“The Golden State Killer,” the man accused of at least 12 murders, 45 rapes and dozens of burglaries across California between 1974 and 1986, is now behind bars. Police say they matched Joseph DeAngelo’s DNA, taken from a discarded sample outside his home, to a sample from the investigation. The dark mystery is finally solved, after almost 40 years, but why did it take so long? And might anything the police did there help us solve the remaining mysteries in New England, like the New Bedford Highway Killer, suspected of at least nine deaths in the late 80s, or the Connecticut River Valley Killer, believed to have killed at least seven people from the late 70s to the late 80s?
Northeastern criminology professor James Alan Fox, the author of Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder, joined Jim Braude to discuss.
