Ventura County enters the account as the jurisdictional setting of a murder investigation that first stalled amid uncertainty about the killer’s identity, then became a crucial link in a wider serial-murder inquiry. Its significance lies not in a detailed portrait of the county’s landscape, but in the changing fate of the Smith case: the release of a suspect, the shelving of the investigation, and the eventual DNA comparison that connected evidence from Ventura to other killings.

The Smith investigation

After the preliminary hearing, the Ventura County district attorney released Joe Alsip for lack of evidence. Investigators returned to square one, divided over whether the killer had known the Smiths or whether the crime was random and sexually motivated. The case remained unresolved; for years its file sat on a shelf in the investigators’ bullpen before being moved to the evidence vault.

That uncertainty formed part of a broader pattern of hesitation about connections among cases. The Smith investigation would later be compared with an unsolved serial case involving four homicide victims in Orange County. The comparison gave investigators a reason to revisit forensic material that had survived even as the inquiry itself went dormant.

Evidence crosses county lines

Larry Pool asked Ventura investigators to send whatever forensic evidence remained from the Smith case to the Orange County Crime Lab. The package contained glass slides. Mary Hong, who opened it, recognized a limitation: such slides could preserve biological material from swabs used in rape kits, but the swabs themselves were usually included as well, giving a criminalist more material to examine.

On February 17, 1998, Pool received Hong’s report. She had developed a DNA profile from semen on the slides and eliminated Lyman Smith as its source. The profile matched those from the Harrington, Witthuhn, and Cruz cases. Material preserved in the Ventura investigation thus connected the Smith murders to killings investigated elsewhere, shifting the case from an isolated, unresolved crime toward a larger pattern.

Records and the limits of the account

The book describes the Ventura investigation as especially difficult to document. Michelle McNamara planned to cover it at length, but her account remained limited because she could not obtain the elusive case file for years. In 2014, she paid the Ventura County Courthouse $1,400 for printed transcripts of the Joe Alsip preliminary hearings: 2,806 pages reproduced from microfilm.

The transcripts contained references to material documented more fully in official reports, deepening McNamara’s interest in the missing file. She obtained access to it in January 2016, when she borrowed three dozen boxes of Golden State Killer material from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. The file focused primarily on Joe Alsip, whom the investigation had treated as a red herring. McNamara had read much of it before her death but did not have time to incorporate it into the narrative. Ventura County therefore remains both a pivotal investigative jurisdiction and a gap in the book’s fuller reconstruction: the surviving DNA evidence is consequential, while much of the underlying record is only partially represented.