Eighteen days after Elaine disappeared, a female body floated ashore at Lighthouse Point in Santa Cruz. A radiologist studied the bones and concluded that the woman was twenty-five to thirty years old. It wasn’t Elaine. The Jane Doe was buried in an unmarked grave. The Davis disappearance went cold.
Thirty-one years later, a Walnut Creek police detective nearing retirement brought the case file to Holes, who reviewed it. Holes concluded that the radiologist was wrong and couldn’t have made an accurate determination of age. Holes joined other officials in an effort to exhume the Jane Doe’s body. Twenty-five feet deep on the side of a hill, shovels connected with a plastic body bag filled with bones.
Elaine’s father was dead. Her mother lived in Sacramento. Two days after the exhumation, Walnut Creek detectives asked to speak with her. Elaine’s younger sister came in from out of town for the meeting. The detectives told the mother and sister the news: we’ve identified Elaine.
“The family buries her,” says Holes. “A week later, Mom dies.”
We leave Walnut Creek, heading north. Mount Diablo, a mass of strange protrusions towering above valleys cut precisely into planned communities, recedes. Black mountain cats are said to slink among the high rocks on Mount Diablo. Mysterious lights have been glimpsed. In 1873 a live frog was found partially embedded in a slab of limestone 228 feet underground, according to local legend. In late August and early September, just after the first fall rain, hundreds of male tarantulas emerge from holes in the ground. They skitter through mint-scented mountain sage in search of burrows delicately draped in silk, where females are ready to mate. Visitors armed with flashlights flock to the mountain around sunset or just after dark, the best time to see the tarantulas. Bats wheel over gray pines and live oaks. Great horned owls hoot solemnly. Beams from flashlights weaving across trails sometimes catch a piece of earth that’s moving; closer inspection reveals the scuttling of saucer-size tarantulas. The male tarantulas never return to their holes. They mate as much as they can and then die, from starvation or cold.
We cross the bridge to Solano County, where we’ll turn east toward Davis.
“On a clear day, you can see Sacramento from here. And the Sierras,” says Holes.
He lives halfway between Sacramento and the East Bay. On weekends he often finds himself visiting the crime scenes.
“I like to drive,” he says. Whenever he’s in Southern California, he visits the crime scenes there too. During trips to Disneyland with his family, when the kids grow drowsy, his wife oversees naptime at the hotel while Holes takes a drive. To the Northwood subdivision in Irvine, to 13 Encina, where Janelle Cruz lived, or to 35 Columbus, where Drew Witthuhn cleaned up his sister-in-law Manuela’s blood.
“Each time I’m trying to look for Why here?” Holes says. “Why this?”
DAVIS
[EDITOR’S NOTE: This section features selections from the audio transcript from the trip to Davis.]
PAUL HOLES: This is how the EAR would have traveled down to the East Bay. Along I-80, right here.
MICHELLE: If you had to guess his point of origin, in terms of where he went to school . . . I won’t keep you to it. I’m just curious.
PAUL HOLES: If I were to guess? Sac State. If he was college-educated. Locationwise, if you take a look at where his attacks are, you know, you have the whole Rancho Cordova cluster. You have the attacks along La Riviera. You have the attacks that are right there, right by Sac State. Sac State seems likely. Now, you have some community colleges up in the Sacramento area that he could have gone to. Uh, high school? Uh . . . whew. There’s so many possibilities.
MICHELLE: I mean, you don’t feel like, maybe he grew up in Goleta?
PAUL HOLES: I wouldn’t say that, but when I look at the Sac cases, and—this is one thing I want to show you at some point—when you do a flyover of the order of his attacks in Sacramento, you see very early on, he is literally crisscrossing Sacramento. He is showing intimate familiarity with the area.
MICHELLE: He’s not showing up just to go to Sac State.
PAUL HOLES: No, no. I think he has a history up in Sacramento. Now, does he have a history in Goleta? I mean, anything’s possible. We don’t know. But down south, Goleta is—for me—that’s ground zero down south. And there’s something in Irvine. Some reason why he has two cases there.
MICHELLE: And that are not far apart at all.
PAUL HOLES: No. No. Ventura and Laguna Niguel are the two outliers. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Holes is referring to the Dana Point case here; some people mistakenly consider Dana Point part of Laguna Niguel.]
PAUL HOLES: Davis/Modesto, to me, is significant.
MICHELLE: Modesto was just once or twice?
PAUL HOLES: Twice.
MICHELLE: Okay.
PAUL HOLES: So, when I did my initial geographic assessment, I broke the EAR into phases. The first phase being up in Sacramento. Second phase being Modesto/Davis. Third phase being East Bay, and then the fourth phase being down in Southern California. When you get to this phase two—I lump Stockton into Sacramento because the EAR goes back to Sacramento after Stockton, but then once he hits in Modesto, he doesn’t go back to Sacramento until after he comes down into the East Bay. And he’s toggling back and forth between Modesto and Davis. It’s a hundred ten driving miles between those two cities. And between the second Modesto attack and the second Davis attack, it’s just twenty-two hours’ difference. Why is he toggling back and forth? I think it’s work-related. He’s not doing this to throw law enforcement off. I think there’s a work-related reason why he’s being sent to Modesto and having to go to Davis, and going back and forth.
MICHELLE: There’s only a twenty-two-hour difference?
PAUL HOLES: Twenty-two-hour difference.
MICHELLE: Wow. I didn’t know it was so close in time.
PAUL HOLES: And it just so happens, in those two cases, and only those two cases . . . In the Modesto case, you have the cab driver that picks up the strange man from the airport, who he drops off and is last seen headed toward new construction under way that’s just south of where the victims are attacked. And in the Davis case, that’s where the footprints lead back from the victim’s house to the UC-Davis airport. Shoe prints. That’s what I’m going to show you. So, is it possible that you’ve got the EAR flying into Modesto for that one attack, and then flying up to UC-Davis for the second attack?
MICHELLE: For work?
PAUL HOLES: For work. And, what does that say about who he is?
MICHELLE: Yeah.
PAUL HOLES: Well, your common joe ain’t flying an airplane.
MICHELLE: No.
PAUL HOLES: Your common joe ain’t producing a diagram that is, “How should I lay out this land?”
MICHELLE: Right.
PAUL HOLES: It takes somebody with resources. Because when you read the case file on the EAR, you don’t think this is somebody of wealth, right?
MICHELLE: Right.
PAUL HOLES: I don’t get that. This seems contradictory to that. But that’s what the EAR was about. Everything about him was misdirection.
MICHELLE: So, you’re leaning toward thinking he had more resources?
PAUL HOLES: I think he has . . . well, I think if this turns out EAR was doing this not for just a school project, but he’s actually looking at developing land and working for a developer, he’s at least minimally hooked in to the company at a level where he’s got a lot of say in that company.