Holes regrets not making a switch to the investigations unit twenty years ago, when he was first tempted. Certainty won. He had two small kids. He was climbing the ranks in forensic science. You can see why he’s chief material. He’s blond and fit, with a handsome, genial face. He never winces or eye-rolls. His parents are from Minnesota, and he retains a hint of the long o. I once referred to Rupert Murdoch and he shrugged, not recognizing the name. “We run in different circles,” he said. Looking at him, you’d never guess that his parents once gave him the book Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives as a “thinking of you” gift.
DNA testing once required hours of tedious manual work. In a sexual assault case, for example, you would take a swab from a plastic tube, isolate the sperm, and locate the DNA markers via a dot-blot technique that involved a series of white strips, trays, and specialized washes. Increasingly, as technology advanced, robotic arms and instruments did the work. In turn, Holes had more time to dedicate to cold cases. Holes believed Walther might be the One.
When he first came across the “homework” evidence in the Sheriff’s Property Room that spring afternoon in 2011, he had been looking for a ski mask—Walther’s ski mask. He knew that back when Walther was suspect number one, task force investigators had interviewed his friend, a guy who’d been arrested with him for selling marijuana in Sacramento in ’77. The friend gave them a few of Walther’s belongings, including a black ski mask. Walther’s DNA profile wasn’t currently in the system; Holes wondered if he could develop a profile from hairs or skin cells extracted from the mask.
Unfortunately, Walther was in the wind. The man had disappeared off the face of the earth. He’d failed to appear for a court date related to a misdemeanor domestic violence charge in 2003, and there was a warrant out for his arrest. His driver’s license was suspended in June 2004. After that, nothing. No credit. No job trail. No welfare. Holes tried to reconstruct Walther’s messy life as best he could. He requested and received Walther’s school records and noted with interest that his sixth-grade teacher was male, somewhat unusual for the time. Holes got the teacher on the phone. The elderly man said he didn’t recall Walther. But sentence writing would fit with the kind of schoolroom punishment he meted out then, he said.
The teacher mentioned that about ten years ago an unidentified male called him and sang “Freedom Isn’t Free,” a song he’d made unruly kids sing in class. “Remember that,” the caller said, and hung up. The call had upset the teacher enough that he changed his number and kept it unlisted. He told Holes he was sorry he couldn’t be more helpful.
Holes looked up the words to the song “Freedom Isn’t Free,” by Paul Colwell.
“There was a general by the name of George,” starts the fourth verse, “With a small band of men at Valley Forge.”
* * *
RON GREER* HAD TO BE THE ONE. HE WAS A THREE-PACK-A-DAY smoker living in a rundown apartment, and here they were, casually offering him what they knew through surveillance was his preferred brand of cigarettes, and he wouldn’t take a single smoke. He was tightly wound and wary. Sacramento Sheriff’s Detective Ken Clark and his partner did everything they could to relax the guy. They weren’t going to leave without eyeballing a direct DNA deposit. But Greer declined to take even a sip from a water bottle. He knows what’s up, Ken figured. Yep. Nervous and forensically wise. He’s the One.
Greer came to them via a thirty-year-old supplemental report. Many of the investigators share the belief that the EAR’s name is lost in the paperwork somewhere, jotted down on a vehicle stop or suspicious-circumstance report. His cover story was either airtight, or he was eliminated by a lousy but accepted alibi. Ken and his partner began methodically reviewing the old reports. Greer’s name popped up early.
He was stopped driving southbound on Sunrise Boulevard in a two-door yellow Datsun at 4:27 a.m. on April 15, 1977, just minutes after an EAR rape had been called in blocks away. He told police he was on his way to his job working as a janitor at a rice mill. They noted that he was extremely quiet and cooperative. They opened his trunk; their interest grew considerably. He consented to a residence search. His mother had recently died, he told them, and he was living with his sister now. Or, more specifically, on his sister’s property, in a trashed storage trailer buried in some bushes on a steep hillside in Fair Oaks. The trailer couldn’t have been more than eight feet long and wasn’t tall enough to stand up in. He seemed to have a solid work alibi for an earlier EAR rape. Still, the investigators who dealt with Greer never forgot him. They couldn’t shake the memory of what they found inside his car.
That’s why Ken and his partner had tracked him down thirty years later. Greer had significant medical issues now. Still, no water, thank you. No cigarettes. Finally, their patience and ruses running out, they persuaded him to lick an envelope. They swabbed all his car door handles when he wasn’t looking just to be sure.
Greer was pulled over on that spring night in 1977 near an EAR rape because he fit the general physical description of the attacker; he was a white male, twenty-five, five nine, 150. The first thing the patrol officers picked out with their flashlights was a plastic bottle of hand lotion on the front seat of his car. There was a white mask, similar to the kind used for painting or surgery, on the passenger side dashboard. When they popped his trunk they found rope in an opened cellophane wrapper. There was also a pair of tennis shoes.
And two large, zippered bags. Inside the bags, they found a handgun and a hunting knife.
Ken and his partner sent the DNA collected from Greer to the crime lab. They waited. The results came back.
Unbelievable.
Greer wasn’t the One.
As I’ve said, falling for a suspect is a lot like the first surge of blind love in a relationship. Focus narrows to a single face. The world and its practical sounds are a wan soundtrack to the powerful silent biopic you’re editing in your mind at all times. No amount of information on the object of your obsession is enough. You crave more. Always more. You note his taste in shoes and even drive by his house, courtesy of Google Maps. You engage in wild confirmation bias. You project. A middle-aged white man smiling and cutting a cake decorated with candles in a picture posted on Facebook isn’t celebrating his birthday, but holding a knife.
I first sensed the parallels when a weary-looking Larry Pool admitted to me that he used to “feel more” about suspects in the beginning, when as an Orange County cold-case detective, he first got the Original Night Stalker case in 1997. He was “fresher then,” he said, his face drawn, sounding like a middle-aged serial dater toughened by the vagaries of love.
Pool recalled an early moment of excitement in the summer of 2001, when he got a call asking him to report to the assistant sheriff’s office. Such calls always meant good news. When he walked in, a group turned to smile at him—his captain, his lieutenant, members of the administrative staff, and most tellingly, Mary Hong, the Orange County criminalist who developed the Original Night Stalker’s DNA profile. Hong worked in a different building.
Pool pumped his fist in the air before he even closed the door. “Yes!” he said. He’d worked the case nonstop, maybe even obsessively, for three years by then.
There’s been a fingerprint match, the assistant sheriff told Pool. A print left on a lamp at one of the East Area Rapist’s Danville scenes was believed to be the killer’s. The victim had heard him turn on the light; the lamp had been recently unpacked and wouldn’t have had anyone else’s prints on it. A retired investigator from Contra Costa had fished out an old copy of the print and recently sent it down to Orange County.