فصل 26

26

Part Three

[EDITOR’S NOTE: When Michelle died, she was midway through the writing of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. To prepare the book for release, Michelle’s lead researcher, Paul Haynes, aka the Kid, and acclaimed investigative journalist Billy Jensen, who was a friend of Michelle’s, worked together to tie up loose ends and organize the materials Michelle left behind. The following chapter was written collaboratively by Haynes and Jensen.]

A WEEK AFTER MICHELLE’S DEATH, WE GAINED ACCESS TO HER HARD drives and began exploring her files on the Golden State Killer. All 3,500 of them. That was on top of the dozens of notebooks, the legal pads, the scraps of paper, and thousands of digitized pages of police reports. And the thirty-seven boxes of files she had received from the Orange County prosecutor, which Michelle lovingly dubbed the Mother Lode.

Thousands of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and only one person knew what it was supposed to look like. That one person wasn’t Michelle. It was the killer himself.

Michelle’s white whale was not the Black Dahlia Killer, or the Zodiac Killer, or even Jack the Ripper—infamous agents of unsolved crimes whose “bodies of work”—and thus the files of investigative source material—were relatively small.

No. Michelle was after a monster who had raped upward of fifty women and had murdered at least ten people. There were more than fifty-five crime scenes, with thousands of pieces of evidence.

We opened Michelle’s main hard drive and began going through the chapters she had completed. They reminded us why we were drawn to her writing in the first place.

Her prose jumps off the page and sits down next to you, weaving tales of Michelle on the streets of Rancho Cordova, Irvine, and Goleta on the trail of a killer. The amount of detail is massive. But her writing, at once dogged and empathetic, works the specifics into a fluent narrative. Just when the average reader might get fatigued by too many facts, she turns a phrase or shows a telling detail that brings it all around again. In the manuscript and on True Crime Diary, Michelle always found the perfect balance between the typical extremes of the genre. She didn’t flinch from evoking key elements of the horror and yet avoided lurid overindulgence in grisly details, as well as sidestepping self-righteous justice crusading or victim hagiography. What her words evoked was the intrigue, the curiosity, the compulsion to solve a puzzle and resolve the soul-chilling blank spots.

But there were parts of the story that Michelle had not completed. We laid out what she had finished. She had a nuance that one doesn’t normally encounter in true crime (except maybe in Capote—and when he was looking for a hook, he sometimes would just make it up). Michelle was writing a nonfiction book with a style that couldn’t be replicated. We thought about it and even took a brief stab. But it was fruitless. She had told this story in so many forms—in the chapters she had completed, in the story for Los Angeles magazine, and in her numerous blog posts— that there was enough material to fill in many of the gaps.

That being said, there were topics she would have definitely expanded on had she been able to complete the book. Many of those files or scribbled notes presented a lead she wanted to follow—or a red herring she might have disregarded. Where a friend’s bucket list might be littered with items like “Trip to Paris” and “Try skydiving,” Michelle’s included “Go to Modesto,” “Complete the reverse directory of Goleta residents,” and “Figure out way to submit DNA to 23andMe or Ancestry.com.”

BACK IN 2011, AFTER SHE POSTED HER FIRST STORY ON TRUE CRIME Diary about EAR-ONS (she hadn’t yet given him the Golden State Killer moniker), Michelle first became aware of Paul when he posted a link to her piece on the A&E Cold Case Files forum, which at that time was the only place where a dialogue about the case was taking place.

Michelle wrote him immediately.

“Hi!” she began. “You’re one of my favorite posters.” She proceeded to describe a rare surname she’d stumbled upon, whose few bearers shared some interesting geography. Maybe they were worth looking into.

“I struggle with insomnia,” she explained, “and when I can’t sleep, I sleuth around for good EAR suspects. I don’t know what your system is, if any, but I’ve been doing two things—running down names in the Goleta cemetery, and running names gleaned from alumni lists from multiple schools in Irvine, particularly the Northwood neighborhood. Not counting sheep, exactly, but hypnotic in its own way.”

The results of Michelle’s insomnia were laid bare on her hard drive:

Old maps and aerial photographs of Goleta, used to compare against the “homework” evidence map Images of the soles of shoes and bindings from the crime scenes An analysis of the turf-plugger tool, possibly used in the Domingo murder A folder bursting at the seams about the Visalia Ransacker, and theories she was putting forth to connect him to EAR-ONS

There was a list of some specific items taken from the victims of the East Area Rapist:

Silver Dollar “MISSILE” Silver Dollar “M.S.R.” 8.8.72 Ring with “For my angel” 1.11.70 One set of cuff links, yellow gold, initial “NR” in script Man’s gold ring, 80 pt diamond, square shape, 3 gold nuggets Ring “[redacted] Always [redacted]” 2.11.71 Gold initial ring WSJ Antique silver spoon ring by Prelude by International Class ring Lycoming College 1965

As well as a note mentioning that the rapist had a particular penchant for clock radios, having stolen five of them.

Nestled among the array was a spreadsheet containing the names and addresses of the 1976 Dos Pueblos High School cross country team, a rabbit hole she went down with the thought that the EAR might have been a young runner with muscular legs.

One document was titled “Possibly Interesting People.” It was a list pasted together over time, with notes and nuggets added as Michelle ran down the names and birth dates of potential suspects. Some of the fragments retained the tag “Sent from my iPhone”—betraying its contents’ origin as a quick note to self while Michelle was killing time at a movie premiere.

In another notepad, she wrote: “Don’t underestimate the fantasy: not raping in front of men—afraid of male; functional; privacy, writhing male not part of his fantasy. Mommy and crying. No remorse. Probably part of fantasy.”

There were even notes on her own psychology:

He was a compulsive prowler and searcher. We, who hunt him, suffer from the same affliction. He peered through windows. I tap “return.” Return. Return. Click Mouse click, mouse click. Rats search for their own food. The hunt is the adrenaline rush, not the catch. He’s the fake shark in Jaws, barely seen so doubly feared.

Michelle would reach out to witnesses from the old reports if she felt there was some detail left unelaborated or a nagging question the investigators neglected to ask. One of those witnesses was Andrew Marquette.

The night of June 10, 1979, was an especially hot one, and Marquette had left his bedroom window open to catch a breeze while he tried to sleep. Around midnight, he heard the crunch of footsteps on the rock path beneath his window. He peered out and saw a stranger creeping slowly alongside his house, his eyes fixed on the window of his neighbors. Marquette looked into the same window and could see the couple that lived there putting their child to bed.

Marquette continued observing the subject as he slunk toward a pine tree and receded into the grassy darkness. He fetched a .22 pistol he kept near his bed and racked the slide. It was a sound the prowler must have recognized, as he immediately sprang into motion and scrambled over the fence into the front yard. Marquette went to his neighbors’ house and knocked on the front door. No one answered.

He returned the pistol to his house and began heading back next door to try his neighbors’ again. Midway there, a passing car’s headlights swept across the homes on the north side of the block and briefly illuminated the prowler, who was now on a bike, leaning against a house. As Marquette started to approach, the subject began pedaling furiously across the lawn, fleeing from Marquette and disappearing into the night. Marquette called the police. They cruised up and down the neighborhood, searching for the prowler to no avail.

Several hours later, the forty-seventh EAR attack occurred half a block away. Investigators reconnected with Marquette during the canvass, and he told the same story.

The prowler was a white male in his twenties with collar-length hair, wearing Levi’s and a dark-colored T-shirt—consistent with what the latest EAR victim described. The bicycle on which the prowler had fled was found abandoned later that morning, several blocks away, next to an Olympia beer can from the victim’s fridge. Investigators quickly realized that this was the same bike stolen several hours before the attack from an open garage a mile away. Near that garage, detectives found a pair of white, knotted shoelaces.

Michelle felt that Marquette was someone worth reinterviewing. She contacted him in late 2015.

She sent him a map she had sketched, along with her understanding of the schematic of that night’s events, and asked him to confirm and amend where appropriate. Paul compiled a seventeen-picture photo lineup, and Michelle asked Marquette which of the individuals most closely resembled the man he saw that night.

On the phone, she asked Marquette to spit out the first word that came to mind to describe the prowler he observed. Marquette replied without missing a beat: “Schoolboy.”

In a 2011 file called “EAR CLUES,” Michelle attempted to consolidate many of the known facts about the man into a profile:

Physically he’s most often described as 5? 9? to 5? 11?, with a swimmer’s build. Lean, but with a muscular chest and noticeably big calves. Very small penis, both narrow and short. 9–9½ shoe size. Dirty blond hair. Bigger than normal nose. Type A blood type, nonsecretor. He used the phone to contact his victims, sometimes before an attack, sometimes after. Sometimes just hang-up phone calls. Sometimes with theatrical, scary-movie deep breathing and threats. He wore ski masks. He brought guns. He had what looked like a pen style navigator flashlight, and he liked to startle his victims awake by beaming it at them, blinding them. He tore towels into strips, or used shoelaces, to bind victims. He had a script, and he stuck to it. Some variation of, “Do what I say, or I’ll kill you.” He alleged he only wanted money and food. Sometimes he said it was for his apartment. Other times he mentioned his van. He would make the woman tie up the man, then separate them. Sometimes he’d stack dishes on the man’s back and tell him if he heard a crash he’d kill the female victim. He frequently brought baby lotion to the scene to use as a lubricant. He liked to steal neighborhood bicycles and escape on them. Some personal items associated with him: a bag with a long zipper, like a doctor’s bag, or duffel bag; blue tennis shoes; motocross gloves; corduroy pants. He took driver’s licenses and jewelry, particularly rings. Some of the things he said, which may or may not be true but are nevertheless interesting: Killing someone in Bakersfield; moving back to LA; “I hate you, Bonnie”; being thrown out of the Air Force. Something may have been going on with him in late October 1977. In two different attacks around then he was described as sobbing. Some of the vehicles possibly associated with EAR-ONS: green Chevy van, 1960s yellow sidestep pickup truck, VW bug.

An e-mail forwarded to Michelle by Patton reveals that she had even enlisted her father-in-law, a career US Marine, to do some research on military bases in the area back then, as there was a theory that the rapist might have been an airman.

Begin forwarded message:

From: Larry Oswalt

Date: April 18, 2011, 2:01:06 PM PDT

To: Patton

Subject: Air Force Bases around Sacramento

Mom said Michelle had some questions about Air Force Bases around

Sacramento. Here is the list.

Near Sacramento:

McLellan closed 2001

Mather Closed 1993

Beale still active—40 miles north of Sacramento

Travis is located in Fairfield, CA sort of north of San Francisco and a good ways from Sacramento.

Let me know if you need any additional info.

Dad

Many have attempted to profile EAR-ONS over the years, but Michelle wanted to go one step further and dive deep into the locations of the rapes to see whether geographic profiling could lead to his identity. Among the pieces she left behind were her musings about EAR-ONS’s geography:

My feeling is that the two most important locations are Rancho Cordova and Irvine. The first and third rapes were only yards apart in Rancho Cordova. He walked away in an unhurried fashion from the third attack without his pants on, suggesting he lived close by. He murdered Manuela Witthuhn on February 6, 1981, in Irvine. Five years later he murdered Janelle Cruz. Manuela and Janelle lived in the same subdivision, just two miles apart. Interestingly, Manuela’s answering machine tape was stolen in the attack. Was the suspect’s voice on the tape? If so, was he worried it was recognizable as someone in the neighborhood?

A document Michelle created in August 2014, entitled “Geo-Chapter,” has her rethinking the map after more than three solid years of nonstop research. When you open it, there is just one line: “Carmichael seems like central clearing, like a buffer zone.”

FINDING THE KILLER WITH GEO-PROFILING

While his most fundamental characteristics—his name and his face—are unknown, it can be said with reasonable certainty that the East Area Rapist was, among approximately seven hundred thousand other humans, a resident of Sacramento County in the mid-to-late 1970s.

The EAR’s connection to the many other places in which he struck—Stockton, Modesto, Davis, the East Bay—is less clear.

The East Area Rapist was a highly prolific offender in Sacramento, exhibiting the familiarity and ubiquity of someone who was undoubtedly local. With places like Stockton, Modesto, and Davis, where he struck two or three times apiece, one questions what connection he had to these cities, if any. Perhaps he had family there or had business there. Maybe he was just passing through. Maybe he flung a dart at a map.

But you’d be hard-pressed to find an investigator who doesn’t believe the EAR lived or at least worked in Sacramento.

If we accept that the EAR was living in Sacramento from 1976 through 1978 or 1979, which is nearly certain, and then lived in Southern California during the first half of the 1980s, which is highly probable, then the haystack gets considerably smaller. Devise a list of people who lived in both areas during those time periods, and the suspect pool shrinks from nearly a million to maybe ten thousand.

It would be ideal if the process were as simple as, say, applying filters to a product search on Amazon. With a few clicks, one could filter by gender (male), birth year (1940–1960), race (white), height (5? 7? to 5? 11?), places lived (Carmichael AND Irvine; or Rancho Cordova AND in the 92620 zip code; or Citrus Heights, Goleta, AND Dana Point), and maybe occupation for good measure (real estate agent, construction worker, painter, landscaper, landscape architect, nurse, pharmacist, hospital orderly, cop, security guard, OR serviceman—all of which are among the many occupations that various investigators and armchair sleuths have posited the EAR may have had). Just set all these search parameters and voilà! You’d be left with a manageable yet all-inclusive list of potential suspects.

But it’s not that easy. The names have to come from somewhere, and there’s no central database of, well, people. It must be either composited or built. And creating such a list is indeed one of the projects Michelle felt most optimistic about.

He may have come from Visalia. Or perhaps Goleta was his hometown. He may have lived in the 92620 zip code of Irvine. He may have gone to Cordova High School. His name may appear in both the 1977 Sacramento phone book and the 1983 Orange County phone book. We didn’t need access to restricted information or an official suspect list to uncover some potential suspects who might otherwise have flown under the radar. All the necessary information and tools that could be used to process it were already available in the form of online public records aggregators, vital records, property records, yearbooks, and yellowed phone directories from the 1970s and ’80s (many of which have fortunately been digitized).

In the year prior to Michelle’s death, Paul had begun creating master resident lists for Sacramento and Orange Counties for the relevant time periods, which combined names from sources such as Ancestry.com’s marriage and divorce records, the appropriate county’s registry of deeds (which entailed using a Web scraper), alumni lists, and old crisscross directories and telephone books.†

Michelle then connected with a computer programmer in Canada who offered to volunteer his help in whatever way he could. Per Paul’s specifications, the programmer built a cross-referencing utility that processes multiple lists and finds matching lines of text. With that application, Paul could begin feeding it two or more lists and then analyze its match results—now numbering over forty thousand.

Once the list of matches had been generated, Paul would go through it and weed out the false positives (far more likely with common names like John Smith) by using public records aggregators. Paul would then collect as much information as possible on each match until he was satisfied that neither he nor any of his male relatives was viable. The names of those he was unable to rule out would be added to a master list of potential suspects.

IN CASES OF SERIAL BURGLARY, RAPE, OR MURDER, THE SUSPECT lists often swell to several thousand names and beyond. Difficulty in managing a list of this size enforces the need to devise a prioritization system, whereby suspect ranks are determined by factors such as prior criminal offenses and police contacts, availability for all crimes in the series, physical characteristics, and—if a geographic profile has been done—the suspect’s work and home addresses.

Geographic profiling is a specialized criminal investigative technique—perhaps more useful and scientific than behavioral profiling, which is arguably closer to an art than a science— whereby the key locations in a linked crime series are analyzed for the purpose of determining the likely anchor points (home, work, etc.) of a serial offender. This allows one to focus on isolated bubbles within a much broader suspect pool.

Although the general technique has informally been around for a while—you see investigators employing it to find a kidnapper in Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963)—the methodology of geographic profiling didn’t even have a name until the late 1980s, about ten years after the phrase “serial killer” first entered the popular lexicon. Given that it wasn’t yet an established investigative procedure, awareness of geo-profiling could not have been a factor motivating the EAR—a lover of misdirection—to misdirect geographically by commuting great distances to faraway neighborhoods in Southern California. Moreover, his Southern California crimes were not generally recognized as EAR crimes (and he specifically seemed to want to avoid this recognition, which is likely one reason he began killing his victims—to eliminate witnesses) until DNA evidence established them as such. The logical conclusion, per the principle of Occam’s razor, is that the EAR was living in Southern California during the period in which he was offending there.

That said, while we would not advocate completely eliminating someone merely because a Southern California residence cannot be established, it would take some damn compelling reason to muster any interest in such a suspect.

However, Southern California—due to the infrequency of the EAR’s known offenses there, and the broad distance covered—is not ideal for a geographic profile. Because Sacramento was the area in which our offender was most prolific over the ten-year span of his known crimes, it is the ripest of the case-relevant locations for building a geographic profile.

With twenty-nine distinct locations linked to confirmed EAR attacks and close to a hundred likely connected burglaries, prowler reports, and other incidents, there is more than sufficient data for developing a geographic profile that would spotlight the neighborhoods in which the EAR most likely lived. In geo-profile-speak, these areas are known as buffer zones. Buffer zones are like an eye of a hurricane, carved out by the typical serial offender’s reluctance to strike too close to home.

So, at least in theory, identifying the EAR should simply be a matter of finding people who were living in Southern California in the early 1980s who had previously lived in Sacramento County in the mid-to-late 1970s—most likely living in one of those buffer zones.

BY LOOKING AT THE AREAS FAMILIAR TO THE OFFENDER IN THE early phases of the series, as opposed to the ones to which he branched out later on, one can analyze the chronology of attacks in Sacramento and break them up into multiple phases. We’ve chosen five:

Attacks 1–4 (pre–media blackout) Attacks 5–8 (pre–media blackout) Attacks 9–15 (post–media blackout following the first news stories about a serial rapist operating in the East Area of Sacramento) Attacks 16–22 (beginning with the EAR’s major m.o. shift from lone women to couples, and preceding his three-month hiatus in the summer of 1977) Attacks 24–44 (following the EAR’s summer ’77 hiatus as well as his first known attack outside of Sacramento County)

Creating a Google Map with a layer for each phase allows you to isolate and toggle between phases, comparing the spread within each and determining if a prospective anchor point or an apparent buffer zone remains consistent through the offender’s incrementally expanding radius of activity. In addition, tighter clusters of attacks tend to signify neighborhoods the offender may not know very well.

Of particular interest is the swath of Sacramento County where Carmichael, Citrus Heights, and Fair Oaks meet, a part of town where the EAR’s attacks were the most spread out—and which also exhibited the most clear-cut buffer zone. (See figure 1.)

Paul adopted the assumption that the EAR lived somewhere in the vicinity of what’s labeled the North Ridge Country Club on the map, and he observed that, each time the EAR attacked in this area, it was on the opposite side of that ostensible buffer zone from where he attacked previously—a possible interplay between instinct (change of pace) and calculation (avoidance of areas with increased surveillance).

FIGURE 1

Paul decided to attempt a geographic profile using an entirely improvised and nonscientific approach. He ported screenshots of his Google Map into Photoshop and began drawing lines between the attacks in this area, pairing successive ones. Plotting both the midway point of each line as well as where each line intersected with another, and then connecting each set of plot points resulted in shapes that Paul then shaded. The most densely shaded area would theoretically represent the EAR’s approximate home base. (See figure 2.)

Alternately, lines were drawn through the midway points that were perpendicular to the lines connecting the paired attacks, in order to find the densest concentration of intersections. The result was similar. (See figure 3.)

Paul then took a different yet equally ad hoc approach by forming a triangle that connected the three most outlying attacks in the East Area, and then, in order to find its true center, creating a smaller, inverted triangle by connecting the midpoints of the larger shape’s three sides. He repeated the process until he was left with a triangle small enough that it was analogous to a sheet of paper he couldn’t fold in half again. (See figure 4.)

FIGURE 2

FIGURE 3

Each effort, both those described above and those omitted out of mercy toward the reader, yielded a similar result, which suggested that the EAR’s anchor point was somewhere close to the intersection of Dewey Drive and Madison Avenue, at the border between Carmichael and Fair Oaks. This conclusion was supported to some extent by a 1995 FBI study (Warren et al.), which found that the fifth attack in a series was closest to the offender’s home in a plurality of instances (24 percent of cases, versus 18 percent of cases where the first attack was closest). The fifth EAR attack was second closest to the proposed anchor point, whereas attack number seventeen was only nominally closer (by approximately three hundred feet).

FIGURE 4

A couple of years later, Michelle got ahold of a geographic profile performed on the EAR Sacramento attacks by none other than Kim Rossmo, the father of modern geographic profiling. In fact, Rossmo himself coined the term.

Rossmo’s anchor point was near the intersection of Coyle Avenue and Millburn Street—less than half a mile northwest of the anchor point Paul had postulated without ever having seen Rossmo’s analysis. (See figure 5.)

FIGURE 5

FINDING THE KILLER WITH FAMILIAL DNA

Scrolling through the rest of the 3,500 documents in Michelle’s hard drive, one comes upon a file titled “RecentDNAresults,” which features the EAR’s Y-STR markers (short tandem repeats on the Y chromosome that establish male-line ancestry), including the elusive rare PGM marker.

Having the Golden State Killer’s DNA was always the one ace up this investigation’s sleeve.

But a killer’s DNA is only as good as the databases we can compare it to. There was no match in CODIS. And there was no match in the California penal system’s Y-STR database. If the killer’s father, brothers, or uncles had been convicted of a felony in the past sixteen years, an alert would have gone to Paul Holes or Erika Hutchcraft (the current lead investigator in Orange County). They would have looked into the man’s family, zeroed in on a member who was in the area of the crimes, and launched an investigation.

But they had nothing.

There are public databases that the DNA profile could be used to match, filled not with convicted criminals but with genealogical buffs. You can enter the STR markers on the Y chromosome of the killer into these public databases and try to find a match, or at least a surname that could help you with the search.

Paul Holes had done this in 2013, and just like Michelle smiling and proclaiming “I’ve solved it!” Holes thought he had finally caught the man via this technique.

Michelle tells the story in this half-finished section, titled “Sacramento, 2013.”

Paul Holes can still hear the sound of his filing cabinet drawer slamming shut. He’d emptied out everything pertaining to the EAR, boxed it up, and FedEx’ed it to Larry Pool in Orange County.

“Larry’s got it,” Holes thought. Only a matter of time.

A decade later, Holes was sitting in his office, bored out of his mind. He was chief of the crime lab now. On his second marriage. Two more small children with the second wife. He’d worked at the crime lab long enough to see entire specialties discredited. Hair analysis? Made him cringe to even think about it. He and his co-workers sometimes sat around and laughed at the tools they used to have to work with, unwieldy and defective instruments, like the first generation of mobile phones.

He was starting to make good on the promise he always said he would, that he put off for a decade in order to accrue steady promotions and provide for his family. Investigator Paul Holes. He always liked the sound of it. He was meeting the right people. Getting the right credentials. A move to the DA’s office to work cold-case investigation full time was already in the works.

But there was one problem, one he knew full well he was going to take with him to the DA’s office. The EAR. Each year he hadn’t surfaced, nabbed by DNA or turned in by a tipster, Holes’s interest grew. His wife might call it an obsession. Spreadsheets were made. Leisurely car rides turned into crime-scene tours. Not once, but weekly.

Sometimes when he thought of the destruction wrought by one faceless man, not just the victims but also the victims’ families, the detectives’ shame, the wasted money and time and effort and family time and ruined marriages and sex foregone for lifetimes . . . Holes rarely swore. Wasn’t him. But when he thought about all this, he just felt, fuck you. Fuck. You.

The first generation of detectives who worked the case were having health problems. The second generation of detectives, who worked it when they could grab time here and there, were retiring soon. Time was running out. The EAR was looking back at them, smirking from a door half-closed.

Holes scooted his chair over to his computer. In the last year, ancestral DNA had become popular with people curious about their genealogy and, though this was much less publicized, as a tool for finding unidentified criminals. Many in law enforcement were wary. There were quality-assurance issues. Privacy issues. Holes knew DNA. Knew it well. In his opinion, ancestral DNA was a tool, not a certainty. He had a Y-DNA profile generated from the EAR’s DNA, which means he isolated the EAR’s paternal lineage. The Y-DNA profile could be input into certain genealogical websites, the kind that people use to find first cousins and the like. You input a set of markers from your Y-DNA profile, anywhere from 12 to 111, and a list of matches is returned, surnames of families with whom you might share a common ancestor. Almost always the matches are at a genetic distance of 1 from you, which doesn’t mean much, relative-seeking-wise. You’re looking for the elusive 0—a close match.

Holes did this every couple of weeks. He kept his expectations at zero. A way to feed the obsession. So it was that on an afternoon in mid-March 2013 he input the familiar sequence and hit return. After a moment the list appeared, many of them familiar surnames from his previous searches. But he didn’t recognize the name at the very top of the list.

The EAR has one extremely rare marker. Only 2 percent of the world’s population has this marker. When Holes clicked on the link of the top name he saw that the profile contained this rare marker. It also matched eleven other EAR markers, all the same—0 genetic distance. Holes had never received a 0 gdistance before.

He didn’t know what to do first. He picked up the phone to call Ken Clark, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s detective he talked to the most, but then hung up before dialing. Sacramento was an hour drive from Holes’s office in Martinez. He grabbed his car keys.

He’d go to the place where, thirty-six years ago, it all began.

Michelle never got to finish the punchline—the kind of punchline that could have driven anyone who had been working on this case for so long over the edge. It turns out that a retired Secret Service agent and amateur sleuth named Russ Oase had anonymously uploaded EAR’s markers into the same database. So the match Paul Holes thought he had was actually the result of two guys uploading the same killer’s DNA profile and getting a mirror-image match.

DNA was the thread Michelle felt was the best way to get out of the maze of the Golden State Killer. California was one of only nine states in America that allowed testing of familial DNA within the state’s database. If the GSK’s brother was arrested for a felony tomorrow, we would see a hit. But that database contains only people who have been convicted of a crime.

Michelle thought she might have found the killer when she had uploaded his DNA profile to a Y-STR database available online from Ancestry.com.

On quick glance, at the top of the page, it looks promising. The name at the top (we are obscuring all the names) has many hits, as seen by the check marks. The name is very uncommon (only a handful in the United States and England). Next to the name, MRCA stands for Most Recent Common Ancestor, and the number is the number of generations you have to look back in your family tree to have a 50 percent probability that you will find a common ancestor. The MRCA between the man and Michelle (standing in for the killer’s DNA) is estimated to have lived eleven generations ago (with a 50 percent probability).

After sharing her find with Paul Holes and other experts, Michelle would discover that it wasn’t quite as significant as she initially thought. You would have to go back through this guy’s family 330 years, and even then you’d have only a fifty-fifty chance of finding him.

Finding the exact person with these results was a no-go with this test.

One of those experts Michelle consulted was Colleen Fitzpatrick, a forensic genealogist who aids people in finding their birth parents—and who has been instrumental in helping solve some major crimes, including Phoenix’s infamous Canal Killer. Fitzpatrick wrote the book on forensic genealogy—literally†—and spent many hours, some of them the early a.m. variety, on the phone with Michelle, discussing the various ways of approaching the genealogical route to identifying the GSK.

After Michelle died, Colleen explained to Billy that even though we don’t have a usable lineage to follow from the above comparison, we do have a clue:

“Even if you come up with Y-matches that are distant, but they all have the same name, you can say that is probably Mr. X’s last name and he belongs to the same extended family as those matches (along the direct line), maybe going back many generations. But in this case, there are a variety of names, so you can’t pin one down. The ‘flavor’ of the names can sometimes give you some ethnicity for your Mr. X. Say, if his list is made of all Irish names, you can say he’s probably Irish. That is what I did on the canal murders. Not only did I come up with the name Miller for their Canal Murderer, I also told the Phoenix PD that he was a Miller of Irish extraction. A few weeks later, they arrested Bryan Patrick Miller. That’s where I got the idea that the EAR had a German name but was from the UK. In the tests I ran for Michelle, that’s the ‘flavor’ of names I was coming up with.”

So we were looking for a guy with a German name whose family at some point lived in the UK. Of course, he could have been adopted; then all bets are off.

IT ALL COMES DOWN TO THE SIZE OF THE DATABASE YOU ARE TRYING to compare your sample to. By 2016, there were numerous companies offering to run your DNA profile and add it to a rapidly expanding data set. These companies use autosomal DNA testing. For around a hundred dollars and a little bit of your saliva, the companies deliver your DNA profile. On top of learning whether you might possibly get Alzheimer’s in the future, or the odds of your eye color, the test is used by adoptees or people who were raised by single moms. The results that come back to them can deliver previously unknown first cousins, and from there, they can find their birth fathers and other information about their own identities. If you don’t get a hit at first, there is still hope. The companies send you e-mails when new family members have uploaded their DNA. “You Have New DNA Relatives” read one Billy recently received from 23andMe, having submitted his own DNA a few years back. “51 people who share DNA with you have joined DNA Relatives over the past 90 days.” The tests do not connect just male lineage. They connect everyone.

Most important, the databases are huge—23andMe has 1.5 million profiles and Ancestry has 2.5 million.

Just think of how many murders, rapes, and other violent crimes could be solved if law enforcement could enter the DNA from crime scenes into these databases and be pointed in the right direction via a cousin of the perpetrator found in the system. Unfortunately, neither company will work with law enforcement, citing privacy issues and their terms of service.

The idea that the answer to this mystery is probably hiding in the databases of 23andMe and Ancestry.com kept Michelle up at night.

If we could just submit the killer’s actual genetic material—as opposed to only select markers—to one of these databases, the odds are great that we would find a second or third cousin and that person would lead investigators to the killer’s identity.

So the answer may very well be sitting behind this locked door. A lock made up of privacy issues and illegal-search-and-seizure issues.

Michelle wanted to be able to enter the killer’s DNA into these rapidly expanding commercial databases. She would have eschewed their terms of service to do so. But to enter your DNA into those databases, the company sends you a tube that you spit in and send back to them. Michelle did not have the killer’s spit or even a swab. She had the profile on paper. But according to a scientist friend of Billy’s, there was a way around that. Nevertheless, when critics talk privacy, the terms of use of the businesses, and the Fourth Amendment, they evoke the classic statement by Ian Malcolm as played by Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

WHEN MICHELLE BEGAN WORKING ON THE FEATURE FOR LOS ANGELES magazine that served as the basis for this book, official case files began trickling into her possession. She read the materials carefully and began building an index of people, places, and things named in the reports. The purpose was threefold: to promote easy location of investigative elements within the reports, to disambiguate individuals and find those who may be of interest on the basis of later geographic movement, and to find overlapping names or possible common bonds among victims.

Michelle had cultivated relationships with investigators both active and retired that evolved into open exchanges of information. She was like an honorary investigator, and her energy and insight reinvigorated the case’s tired blood. She passed our findings, along with the Master List, to some of the active investigators.

The collection of official case materials continued to grow. The culmination was a stunning acquisition of physical case materials in January 2016, when Michelle and Paul were led to a narrow closet at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department that housed sixty-five Bankers Boxes full of EAR-ONS case files. Remarkably, they were permitted to look through them—under supervision—and borrow what they wanted.

This was the Mother Lode.

They set aside thirty-five of the boxes along with two large plastic bins to take back to L.A.

Michelle had thought ahead. Instead of sharing a day trip in one vehicle, they motorcaded into Santa Ana in dual SUVs. They stacked the Bankers Boxes onto dollies and wheeled them down to the loading dock behind OCSD headquarters, where they stuffed them into the two vehicles while the undersheriff, unaware of what they were doing, emerged from the building and luckily didn’t seem to notice what was going down. They moved as quickly as physically possible, lest people at OCSD changed their mind.

They returned to L.A., and the boxes were moved to the second floor of Michelle’s house. What had been her daughter’s playroom would now become the Box Room.

They soon began digging through the materials. All the holy grails, the holdouts Michelle had not yet seen, were there, as were mountains of supplemental reports. Supplemental reports— compiled from the orphans and outliers, the one-offs that drifted to the back of the EAR filing cabinet in the absence of real estate in a specific case folder—were among the materials that they coveted the most. Michelle and Paul shared the belief that if the offender’s name was anywhere in these files, it was likely one of those clues in the margins: the forgotten suspect, the overlooked witness report, the out-of-place vehicle that was never followed up on, or the prowler who at the time gave what seemed like a reasonable explanation for his presence in the area.

Michelle purchased two high-volume digital scanners, and they began scanning the materials. Much of this material had not been seen by active investigators like Paul Holes, Ken Clark, and Erika Hutchcraft. Scanning would not only allow the files to become easily accessible and make the text searchable, but it would allow Michelle to reciprocate the generous spirit of these investigators by providing them an invaluable service.

This was the single most exciting break since the investigation began. This was a major pivot, a game changer. Michelle believed that the probability of the offender’s name being somewhere in those boxes was about 80 percent.

AFTER THE LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED, Michelle wrote a blog post about the letters she was getting from armchair detectives who had read the story and became obsessed— even for just a few hours—with cracking the case.

In the last week, I’ve received dozens of responses from readers about my article “In the Footsteps of a Killer.” Many emails contained insights about the evidence and fresh ideas for how best to catch the Golden State Killer, the elusive serial violent offender that from 1976 to 1986 preyed on victims up and down California.

The map drew the most ideas, with many readers contributing theories based on their professional or academic backgrounds. One reader, a general contractor with experience with “golf planned communities,” felt the map looked like many of the communities he’d worked on. The hand-drawn paths, he said, resembled golf cart paths.

Another had a chilling insight into the detailed property lines. They’re indicating fence lines, the tipster wrote, because the mapmaker is showing barriers he would encounter while moving around in the dark.

One reader felt there was a clue in the “Mad is the word that reminds me of 6th grade” journal entry. The “6” in “6th” grade looked more like a “G,” she pointed out, adding that the writer clearly went back and inserted the word “the” before the “6,” as if changing what he was originally going to write, which in her opinion was probably the name of the town he grew up in. A town, she surmised, which begins with “G.”

The “Mad is the word” evidence details the writer’s anger toward his male sixth-grade teacher. More than one reader pointed out that male sixth-grade teachers were relatively unusual in the 1960s, when the writer presumably was in elementary school.

Another reader noted that Visalia, where the Golden State Killer may have started out as a younger offender, was home to many pilots from nearby Lemoore Naval Air Station. The killer may have been the son of a pilot, the tipster theorized, as several other locations in the crime series are close to military air bases.

Some of these clues might help form the picture of the killer. And some might have absolutely nothing to do with him, like a jigsaw puzzle you buy at a garage sale that’s been mixed up with pieces from twenty other jigsaw puzzles.

Michelle was determined, to the end, to investigate each and every piece to see if it fit.

One of the last documents modified on her hard drive—dated April 18, 2016, three days before her death—was titled “StillToDo.”

Find out from Debbi D about flashlight; would they have brought flashlight from other house. To her knowledge did Greg visit Toltec? [One of the detectives] needed psychiatric leave after O/M [Offerman/Manning], and Ray said worst crime scene he ever saw (this was in email to Irwin.) Why worse than Domingo/Sanchez? For Erika: Since my training isn’t in reading crime scenes, what do you think happened at Cruz? For Ken Clark: Was there a public/press link to Maggiore at the time of the homicide? Is it true FBI ran familial and expected 200 to 400 hits for names and got zero? Find out from Ken exactly what he meant about the husband or the guy in the clown suit walking down the street.

The questions go on for pages and pages. On Michelle’s blog, True Crime Diary, we will begin to try to get the answers to the questions she had left open. The discussions of the case are ongoing, and we invite readers to join in and follow the numerous message boards that light up day and night with new clues and different theories about the killer. Michelle always said she didn’t care who solved this case, just as long as it got solved.

There’s no question as to Michelle’s impact on the case. In the words of Ken Clark, she “brought attention to one of the least known, yet most prolific serial offenders ever to operate in the United States. If I hadn’t read the reports for myself during my years of investigation on this case, the story would be almost unbelievable. Her professional research, attention to detail, and sincere desire to identify the suspect allowed her to strike a balance between the privacy of those who suffered while exposing the suspect in a way that someone may recognize.”

“It is not easy to gain the trust of so many detectives across so many jurisdictions,” Erika Hutchcraft told us, “but she managed to do so and you knew it was by her reputation, her perseverance, and the fact that she cared about the case.”

Paul Holes concurred, going so far as to say that he considered Michelle to be his detective partner on the case. “We were constantly in communication. I would get excited about something and would send it to her and she would also get excited. She would dig and find a name and send it to me to look into. This case is the ultimate emotional roller coaster—the highs are amazing when you think you have found the guy, and then you crash when you eliminate the promising suspect through DNA. Michelle and I shared in those ups and downs. I had my good suspects and she had hers; we would send e-mails back and forth in a growing crescendo of excitement only to experience the finality of an elimination.

“Michelle was able to accomplish gaining not only my trust but the trust of the entire task force and proved herself as a natural investigator, adding value with her own insights and tenacity. The ability to learn the case, have insights that many do not have the aptitude for, the persistence, and the fun and engaging personality all wrapped up in one person was amazing. I know she was the only person who could have accomplished what she did in this case starting out as an outsider and becoming one of us over time. I think this private/public partnership was truly unique in a criminal investigation. Michelle was perfect for it.

“I last saw Michelle in Las Vegas where we spent a lot of time together talking about the case. Little did I know this would be the last time I would see her face-to-face. Her last email to me was Wednesday, 4/20. As always, she let me know she was sending me some files she and her researcher had found and thought I should know about. She ended that email with ‘Talk to you soon, Michelle.’

“I downloaded those files she sent after I found out about her passing Friday night. She was still helping me.”

In an e-mail to her editor in December 2013, Michelle addressed what every true-crime journalist has to come to grips with when writing about an unsolved crime: how does the story end?

I’m still optimistic about developments in the case, but not blind to the challenge of writing about a currently unsolved mystery. I did have one idea on that front. After my magazine article was published, I received tons of emails from readers, almost all starting along the lines of, “You may have thought of this, but if not, what about (insert some investigative idea).” It really confirmed for me that inside everyone lurks a Sherlock Holmes that believes that given the right amount of clues they could solve a mystery. If the challenge here, or perceived weakness, is that the unsolved aspect will leave readers unfulfilled, why not turn that on its head and use it as a strength? I have literally hundreds of pages of analyses from both back in the day, and more recently—geo-profiles, analysis of footwear, days of the week he attacked, etc. One idea I had was to include some of those in the book, to offer the reader the chance to play detective.

We will not stop until we get his name. We’ll be playing the detective as well.

— PAUL HAYNES AND BILLY JENSEN

May 2017