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.