Jim White—Mary Hong

Jim White and Mary Hong’s collaboration turned an old suspicion into a testable DNA connection. White urged Hong, a criminalist assigned to cold cases, to prioritize the Harrington and Witthuhn murders; her analysis confirmed that the cases shared a DNA profile. As Hong reviewed a spreadsheet of other unsolved cases, she found the same profile in the Janelle Cruz case, extending the significance of their work beyond the two cases White had named.

An Old Suspicion Meets a New Assignment

By the time Hong took on the cases, White had held onto his suspicion for fifteen years. He drew her aside and named the Harrington and Witthuhn cases, telling her he had always thought the same man was responsible. Hong had not worked in the laboratory when the murders occurred, and the names initially meant nothing to her. White’s conviction was therefore a lead, not knowledge she could simply inherit: the cases had to be examined through the evidence.

The assignment arose amid a broader effort to use DNA testing on unsolved homicides. Between 1972 and 1994, Orange County investigated 2,479 homicides and cleared 1,591, leaving nearly 900 unsolved. The laboratory prioritized cases involving sexual assaults because repeat offenders might leave biological material suitable for DNA typing. Hong was among the criminalists tasked with that cold-case work. White’s choice of the Harrington and Witthuhn cases brought his earlier judgment into this systematic review.

Turning the Cases into a Comparison

In late 1996, Hong retrieved the Harrington and Witthuhn rape kits from the Property Room. The laboratory had recently adopted PCR-STR, a method suited to small or degraded samples, in addition to the older RFLP process, which required more abundant, well-preserved DNA. This technical change mattered to the collaboration: material preserved for years could now be examined with a method better suited to cold cases.

The unidentified male DNA extracted from the two kits supplied something more reliable than an impression of similarity. Hong and White met at the threshold between an old investigative hunch and a laboratory conclusion. Hong appeared in White’s doorway and named the two cases. After their profiles matched, she summed up the finding as the same man; White allowed himself a smile and returned to work. The exchange was brief, but it marked a change in status: what White had suspected for years was now supported by a comparison of biological evidence.

The Spreadsheet and a Wider Connection

A few weeks later, near the end of 1996, Hong was reviewing a spreadsheet containing about twenty unsolved cases for which DNA profiles had been developed. The chart cross-referenced case numbers and victims’ names with profiles built from the five PCR loci then in use. She already knew the Harrington and Witthuhn profiles matched. As she scanned the other entries, one stopped her; she compared it repeatedly with the Harrington and Witthuhn results before accepting that it was the same profile.

The additional case was the murder of eighteen-year-old Janelle Cruz, whose body had been found in her family’s Irvine home in 1986. No one had previously proposed a connection between Cruz and the other two cases. The geographic and personal differences had helped keep the possibility out of view: Cruz lived in the same subdivision as Manuela Witthuhn, but she was ten years younger than Patty Harrington and Manuela, and the cases were separated by more than five years. Hong’s spreadsheet review did not merely confirm White’s original comparison; it exposed a link that the earlier case theories had not anticipated.

A Partnership of Judgment and Method

The collaboration depended on distinct contributions. White preserved a case connection in his memory and directed attention toward two files; Hong, who had no personal familiarity with the original investigations, retrieved the evidence, compared the profiles, and then tested the apparent match against a wider set of cases. His suspicion shaped what was examined, while her methodical review established what the profiles supported and revealed the further match.

The book presents criminalists as careful workers whose conclusions must withstand scrutiny, and contrasts their measured approach with investigators’ desire for action. White and Hong’s exchange embodies that difference without making it a conflict: his earlier intuition did not substitute for testing, and the laboratory result did not stop at confirming his intuition. Hong’s broader comparison produced the unexpected Cruz connection. Their work shows how a cold-case breakthrough could depend both on a remembered suspicion and on the patient comparison of evidence across separate files.