It's scary when you think about it. This guy now caught had no criminal history, long standing job with 1 employer, and absolutely no ties to or interaction with the victim's family. He seems like your average 'Joe Soap' with nothing glaring about him to make people think - 'yeah, we should phone in a tip about X because of that other incident/his creepy behaviour/his social ineptness/complaints from female employees/his Peeping Tom juvenile record etc etc. There was NOTHING to say - look at this guy! No wonder he went undiscovered for so long.
Really makes you wonder how many other cases out there were completely random and thus will be so difficult to solve without expensive recourse to technology like this. Unfortunately there just isn't the funding to address every cold case, or even most of the cold cases, so it does make you wonder how many 'Average Joes' out there have gotten away with despicable things.
If you think about it, statistically it must be 'average' or 'normal' people who commit the vast majority of crimes like this. I think much hyped serial killers like BTK (Dennis Rader) and the Golden State Killer (Joseph D'Angelo) are the exceptions to the rule and get all the media attention and hype while 'ordinary' yet singular and grotesque acts like this are a flash in the pan for some suspects, an aberration to their normal behaviour, so they go undetected because why or earth would they be on police 'radar' or on anyone's 'radar' for that matter? They've done nothing (known about) to warrant it.
Chilling. A vicious killer in plain sight, pays his bills, pitches up to work on time, probably has kids and a dog. I think it's kind of more scary than the out and out nutsos like Richard Ramirez who were so blatantly sick and twisted. Those killers you can point to or suspect right off the bat because of their anti - social behaviours, alcohol/drug abuse, slovenliness, mental illness/psychopathic behaviours, institutional records etc. So easy to say - 'Of course it's (insert name), guy's the neighbourhood freak and he's totes off his rocker, remember that girl he (insert crime) last year??' With a 'normal' criminal like this guy who only offends once and gets away with it he could be literally anybody, which makes him so much dangerous.
As usual with this type of suspect you have the inevitable question/doubt of 'He only raped and killed this one young girl, no one before, no one afterwards, really??' I suppose the science will tell if he's linked to other cases and we'll just have to wait and see.