Holes began asking older friends and colleagues about the EAR and was surprised at how pervasive the case had been. Everyone had a story. His undersheriff remembered the helicopters whirling overhead, the roving spotlights darting through the quiet subdivisions. A UC-Davis professor said his first date with his wife had been taking part in one of the nightly rape patrols. One of his co-workers quietly confided in Holes that his sister was one of the victims.
Between October 1978 and July 1979, after which he vanished from Northern California, there were eleven EAR cases in the greater East Bay area, including two in San Jose and one in Fremont. Trying to make headway twenty years later was daunting. Local police departments handled some of the cases. All of the agencies, including Sacramento County, had destroyed their evidence. It was routine Property Room procedure. The cases were past the statute of limitations. Fortunately CCCSO (Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office), where Holes worked, had kept its evidence. The set-aside red EAR files weren’t a fluke; demoralized CCCSO deputies back in the day assured that it would stay that way. It was the opposite of hanging a police commendation plaque. The EAR was their failure. If the human brain was, as experts allege, the best computer in the world, the old guard wanted their conspicuous EAR files to lure one of those young, inquiring computers in, fast and deep. Sometimes the tough cases were just a relay race.
“We always catch the dumb ones,” cops like to say. They could tick off ninety-nine out of a hundred boxes with these kinds of arrests. That one unchecked box though. It could vex you into early death.
*
IN JULY 1997, HOLES BEGAN PULLING THE EAR RAPE KITS FROM Property and seeing what evidence might be coaxed from them. The CCCSO crime lab wasn’t as advanced as other California labs. Their DNA program was relatively new. Still, it looked as though three kits would yield material for a rudimentary profile. Holes figured that, even though the EAR’s m.o. was distinctive and there was little doubt the Northern California attacks were connected, if he could conclude with scientific certainty that one man was responsible for CCCSO’s three EAR-suspected cases, that could resurrect the investigation. They could dig up old suspects and swab them.
The DNA-amplification process took a while, but when the results developed, they confirmed the match. The same man, as predicted, was responsible for the three Contra Costa County cases. Holes now had a basic DNA profile of the EAR that would grow more advanced when the lab acquired better equipment. He began delving into the case files themselves, something he’d put aside while he concentrated on the science. He picked up on the EAR’s patterns. Choosing neighborhoods to prowl for information gathering. Phoning victims. Tactically preparing.
Holes compiled a list of old suspect names and then tracked down retired detective Larry Crompton. Crompton had been a member of the CCCSO’s EAR Task Force at the height of the series. Holes could tell from the number of times Crompton’s name appeared in the reports that he was the de facto leader. He’d either been a worker bee or taken the cases to heart.
Calling up retired detectives about an old case is a mixed bag. Some are flattered. A lot are mildly annoyed. They’re in line at the pharmacy waiting for their heart medication. They’re installing garboard drain plugs on their fishing boats. Your polite enthusiasm represents lost minutes of their day.
Crompton answered Holes’s call as if he’d just been talking about the EAR that moment, had possibly been talking about the EAR for years, and this unexpected, welcome call was a natural continuation of an ongoing conversation in the Crompton household.
Crompton was born in Nova Scotia and looks like the kind of tall, lean, honest-faced rancher John Wayne would have trusted in one of his Westerns. He’s got a slightly odd, breathless way of speaking; never hesitant, just brief, confident declarations that could use a little more air.
Holes wanted to know if Crompton remembered any old suspects who stood out and should be reexamined. He did, and unenthusiastically fed Holes some names. Crompton’s real wish, it turned out, was for Holes to follow up on an old hunch of his that the bosses had prevented him from pursuing at the time.
Jurisdictional cooperation is spotty at best now but was downright dismal back in the late 1970s. Police Teletype and the gossip mill were the only ways cops heard about cases in other agencies. The EAR disappeared from the East Bay in the summer of 1979. Crompton’s bosses nearly danced with relief. Crompton was panicked. He could tell the guy was escalating, that he was requiring more terror in his victims’ eyes to get off; his threats about killing his victims, previously stilted in manner, were more severe but also looser, like someone shedding his inhibitions. Crompton worried. Inhibition shedding was not what the EAR needed.
In early 1980, Crompton got a call from Jim Bevins, a Sacramento Sheriff’s investigator he’d become close to through their work on the EAR Task Force. Bevins was trying to step away from the case. Its hold over him broke up his marriage. But he wanted to tell Crompton that he was hearing rumors that Santa Barbara had a couple of cases, one a homicide, that felt like the EAR. Crompton called down there.
They stonewalled. “Nothing like that here,” he was told.
Several months later at a statewide training conference, Crompton was seated by chance next to a Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s investigator. Small talk ensued. Crompton played dumb. Pretended he wanted to talk shop.
“What about that double homicide not too long ago?” he asked.
He never let his face reveal the chill he felt as he listened to the details.
“I’m telling you, Paul,” Crompton said. “Call down south. Start with Santa Barbara. I heard there was something like five bodies down there.”
“I will,” Holes promised.
“I know it’s him,” Crompton said, and hung up.
TWENTY YEARS LATER, HOLES CALLED SANTA BARBARA AND GOT shut down too. The Sheriff’s Department denied having any cases that resembled what he was talking about. But near the end of the conversation, the detective on the other end either recalled something or had a change of heart about obfuscating.
“Try Irvine,” he said. “They have something like that, I think.”
Holes’s call to Irvine led him to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, which put him in touch with criminalist Mary Hong at the crime lab. Holes explained that he’d recently developed a DNA profile for an unidentified white male known as the East Area Rapist, or EAR, who’d committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California from 1976 to 1979. EAR investigators always suspected he’d headed south and committed more crimes there. Holes rattled off a quick description of his m.o. Middle-to upper-middle-class single-story homes. Nighttime home invasions. Sleeping couples. Binding. Female raped. Occasional theft, mostly personalized jewelry that meant something to victim over more valuable items. Ski mask made physical identification difficult but evidence indicated a size 9 shoe, blood type A, nonsecretor.
“Sounds a lot like our cases,” Hong said.
At the time Holes and Hong talked, their labs were using different DNA-typing techniques, OC being an early adopter of STR typing. They could compare one gene, DQA1, which matched, but that’s all they had to compare. The Contra Costa lab also wasn’t CODIS-eligible yet, meaning they couldn’t link into the state or national databases. Hong and Holes agreed to keep in touch and update each other when the Contra Costa lab was up and running.
*
GOVERNMENT-FUNDED CRIME LABS EXPERIENCE ALL THE USUAL economic vagaries one would expect. Elected officials know it’s not popular to reduce the police force, so job cuts often fall on less conspicuous positions, like forensic scientists. Lab equipment isn’t cheap, and lab directors often have to make repeated requests to get what they need.