Larry Pool

Larry Pool is an Orange County cold-case investigator whose method combines painstaking persistence with an unusually firm moral code. Assigned cases that others might leave unresolved, he follows evidence across jurisdictions and years; his work on the Original Night Stalker case brings both the exhilaration of a major lead and the discipline to accept when DNA disproves a suspect. Over time, the case’s accumulation of files and false hopes also changes how readily he allows himself to believe a solution is near.

Identity and Investigative Temperament

Pool transferred from the sex-crimes unit into the Countywide Law Enforcement Unsolved Element in February 1998. An Air Force veteran with a stiff bearing, he is described as having little patience for moral ambiguity: he loves God and abhors cursing. The contrast between his outlook and the conventional image of police work is pointed. Other officers might relish undercover assignments and the adrenaline of uncertain situations; Pool never worked undercover, and his manner gives little reason to imagine him doing so.

His strengths emerge in a different kind of work. Cold cases, with their gaps and unfinished trails, suit a detective who can keep an investigative question active without forcing an answer. Pool is an insomniac who might set a problem running in the background of his mind, then find that an answer comes later while he is brushing his teeth or getting into his car. This is not presented as a dramatic stroke of intuition so much as sustained attention: he continues to turn over an unresolved question beyond the formal hours of investigation.

That temperament is connected to his moral seriousness. In one earlier case, Pool interrogated a serial killer on death row in another state about a missing woman whom Southern California police suspected the man of killing. Pool urged him to disclose where the woman’s body could be found, appealing to his conscience and to the family’s need to know. The killer began negotiating, mentioning the better conditions in California prisons and the possibility of a transfer. The account illustrates Pool’s willingness to engage a suspect directly, but also the ethical purpose he brings to the encounter: locating the missing woman matters to him beyond the mechanics of closing a case.

Cold Cases and the Three Victims’ Files

Although Pool had twelve years in the Sheriff’s Department, he was relatively new to homicide investigation when a cardboard box of three cases became his assignment. The files concerned Keith and Patty Harrington, Manuela Witthuhn, and Janelle Cruz; together, the cases represented four victims. The box makes the scale of the task concrete. Pool was not handed a single clean narrative, but separate unresolved deaths whose relationships to one another required investigation.

His subsequent work connected the casework to the Smith murders in Ventura. Pool told the Ventura Police Department that the Orange County Sheriff’s Department had an unsolved serial case involving four homicide victims with similarities to the Smiths. He asked that any forensic evidence still held on the Smith case be sent to the Orange County Crime Lab. This cross-jurisdictional request reflects a practical approach: a suspected connection had to be tested through evidence preserved by another department, not merely asserted from resemblance between cases.

The package that arrived exposed the limits of what investigators could work with. Mary Hong opened it and found a couple of glass slides. Such slides were used to examine material from rape-kit swabs for sperm, but the swabs themselves were usually included as well; the available biological material therefore seemed scant. The episode does not show Pool controlling what had been retained or sent. It shows the conditions his investigation had to confront: a possible forensic bridge between cases could depend on a small, incomplete set of materials, and the laboratory could use only what the evidence supplied.

The Original Night Stalker Investigation

Pool first took on the Original Night Stalker case in 1997, when he was still fresher to the work and more emotionally affected by suspects. By October 1, 2000, the Orange County Register had published the first article about the DNA link, and Pool’s office had become a visible record of the investigation’s scale. His victims’ photographs were pinned above his cubicle, while binders accumulated around him. The article described ninety-three binders of case material. The number conveys not a solved case but years of collected information gathered into a workspace devoted to an offender whose identity remained unresolved.

The investigation brought periods of intense activity. A decade after the DNA match between the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker was still new, Pool had substantial investigative resources at his disposal. An Orange County Sheriff’s Department helicopter flew to Santa Barbara to collect a suspect’s DNA swab while the suspect was under active surveillance. Pool also traveled to Baltimore to exhume a body. He recalled that, before the security changes following September 11, parts of the exhumed body were packed in his carry-on. These details show the unusual reach of the inquiry: surveillance, laboratory comparison, travel, and exhumation all became part of a single effort to test identity.

In the summer of 2001, Pool was summoned to the assistant sheriff’s office, a call that he understood as likely to bring good news. The room held his captain, lieutenant, administrative staff, and Mary Hong, the criminalist who had developed the Original Night Stalker’s DNA profile. The assistant sheriff instructed Pool to find where a man was buried. DNA then disproved the apparent breakthrough: the dead fingerprint examiner was not the killer. The reversal matters to Pool’s portrayal because his excitement and the assembled officials’ optimism did not substitute for forensic confirmation. The evidence had to be allowed to reject the suspect.

Accumulation, Disappointment, and Caution

The investigation’s physical burden continued to grow. The account recalls Pool’s furrowed brow, photographs over his cubicle, and binders gathering around him like a fortress. The image is both a portrait of concentration and a measure of confinement: the case occupies his workspace through records, photographs, and the repeated labor of comparison. By the time he spoke with the book’s narrator, he appeared more formal than animated, greeting the visitor at the Orange County Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory in wire-rim glasses and a red checkered shirt. When colleagues interrupted, he answered with the clipped workplace acknowledgment Copy that.

Pool acknowledged that he no longer became excited as he once had. Earlier in the case, he had felt more about suspects; fifteen years later, he responded to a report by looking it over with taciturn severity. This restraint follows the experience of a promising lead that DNA eliminated. When the narrator contacted him about Doug Fiedler, the narrator privately believed there was a strong chance of having identified the killer. Pool let the narrator down gently. His response reflects experience rather than a claim that the lead was worthless: he had once been swept up by suspects too, and now the possibility of a match had to survive investigation before it could become a conclusion.

A later, unfinished section titled Sacramento, 2013 returns to the transfer of the East Area Rapist materials. Paul Holes remembers emptying his filing cabinet, boxing the files, and FedExing them to Pool in Orange County; at the time, he thought it would only be a matter of time. The passage places Pool at the receiving end of another investigator’s accumulated casework, extending the image of his role as custodian of a long-running inquiry. Holes’s recollection establishes the expectation attached to the handoff, not the outcome of any particular lead.

Narrative Role

Pool embodies the tension between persistence and certainty in a cold-case investigation. His insomniac habit of keeping problems in mind, the three-case box, the slides from Ventura, and the ninety-three binders all show sustained effort through incomplete evidence. Yet the dead suspect’s DNA exclusion and Pool’s later reserve prevent persistence from becoming proof by itself. The book’s portrait rests on that distinction: his commitment remains, while his willingness to treat excitement as evidence diminishes. In a story shaped by years of unresolved crimes, his work is both an attempt to make connections and a repeated test of whether those connections can withstand forensic scrutiny.