I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer
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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 upl
oaded 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.