Mary Hong—Paul Holes Case Collaboration

Mary Hong and Paul Holes built a cross-laboratory collaboration that turned a suggestive resemblance between separate case series into a confirmed DNA match. Hong brought knowledge of Orange County profiles, including links among the Harrington, Witthuhn, Cruz, and Smith cases; Holes brought a profile from the East Area Rapist investigation. Their first comparison was restricted by incompatible laboratory methods. When both laboratories later adopted STR typing, the two could compare the profiles directly, establishing that the same offender was linked to the Northern and Southern California cases.

The Cases Behind the Connection

Hong’s work had already brought several Orange County cases into a common forensic picture before Holes contacted her. In late 1996, she reviewed a spreadsheet of roughly twenty unsolved cases with successfully developed DNA profiles, each represented by five PCR markers then in use. The profile from the 1986 murder of Janelle Cruz matched those from the Harrington and Witthuhn cases. Cruz had not previously been considered connected to them, despite living in the same Northwood subdivision as Manuela Witthuhn. Hong’s careful review of the markers thus extended the emerging pattern to another case.

A separate link came from Ventura. After Larry Pool asked that evidence from the Smith case be sent to the Orange County Crime Lab, Hong opened the package and found glass slides, without the swabs that would ordinarily provide additional biological material. She nevertheless developed a DNA profile from semen on the slides. On February 17, 1998, Pool received her report: Lyman Smith was eliminated as the source, and the profile matched those from the Harrington, Witthuhn, and Cruz cases. This work established the forensic context Hong would bring to her later exchange with Holes: she had seen a profile connect cases that had previously been treated as separate.

An Initial Comparison, Not Yet a Confirmation

Holes reached Hong after trying to contact investigators in Santa Barbara about a possible Southern California connection. A detective suggested he try Irvine, and the resulting call connected him to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and then to Hong at the crime lab. Holes described the East Area Rapist profile and the broad pattern of the Northern California offenses: residential attacks, nighttime entry, binding, and theft of small personal items. He also described the offender as a nonsecretor and reported a shoe size of nine. Hong recognized similarities between that account and the cases known to her.

The similarity gave them a reason to compare evidence, but it could not by itself establish that the same offender was involved. Their laboratories were using different DNA-typing techniques. Orange County had adopted STR typing early, while the Contra Costa laboratory was not yet using the same system. At that stage, they could compare only one gene, DQA1, and that marker matched. A single shared result was a limited basis for assessment, not the fuller profile comparison they needed.

There was also a practical barrier: the Contra Costa laboratory was not yet eligible to use CODIS, the DNA database system that could support links among jurisdictions. Holes and Hong agreed to stay in contact and exchange updates when the laboratory was operational. Their collaboration therefore depended not just on the apparent relationship among cases, but on waiting for laboratories with different capabilities to reach a point where their results could be compared on common terms.

The 2001 STR Comparison

The delay reflected the resources required to bring the laboratories into alignment. The Contra Costa laboratory, which had historically operated with limited resources, took about a year and a half to catch up with Orange County’s STR capability. Once STR typing was running in January 2001, Holes asked his colleague Dave Stockwell to rerun the DNA extracts from the East Area Rapist cases. The new tests showed that the three Northern California cases still shared the same offender profile.

Holes then directed Stockwell to contact Hong so the two could compare results using the same technology. Stockwell and Hong read their markers aloud to one another over the phone. As each called out a marker from the profile, the other confirmed the corresponding result. The exchange ended when Stockwell reported the outcome to Holes: the profiles were a perfect match. The step from one shared marker to a direct STR comparison transformed their earlier suspicion into a robust cross-case link.

What Their Collaboration Established

The match connected the East Area Rapist cases to the Orange County profiles already associated with the Harrington, Witthuhn, and Cruz cases, as well as the profile developed from the Smith evidence. It made Hong and Holes’s exchange more than an informal discussion of similar methods of offending: the laboratories had independently examined evidence from different cases and then confirmed that the profiles agreed using compatible techniques. The forensic result linked cases that had not all been investigated together and crossed the boundary between Northern and Southern California investigations.

The finding became public on April 4, 2001, when news coverage announced that DNA connected the 1970s rapes to serial-murder cases. The speed of the public revelation contrasted with the careful, stepwise work that had preceded it: Hong’s earlier profile development and comparisons, Holes’s initial approach, a restricted one-marker test, the wait for STR capability, and the final marker-by-marker confirmation. The collaboration’s significance lies in that sequence. It shows how a promising resemblance can remain provisional until laboratories can compare evidence on a shared technical basis, and how sustained communication between investigators and forensic scientists can bring previously separate case files into one evidentiary picture.