Walnut Creek Police Department

The Walnut Creek Police Department’s role in the book centers on the long-unresolved disappearance of Elaine Davis. A detective nearing retirement brought her case file to Paul Holes, helping set in motion a review that overturned an earlier identification and ultimately reunited Elaine’s family with the truth about what had happened to her.

Role in the Davis Case

Elaine disappeared from her family’s home in Walnut Creek in 1969. Thirty-one years later, a Walnut Creek police detective nearing retirement brought the case file to Holes for review. The original investigation had included a radiologist’s assessment that a body found in Santa Cruz eighteen days after Elaine vanished belonged to a woman aged twenty-five to thirty. Holes concluded that the age estimate could not have been made accurately, reopening the possibility that the unidentified woman was Elaine.

Reexamination and Identification

Holes joined other officials in an effort to exhume the unidentified woman’s remains. The body had been buried in an unmarked grave; the search reached a depth of twenty-five feet on the side of a hill before investigators found a plastic body bag containing bones. Two days after the exhumation, Walnut Creek detectives asked Elaine’s mother to meet with them. Her younger sister traveled from out of town to attend. The detectives then told the mother and sister that the remains had been identified as Elaine’s.

Consequences and Significance

The identification closed one uncertainty for the family, but its timing carried a further loss: Elaine’s mother died a week after the family buried her. The department’s part in this account is specific rather than institutional—the narrative does not describe its wider structure or procedures. It shows, instead, how a detective’s renewed attention to a dormant file, followed by collaboration and reconsideration of an old forensic judgment, could change what a family knew decades after a disappearance.