I'll Be Gone in the Dark

by Michelle McNamara

  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 Mic
helle 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.