Police claim the killer was heard screaming, "I hate you Bonnie!" during one attack.
Was the accused Golden State Killer driven by hatred for his former fiancée?
Police say the serial killer screamed "I hate you, Bonnie! I hate you, Bonnie!" while carrying out a terrifying attack in the 1970s.
Suspect James Joseph DeAngelo was once engaged to a woman named Bonnie Lee Colwell. In an engagement announcement that appeared in a local California newspaper at the time, she was described as a lab assistant at Sierra College.
The wedding, however, never took place.
DeAngelo later married another woman, Sharon Huddle.
The "I hate you, Bonnie" rant was one of the many pieces of evidence that rant helped lead cops to DeAngelo.
Detective Paul Holes has spent his career looking for the Golden State Killer.
"Now that we have identified him, and we see that there is a Bonnie, that is very significant," he told Inside Edition.
But perhaps no piece of evidence was more crucial than DNA left by the killer, which was entered into an online database called GEDmatch.
A distant relative of the accused Golden State Killer had submitted his DNA to the same database in an effort to find other relatives, but he never could have expected that one of those relatives would allegedly be one of California's most prolific serial killers.
Information from GEDmatch led detectives to a family member of DeAngelo. They then used other information they had amassed about the Golden State Killer to close in on DeAngelo.
“Forty-four years and he was unknown, it took us four months once we started using this technology," Holes told Inside Edition.
Meanwhile, the youngest of the Golden State Killer's rape victims tells Inside Edition her memories of the attack are still vivid.
Margaret Wardlow was just 13 years old when she was sexually assaulted in 1977.
"I remember being woken up with a flashlight in my face," she told Inside Edition.
She said she refused to show her attacker she was afraid.
"In a very harsh whisper he would say, 'Do you wanna die? Do you want me to kill your mother? Do you want me to slit your throat?’ I answered him immediately, ‘I don't care!’ And he'd say, ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!'" Wardlow said.
She says she hopes she will one day have the opportunity to confront her attacker.
Wardlow said: "I’d love to tell him, 'I wasn't afraid of you then. I’m not afraid of you now. All those years you were at large I was never afraid of you! Ever!'"
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