Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office

The Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office occupies a crucial place in the book’s account of the East Area Rapist investigation: it preserved evidence from old cases, then gave Paul Holes the institutional setting in which to test that evidence as forensic methods improved. Its significance lies not in a single breakthrough alone, but in the long relay between investigators, stored materials, and laboratory work that allowed a dormant investigation to move forward.

Institutional Role and Personnel

The office appears through both its investigative work and its crime laboratory. Larry Crompton had served on its East Area Rapist Task Force during the height of the series, while Holes worked there as a criminalist. John Murdock, chief of the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Crime Lab, was among the colleagues involved in the office’s later attention to the case. These roles place the investigation across generations of staff: detectives who worked the original cases, and laboratory personnel who returned to the evidence years later.

Crompton’s name appeared repeatedly in the old reports Holes reviewed, suggesting that he had been a central figure in the task force. When Holes tracked down the retired detective, Crompton responded as though the subject had never really left his household’s conversation. Their contact connected a new round of forensic work with the memory and paperwork of the earlier investigation. The exchange illustrates how the office’s case knowledge was distributed among reports, evidence, and people who had once handled the work directly.

Preserving the Old Cases

The condition of the Contra Costa County files contrasted with that of cases held elsewhere. Between October 1978 and July 1979, the East Area Rapist committed eleven attacks in the greater East Bay area, including two in San Jose and one in Fremont. Several local agencies had handled cases, and agencies including Sacramento County had destroyed evidence under routine Property Room procedures. The cases had also passed the statute of limitations. The Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office, however, had kept its evidence.

The surviving materials were not described as the result of a formal commendation program. The old files had been set aside in red folders, and deputies who had worked on the cases ensured they remained there. The book presents that preservation as an expression of unresolved professional failure: the case had not been solved, and the conspicuous files might draw a younger investigator into it. Years later, Holes did just that. In a cold case, retention became more than storage; it preserved the possibility that new methods could ask questions the original investigation could not answer.

Holes’s DNA Investigation

In July 1997, Holes began retrieving the East Area Rapist rape kits from Property and assessing whether they could yield usable evidence. The Contra Costa lab’s DNA program was relatively new, and the laboratory was less advanced than some other California labs. Even so, Holes believed that three kits might produce material for a rudimentary profile. He reasoned that a scientifically established connection among the office’s three suspected East Area Rapist cases could give investigators a basis for revisiting old suspects and seeking comparison samples.

The amplification process took time. When the results were ready, they confirmed that the same man was responsible for the three Contra Costa County cases. The test gave Holes a basic DNA profile, one that could later become more detailed as the laboratory acquired better equipment. He then turned from the initial scientific question to the case files, tracing recurring behavior such as neighborhood prowling, gathering information, contacting victims, and preparing tactically. Laboratory results established a connection; the reports helped him reconstruct the patterns surrounding it.

The work continued as the office’s technology developed. Government-funded laboratories faced ordinary budget pressures: equipment was costly, and laboratory directors had to make repeated requests for what they needed. The Contra Costa lab took about a year and a half to catch up with the Orange County Crime Lab. In January 2001, after Contra Costa began using STR typing, Holes asked colleague Dave Stockwell to retest the East Area Rapist extracts. The retest showed that the three cases still shared the same offender profile. Holes then asked Stockwell to compare the results with Mary Hong’s findings in Orange County. Stockwell and Hong read the genetic markers to one another over the phone, extending the comparison beyond the office’s own case set.

Evidence Beyond the Profile

The office’s role also appears in the recovery and reassessment of physical evidence. In Danville, bloodhounds followed a route from a crime scene toward railroad tracks and stopped at an intersection about half a mile away. Three handlers agreed that the dogs’ movements suggested extended prowling, an approach through a north-side fence, and an exit over the southwest corner of the back fence before the perpetrator headed south along the tracks, likely to a vehicle. Such tracking could suggest a route, but it could not by itself establish the identity of the person who had taken it.

A criminalist, John Patty, searched along the route and collected notebook pages, a hand-drawn map, purple yarn, and a fragment of typed paper. The items were sealed and stored in the Property Room. Decades later, Holes found the package while asking about a ski cap belonging to an old East Area Rapist suspect. The discovery gave him material to examine with touch-DNA technology and high-resolution scanning, but the chain of preservation could not restore every missing detail: there was no photograph or sketch showing exactly where the items had been found, and Patty had died in 1991. The book stresses the difference between preserving an object and preserving the circumstances that make it fully interpretable.

Holes had practical grounds for considering the pages relevant to the case: three independent bloodhounds had indicated the escape route, and its endpoint was consistent with the distance at which the East Area Rapist was known to park before approaching a target. Patty had also been an experienced criminalist involved in the Contra Costa County cases, making his decision to collect the material significant. Still, the associated yarn remained unexplained and the typed fragment illegible. The office’s evidence could sustain further inquiry without resolving every uncertainty.

Institutional Significance

The Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office is portrayed as a place where investigative work persisted beyond the original task force and the first generation of forensic methods. Its retained files allowed Holes to confirm a three-case DNA link; later laboratory capacity supported retesting and comparison with results from Orange County. Its physical evidence also preserved leads that could be revisited, though gaps in documentation and the loss of firsthand knowledge limited what later investigators could know.

That history makes the office’s contribution cumulative rather than instantaneous. The breakthrough depended on material kept in storage, on investigators who had recorded and collected evidence, on staff who developed and retested DNA, and on comparisons that crossed laboratory boundaries. In the book’s account, the office demonstrates both sides of cold-case evidence: preservation can give a future investigation a chance, but the passage of time can still sever an object from the context needed to explain it.