The Golden State Killer - Part 3: The Dark Arts of DNA Databases | #462

**Hannah** (0:09)
Throughout the 70s, the 163,695 square miles of California, thank you, I practice, were terrorized by one man in many masks. He stalked through the whole state with one intention, to create a collective that lived in total fear all because of him.
And he managed it, as the Vesilia Ransacker, the Rancho Cordova Prowler, the Creek Killer, the Santa Barbara Slasher, the Diamond Knock Killer, the East Area Rapist, the Ea, the original Night Stalker, Ea slash Ones, and finally, the Golden State Killer, the name that ties all of those identities together.

**Cerruti** (0:55)
For decades, little was known about him, except that he was a man living in opposition. Many of his victims reported to various police departments and sheriff's offices that their tormentor spoke in a low, gravelly voice through a clenched jaw, telling them to shut up and clearly demonstrating to them that he had been watching them for quite some time, relishing in the torment he had caused. But then his mask would slip. After brutally raping some women, he would sob, I'm sorry, mummy, on a loop. One victim reported that she could hear the East Area rapist hysterically crying in another room as she lay tied up, face down, terrified that he would come back and defile her again.
Most tellingly of all, in July 1978, after all his raping and sodomizing, the man in the mask wept, I hate you, Bonnie. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.

**Hannah** (1:55)
In April 2018, all the way in Italy, Bonnie Olson's phone rang. It was her ex-husband.
He was calling to ask her if she remembered the guy she'd gone out with before him.

**Cerruti** (2:11)
Of course she did.

**Hannah** (2:11)
She nearly married him. It's not a person that anybody forgets. The man Bonnie actually married, the one on the other end of the line, had something he needed to say.
I need you to know, they are arresting him as the East Area Rapist. I'm Hannah.

**Cerruti** (2:29)
I'm Cerruti.

**Hannah** (2:31)
And this is RedHanded, the episode where I thought we would finally get to put The Golden State Killer to bed. But my sleep paralysis and night terrors have to extend by another week, and if mine do, so do yours, because I think this might be our first ever four-parter.

**Cerruti** (2:47)
Oh, congratulations.

**Hannah** (2:49)
I called it being three a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. And then today I was like, it's got to be four. It just has to be. Yeah.

**Cerruti** (2:56)
I mean, if any case is going to, I think a case that spanned this length of time and took this many forms from the killer, is probably one that is worth pausing on over the space of four weeks.

**Hannah** (3:12)
I agree. And also, if we hadn't have got him, this would have been over two weeks ago.

**Cerruti** (3:18)
Yeah.

**Hannah** (3:18)
It would be a totally different Kettler fish. But because he gets caught, that just opens up. He doesn't confess. Don't get, don't be silly.
But it does open up a whole other chapter to this story that otherwise I don't think we ever would have got to see.

**Cerruti** (3:35)
No. And there is actually a lot to this story that I don't know. I think it's one of those ones that maybe because it is so famous, people like me perhaps are like, oh, I know it. And I haven't really taken the time to delve into it in a huge amount of depth because it feels overwhelming. As somebody who you have done the research, I'm sure you can agree to. It feels overwhelming, so I haven't really gone near it.
So I'm learning a lot and I'm very intrigued to hear what the hell is going on with Bonnie because that's absolutely fucking terrifying. Oh, yeah.

**Hannah** (4:05)
Bonnie has got quite the part to play in this saga.

**Cerruti** (4:08)
Oh dear. Well, let's pick back up then with our story. Many similar nights were unslept by Orange County Sheriff Investigator Larry Paul, who dedicated 20 years of his life to tracking down this man in a ski mask. And also, he was the originator of the name, the original Nightstalker.
Something that Larry actually wasn't too happy about in the end. He worried that it made people more obsessed with Richard Ramirez, who was operational in California in the 80s, and actually turned attention away from the Eron's investigation. Paul was assigned to the Orange County Sex Crimes Unit in 1998, and his first task was cracking open those county cold cases, starting with the murders of Keith and Patty Harrington. Over his decades of service, Larry Paul built a database specifically pertaining to this case called the Harrington Access Databank. He had to build it himself, because in his own words, Excel wouldn't cut it.