Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - This Comedian Caught a Serial Killer? - The Golden State Killer Story

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

The Golden State Killer, later identified as Joseph James DeAngelo, was a former police officer who terrorized California from the 1970s through the 1980s

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My whole world is falling apart right now. It's chaos. Watch the Hulu original series. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for Bumno subscribers. Terms apply. So this famous comedian sort of helps catch a serial killer. Now the serial killer's name is Joe, and Joe is around 28 when this story starts,

and he's a police officer living in California. And Joe is just a straight up villain. Like all he wants to do is hurt people. And so one day in 1974, he starts doing just that. He starts breaking into people's homes, but he's really weird about it. Like a normal burglar will get into a house and they'll look for money or valuables, but Joe instead looks for random things. Like he steals from piggy banks, he'll steal class rings or engraved jewelry,

stuff that would have sentimental value just to mess with people. And since he's a cop who's worked on lots of burglary cases, he knows how to do all this and not get caught. And so he does it for about two years. But then he runs into a problem. Like with a lot of these types of people, stealing random things loses its appeal after a while. It's just not thrilling enough for Joe anymore. And so he escalates things.

He starts breaking into people's houses while they're home and essaying the women he encounters. And he does this over and over and over again. And so this goes on for about three more years. And when that stops being thrilling enough, he escalates things again. And he starts breaking into houses, and murdering the people he encounters. And he does this over and over and over again. And seven more years go by.

And it's now 1986. And Joe's around 40 years old at this point. And he's no longer a cop, but he's still going out and breaking into people's houses and committing murder. In fact, over the last decade, he's broken into around 120 homes. He's essayed 51 women,

and he's murdered 13 people. This guy is legitimately evil. But then, that same year, Joe suddenly just stops. Why does he stop? Well, it's speculated that he stops because this is 1986, the same year that law enforcement starts using DNA identification to solve crimes and track down criminals. And he's been leaving DNA all over these crime scenes.

So now Joe knows if they match his DNA to the DNA at the crime scenes, he's screwed. So he stops and he moves on, he starts living a fairly normal life and no one ever suspects that he ever broke into any houses or killed anyone. And 20 years pass and it's now 2006 and that is when we meet this woman, Michelle. Michelle's about 36 during this time and she writes for a true crime website called True Crime Diary. It's actually her website. And Michelle, she's been writing about all sorts of different true crime cases and stuff for years. But at some point, she becomes interested in this old unsolved string of crimes from the 70s and 80s, where this mysterious guy went out and murdered and essayed a lot of people in California. And she gets way

into this case. She's writing stuff for her website. She's writing magazine articles for magazines. She keeps putting this case in the public eye, which is generating quite a bit of interest, which is therefore generating a lot of tips and information for police to follow up on. And this goes on for years, and Michelle's work is so compelling that she eventually gets a book deal out of all this. So now she's writing a book about this case, still not knowing that this former cop Joe is behind it all. And so she works hard on this book. She becomes obsessed with writing it, working on it every day, working on it so much that it's making her anxious and it's like stressing her out sometimes,

but she is determined to get it done. She really wants to see this case get solved. And by 2016, when Michelle is 46 years old, she's pretty far along at this point, somewhere between halfway and two-thirds of the way finished. But then, that same year, the absolute worst thing happens to her. So Michelle's husband is actually this guy, Patton Oswald.

And Patton, he's a famous actor, comedian, He was the voice of Remy and Ratatatoui. He's been on a lot of TV shows, Parks and Rec, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Agents of Shield. He's been working a long time. You've definitely seen him and stuff. So one morning, Patton is at home and he comes into the bedroom where Michelle is asleep. And he finds that she's not breathing because Michelle had unfortunately suddenly passed away in her sleep. And so later they have an autopsy done.

and that autopsy reveals that she died from an undiagnosed heart condition combined with an accidental overdose of medication she was prescribed. It was extremely sudden and extremely tragic. And Patton is, of course, devastated by this. I mean, for a lot of reasons, not only did he lose his best friend and partner, but he's a public figure. So he's sort of expected to get out there and talk about this experience publicly. I'm not trying to say that this is meaningless,

but it really does. everything seems like the lights have been turned down 50% on everything since she's gone, you know. Now, Patton also knows how much catching this killer meant to Michelle. He watched her work hard on her book all those years. And so he decides to take over this project and make sure her book gets finished and published. And so he gets to work and he recruits an investigative journalist and also this researcher that Michelle had been working with. and he gets them to go over Michelle's manuscript and all of her notes and stuff,

and together they're able to put together all her research and compile her work into the latter section of her book, and they actually end up finishing it. And in 2018, Michelle's book finally gets published. It's called I'll Be Gone in the Dark. And it immediately blows up. It becomes number two on the New York Times bestseller list, and again, her work keeps this day. decades old unsolved case in the public eye. So now a lot more people are interested in figuring out

who this killer is. Meanwhile, police have somewhat been continuing to investigate all those murders in California in the 70s and 80s. And they've got some old DNA evidence, but they haven't ever really been able to use it because it doesn't match anyone in any of their databases. But then they get an idea. They're going to run it through this genealogy. website, like the ones where you submit a Q-tip sample and they like tell you all about your family history, one of those. And so they submit this killer's DNA to one of these websites and boom, they get a match. And that allows them to narrow it down to like a thousand possible people. So now they have to go through this long-ass family tree. But they eventually zero in on one guy,

a guy who had never been a suspect before. Former police officer Joe. And Joe. And Joe is like 72 years old at this point. He's old. And so police are like, who the fuck is this guy? But they look into his background and they realize he was living in the area when all those crimes happened. But they still need his DNA to match the DNA they found at all those crime scenes. And there's no way he's going to voluntarily give that to them. And so I guess police just like sneak around his home and they get some of his discarded trash and they get some DNA samples from that.

And so 32 years after Joe committed his last murder, bam, they arrest him. Here's his mugshot. And ultimately, Joe gets sentenced to life in prison. While in 2020, Michelle's book gets developed into an HBO docu-series called I'll Be Gone in the Dark.