Passage of California Proposition 69 expanded California’s DNA database to include all felons, turning a forensic tool into a much broader investigative resource. For Larry Pool and Keith Harrington, the law also carried a specific hope: that a larger pool of DNA profiles would identify the East Area Rapist / Original Night Stalker. The database grew, but the expected answer did not emerge.

Background: DNA and the Cold Case

The law arrived amid rapid change in forensic DNA testing. When the Orange County Crime Lab began incorporating DNA analysis in the early 1990s, processing one case could take as long as four weeks, and testing required a relatively large, well-preserved sample. The technology was slow and demanding beside later methods, which could draw a genetic profile from a small scattering of skin cells in hours.

The first databases were also still developing. In the mid-1990s, crime labs relied on RFLP analysis, a laborious approach to DNA profiling. California’s database was in its infancy when Orange County prosecutors, detectives, and criminalists began submitting evidence from old unsolved cases to a new California Department of Justice laboratory in Berkeley, where profiles of known violent offenders were being collected. In June 1996, the first cold hit from that effort identified a serial killer and helped exonerate a man who had spent sixteen years in prison. That early success showed what database comparison could do, but it preceded Proposition 69 by years.

Passage and Purpose

Proposition 69, formally the DNA Fingerprint, Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act, established an all-felon DNA database in California in 2004. Pool, who had worked on the case for fourteen years, was instrumental in the law’s passage alongside Keith Harrington’s attorney brother, Bruce Harrington. The state’s Department of Justice came to hold the country’s largest working DNA data bank.

The measure widened the reach of DNA collection beyond the limited set of profiles available in the fledgling system. Its significance was practical as well as legislative: a crime-scene sample could be compared against a larger body of known profiles, potentially connecting an unsolved crime with a person already in the system. The law’s title joined three aims—DNA identification, attention to unsolved crimes, and protection of the innocent—in a single measure.

The Unfulfilled Expectation

Pool and Keith Harrington believed that expanding the database would eventually net the East Area Rapist / Original Night Stalker. The account presents their expectation plainly, then records its failure: the larger database did not produce the match they sought. For Pool, the disappointment was sharp. The contrast matters because database growth and case resolution are not the same thing; a wider search can improve the chance of a match without guaranteeing that the relevant person’s profile is present or that a particular case will be solved.

The law therefore stands in the book both as a major investigative advance and as an unfinished promise. Investigators and advocates had helped build a system capable of identifying offenders through DNA, yet the case that gave the effort urgency remained unresolved. The East Area Rapist / Original Night Stalker’s pattern of neighborhood reconnaissance—selecting possible targets, watching routines, and exploiting opportunities—underscored the investigative problem that a database alone could not answer: how to connect the evidence left behind to an identity.

Later Limits of the Search

The book contrasts government DNA databases with the much larger commercial genealogy services that later drew Michelle McNamara’s attention. 23andMe and Ancestry.com held millions of profiles, and a crime-scene sample might, in theory, point investigators toward a relative of an unidentified offender. But neither company would work with law enforcement, citing privacy concerns and its terms of service. The possibility of searching those databases thus remained distinct from the state system Proposition 69 had expanded.

Meanwhile, McNamara and Paul Holes pursued another route through the accumulated case record. McNamara indexed names, places, and objects in official reports, shared findings with investigators, and helped scan materials from sixty-five boxes of files obtained under supervision in January 2016. Those efforts did not alter the law’s scope, but they illustrate the continuing work around its central promise: forensic databases could compare and connect profiles, while investigators still had to assemble the records, evidence, and leads that might make a match meaningful.