But there was one problem, one he knew full well he was going to take with him to the DA’s office. The EAR. Each year he hadn’t surfaced, nabbed by DNA or turned in by a tipster, Holes’s interest grew. His wife might call it an obsession. Spreadsheets were made. Leisurely car rides turned into crime-scene tours. Not once, but weekly.
Sometimes when he thought of the destruction wrought by one faceless man, not just the victims but also the victims’ families, the detectives’ shame, the wasted money and time and effort and family time and ruined marriages and sex foregone for lifetimes . . . Holes rarely swore. Wasn’t him. But when he thought about all this, he just felt, fuck you. Fuck. You.
The first generation of detectives who worked the case were having health problems. The second generation of detectives, who worked it when they could grab time here and there, were retiring soon. Time was running out. The EAR was looking back at them, smirking from a door half-closed.
Holes scooted his chair over to his computer. In the last year, ancestral DNA had become popular with people curious about their genealogy and, though this was much less publicized, as a tool for finding unidentified criminals. Many in law enforcement were wary. There were quality-assurance issues. Privacy issues. Holes knew DNA. Knew it well. In his opinion, ancestral DNA was a tool, not a certainty. He had a Y-DNA profile generated from the EAR’s DNA, which means he isolated the EAR’s paternal lineage. The Y-DNA profile could be input into certain genealogical websites, the kind that people use to find first cousins and the like. You input a set of markers from your Y-DNA profile, anywhere from 12 to 111, and a list of matches is returned, surnames of families with whom you might share a common ancestor. Almost always the matches are at a genetic distance of 1 from you, which doesn’t mean much, relative-seeking-wise. You’re looking for the elusive 0—a close match.
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.