Paul Holes's Commitment to the Case

Paul Holes’s commitment to the East Area Rapist case was more than a long assignment: it became a recurring practice of returning to the evidence, the places, and the unresolved question of how the crimes had been possible. He pursued that question through crime-scene visits, records, and DNA analysis, even as his career advanced and family responsibilities grew. The apparent genetic breakthrough he found in 2013—then discovered to be a false lead—reveals both the reach and the limits of that persistence.

Returning to the Case

Holes lived roughly halfway between Sacramento and the East Bay, and weekends often found him visiting crime scenes. When work or family trips took him to Southern California, he made those locations part of the journey too. During Disneyland trips with his family, while his wife watched the children nap at the hotel, he drove to Northwood in Irvine, where Janelle Cruz had lived, or to the address where Drew Witthuhn had cleaned up after the killing of his sister-in-law, Manuela Witthuhn. These were not occasional stops made for ceremony: the account describes weekly crime-scene tours as the case continued to occupy his attention.

The visits served a specific investigative purpose. Holes tried to understand why each location had been chosen—why this place, rather than another—and what the distribution of attacks might say about the offender. In Davis, he traced a possible route toward the East Bay along Interstate 80 and considered where the offender might have gone to school. He floated Sacramento State as a possibility if the man had attended college, while acknowledging the many alternatives. The questions were exploratory, not conclusions. Their recurrence shows a commitment to keep testing possibilities against geography rather than treating a familiar theory as settled.

Reading Places and Patterns

The case demanded attention to ordinary surroundings as well as crime scenes. Reports described the East Area Rapist moving through Sacramento’s drainage canals and ditches, apparently using this underground network to approach neighborhoods. The recorded pattern included a preference for single-story homes, often near a greenbelt, field, or park, and signs of prowling or unauthorized entry in the surrounding blocks before an attack. Reports also described a rise in hang-up calls within a small radius. Such details made the neighborhood itself part of the investigative problem: the offender appeared to study several possible targets and their routines before choosing when to act.

The physical arrangement of a house could help explain a choice without identifying the person who made it. Holes noted that two-story homes were uncommon among the neighborhoods attacked. A single-story layout could make it easier to observe activity through windows, while a second floor might give residents a view of someone moving through yards or jumping fences. That reasoning tied a repeated feature of the scenes to the practical conditions of surveillance and entry. It did not resolve who the offender was, but it showed why Holes kept treating buildings, sightlines, and routes as evidence rather than background.

Other fragments remained less conclusive. In one investigation, bloodhounds tracked a route consistent with extended prowling, entry through a backyard fence, and departure along railroad tracks toward a street where the offender may have entered a vehicle. In another, dogs tracked a scent around a corner near an open field and a house where a pool was being built. These observations offered possible paths, not an identity. The case repeatedly required Holes to work with clues whose value depended on interpretation, and to resist turning a plausible reconstruction into certainty.

The Personal Cost of Persistence

A decade after sending his East Area Rapist files to Larry Pool, Holes had become chief of the crime lab and was preparing to move into full-time cold-case investigation at the district attorney’s office. He had pursued promotions and professional credentials while putting off that career goal, in part to provide for his family. The planned move represented a return to the work he had long wanted to do, but the case would not remain behind with the files: he expected to take it with him.

His interest had intensified during the years the offender remained unidentified. Spreadsheets accumulated; drives that might have been leisurely became crime-scene tours, eventually a weekly routine. Holes connected the case not only to the victims but to the harm that spread outward: families left without answers, detectives carrying the burden of an unsolved investigation, and the loss of time and family life. His anger was directed at the offender and the destruction attributed to him. At the same time, the account records a practical sense of urgency: the first generation of investigators was facing health problems, while the next generation was nearing retirement. The work, and the people able to carry it forward, were not endless.

A DNA Lead and Its Limits

As ancestral DNA searching began attracting public interest, some law-enforcement professionals remained wary of quality assurance and privacy. Holes regarded the approach as a tool, not a certainty. He knew DNA analysis and had a Y-DNA profile generated from the East Area Rapist’s DNA, representing the offender’s paternal lineage. The profile could be entered into genealogical websites, which returned surnames of people who might share a paternal ancestor. Because most results were distant matches, he looked for the rare zero genetic-distance result rather than treating any surname as an answer.

Holes repeated the search every couple of weeks and kept his expectations low. In mid-March 2013, a result at the top of the list caught his attention. It carried a marker found in only two percent of the world’s population and matched eleven other markers from the East Area Rapist profile, with zero genetic distance. Holes had never received such a result. He began to call Sacramento County Sheriff’s detective Ken Clark, then stopped before dialing. Instead, he took his keys and drove toward Sacramento, wanting to return to where the case had begun.

The apparent match did not provide the identification he hoped for. Retired Secret Service agent and amateur sleuth Russ Oase had independently uploaded the East Area Rapist’s markers to the same database. The result therefore reflected the presence of the offender’s own markers in the system, not a newly discovered relative. The episode’s reversal underscores the discipline Holes’s approach required: even an unusually precise-looking match had to be traced to its source before it could count as a lead.

Significance

Holes’s commitment is defined by repetition without guaranteed reward. He revisited places, compared patterns, and returned to a DNA search despite expecting little from it. The case’s geography offered questions, not a map to a known suspect; its records preserved observations, not a complete account; and the 2013 result briefly seemed decisive before its origin changed its meaning. His persistence mattered precisely because it did not make uncertainty disappear. It kept the investigation active while preserving the distinction between a suggestive clue and a verified answer.