Mary Hong

Mary Hong is the criminalist whose laboratory work helped turn a suspected connection among separate California cases into a DNA-supported link. Her role was both interpretive and practical: she recognized similarities in the cases, kept an emerging profile in circulation, and recovered DNA evidence from glass slides sent from Ventura. The resulting comparison connected the Harrington, Witthuhn, Cruz, and Smith cases to the same unidentified killer.

Initial Contact and the Limits of Comparison

When Paul Holes contacted the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, he described an unidentified white male known as the East Area Rapist, who had committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California between 1976 and 1979. He outlined a pattern involving nighttime entries into single-story homes, sleeping couples, binding, rape, and occasional theft of personal jewelry. Investigators suspected the offender might have committed crimes farther south. Hong heard the description and recognized that it resembled cases under discussion in Orange County.

The resemblance could not immediately be tested in full. The Orange County Crime Lab was an early adopter of STR typing, while the Contra Costa laboratory used a different DNA-typing method. The two labs could compare only one gene, DQA1, and that marker matched. It was a meaningful point of agreement, but not a complete profile comparison. The Contra Costa lab was also not yet eligible to enter information into CODIS, preventing a database search through the state and national systems. Hong and Holes agreed to stay in contact and exchange updates when the Contra Costa lab became operational for that purpose. Their early conversation thus produced a lead while also defining the technical and institutional limits on what either laboratory could establish at the time.

Keeping the Profile in Circulation

In January 1997, members of the Countywide Law Enforcement Unsolved Element began reviewing old files as new leads arrived. At the same time, Hong faxed the Harrington, Witthuhn, and Cruz DNA profile to hundreds of crime laboratories across the country. No laboratory responded. The effort did not yield an immediate identification, but it carried the profile beyond the original investigations and made the possible connection available for comparison elsewhere.

A further opportunity came through Larry Pool, who asked Ventura Police Department to send any surviving forensic evidence from the Smith case to the Orange County Crime Lab. Hong opened the package and found a small amount of material: a couple of glass slides. She was concerned because rape-kit swabs are commonly rubbed onto slides to make sperm easier to examine under a microscope, but the swabs themselves are usually included as well. Having the swabs would have given a criminalist more biological material to work with. The slides were therefore a limited and imperfect remnant of the original evidence, not a complete kit.

The Smith Case Match

Despite that limitation, Hong developed a DNA profile from semen on the slides. On February 17, 1998, Pool received her report: Lyman Smith could be eliminated as the source of the biological material. The profile matched those from the Harrington, Witthuhn, and Cruz cases. Evidence from a case that had once been set aside in Ventura was now linked to three other investigations through a shared DNA profile.

The comparison changed the meaning of the Smith evidence. Earlier, investigators had divided over whether the killings involved someone who knew the Smiths or a stranger committing a sexually motivated crime. The case had gone from the investigative bullpen to the evidence vault. Hong’s result did not, by itself, identify the offender, but it supplied a concrete connection that could not be explained by the initial disagreements over motive or familiarity. It also tied evidence from the surviving slides to a pattern spanning multiple cases.

Recognition and Investigative Significance

The DNA link met with disbelief among some members of the Ventura investigative team, including detective Russ Hayes, one of the leads on the Smith case. Their reaction reflected the force of the new connection after years in which the Smith file had yielded no resolution. Hong’s work had taken a few old slides, developed a profile, and placed the case within a broader group of murders rather than leaving it isolated.

The Harrington, Witthuhn, and Cruz comparison also overturned the direction of suspicion in the Cruz investigation. When the killer’s DNA profile was developed, Mike Martinez and the other boyfriends and male friends in Janelle Cruz’s circle were conclusively eliminated; the profile matched an unidentified killer responsible for three other murders. Hong’s discovery therefore did more than join files: it redirected investigators away from people originally suspected and toward a serial offender whose cases had not previously been conclusively connected.

Hong’s significance lies in the chain of work rather than a single dramatic test result. She recognized a resemblance when Holes described the East Area Rapist’s crimes, helped preserve communication across laboratories that could not yet fully compare their methods, circulated a profile without receiving an immediate response, and extracted a usable DNA profile from evidence reduced to glass slides. When the comparison finally linked the Smith material to the Harrington, Witthuhn, and Cruz profiles, a set of separate investigations acquired a shared evidentiary basis. Her wide-eyed reaction to the match conveyed how startling the result was even to a scientist not easily shocked; the spreadsheet that prompted it represented years of cases converging in a form investigators could test.