Behind the Bedroom Door

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
On a Sunday afternoon in March 1980, a twelve-year-old boy rides his bicycle to his father's house in Ventura, California. The front door is unlocked. From the bedroom comes the beeping of an alarm clock that nobody has switched off.

Evidence from that house goes into a sealed kit, and for thirty-seven years the kit stays closed.

Behind the Bedroom Door is a documentary-style true crime account of the Golden State Killer investigation, told in order from the first case files to the final statements in court. It begins in Visalia in 1974 with the Visalia Ransacker, follows the East Area Rapist through Sacramento and the East Bay, and tracks the Original Night Stalker down the coast to Southern California. According to prosecutors, one man committed thirteen murders and nearly fifty rapes. Detectives in different counties each held part of the record, and for more than twenty years no one could prove it belonged to the same serial killer.

Then came the DNA. In 2018, investigators uploaded a profile from the Ventura kit to a public genealogy database, and genetic genealogy turned an unknown man's DNA into a family tree of more than a thousand people. When the branches had been cut back, one name was left: Joseph DeAngelo, a former police officer living in a suburb of Sacramento. Investigators, among them Paul Holes, who had worked the cold case for twenty-four years, watched the main suspect until DNA from a discarded tissue matched. Prosecutor Thien Ho later laid out the facts in a Sacramento courtroom.

The book draws on court records, prosecutors' statements and the words of survivors and families. Theories are marked as theories.