excited because her fortune cookie is saying, you know, you're going to find your dream home. And we had just put, you know, an offer down on the house,

“the house that I'm sitting in right now, in fact. And she just happened to say, so what did Kirk want?”

And I didn't know what to say, because I was like, I'm not going to just say, you know, I don't want her blowing up in the middle of the restaurant, right? And she is a DNA analyst. And so I just kind of look at her and she, I don't do anything. And she looks at me and she says, well, are the DNA results back. And I just do a single nod. And she she was like, well, and I didn't do anything. I'm just staring at her and she goes, no, oh my god.

And all I did is another sick one. And then she's like practically pushing me out of the restaurant to get into our rental vehicle. So she can hear what exactly is going on. And then as I'm letting her know, and she's super excited, that's when Steve Kramer calls me because now he knows. And then it's, it's game on because now it's no longer surveillance. It's, it's an arrest has to be affected interviews need to occur. And it's a lot of work. So that's where, you know, I end up flying back

to California. Wait, wait, wait, what did your fortune cookie say? I could, I could tell you. And he's back to those scenes where, you know, I was so, because my wife is excited. Open up your fortune cookie. And and I was just so focused on golden state killer. I did it. And I just kind of dropped it on the plate. And then that's when she starts asking what Kirk wanted.

All right. So by the way, my, my wife's a huge fan of yours. She listens to your stuff all the time.

Oh, tell her. I said my regards. And I'm already a huge fan of hers. That I can feel her excitement in this moment. I wouldn't have known whether to leave or to order like a double martini. You know, it's like, oh, what do I do? I'm not sure. I'm technically retired. But yeah,

“I think I need to go back. So, but there was, they did a second pass at it, right? They did,”

they decided the DA who I also interviewed, who was, who was running this, the woman for giving me, I forgot anything. Henry, that was super. She was like, let's be really sure, right? And that's when there was a dumpster dive, right? Somebody took his garbage. You guys took his garbage. Right? No, and, and in part, you know, the, the car door handle, of course, multiple people. We all touch a car door. And, and so even though everything, 21 markers, you know, we're sure

we've golden state killer. There was a second person in that sample in DNA. And so that's where

Ann Marie, her office, we're like, no, we want a better sample. So now, Trash Day is, I believe it was Tuesday for Monday. But the Sacramento has a, a, a very clever way to collect trash without it being noticed. And I'm not going to divulge the, the process because they like to use that on a regular basis. Right? But they were able to get his trash collected. And they, you know, Ken Clark, the, the, the, the homicide, the sergeant from Sacramento and, and 10 o'clock bell. I, you know, I've heard

the story that says, filtering through the trash that's collected from the ads loader,

they're selecting items that look like the most promising to have his DNA on them. And they got

11 items and then the last item that they looked at said, "Oh, there's a piece of tissue over there. It might as well grab it." What, what would it hurt? Well, that turned out to be the actual evidence item that came back with the Angela's single source DNA profile. And 100% matched the golden state killer.

“You had your man, that was it. I think in your book, I'm trying to remember there was a line”

something like that the face of evil had been identified after all these years. You, you knew who it was who'd been taking up your life, your life's work. And you were going to be able to provide that to the victims who had survived his attacks, whose lives he had all but ruined in so many cases and so many lives he had taken. What a huge, huge moment for a law enforcement for you, everyone involved. And I just, I can't even imagine the flow of emotions when you actually got

to see him in cuffs and be at the, at the DA's office at night. Yeah, yeah, and again, it was, it was such a surreal moment because now that this, this, this masked man that I've been chasing for 24 years, various unmasked. And the such a weird place to be, I can't even describe the emotion because in part, you know, I still had a lot of work that needed to be done that night as well as the following day. But at the same time, there was a sense of accomplishment. And it was like,

okay, you know, this, this is, this is a big deal. And personally, I am very gratified that I had a role and getting the Golden State Killer here in handcuffs sitting in an interview room. Crazy. So what did he say when, when the cops, you know, went up to him, I know they decided we got to go now and

“they got him on this, on his side lawn. What, what happened? Did he say anything? What was he like?”

Well, you know, they, they ended up using a specialized team because he was such a threat if you think about who this man is, the Angela, he's a law enforcement officer, he's a serial killer. He has shot at a cop that is passed down in Bicellia. He had more guns registered to him over the years that what the California firearms database could print out at once. Oh, wow. And, you know, we were so concerned that he would fight, he would be armed, he would take his

daughter hostage, grandkids hostage. So, you know, the hope was, is that he would be arrested away from his house. And they were going to do a very covert type of arrest, but that didn't play out. And so they had to arrest him in front of his house. But fortunately, he moved himself over to the side yard where he was a lot isolated from, from doors and stuff. And then they approached

specialized arrest team that I'm not going to divulge. But he was quickly taken into custody by,

“multiple individuals, each individual had to control a limb. And he's handcuffed and placed in the”

back of a van. And then that's when he makes that, that famous statement. I've got a roast in the oven. Yeah, crazy. So he winds up, obviously being charged. And he pleats guilty. I mean, there was no way around it. They're really realistically to talk about having him dead to rights. That there was just no way around it. He had, he had to plead guilty if he wanted to spare himself the death penalty. Yeah, see, he had to plead guilty, but the, the, the notable aspect about his, his plea

deal is he had to admit to everything. So he, over the course of the series, you know, some of the cases in Northern California that were not homicides, he could not be prosecuted for because there were past action limitations. And we wanted all of those victims to have that

“sense that their case was just as important as the other cases that he could be prosecuted for.”

So he pled guilty to everything that he was charged with. But then he also admitted to all those other cases that he wasn't charged with. So as a very interesting process that occurred. Hmm. So he did, right? I mean, he did list the crimes. Do we believe he listed all the crimes for which he was responsible? You know, he, he, he did at least the crimes, the crimes were, these are

the crimes. And then him and his authorities basically had him plead plead guilty or admit to them

in a court of law. Now, if he has other crimes out there and their crimes that he could be prosecuted for, if there's other homicides out there, he would be stupid to have not thrown those out in the table during that plea deal because now he can still be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law moving the death penalty on those cases. Hmm. So the court held a hearing, of course,

“and did allow victim testimony, which is so important. It's such an important piece of this. And”

one of those to testify, we have a short sound bite was a woman named Mary Berward, who was only 13 years old when she was attacked by the Golden State killer. Here's that sound bite in part, number three. On June 25th, 1979, the 4 a.m. Joseph James DeAngelo, forced his way into my home, into my life, into my room, a child's room, personally decorated with hand-painted hearts and rainbows, quotes about love and kindness.

He raped me. He stole my innocence, my security, threatened my life, threatened my life, my family. I was 13 years old. No 13 year old should have to find out what a rape hit is. And then it turned out I've been ovulating, so steps were taken to prevent pregnancy. Oh my God. Talk about putting a real face on just a list of victims. You know, that brings it home. Not that the judge was ever going to go light on this guy, but it's somewhat cathartic. I've

talked to enough victims to know. It's somewhat cathartic to just have your say. Yeah, Mary, you know, I had reached out to her about 10 years prior, and we chatted briefly on love, on a comment and have a face-to-face talk. It's just too much for her to do at that point in her life.

But I always had her number in my cell phone. And so after the press conference where we announced

to DeAngelo was arrested, I'm driving to lunch to meet the genealogy team and Mary calls me. And I answer it. Hi, Mary. And she asks and is such a weak voice on the phone. Is it him? Is it really him? And I told her, yes, it's him, and he will never get out. And she starts to sob. And after sobbing for five seconds, 10 seconds, she's just like, I'm sorry.

girl, now as an adult woman, you know, those 30 years of trauma were pouring out. And, you know,

“to see her, these old strong and confronting him was amazing.”

Oh, my gosh, Paul. And the relief she must have felt to know, he cannot hurt anyone ever again. He can put no other children, women, men through this. He did speak. He did speak two days later. August 21st, 2020, as you point out, he hasn't said much, but we have a little bit of what he did say in sound by the story of this and all your statements. Each one of them. And I'm really sorry. Everyone ever.

Thank you, Brian. What do we make of that? Well, a little bit of backstory for those

victim impact statements. And it's not once that he looked at his victims as they were talking to him. And some of them called him out saying, you're such a coward. Now, we talked earlier about the Agelo and how vindictive he is. And he all along during the core Seth, you know, all his court appearances, he's been playing this frail old man and we know he's not. So, here he is, be called a coward. And so he took that moment. He easily could have just

leaned forward for his wheelchair and talked in the microphone and said, sorry, and it wouldn't be little voice. But he chose to stand up, turn and face the part of the audience where those

“victims were sitting. This is him basically saying, I'm not a coward. And I think his apologies”

are hollow. He took that moment to psychologically instill fear into these victims once again. Because I will tell you when he stood up, even though he's lost a lot of weight, his physical presence resonated throughout that space, that conference room when you were here.

I'm sure. So, this was, this was him basically, I won't say it on your show, but, you know,

it's sort of an FU to the victims. Yeah. And someone like that, I do believe in one's aura. You know, whatever it is, energy, spiritual who knows, but they have an evil aura.

“When you're in the presence of evil, oftentimes you actually do know, it can feel it and looking”

at him and knowing what he had done, I'm sure they felt it that day. So, it is scary. I mean, it's it is hellacious. Yeah, it's like the devil incarnate right there. No. So, he's in prison for the rest of his life. That's that. He hasn't written a book. He hasn't done a big interview. Do you think, will ever know more? He has been contacted, of course, by numerous individuals, outlets, you know, to come in and talk to him. He's refused every single

request. There is hope that maybe he will talk to select individuals from the investigation under certain circumstances. And that's something that we're talking about and reshure in myself as time goes on. And I hope we get that opportunity because, you know, there is knowledge to be gained by law enforcement and by the community with what he knows about reasons for his attack and how he committed these attacks. But I don't know when when that's going

to occur, if it's going to occur and, you know, he's he's not getting any younger and quite frankly, he's probably the number one target in the nation in the prison system for other inmates. So, I just hope the prison system does keep him safe even though that seems contradictory. He at all, from considering the herft that the horror of the crimes that he committed. But I really do want to have a chance to talk to him or help somebody gets a chance to talk to him,

co-param. And they have what I've been told by a CDC authority is that that's the best location for him.

They have the most real best ad-sag component of any of the prisons in California.

“I mean, based on the history you just told me, I feel like the best way to get him to sit,”

might be to say he's not man enough to do it. Well, that's, you know, what we've talked a variety of strategies on what would make him most willing to talk. Right. That conversation is ongoing. What about you now? Got your man. You got your house in Colorado. You got your retirement. Your pension. Now what? Well, my retirement hasn't gone the way I thought it was going to go.

So, you know, I obviously have gotten very involved on the media side of things, both TV as well as podcasting. And I'm pursuing those opportunities. And I really, in many ways, they keep me involved because I focus in on projects where I can help out on the case. I can help

“law enforcement, you know, consult and not just tell a story. You know, that's, that's going to be”

my goal moving forward is to continue to take on projects where, you know, let's see if we can get other family members answers as to what happened. I don't see you just doing golf and fishing and skiing, but it would be nice given the way you've lived if you could get a bit more of that into your day. I, I, I, you know, out here in Colorado, you know, I've taken up mountain biking. I've got a Jeep where I can go out into the back country and, you know, what I call my

dandelion breaks where I've just kind of get away. Yeah. But I've been so pulled in so many directions that, you know, those instances of that type of activity are few and far between. Paul, what a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here in Frantana's the story. Well, thank you very much for having me. And don't forget, I want our audience to go buy your book, support you in your retirement. You've earned it. The book is called Unmasked and it is

absolutely riveting my team right at it. And I'm in the process of reading it and you will not be sorry that you pick this one up. Thanks again, one in incredible journey and a testament to Paul and all the others who worked so tirelessly on this case.

Rachel Panney was always fascinated with money. Those who knew him as a child knew that he

would someday become a millionaire, but they couldn't imagine how. In the mid 2010s, he was broke and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. But then he and a business partner said, out on a mission to create a Bitcoin debit card, the company they created and the technology they promoted, however, was all a lie. And it did not take long for everything to come crashing down. Today we bring you the story that was the focus of the Netflix documentary, Bitcoin,

with the man at the center of it all. Rachel Panney is the founder and former CEO of Bitcoin company, Centretek. He's joined today by his high school best friend and co-host of his new podcast, creating a con, the story of Bitcoin. Johnny Begood, that's his friend. Guys, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Nice to see you. Okay. So I watched the Netflix documentary and Ray, I got to tell you the truth. You found you completely charming in so many ways,

“and I ended the series thinking he's definitely still a criminal. Am I wrong?”

Yeah, you're definitely wrong in that regard. I've changed a lot. You have. Okay. Well, well, like what did it? Getting convicted because you didn't have to serve jail. I can see how actual prison time would reform a guy. But what did it? So I was addicted to drugs since I was 12. So then basically, once I got arrested this time, was the first time being sober since for 15 years of drug use. So that really is what changed me.

You know, all these crimes I did, I always did them under the influence.

I really feel like not for nothing, but we've interviewed many felons on this show, and some guys did a lot of frauds over the course of their lives and their 20s and their 30s, and then wound up using their talents for good, like helped the state. And I know you did work with the government ultimately. But like, just FYI, this could potentially be a lane for you because you're a talented guy in many ways, and you actually successfully pulled off a lot of these

have a great life in front of you, and I hope it's all used for good. Now, Johnny, I, you were in the documentary a bit, but not as much as Ray, who's the star, because it's his story. But you guys, what you've been best friends since you were kids? Yeah, we've been best friends since

third grade or fourth grade. And we've, we grew up together in the same town. I always

considered him like a brother to me, and we just took very different paths in life, but we always remained best friends despite if you wrote it. Did you know, like, okay, you know, Ray, yeah, you know, is he one of those guys, like, he cheated on the test? You know,

“was there like a strain of dishonesty or potential future fraud or color within the light?”

What's that? No, this was, this was like, a lot of people asked me, did you like, were you shocked? It was very natural progression throughout Ray's whole life. It was like a progression of criminality. Ray has been involved in criminal activity since he's 12 years old, so this was not really a shock to me. It's interesting because it sounds like Ray, like, we meet your mom and she seems totally lovely, but around you growing up, you know,

one important thing, which is your dad's split, so you didn't really have a father growing up, and then now you've still come out and said, you actually suffered abuse too, sexual abuse is a young man. So explain how you think you got to the point where crossing the legal lines just kind of wasn't a thing for you. Yeah, so basically as a kid, from 8 to 12, I was being molested pretty much regularly, and my mom, my dad had left, and my mom was working 12 hours a day in ICU as a nurse,

so from that, and then I also, it was, I felt like it was happening and it was so obvious to everybody my family that everybody always knew. So pretty much I at a very young age, I was like, it's me against the world, and because of that, I also like viewed my grandfather as like a, he was a, he started a union in New York City, so pretty much anybody that's connected with the unions, has some sort of connection. So he presented as like a mobster figure, and he was also like the

one that always had cash would help my mom get the house or get me my first car. So I,

I was just like, that's who my idol is, and I viewed it as like it was criminal activity based,

“right? So I was like, that's what the, the, the route I'm going to take. In the documentary,”

I talked about trauma for about two hours before I said I always wanted to be a criminal, but they just took the last line and made it seem like that was just like my opening thing to say. Right, that did come out of nowhere, so that makes more sense. So you, it was the first like actual step toward criminality, the use of drugs, or just walk us through like that first line cross, as you remember it. Yeah, the same person that was abusing me, like, how many smoking weed at 12,

and then from there, I, I became friends with one of like the biggest drug dealers in, well, it was a little brother, but the biggest drug dealers in Long Island for weed, and I just

started selling weed. That was like my first step into crime. And have you, you've never said who this

person was who hurt you? No, it was my step, brother. How did it finally stop? I, I got bit, I grew up, you know, I started like dating, what happened was like, I was always questioning my sexuality up until 12, and then I got a girlfriend, and I pretty much, um, had my first interaction with the girl sexually, and I was like, oh, well, I'm definitely not gay. So then that kind of what just, like, I pretty much had like 13, 14, I just was always with that girl. She, she had a troubled child

that also. And my mom, we had like a crazy household, but she basically moved into my house, like I like 14, 15, um, like kind of getting away from her family as well. So that's kind of what just guide me away. Then they got at the voice pretty much like right around that same time. So he was just out of the picture completely. I still have two boys, by the way. So I, uh, I have two little boys now. You, you know, yeah, I'm sure you're very protective of them.

Has he contacted you to say, what are you doing? Or I'm sorry, or threaten you, like, how is he reacted to you going public with that? I have no idea. I mean, I haven't heard from him since I was 17. So I mean, he, he, he was always like, he was very different than me and my brothers were like beach bombs. My brothers were big surfers. And then they were like kind of a dirty finger in

“now's rock band type of guy. So honestly, they probably live in like the boom docs and I, I really”

have no idea what's going on with that. Okay. So you, you, you, you know, wind up getting a little older. And then we were talking about you sort of your first foray into crossing legal lines.

Was it drugs? At first, yeah. I mean, I was doing drugs. And I started selling drugs. And then

pretty much quickly that evolved into abroad because it was like drug-based fraud. So I, um, had someone someone stole a pad because I was doing oxy cotton and then someone stole the prescription pad and just gave it to me. And I, I just had this kid right out this prescriptions. And then I basically had like, I first like me and my girlfriend went in and when they scripts work, they filled. And at the time, oxy cotton, like I, I was, um, you know, like the opiate epidemic

really hit my generation hard. So everybody was doing oxy cotton. It was like, no one was talking about the negative effects of it. And everybody was just trying it. So the pills sold very fast. And I was fully addicted by 1516. And then this happened about 17 years old. That was like my first fraud. And I got arrested for that case as well. What year was that? So if I was 17, I was born in 91. That was 2008. Okay. And Johnny, did you, were you there for this? Like you remember

Ray get involved with drugs and, you know, sort of going down. Well, I mean, like he, like he said, um, the opiate epidemic, kid our generation pretty hard. So this was like, everyone was taking these pills. Um, and the high school we went to, we didn't even know was a synthetic heroin at the time. What people used to be selling blues or oxies for $23 a pop. And then all of a sudden they went to $45 when everything started cracking down, which then everyone turned to heroin afterwards,

because they were addicted. All of these things were super common growing up. So, you know, we, we were talking the other day about, if you go through our yearbook, this, we probably know more people had died from addiction than anything else. Um, so yeah, it was kind of par for the course. I know you grew up in Long Island, right? But look, what kind of an area was it? Long Island, it's got all sorts of different neighborhoods. Oh, a beautiful picture. As a place called Atlantic Beach,

love it. Um, it really is, sorry, go ahead. Uh, so it really is like on the on the surface it's, you know, everything's beautiful and perfect. But there's like a darkness that kind of,

“you know, lies underneath. Um, and not just the drugs in the land Beach, I think like the,”

the culture in general. So, and I think that's kind of the same with a lot of these small towns. Ray, I can't believe you got away with thinking, I have somebody swiped a doctor's prescription, uh, pad as you point out out of a doctor's office. And then you started writing prescriptions on it. Like 2008 was not, you know, 1998 when we really had no clue and the opioid crisis was first start, you know, like it's amazing to me that they wouldn't double check the doctor signature. Like,

how did you not get caught right away on that one? So there was a method. Um, so basically the doctor's office is closed at around six, seven o'clock. So you make sure you go to the pharmacy

after the doctor's office is closed because they always call to verify, but they'll fill the

prescription without the doctor verifying if the doctor's office is closed. So we would just do that. But the pharmacies were all in on the opioid epidemic. Walgreens got sued. I believe that's where we always went. And, you know, if you see a bunch of skinny crackhead looking kids coming into your pharmacy one after the other feeling prescriptions for ox gun, you would assume something's wrong. Um, we didn't get caught until we went to like a mom and pop pharmacy and that was when they were like,

oh, this is definitely something wrong here and they called the cops. So everybody was in on that that whole opioid epidemic. That's fascinating and frankly believable. Um, so okay,

“you get caught. You don't wind up serving jail time. You get kind of a slap on the wrist, right?”

Yeah, for that, I did drug court for pretty much like every single time I would get arrested,

I would always go to rehab and then go to like do some sort of drug, um, outpatient type of thing

always. But I always had very good lawyers, obviously. Mm-hmm. And you're, you know, you're good looking guy. Do you feel like you were able to charm these judges? You're like, I'm just wondering how that played because, you know, you're going to have a lot of people out there being like, if he was a black kid from Chicago, he would have been put behind bars. Yeah, I hear that regularly. And, um, I don't know the correct answer. I'm a, I'm a

handsome white guy. So I mean, I don't really have the the answer for what would happen if I was a black guy. I really, I don't know. Right, right. But I'll show it. I'm sure like, it's somewhat has to play into, you know, like, I, I don't know. Yeah, I can't really give you an answer for that one. Well, we'll let the audience take a look at the YouTube, make up their own eyes on it. All right. So then you wind up graduating to a car, like, getting a lovely, like, car rental service going,

“exotic Miami exotic, right? That's what it's called. And this is, but it was not in Miami or”

was it in actually in Miami? Yeah. So I, I basically like, during that time of drug court, I started

This is terrible. I don't know how anybody could work. Good job like this. And this honest job is

“not for me. Yeah. I was breaking my back to end scaffolding at the New World Trade Center for,”

like, a couple of years there. And then I basically was, I went and visited my friend down in my

Miami. And that's when I, at first, I, I found this loophole in Vemau when I first moved down there. And I was able to just send money without having money in the bank account to back it. And I just, like, kind of exploited that loophole to the maximum extent. And, you know, we made, like, good amount of money on it. I don't know the exact figure. But from there, I was like, I came back to New York. I told my girlfriend. I was like, I'm moving out to Miami. She didn't even believe me.

And then I was like, you're there coming with me over here staying here. And I just, uh, the next day put my TV and everything in my car and drove down there and, uh, kind of continued with the Vemau thing for a little bit there, built up a few hundred thousand. And from there, we parley that into opening a exotic car rental business. Yeah. The Venmo scheme is actually very interesting to me, too,

“because I, I read you, and we're talking about how, if the way it works is like, let's say, you”

wanted Venmo three grand Johnny, but you had, you know, $2 in your account on Venmo. There was this period where Venmo would send it. Even though you didn't have the funds, and they might shut down that account of yours, but they didn't come after you for it. Yeah, Venmo PayPal, they all had the same issue. I don't know how they allowed this, but basically they would front the money. As long you had one transaction done through your account. They would just front the money, as soon as you

sent it, and the other person would get it and be able to cash it out. And your account would just go negative three, like basically bounce against the bank account. And, uh, you'd get a $35 or like, I don't know, whatever the fee would be. And then, uh, your Venmo would just get banned. And back then, like, they didn't even bill you for it. It was just like your Venmo was banned. So it was like, all right, we're going to find like a hundred people to do the exact same thing. And I just like

created like fake Instagram accounts, like, to find like college kids that were broke that needed money quick and, uh, give them a thousand dollars out of the transaction, take the other couple thousand, and, um, we just did that for a little bit there. I mean, I have to give you points for ingenuity. I like who would have even thought about this. I had, did you discover that this could even happen? Um, I was just sitting on the balcony. This is something Johnny speaks to a lot,

as far as, like, how I view systems. Um, I mean, maybe Johnny can expand. Yeah, I mean, even going back to when we were talking about like the pharmacy thing and, and the Venmo thing, rages has a very unique way of looking at systems and then like figuring out a way to exploit them. You mentioned earlier how like, um, you know, he's very intelligent in a lot of ways. And if he would have applied that somewhere else, like, he could have done it. I mean, you did do some

amazing things, but you could have done some kind of really world changing things. Um, it's always

fascinated me. And it's like, it's all me in a new way to look at things in general, right? Can look at a system and like immediately figure it out and figure out where the flaws lie. It is kind of a gift. And it could be used for good. If you put on the white hat, you know, you spent a lot

“of time wearing the dark hat. Uh, but now I think you're kind of an transition period where you're,”

you know, you're totally owning up to what life was like before. And it's a new star. Okay, so let's get to you, you're running the exotic car company. You've got this money that you kind of stole on that kind of you did steal via Venmo. And, um, that was your seed money for getting all these Lamborghinis and Ferrari's and renting them out to people who wanted a beautiful rental car. And among those who came in were some celebrities, and this would later prove very important

these connections that you were forming while doing this. Who were they? Um, we had pretty much every celebrity you can ever think of. But they're mostly like rappers. Um, that's like everybody comes to Miami and just rents cars and spends all their money. Like as far as that business down to Miami, it's one of the best businesses I wish I would estate in in that business. But, you know, everybody from Rick Ross, Little Wayne, Young, Young Ma, like all these names, but Floyd

made whether DJ Khaled does it because they're every time they're down in Miami, unless they live there now, a lot of them live there now. But, um, it's just pretty much what everybody does.

Everybody wants a nice car. Even when I go down to Miami, I always would want to get a nice car.

So you're making good money, but you're spending a ton and this would ultimately be a problem. What were you spending all the money on? Um, so that's one thing I always talk about now. Like at that point, I was trying to go legit with that business. And of course I had bad spending habits. I was a degenerate gambler, drugs going out to the club, but also my partners were not the best

the company. So that became a big issue as well. And then like, you know, but we were also just

“going out to the club every day. In Miami, you go out to the club, it's $10,000. It's not a cheap night,”

ever. Um, but anything you can imagine, we also had like a beautiful penthouse apartment in Boca,

oh, that we all lived in. And, you know, our offices are always just pretty much anything you can

imagine as far as like Miami scene for young kids is what we were spending our money on. So you're earning big, but you're spending big, and it turns out there was an embezzlement problem on top of all of it, which isn't a great recipe for keeping the business afloat. All right. So then how does this parlay into the subject of, you know, the Netflix documentary, your podcast, tons of articles, you know, this story just blew up once you guys got caught for

what you did with Scentra, a CE and TRA. Take us from my Miami Exotic, the car rental thing to the birth of this crypto company. Yeah. So basically, there was a point there where I go, like,

“the businesses, about $400,000 in debt, and I, uh, I go to Vegas, and I, brace you said, I brought my”

last $100,000 to Vegas, and I just was like, I played in the world series of poker. This is my genius attempt to try to make the $400,000 back, played in the world series of poker,

and then I basically played back or at, with the last of it, and hopes to try to make it all back,

or I was going to kill myself. So I, and then I lost it all, and then I just took about $100, and I, or like, $56,000, and, uh, I basically just fell asleep for 24 hours and woke up. And then from there, I fly back, and, uh, my two business partners are arguing with each other about where this money went. They were basically blaming each other, because one of them, the check was cash in one of their names for, like, over 100,000, and they were just saying, this guy wrote it

out, and he cashed it, and I didn't know what was the truth, and ended up deciding to get rid of

“one of my partners and go with the other one who ended up being my partner in centrotech.”

So after we had gotten rid of the first guy, this other guy was just like, one day I just saw my trading, I thought it was stocks, and he was like, oh, this is like the new thing, crypto currency, and I was like, ah, whatever that means, you know what I mean? I had no clue, but then he kind of broke it down for me, and from there, he ended up losing a bunch while he was trading, and from there you're trying to like sue Coinbase for what they call flash crash. Um, I don't know if anybody

really know what that means, but basically the price just went down from a couple hundred dollars down to zero, and then right back up. So anybody that has a trade position gets liquidated right away. And, um, so he was trying to sue, and through trying to sue, he went on Reddit and found out about these companies, they're creating ICOs, which is basically a cryptocurrency version of an IPO, and, um, they're like this young kids raising hundreds of millions of dollars.

Hmm, so Johnny, this is one of the things that they talk about, and I know you guys address is like the industry's totally unregulated. I mean, it remains completely unregulated for the most part, but this, if you were looking to start a fraud, this would be a great lane to do it in. Yeah, and Ray kind of taught me that, um, people like Ray and Sorby when they're thinking that was his partner at the time when they're thinking of like what to do, they look for

unregulated markets. That's like, you know, that's like chumming the water for sharks pretty much. And to Ray's point, since he's been caught, things have not gotten better. They've gotten it seems like worse in the crypto space, um, where, you know, we were joking before, like at least central tried to hide, hide it behind some legitimacy, but a lot of the coins that are coming out today are just, they're like open scams with no concepts other than get-rich quick.

What's amazing to me in watching the story is, the fraud was so bold. The claims you were making

were so bold, false, but bold. And it took a while for anyone to figure it out. You made tens of millions of dollars before anybody was like, what the hell's happening here? Before you got an SEC letter, it's crazy how long it went on and how much money you made, despite what seems to be an easily, you know, pierced veil of legitimacy. So can you just give us a couple of things that you guys did to make this company? Well, before we get to that, explain what the theory was that

you were selling because I still don't totally understand it's like a credit card for crypto, but one of my big questions was, how on Earth could you ever fool anybody into thinking such a thing as legitimate because they'd be looking for their crypto credit card to arrive in the mail and then be, they'd be looking to use it and they'd find out really fast, this doesn't work.

Yes, there's a lot of things to break down there. So basically, when you create one of these companies,

“you created based on a concept and originally, when we were raising the money, we had said that”

we were in beta testing, right? So we gave them a, this is a timeline of when the cards would be ready for mass adoption, basically. So the whole time we were raising the money, people weren't expecting cards. They were just basically looking at us, you make videos using like what was beta tested and I'm there, they're investing on the concept, not as much as like, oh, I pay now, I get a card. And basically the concept was, how it really works and how it works today.

Well, people don't realize that we ended up actually developing it by the time we got arrested

and we had the cards working with the wallet, but so how it works is essentially you have

cryptocurrency in a crypto wallet and then when you have a debit card or a prepaid card and the prepaid card is backed by a pool of fiat currency. So then as soon as just the person swipes, it pays in fiat currency, but on our side, on the back end, we take out the cryptocurrency value of how much they spent in fiat. And so we just have a pool of blocks like cash, US dollar, whatever country, you know, euros, US dollar, you know, whatever country the cards being used in.

So just explain it. So the way it would work, the way you'd sell it is, okay, Megan Kelly, here's a card, you buy it and then what, how would you tell me this is all going to go down? So you're going to be able to swipe your card and then it's going to subtract that amount in cryptocurrency Bitcoin, whatever crypto you're using out of your crypto wallet.

“And where would you say I could use this card? Anywhere. Like, at the Walgreens?”

It's a Visa card. It's a Visa card. Yeah, you can just go to the store and use it. Like, it's, they have them now. There's other companies that were our competitors, they made the same lives that now own Staples Center. They made the exact same lives as this. They said they had Visa MasterCard, they owned Staples Center, they just settled. So it works. The concept works.

That's unbelievable. Okay, so we've gotten there. The vision actually was realized, but wasn't totally real while you were doing it and pushing it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, go ahead. Now, we completely lied in the very beginning. That's 100% true. And that's where we were arrested for. People don't, people like Netflix like sensationalize the part about just like the crime part, right? We completely lied. We made up a fake CEO. We, you know, didn't have Visa MasterCard in the

beginning. But once we raised a few million dollars, we actually worked. We hired 40 plus developers

in-house to develop this product. And we built towards what we were trying to develop. And we got there by the time we got arrested. But that's just not talked about ever. Hmm, that's the bitter irony of the whole thing. All right, so you're committing this fraud, you're getting people to donate

“based on the beta testing. Like it's going to be the next big thing you should get in now”

while the get-ins good. And then at some point early on, I guess, there was like a crypto guru who wrote a favorable article about Sentra Tech. And my impression from the podcast, guys, is that you were like, hell yeah, great. So, like, you weren't expecting this. And it turns out this guy didn't even mean to be writing it about your company. Hold on, there's a little clip, I think, from the Netflix special about this guy. Let's play it. And then you guys can explain it in

stop one. Clearly, there was a reason why all this big money was coming in. People in our chat room started saying, Cliffhire wrote this article, you guys see that and then me and sort of like jumped in there were like, of course, we know Cliffhire, like we loved Cliffhire, like, yeah, he's the man, we had no fucking idea who he was. The whole banking system is failing. But in the, in the meantime, we're all going to be dealing with a real money in the form of gold silver and cryptos. And the

cryptos are going to be the fluid part of it. And he was like a crypto guru type of guy. He's just something like old nerd. He was saying this is going to be a big thing. He put out this press release, telling all his big investors to put it out there money for central. We went from having like 200 people in our Slack channel to having like 2,000 people within like, you know, a couple of hours. Time to go to the strategy for this company's taken off. Unbelievable. So it's just dumb luck.

So the, so we had raised a few hundred thousand completely like just grinding it out, going in

of a few million came in. Oh my god, I kind of feel bad for Cliffhire. Do you feel bad?

I do do. He's just super nice guy and he's actually very intelligent. What he does is he uses like almost like an AI type of system that searches the internet for things. And he didn't do his due diligence before he put out his press release that had us in there. It basically combined the name center with a bank. And that was why that confusion happened. Oh my god, you can't make this stuff up, right? It's like this poor guy. Now, since he's come out, he's like very sorry

that he did all this and all that. But the damage is done. All right. So how long were things

“rolling around, rolling along, post the cliff high, mistaken article with all the money pouring in?”

So, so how long was things going on? Well, like until the New York Times reporter came sniffing around like, well, how long were the glory days before somebody was really kicking the tires? It was really like a year period where everything was going good. My timelines are terrible, though, from my substance abuse. I really like, I'm not going to hold you to it. I'm just looking for a general feel. All right. So we're like around a year period. And what kind of dough are you bringing

in? At the height, like what happened was crazy, too, is that everything we had raised, they said we raised 32 million. But that was, at the same time, as we raised that money, crypto went up like 10x. So it became a few hundred million pretty quickly. So we were making about 2 million a day

at at some points. And then what people, there's another part that people never really covered,

is I figured out a way to basically control the price from this decentralized exchange that ended up getting shut down. But there was like a way back then that you could essentially like artificially control the price. It's amazing. Like you, you've got these genius powers that were used for, you vote, but it's wonderful that you're talking about them and letting us all in on the secrets in a way because it's like, this thing is still big and it's still out

there and there are tons of people who are buying crypto as we speak. I mean, I guess we should ask that Johnny, can you want to speak to this? Is it like, it's not, is it all a fraud? I mean, I know some people say this about Bitcoin, Ethereum, and like it's all fraudulent.

“I think there's so many things people hate nuance nowadays and like there's so many things that are”

some things, yeah, do you do your research, some of them are legitimate, some of them are not legitimate, and just because one of them is a scam or I mean in crypto's case, a few hundred of them are a scam doesn't mean they all are a scam. You know, I would just say stick to the basics and if there's a coin named after like an animal, probably don't buy that one. So let me just ask you, Ray, were you shocked when Sam Bankman freed, got arrested and his company imploded?

No, not at all. I wasn't, I wasn't shocked. I think in crypto currency pretty much like 95% of it is fraud. Like if it's not considered fraud, it's insiders, you know, like the insiders of

the ones always getting rich and even like they controlling the price thing, now it's just done by

AI bots and they clone market makers. It's all the same thing. All these projects are making crazy money now and their new loop, loophole is just don't offer any product. Just let's just tell everybody they're going to get rich off a picture of a dog. Wow. So do you like, do you own any crypto now? Either one of you guys? Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, same. Well, so why? Why would you trust anybody who's in the market now? So like the ability to like Bitcoin and Ethereum in my opinion are

great investments. I mean, not financial advice or whatever they want you to say there, but I think there is a great thing to be able to just send money to someone in China instantly without any bank involvement. I think that's the real use case in my opinion. There's some smaller use cases,

“maybe if you want to like put a crypto currency in a game and make it something like that or there's”

a couple of fun use cases, I guess people can make out that there's prior legitimate projects trying to do it. But for the most part, you just want to be able to spend, I mean send money anywhere, like I can send money to Johnny without having to go on the bank or I can send money to anybody without having to go on the bank. Hmm. Okay, so back to your company, Central Tech. This guy writes the article, the money's pouring in and when you say it was worth more like between

2 and 300 million, but you're not suggesting you had that money in the bank, right? What are you suggesting about how do you put get that number on the company? So the market cap of the company was 600 million. The cent likes we created 100 million Central tokens. That was worth 6,000 coin and we

Central tokens, but then we also raised 200,000 Ethereum, which were at a time over a thousand

“dollars. So that's another 200 million. So at one point our company has 350 million if we wanted”

to liquidate it, we were liquidating a lot to be able to pay our employees and do whatever we wanted to do. So realistically we had liquid like it's tough because like you would say that's not liquid maybe because it's in cryptocurrency, but we could have sold any amount of it at any time and made it liquid instantly. All right. So things are rolling and you're living the high life, enjoying the money and the our money suits and the all of the accoutrement, the fancy watch, the Rolex and so on.

And then a writer from the New York Times named Nathaniel Popper gives you guys a call and he wants to figure out a couple of things about the company, including why on your website, I guess you decided to go with just everyone went to Harvard Business School. Every single person there went to Harvard, like you didn't, but Johnny's laughing, why didn't you like mix it up a little, you know, like this guy went to Wharton and this guy went to like why did you this seemed effortless to just say

everyone's Harvard? Well, the funny, there's a funny story there actually because what happened was someone had said something about us and we all, sorbi was like everybody created a LinkedIn and we all created those LinkedIn separately in different houses and then we all put Harvard and then right away when we noticed that I changed mine to UCLA pretty, pretty quickly. I don't know what forecasted. So that was just the original thing was the Harvard thing and it's pretty funny like

that was just all of our instinct like, oh yeah, we all went to Harvard. So can you explain Farkis because we haven't talked about him. We talked about sorbi, your buddy who you knew from earlier

and who's this third guy because he becomes important. Yeah, I feel bad. I always talk so

bad about him. He's a nice kid. He's just he sorbi's fiance's brother and he kind of got roped into this. In my opinion, he shouldn't have got any jail time. I even told the FBI that and they basically just said kind of something along the lines of, if someone's telling you that you're doing your fraud, you can't be like, I didn't know. But he really didn't, like even though he was involved in the conversations, I don't think he comprehended what me and sorbi were talking about.

“Like he's so like over trying to build a company. He's in the documentary and I think it's”

fair to say, can't stand you. Yeah, yeah, I think what they did also in Netflix is like they showed him a clip of me talking about him to like trial him up before he talked because there was points there like like other edits where I think he was talking more highly of like, I don't think he has any real issue with me. His issue is that like I'm talking bad about him and I'm not trying to talk bad about him. I'm saying I don't think he was even involved in the actual crime of everything.

Who was the brains of the operation between you sorbi and farkess? Sorbi was definitely that the

headhunter, for sure the main guy and I was second in command. He was the original idea guy

and I was just the guy that would manage the employees and then I found out some other loopholes throughout that time. But yeah and the funny thing is me and Sorbi both went to the same high school.

“Did you guys go to college at all? I think Sorbi went to the same chance for a year and then he got”

kicked out. So not Harvard. All right so you said it off the website is you know kind of and as I'm saying it Johnny they stole the website from another tech company. Well what do you mean they stole the website or the uh they just copied somebody else's website right? It wasn't like they didn't come up they kind of found a company that looked like it was in business. There's a lot of just copying and then changing things going around at center tech from the

idea itself to the website to uh most facets of it. It's amazing to be that you would again it's

it's a bold move to just steal somebody else's as opposed to just come like that's another indicator obvious of fraud and then perhaps most bold move of all Ray was to say that you had struck a partnership with Visa and Mastercard for the connection with your cards which of course would legitimize it in the eyes of potential consumer and this New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper found out that was not in any way true here's a bit more from Bitcoin via Netflix of

that sought to. Ray I've been coming across other questions that have come up around

know I know be told about that you know I mean but I mean I can't give you direct answers on that.

“These guys say that they're issuing a card with Visa they pictures up on their website”

that have cards that have the Visa logo on it one of the first things I did was call Visa. They said we have no idea who these guys are and there is no record of an application they're going to have to take that off of their website. I can't I can't I can't. Okay I mean Visa is just saying this company center is not allowed to issue a card with Visa on it. If we do it in that order

it they're never going to speak up. Anytime somebody tells you you know I don't really feel

comfortable answering that question or these are questions that are very very very comfortable you to answer to you. You know I mean like you know that there's something going on here. Oh God this was not a banner moment for you Ray. Were you you were definitely drugged up during these phone calls now? Oh I was at that point in my life I was taking

“20 Zanix a day like 40 milligrams of Zanix every single day the whole time I was running”

center then besides that I was so you didn't feel panic I mean on the bright side you probably didn't panic when you got that phone call. Yeah I was probably smiling on the phone but I felt nothing that was the thing I really felt absolutely nothing that entire time I was empty in that way but I mean obviously it's an edit to make me like they literally just highlighted just as much as possible but definitely was high as a kite there. He talks about how as he's the New York Times reporters

doing his investigation he's watching the center tech website and it's removing the references to views and mastercard taking down the LinkedIn's that say Harvard like as he calls with hey what about this what about this you guys are actively changing it which is just the worst possible thing you can do and nothing says I'm committing a fraud like that so like in a way you guys were very sophisticated and in a way you were very keystone am I wrong? You're 100% right you know we were

in over our heads as far as like how big this thing got right like we had done fraud before but it's easy when it's small scale stuff but once you're in the public eye in a company gets to the point we did after we had those huge endorsements it got tough because there were just so many eyes on you so every little thing that you had that was not true we just get called out instantly so like throughout the whole time we were taking Visa down putting it back on just to keep an

investor like that was the thing is that the investors were controlling our like our decisions on what to do on the website like if a guy had invested a million dollars and then he was like oh where'd Visa MasterCard we just put it right back up we're just trying to keep whatever money we had so you mentioned the celebs this is where DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather from exotic cars

“or Miami exotic come back into the story how did you use them to promote this fake company?”

yeah it's always pretty funny that people follow any sort of rap or boxers financial advice

but that's the cryptocurrency world for you so yeah we just basically reached out for an endorsement through their managers which the manager was like someone we had met in the club scene more so than even the car scene and pretty much you just pay them and you give them a script and they say whatever you want them to say you know they'll promote pretty much anything especially Floyd he's crazy like I've seen him promoting lawn products, bug sprays he's just giving some money and he

does it oh god even now even post this I don't know he's a crazy guy I've just seen him promote some wild stuff on there and I always just make jokes about like the amount of things that he's promoted but I think if like he's selling boxing gloves he should probably buy them but I wouldn't take this financial advice but you know it wasn't of course Johnny it wasn't just those two celebs endorsing the central tech we saw in the Sam Bankman Freed scandal it was Tom

Brady and Jezelle and Larry David like the celebrities at the prices right they sell out yeah and

Ray has spoken on that before first of all like with the central tech thing that was kind of before

the it was cool to do that because right afterwards when all the celebrities started kind of doing that and a lot of them did get in trouble but the amount the the check that like a normal commercial can offer you versus a crypto commercial is going to be like vastly different and a lot of the celebrities a lot of time I don't really think they fully understand what they're promoting

like commercial spots on these big channels okay I'll do it sure yeah that's all it is is that we we just the value proposition was just so much better in crypto because we just had like we knew

that if Floyd made whether at least gave him a million dollars we were gonna make five million the next

day so we had the ability to do that when you're a regular company that's promoting a product I don't think Floyd made whether's gonna bring you in that much money to they aren't able to give

“him a million dollars so that's why all these celebrities right away of course they'll take”

these big checks it's you know to do a couple Instagram posts it's the easiest thing I've ever heard for a million dollars what's crazy is like okay I don't know about Floyd's situation but you look at Tom Brady you didn't need money Giselle is even richer than Tom Brady is she's she was for a while the highest paid supermodel in the world why would they take the risk this is one of my question like why would you take the risk with this crypto currency company like they did

with Sam Beckman Freed but you're just saying it's just the easiest money ever it's besides it's just being the easiest money ever I think with the SPF one is a little bit more detail because the public perception was so high of of who he was and he was donating to campaigns and to every both sides right and left and he just no one thought it was gonna fall through I mean

“he there was just too much it seemed like it was too big to fail and I think those big celebrities”

he probably offered them massive money like five million for just a one commercial you know that that probably took them like a few hours that are alive so maybe even more than that I think the amount of money those guys probably got for those commercials was crazy I think they're actually SPF is helping the government as of like two days ago in regards to the celebrity endorsements okay continue to follow that one so Nathaniel Popper the New York Times is legit and was

onto the cent but there were other guys who write about crypto who also were questioning whether

you guys were legit and you know never to be dented by somebody sniffing around you guys wound up

buying a lot of those guys off I maybe I'm not cynical enough but like I'm amazed that somebody who's saying hey crypto world watch out for centrotech they don't seem legit could for what 20 grand just completely flip and the next week be like actually as wrong they look good is that what happened maybe 50 times like not even just like a couple people every single one of the people that are promoting crypto they all are just doing it for greed essentially it was the easiest

thing I've ever seen like there was one guy that was hard the hardest one out of like 50 people that we just paid off either a few thousand five thousand ten thousand whatever it took to get those taken down and he after about two weeks of saying no and continuing to make videos he's like you know my kids a little sick you know you know send me this and we sent it to him in the next day you know applauding us

“one of the frauds that I think came about from Nathaniel Popper's investigation”

was the matter of the CEO so do you want to take that one Johnny the name of the CEO and how these guys found the CEO Michael Edward to if you looked at his photo looks strikingly like raise grandfather was the the fake CEO or you actually switched his photo out so yeah Michael Edwards was a fake CEO people were asking a lot of questions who are these guys who is this racer panning these three guys from Long Island are they really

experienced enough to run this crypto company so Ray and Sorvey did what anyone would do

and they googled old white man and found the first photo slapped it up on LinkedIn

slapped it up on the center website said he went to Harvard also and of course today they had a brand new CEO with some legitimacy and and called him a co-founder of the company too but this house of cards too would crumble fantastically and here's a little bit of that from the Netflix film Bitcoin hello I'm Michael Edwards founder and CEO of center tech is that who you really are? no that's not who I really am I'm Dr Andrew Hulaco I'm a professor at

the University of Manitoba on August 25th Michael Edwards suddenly left this world he leaves me behind his French bulldog Stanley and an accomplished career as an investor and VP for the Wells Fargo

venture as co-founder and chief executive officer of center tech in Miami Beach Florida that's

“pretty creepy well at least I had an MBA and I was I was well-trained at Harvard”

hadn't realized that they had actually gone to that extent Michael Edwards was never even a

real person not at all we completely created him from scratch the photos for Michael Edwards were just taken off Google we just looked up old white guy looked at all the images found the old white guy and just took that image and you know that was Michael Edwards oh my god and then you killed him off Ray when the press was sniffing around with it oh bit a fake old bit about his French bulldog Stanley the audacity who wrote the whole talk though yeah and the crazy thing is that guy's

like the sweetest man in the world I feel terrible for that guy and he took it really well like as far as like I even seen him recently like on Twitter like promoting the documentary yeah yeah so he's a you know I feel sorry for him but it's a it's it you know hopefully he's not too upset about at this point I was actually shocked he he did that scene because when we listened to sorbys trial it was like a dialing thing during COVID I I truly felt the worst for him out of like

every victim because he didn't invest anything he's like teaching a class one day and then like the Mounties and the FBI roll up and they're like we need to talk to you and apparently he's like the sweetest guy ever so he seems pretty sweet who wrote the oh bed who came up with the French bulldogs Stanley I'm just curious that's definitely a sorbys thing as soon as you hear French bulldoggy

“yeah I think of sorbys or bird friend if anything but I was never a fun bulldog guy”

it's incredible and now you need a new fake CEO and this is where your grandpa comes in your 79-year-old

grandpa so you put his picture on there and a new profile fake for him and not surprisingly Nathaniel was not fooled and pretty soon on earth the fact that this is your grandpa and not another Harvard grad yeah no I don't think we put him even as a Harvard grad we used his real background and we just put his real name as the CEO so like essentially I even asked him before I did it which I you know I feel bad that I even had to I even asked him but

it was a weird one because he was like on his death bed at that point okay so but he has no experience in his lane so it was clearly just a figure head that you know was meant to stay off further questions it didn't work and then just as things are looking pretty

“dire like the New York Times is on to you I think the New York Times piece had hit and it was”

extremely unfavorable like I like the like the tech guy who mistook you for another company and wrote this favorable article income the South Koreans and resurrected central tech for a no good apparent reason I don't understand it all how they sniffed around and said sure I I want in so explain what happened with them yeah so there the even though in New York Times article was bad and and people make it sound more dire than the situation was no one started

taking their money out everybody because the price was being controlled on the back end by me kept going up everybody was see that they would be like oh the New York Times is just this is a hit piece they they were just like no matter what what happened as long as that price was going up everybody stayed around and then the South Korean thing comes about they they came into the chat rooms and they're like oh we want to invest big money and everybody says big money you know

like all right yeah sure they're like you gotta come to South Korea and we're like yeah sure

we're definitely not going to South Korea but then right away they just send five million dollars we're like

oh shit I guess we'll go to South Korea and but I wasn't I wasn't gonna go I wasn't not going to South Korea and so we just jumped on a plane by himself and goes down there to present basically we had and finished developing the app the app was like in a prototype stage right there at that point it wasn't finished but we basically connected it to our bank account so that if he swiped his card it would look as if the the app worked properly but it didn't he goes over to South Korea

he meets with these execs and yours was to have this dazzling demo of an app that will

then sorbid doesn't answer for about eight hours there or whatever amount of hours and so I'm like

“sorbid died at that point I was sure sorbid was dead right yeah because they had already invested”

five million right so it's like there's real pressure there it's not like they can just be like all right whatever so then out of nowhere he answers whatever amount of hours later and he's just like the app didn't work but they still invested and the only take that I could get from that is that that money was also criminal proceeds and that's like a lot of cryptocurrency is that they joined in on the fraud everybody like even the youtubers right they're all complicit in a way in this

fraud as much as where the the co-founders and where the reason for this fraud if you're going to know something's a fraud and then you're going to promote it and then these guys see the app doesn't work and they're still going to invest and and take a lot of the percentage they're everybody's complicit at that point that is a very good point that actually I hadn't even considered that until

“you just said of course that's the reason why why why else would they give you how much additional”

money did they give you after that initial five and then the failed app 10 another 10 15 million total another 10 oh my god you're right that's that makes perfect sense so what leads to the downfall how do we go from 15 million cash influx maybe we are going to be legitimate we dodged the New York Times storm we weathered it what what led to the implosion yeah so pretty shortly after that me and Sorby I went and lied on the stand for Sorby and his DWI case and I got a

perjury charge for trying to lie on the stand for him and uh wow after that we were like put out a press release that we're stepping down from the company Sorby stayed on and basically me and Sorby got in a really bad fight because I was still trying to pay back the debts that we had built for my amics addicts even though we had all this money I was like all right let's take some of his money and pay off these debts and he was trying to not pay it so I got like in a

bad argument with him and I left the company so like people what people don't realize is I never

made any money from investor funds ever throughout this whole time Sorby had those wallets himself and this is also why my sentence was what it was it's just they highlight me in the documentary because of I'm the one in it uh so I'm not made all my money I made all my money off selling central tokens myself after the fact hmm okay so but what you you lied in the DWI can I just ask I know this is probably small ball after the frauds that we've been discussing but what's there

any pause about lying on the stand I don't mean I'm a former lawyer recovering lawyer so I just always feel like you've taken it over to talk the truth right and then you lie like that had to be scary I what explain it um yeah I mean Sorby had this DWI from before I even linked back up with them from years ago it was like a 17th DWI and he was gonna lose his license he asked me to do it

we flew to New York I had never I wasn't with him the day he got it so we went to the restaurant

where he had got this DWI we kind of studied the room so I would have like the correct answers his lawyer prep to me on what to say basically um which is a crazy fact of the case and uh I just kind of went up there and said what I was told to say that he only had one class of Pino Grigio and from there you know pretty much got arrested shortly after that no I was like hard to do but uh I was you know under a lot of you know taking on the

panic I mean I didn't feel hard at the time did he get off no no we we both he ended up getting

“charge for that I don't know what his result I think we both got charge of perjury that was my end”

that up in my first felony oh okay and why do you say Johnny this part drives you crazy because I mean you mentioned several times how about how like well everything seems so brash everything like like you know the audacity of everything raise yeah and sorbi's like um they're they're wait for risk reward it needs to be recalibrated in my opinion it's like so out of there's no reason you know at this point raise raise business partners with sorbi but it's not

like he necessarily likes him so why would you do that and we've talked about this a lot

and the answer is oh why wouldn't I do it like I know how to talk on the stand like you know

I would do it for you and I was like that it doesn't really compute but rage just has a very different you know you know you know weight of risk and reward mm do you have you ever met Jordan Belfert no no but the funny thing is central started shortly after that movie came out

and now is on the straight narrow and espousing a lot of lessons on it should definitely read his stuff and watch some of his podcasts because there's probably some gold here for you to mine too I definitely do I do watch some of his podcasts for sure yeah anyway that your story is kind of reminding me of his which is why I ask so all right you've got to step down from the company things between you and sorbi are not good and then

is it the SEC letter that the company gets that's the beginning of the end because finally

the SEC was like hmm maybe we need to step in yeah for sure so I had left the company and sorbi was continuing on and within like two months after me leaving the SEC got involved I was just in the deep end just gambling hundreds of thousands at all as every day so when sorbi called me about the SEC he was like oh just go me with this lawyer it's just the SEC at civil and I was like civil stuff I mean if it's just civil I'm fine you know like that's really not that scary and so I just met with the

lawyer and I was they were like well you have a couple options here you can cooperate and like oh what does it take to cooperate and they tried to meet with me at that time and I was just on way too many zanics they were like well you can't even form a form sentence right now so that's not so it's not going to be a great friendship yet and by the way speaking of attorneys this is another strain of the story that's crazy you at some point did hire a lawyer to help center tech

do what like were you looking for somebody to help you cover up what you were doing or for somebody to help you straight now yeah so what happened with that it's early on in the company there was a company that had got charged by the SEC for being a security and we were just trying to find out

“if our company was the security so sorbi had went on I think you got the found the scant up work”

and funny enough my lawyer right now my criminal lawyer I spoke to me the day he said there's a guy trying to act as if it's him on upwork that's really not him so this must be like a common

new scheme that people are just doing but yeah this guy basically put out like his whole

linked in and everything that he worked you know like as a big time lawyer for politicians and stuff and sorbi hired him pay them a couple of dollars I was giving you legal advice like you were you were listening to his legal advice yeah he basically just told us yeah this is what we have to do to to remain not a security and we took his word for it for sure and tell tell us what happened with him he once that SEC got involved sorbi had said that was who we used as counsel and because of that

he ended up getting arrested and yeah now he yeah so he got arrested in charge and I think he's out now and it turned out he was a kid yeah yeah it was just like some random young kid that was in college my god it was crazy he wasn't even a lawyer he wasn't even like didn't even graduate from college yeah he was uh he was like a students for Trump at the time in in college and he was doing this like on the side while he's like just playing video games and stuff

“my I you must be a little disappointed in yourself that you didn't spot that particular”

card right you he was kind of calling you I never spoke to him sorbi did but yeah I definitely got

us he was uh he you know I think raise a reaction to it is more like well that that was a good one like yeah yeah I don't like I don't take like I'm not like oh this guy got us like we got a get him back I mean it is what it is we were doing you know scammy stuff and he did the same yeah you're like we're back I went over on us yeah I guess like it's not like a respect I'm not like proud of him but uh it's again but the very audacious who pretends they're a lawyer

and starts giving advice to a crypto company and whether they're a security that's really bold again all these guys out there who could be using these talents for good all right so long story short you wind up cutting a deal with the government because it did it did turn criminal and you get time served so did you serve any time while awaiting that final negotiated settlement I did about five days in in Florida when I first got arrested and they released me to rehab I did like a 30 day

rehab and I was on house arrest for about a year and no besides that that was my time served did the government want you to get more than time served no no they didn't think they were fighting like like how they break that down is what people don't realize is they really believe that I was

“never going to commit another crime and I think in my opinion that the government is smart I don't”

think that they're just like out of pocket like oh he helped us so much we should give him no time it was that they truly believe that I wasn't going to be out there committing any more crimes and I think that's how they gauge it um as far as with sorbi they felt that it was definitely likely

to agree with the government he went away for eight years and is still in prison right now

correct and Pharkas got one year yeah you did about eight months in my wrong in thinking that this judge who wound up sentencing you was like a little swoonie I mean I I was hearing what she said to you I'm like what's the match she sounds like a school girl who has a crush and not like a judge sentencing a felon so that's the part is that that's not like I helped the government I don't know why they considered me better than other

cooperatives that they've dealt with in the past I was very honest and then during that time I also got married had kids and I became a drug counselor for about three years leading up into my sendencing and sorbi on the other hand was breaking curve if you're going to strip clubs so it's like there's a pretty clear reason why in my opinion that I got time served and then all my the money that I made I owe in restitution so I pay that monthly so it's like I hear what

you're saying as far as like but that's just what the government's recommendation it wasn't the the judge the judge they cut out a small snippet of what the judge was saying to me she gave me a hard time at first and there's just basically that the cooperation was essentially better than what they typically have as a cooperator okay so what about the victims because you know we've been laughing and there's some aspects of the story they're just so sort of extraordinary you can only laugh

but in this case as with Sam Bankman Fried there are people who actually got hurt and they're

“going to watch this and they're going to want to know what you have to say to them yeah not absolutely”

and out of everything that's the one thing that I truly regret the most is that people lost money

they also have you know they we we were charged with a thirty two million dollar fraud they have

thirty three point five million to give back the only reason that the money's been held up is because there's a class action suit to try to be able to control how the distribution works so there's there's more money than we were charged with in seize seize assets that's actually also like Sam Bankman Fried most of his victims maybe all got repaid but the allegation in court was they could have earned more on that money had it been invested in the way they thought it was being invested I mean

is that parallel to your case too? Yeah exactly and that was one of Sharma's main arguments as

well is that you've never seen a fraud like this where there was more money seized than actually

“raised you know so it's like a it's a weird case in that regard and I honestly haven't even met”

anybody that's like lost money I really don't I don't know and I'm sorry to whoever did those money so this was all wrapped up in 2018? Yes 2018. Okay and now what like you know you're you married is it true you met your wife with your ankle bracelet on? Yes I did my wife my ankle bracelet on I was I actually just was allowed curfew like you know that first I was in house arrest full of house arrest and then I went out when I first got my ankle my curfew was a smaller ankle bracelet

so it wasn't the big one but yeah I mean yeah you did like a year on house arrest. Yeah I was also like I don't know not everybody cares that much like if you're honest about what your past was and why you have that ankle bracelet it wasn't like I was trying to hide it I was making you know like jokes about it right and then I I don't know it just pretty much fell I'm pretty quick there she's she's a great one. Johnny is it a is it a good match do you see why

she over the praise past? Yeah I totally kind of get why it raised very honest about who he is and

“I think that's a big part of like the draw um and I think it comes across as genuine and you kind of”

tend to especially when you're talking to him and like he's he's being so honest and and an open with everything you kind of just tend to forget about that and you're like just talking to like a charismatic person so I could kind of see how um now that happened. Do you think he's gonna do you think he's gonna stay on us on the straight narrow like if he had to bet? So we I we talk about this a little bit at the um the end of the podcast where

right and I were like we went out to Atlantic Beach and we were sitting there and you know

gonna have these like court mandated drug tests. I actually lived with Ray the last time he got off probation and didn't have court mandated drug tests and after three years or something

of being sober he was back on drugs been like a week or something like that and I there's always

that fear there um and you know we could just take it day by day I don't think it's gonna happen

“and I think he's in like such a good place mentally now compared to where he was earlier in his”

life that I'm less worried but it's still a worry. What are you doing for a living now Ray? Me I mean I'm trying to write a book that a podcast and I'm trying to start a new business now I'm afraid what is it just like web development I mean I'll definitely never do another crime like web development company. So talk to me about how you know that because in other interviews I've done with criminals especially those who spend the life doing frauds they talk about the

adrenaline rush from doing it and how that is something that is hard in the way a drug addict wants

the rush of the drug you know some of these criminals need the rush of the adrenaline they like they really like and are addicted to living life on the edge. Yeah I for sure but I've also was 24 25 when I was doing these crimes and now I'm 33 and I've had a massive adrenaline dump after like this all happened right and then so like I think when you're sober for a certain amount of time that's one thing that this like I I speak about this a lot is this case save my life like if I

wasn't arrested there I was dead within probably the next couple months I was spending all my money gambling millions of dollars a month I was gonna be as soon as I went broke I would have definitely

“been dead so the case saved my life that's why I'm grateful for like how this all played out”

obviously especially with like the no time sentence and where my life is today

we forgot my the original question. Just whether you need the adrenaline of the of the crime and whether that's gonna be a tough habit to break. No I don't think so I think just like off drugs it's pretty easy to not commit crimes and do the right thing. I think as long as I stay sober there's no worry to society. Have you gotten any therapy I mean I don't want to blame it all on childhood trauma but it does seem like it's an obvious suspect for why you wound

up making these choices. Yeah I've done therapy I did a ton of like drug counseling and then I became a drug counselor throughout this time and working with other people that had sexual abuse case like trauma kind of helped me a lot just kind of seeing I don't know I feel like I'm an

“a weird person because I compartmentalize it or whatever it may be but there's people that like in”

their 50s and they're still crying about it every day and I don't know I couldn't find a way to like break them through it and I feel like it doesn't hold any weight now that I've talked about it opened. That's great that's a good place. Great scale. No I completely believe in compartmentalization if you can do it lean in. So I'm just curious what your wife's name? Kim Kim. When you and Kim go to parties and you meet new people how how do you work this into the conversation like yeah so

right how do you let people know this is part of your story um I just tell everybody pretty open the uh I don't people that meet me they all are like oh he's actually a nice guy like most people think when they meet you they don't know so I mean like they're there's the big reveal yeah I just kind of tell them my full story I like don't hide it at all it's like I'm like yeah I had a company and then I got in trouble down in Miami and they're like oh what would you do

and I like I had a cryptocurrency company we raised you know some money and we got in trouble it's and and then like they just sure you know whatever is he's telling us telling them the truth all right I gotta tell you something my husband and I not long ago went to this dinner party and there were maybe 14 people there and we played a game per the host where he asked all of us to write down on a piece of paper something some interesting or fun fact about ourselves

without um like the host would know who no the host wouldn't know nobody would know who's who's it was so you didn't write your name on the card then the host takes all the folded up pieces of paper and the host reads one after the other and he reads one and then everybody the table votes on who at the table they think this fact or story belongs to and the stories were crazy some more team like a woman who used to play the tuba in a marching band or like whatever

greatest game ever for you with your friends who don't know this story and haven't watched Netflix

“or listened to the pot and my wrong I mean I think you need to do it yeah I mean I don't know who”

I play it with but sounds fun you got to get people like me who didn't know anything about this until

my team wrote your story to me listen I wish you all the best and let me give the podcast another

“promo give me the name again what is it called again Johnny creating a con the story of bitconned”

all right creating a con the story of bitconned and it's you two together going through the

the gory details of all of this I wish you all the best I hope things go very well for you in the

“white hat Lane and Johnny to use well thanks for coming on and telling the story”

thank you so much appreciate it thank you so much we'll stay on this story and we'll definitely get ray connected with Jordan Belfert can't wait to see where that goes thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show no BS no agenda and no fear