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The recent exposure of Joseph James DeAngelo as the alleged Night Predator— The East Area Rapist aka Night Stalker— came about with so many unbelievable coincidences that the press, which is always suspicious by nature, got suspicious right away. It is not surprising that stories then got posted that the Los Angeles Times inter alia were suing to get the court records to uncover what really happened.
On the face of it, there were indeed reasons to be very curious. The culmination came after only a brief spurt of fame finally seized the case. Prior to the last few years, the case had rested only within the vaults of true crime fans. The case was not famous by any means. (There was only one investigation readily available to people and that was mine displayed on this website for the last 4 years.) However, 2 TV documentaries recently came out garnering the case lots of attention. News dailies knew that only Ventura County, Santa Barbara County, and Orange County had real jurisdiction in the case, and Orange County was the head of the task force. But when the news broke it appeared that Sacramento County took credit. Behind the scenes, naturally, snippets of fact came back to the news stringers. Ventura, Sacramento and perhaps the FBI, alone were involved. The other jurisdictions, including Orange County, were gob smacked. None knew about some new source of DNA or how DeAngelo had been arrived at as the alleged perp. Then it circulated that someone in Contra Costa County, a county which had no jurisdiction, had somehow gotten pristine DNA from a task force county and worked on a genealogy, but hadn’t shared this DNA or its results with the task force. Where did this evidence come from? Who all was really involved?
It is a running joke that the motto of the Department of Justice means “Just Us. Not You!” Yet so many outside the system seem to have acquired this motto for themselves regarding this case. As someone who had been involved both very publicly and behind-the-scenes perhaps some things that I can piece together here may help in understanding what/who was and was not involved, and exactly what the experience was like to be part of a case that was not and yet became famous.
To my knowledge the only reliable DNA information that had ever been used for triaging POIs was information confirming EAR-ONS’s eye color, and outside of law enforcement this information I and Michelle Cruz did not share. Each of us dealt with at least 100 POIs. Some prioritizing was obviously necessary. Persons of interest with the wrong eye color could safely be pitched.
As time went along, I began to realize that other jurisdictions didn’t necessarily have this DNA information. It was implicit. I gleaned it from conversations with those who had turned in a person of interest. It was often very easy to see that “suspects” with radically wrong eye color were being considered. But. . .mums the word.
This was not the first time I got the sense that the main jurisdictions didn’t communicate much or had very different concepts of how to exploit the collective evidence. As early as 2014, I was told the task force didn’t meet much anymore— only once every 6 months. But Ventura’s man on the job Joe Evans ran “Night Stalker” DNA periodically through the criminal system to see if the perp finally had been jailed and his DNA taken for another crime he had committed. This was essentially the standard exploitation of DNA. It was to be run through the criminal databases.
This wasn’t being narrow minded. In the case at hand there wasn’t any DNA leftover to do a detailed genealogical profile on EAR-ONS. It had all been spent lifting EAR-ONS’s identity profile and then linking it to all of his murders. Santa Barbara’s was so sparse and difficult to lift that they did not fully link a double murder in their jurisdiction from 1981 until a few years ago, though the MO in the case was so blatant Santa Barbara knew EAR-ONS had done it. There wasn’t even enough to do a phenotype, and this was desperately needed.
Despite the prolific nature of EAR-ONS’s crimes, despite the existence of dozens of sketches and identikits of “suspicious persons,” no POI resembling one of these led anywhere. It is a bit of a mystery why some of these sketches were even eventually released, and many of them were released decades after-the-fact. Once I was told it was probably so a story would be run by the press. The news likes a picture or they don’t run a story. Originally, in 1976 EAR had been estimated to be between 25 and 35 years old. But by the early 21st century, a shift had taken place. The old sketches, most never seen before, were being released. These usually showed a young man with shaggy, casual shoulder-length hair. These began to beguile even the original investigators. A young perp was viewed as more likely now. This impression came from the sketches released (at this time), and the subsequent theory itself probably inspired the selective release of sketches concentrating on a casual, shoulder length-hair youth. The small clique following the case became convinced a young perp was responsible (18-25 years old).
None of the above where the face can be seen, except for the first, were based on a witness description while EAR was in perpetration. These were always of “suspicious persons” seen in the vicinity of one of his crimes, before or after-the-fact; or the sketch was found in one of the crime folders.
As recent history proves, all of the above are rubbish. They are not only so radically different one from the other that one man could not be the inspiration for them all, they imply for the most part a very young perpetrator.
Exasperated by years of POIs leading nowhere, those following the case online expressed their consternation why no DNA had been used for genealogical tracing or for a phenotype. The fact is there simply was no good DNA left. An early attempt at a familial profile had been done, but it was junk— completely unreliable. The DNA was not complete, the science not yet perfected.
In terms of high profile, by the late 1990s the jurisdictions remaining in the pursuit of EAR-ONS were Orange County (which began it all by linking DNA under detective Larry Poole’s guidance), Ventura C, and Santa Barbara C. Here EAR-ONS had murdered, and there is no statute of limitations on murder. On a lesser order, there was Contra Costa County. The link between EAR and Night Stalker had been made because Contra Costa County had preserved viable DNA from a few of the rapes EAR had committed there. About the mid-1990s, retired CCC sheriff detective Larry Crompton had urged the then-current criminalist Paul Holes to pursue the link with the perpetrator down south that Larry Poole had recently and finally linked to so many murders (known inconveniently as The Original Night Stalker).
Paul Holes followed Crompton’s urging and finally got the DNA compared. Thus proving that the East Area Rapist was one and the same with So. Cal’s “Night Stalker.” Sadly, there was not enough viable DNA left in CCC to form a full familial profile on EAR. All had been spent identifying and linking the crimes. In an orbital way, Contra Costa County remained in the investigation despite having no legal jurisdiction (no crime they had could be prosecuted). Moreover, Larry Crompton was becoming the first man of letters on the case and finally published the first book on it in 2011. Sudden Terror captured the spirit of evil of the true unstoppable and insatiable Night Stalker, and made the cases in Contra Costa County high profile.
At the same time, Sacramento had heavily suspected EAR of the double murder of the Maggiores back in 1978, but there was no DNA to link him definitely to the crimes, and the circumstances did not fit his MO but rather indicated a rage where the perpetrator was defending his identity. Sacramento continued with its own investigation.
The fame of the case jacked up within the true crime crowd, and in 2014 another original detective, Richard Shelby, published his book Hunting a Psychopath to help bring clarity and details to the current pursuit. Fame, relatively speaking, grew from there, and a few documentaries were planned. Since I am the writer here, polity does not allow me to indulge in the impact of Q Files and my own investigation, but it was the only place online that illustrated for any reader the crime spree and the results of a real investigation in situ.
As the fame grew it was becoming a particularly frustrating case for all. Sketches were the only tangible source of trying to envision what EAR had looked like. More descriptions got released that contradicted the young, blondish youth image. These were of a shorter, older man with short, dark hair who was incredibly agile. What did EAR truly look like? Was he a young guy, with blondish hair or an older guy with short dark hair? Many times the circumstances of the sketches were not even released. So it was hard to say just which circumstance was truly “suspicious.”
Web sleuths browsed old year books looking for class photos that resembled one or several of the sketches. Hundreds of POIs were turned in. Over 600 were DNA tested. There was about 7,000 persons on the POI list. It was a nightmare!
No one knew that in the summer of 2017 Ventura C had found a pristine and unused sample of Night Stalker DNA in a separate refrigerator. No one but Ventura knew that this sample, long sought by all jurisdictions as a new source to expand upon, had been given to Paul Holes in CCC. He formed a team to put it in a civilian database and using standard genealogy software his team began to trace EAR from the closest relative they could find in the database. They found one— a 4th cousin. They went back in this distant cousin’s heritage and found a mutual ancestor who lived in the early 1800s and then started working forward to the present day.
On September 26, 2017, there was the elimination of my highest profiled POI based in Placerville. I prepared alternate POIs for triaging. On October 12, 2017, I informed Roy Ellison, the supervisor at Orange County Cold Case Homicide, the viability of following links with a Sacramento auto dealership family member who had not followed the family business but rather went into land development and worked for the East Area’s No 1 land developer. In late 1979 he had moved to Contra Costa County. Although he personally seemed a long shot, many links branched out from this source. I would continue to follow the links.
In that same late October 2017 Paul Holes let a rather dogmatic statement slip in a People Magazine interview. He believed EAR was white collar level in land development. I was stunned. I recognized he was talking about the same link. As far as I knew, Paul Holes’ comment simply reflected another investigator following the car dealership/wrecking angle I had championed. More than one had done so for a good reason. Evidence of EAR having used a variety of used cars and license plates lifted from cars that had been wrecked frequently popped up in the canvassing done by the original investigation. On October 26, I informed Ellison in more detail about these family links.
In retrospect now, this statement is really the first indication that since summer 2017 Holes’ team had already followed the genealogy to the present time and had fixed on an Italian surname. It is not surprising this particular POI would inspire enough confidence to merit a public statement. On the face of it, so much about his circumstances had fit EAR’s travel pattern, and Holes had the advantage already of knowing EAR had an Italian Y genealogy and name and that genealogy was also leading in this direction.
However, behind-the-scenes the comment only intensified my irk over all the emails I had received for years, and continued to receive, insisting that DNA had already (years before) determined that EAR-ONS was German-English by ethnicity and had a rare German surname. Most of the emailers devoutly believed message boards that touted the investigative work of Michelle McNamara. Yet from any investigative point of view she had left little tangible mark in the real world. She had a couple of articles online, did some podcast interviews, and had her own blog online (which was defunct by autumn 2014), but apparently had a celebrity husband and his publicist.
I had discovered that I was not unique in receiving disdainful emails. Official investigators received them frequently. Basically, it was life imitating art. It was a scenario out of an old Murder, She Wrote where the cops look dumb and the amateur is a genius. Some emailers were just snide, and a couple genuinely off their noodle. But most seemed inspired by the years of promotion that McNamara had cornered the market on revealing EAR’s identity. Through her publicity contacts she even got him called after the State’s nickname: “Golden State Killer.” Orange County even used this moniker. This was a unique development in any cold case pursuit.
Nevertheless, the message boards always reflected a strange rivalry with law enforcement, and now a camp of followers essentially glorified the anticipation that McNamara would solve the case. This always smacked of a professional promoter behind it bolstered by what Hollywood calls “toxic fans.”
At this time, about 2011, the case almost solely existed within the realm of message boards where only alias names and obsolete clipart identities existed. There was one website put up by Robert Neville which only had the basics and a “webmaster” contact link. J.J. McGregor had organized all the newspaper files he could on his own blog under Google, and showcased some of his onsite investigations in Visalia. After my section of Q Files went up in late 2013 and then fully the next year the email inundation to me commenced. Some were deriding, saying I had no business in the subject. Many more, however, were complaining about the message board clique that felt it controlled the case independent of law enforcement. Those complaining usually complained about the anonymity on the board. Almost all of these were skeptical of the qualifications of those alias names claiming expertise.
In fact, the case was so obscure still, with law enforcement’s profile only that of the regular email tip links on relevant county websites, that many tipsters had come to the message boards for help and for more direct contacts. Someone on the boards always claimed to have secret “LE contacts” and one or two even achieved prominence by saying they were working behind-the-scenes with a retired detective to vet informants’ persons of interest. Usually, the claim was that it was Larry Crompton or Richard Shelby.
At the center of such claims of inside knowledge was one of McNamara’s toxic fans. They were the nastiest, each certain that she had the clue that would solve the case— the Murder, She Wrote scenario. Those of this formula had made McNamara the center of their hopes. Although she had little presence on the message boards, there was always someone touting she was a super detective with a cutting edge lead. Just wait until her book comes out. She had worked so closely with “LE” that they consulted with her and she had exclusive information. This is actually a contradiction in terms, since she was promoted as being maverick and pioneering on her own as well.
Michelle McNamara, of course, was not responsible for how her toxic fans behaved. My understanding is that she began to realize that most on the boards were kooks and then distanced herself. Nevertheless, McNamara had made public claims that had indirectly inspired some of the most toxic to adulate her to feed their strange sense of independence and even rivalry with law enforcement. In conjunction with a retired detective, one was indeed processing informants’ POIs. Moreover, they were triaging them and eliminating them by tracing what pedigrees they could on genealogical databases. Elimination was declared by finding a surname in the POI’s heritage that indicated another ethnicity than German-English. (Surnames do not indicate ethnicity but national origins). I discovered this was done, spring-boarding off McNamara as the authoritative source. EAR’s ethnicity was just one part of the key evidence she had.
Since this present writer received copies of such emails, the last dating to December 2015, it it undeniable that law enforcement was also receiving reports of this presumptuous amateur activity. It is not surprising that by June 2016 Sacramento County’s District Attorney Anne Marie Shubert formed a high profiled task force. New evidence was presented and in connection with the FBI a page went up on their website with highly visible tip links. Law enforcement was finally fighting their way into a higher profile on the case. Many who had POIs or who had previously submitted them to the message board crowd came to me for the contact information. One was particularly humorous. “I see you’ve run afoul of the Nimrods on the message boards.” (Threads were devoted to deriding me and my investigation). I forwarded all the requesters to special agent Marcus Knutson at the FBI.
By this time (June 2016) Michelle McNamara was already dead. Due to her lifestyle, she accidentally overdosed on drugs and alcohol in April 2016. Yet the promotion of her work barely missed a step. It seemed inspired by the same message board rivalry that had come to promote her to begin with. Based on her notes, ghostwriters would finish her book. It would be dynamite and finally reveal her massive database of information that would help anybody solve the case. One of the ghostwriters was also a member of the message boards under an alias name. In the two years that followed, McNamara was promoted as having died from her obsession to the case. But she had the ultimate key. This key seemed to be DNA.
When in April 2017 CBS’s 48 Hours did a glorifying piece on McNamara, centered on her husband Patton Oswalt, the head ghostwriter Billy Jensen even posted in response to the advert on Oswalt’s Twitter account: “And I’m sure the bastard’s name is in one of her files.” It was not idle boasting or dovetailing on a major promotion piece.
I believe that the ghostwriters Billy Jensen and Paul Haynes truly believed that McNamara had viable evidence in her files that led to specific names, and from their experience anyway they believed she had actually engaged in some semblance of an investigation, else they never would have published the material they did in “her” book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (February 2018) and make the qualifying statements they made. Altogether though the basic PR line was that the book will solve the case, it ironically exposes McNamara as only having a superficial knowledge of the EAR-ONS case and by no means any obsession.
A critical observation would deduce that this lack of progress in understanding the case was the result of McNamara apparently having purloined what she believed was EAR-ONS’s DNA in the form of strands identifying his paternal heritage. (A graph of Y STR Markers is presented in the book. These Y Markers trace paternal heritage. The surnames of other males sharing these Y STR Markers may therefore indicate what surname EAR himself bears. This would be a springboard to finding his identity.) Having these markers she had, by her own admittance, keyed them in a civilian database under her own name and received a list of related surnames. Using these she had apparently done little else but concentrate on trying to find EAR through genealogy.
It would be logical to conclude this considering that as early as July 15, 2011, McNamara asserts in a Dork Forest podcast (beginning around the 8 minute mark) that she knows EAR’s ethnicity. “I know somewhat of what his ethnicity was because they ran it. I’m not supposed to know that but it is German/Scandinavian-English because I was told that. You can do that now. You can like send away your DNA now, so they did it for his.” She also let it slip she had a list of surnames. And for some reason believed the small town of Goleta was significant. She went through the graveyard there (and online) looking for these surnames and when one of these names popped up it rang bells and whistles for her more than others.
Amazingly, this was enough to propel her to the forefront of an obscure case surrounded by alias names on the message boards. Upon this was based all the anticipation that in her files lay the key to uncovering the identity of the villain’s name and the solution to the complex case. She must have spent all those years (2011 to 2016) following pedigrees related to these surnames.
Again, this must have been sincerely believed by Jensen and Haynes, and going though her files after her death they must have found the graph of Y Markers which they then published in her book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark as not only a good sell for the book (understandable) but as a way to open up McNamara’s research for others to follow through and identify the East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker.
The graph presented in the book is indeed the basis of McNamara’s dogma as early as 2011 that EAR was German-English and that she had derived a list of surnames from running this DNA. At the book’s publication those familiar with genealogy understood how to trace the Y Markers contained on page 306. The Y Markers led to such rare German surnames as Stroekel, Lanman, Unkefer, then Anglicized forms Little (Klein), Smith (obviously Schmidt), and Wiley. Confirming the German-English specificity of the DNA, the ghostwriters also speak with noted forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick. She confirms implicitly (page 307) that this was the list that McNamara had given her years before. She states that she had told her that from the list of surnames it would seem she was looking for a “German name from the UK.” The last statement was made because the Y Marker matches are so sporadic that they indicate EAR only had a distant, perhaps even 20th, cousin in the civilian database. The mutual ancestor must have been back 500 years ago and came form Germany to the UK, then eventually his descendants (some of whom might have Anglicized their surname) came to the US.
Devotees to McNamara’s book, one of whom photo-shopped her head onto an angel or saint and declared her the  patron saint of true crime, feverishly tried to trace the surnames and come up with someone holding one of these surnames that looked like one of the myriad of supposed EAR sketches circulating on the web. They were trying to fulfill the long time message board prophecy and book’s current promotion.
At this time I was so disturbed by the fact that real evidence would be slipped out to such a writer that I made overtures to some of the jurisdictions. Moreover, I still couldn’t believe EAR was German-English. Holes’ October 2017 comment also remained with me. I knew Italian was involved. Through Michelle Cruz, I learned the DNA Markers in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark were “inaccurate.” Orange County reaffirmed they would never release any evidence to a civilian and compromise the case. I had also told Ken Clark, Sacramento Sheriff Department’s lead detective on the case, that much was coming back to me from those following the surname search and that these names (Stroekel, Unkefer, et al) jive with what McNamara had claimed in her Dork Forest podcast— German-English and rare surname. He never knew Orange County had DNA familial markers with such “specificity.” He would reach out and check.
In truth, Clark and Orange County were correct. The DNA graph in McNamara’s book is junk. I was told that the markers were “quickly supplanted for better markers.” This statement is the only indication that McNamara had gotten a hold of (presumably underhandedly) a very early ancestral DNA attempt from an incomplete or degraded DNA source. OC had never entrusted this to a civilian, but . . .but McNamara might have absconded with it behind their backs.
A little digging uncovered a cause and effect chain. What I discovered was that McNamara had gotten involved in the case in 2010 at the behest of A&E because their message board was full of vitriol by know-it-alls behind alias names. A&E thought there could be something to the case. She wrote some letters of introduction to some family members of murdered victims, and then because the case had been so stagnant in 2011 she was allowed to volunteer at Orange County. She was allowed to go through the files to sort.
There is no other occasion in which McNamara could have gotten the restricted information. She must have found the DNA graph or a list of Y STR Markers in the voluminous files and copied the sheet or hand-copied the markers. By her own admittance she then hand-keyed these markers into a civilian database under her own name as though this was her own DNA. She received from the haphazard matches the list of surnames. Judging by the date of the Dork Forest podcast of July 15, 2011, she had done this right away, soon after volunteering. So essentially having found the Y Markers, she dashed out the Orange County doors without ever (then or later) asking for qualifications on the value of this particular DNA run.
Doubtlessly, neither the ghostwriters nor the publisher could foresee that the case would be solved so soon after the book’s publication. Nor foresee that this solution would come from an entirely different quarter and that it had begun months before the tome was even prepared for printing. If not for this, the relevance of the book could have lasted indefinitely as sleuths traced these rare German surnames and 500 year long pedigrees, sure this was the only true key to unlocking the mystery. But the case was solved quickly with actual DNA that would uncover an accused with an Italian surname who wasn’t German-English.
Despite McNamara’s claims, law enforcement could never have told her that EAR-ONS was German/Scandinavian and English. Rather she must have purloined the markers, to put it politely, and receiving the list of surnames therefrom simplistically deduced this ethnicity by the list of surnames and from her interpretation of Fitzpatrick’s counsel that a German name from the UK meant “German-English.” As the revelation of DeAngelo as the accused perp confirms, actual DNA could never have led to “German English” at any time. Rather than leading to EAR’s identity, the graph in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark leads to a Herr Stroekel and it may not even have been EAR-ONS’s DNA readout. She may have pinched some other perp’s or hand-copied the markers and made so many mistakes that the resulting botchworks led to a non existent Herr Stroekel. Had Ms. McNamara played on the up-and-up with Orange County, she would have been told that sheet of Y Markers she would covet were junk.
What came of her underhanded action was years of futility. In her Dork Forest podcast she has the bubbly sound of an amateur, an eager and sincere one, but beginner nonetheless. Her error careened out to the virulent message board crowd, and in the hands of toxic fans the triaging of POIs was based on the simplistic belief that surnames reflected actual ethnicity. As to obsession I do not know, but her online blog was defunct already by Fall 2014, a year and half before she died. The contents of her book reveal it was 8 years obsolete at the time of publication. She had made no progress in 5 years’ time. She wasted time and money on gossipy sub plots (buying court documents) and pursuing background lives of the victims. In the case of Janelle Cruz, the final victim, there is nothing but libelous inaccuracy about her and her family (some blame the ghostwriters for this).
Worst of all, McNamara had seriously misled public perception of the case until the publication of her book paradoxically revealed her to have been an uninformed but personally ambitious collector. Indeed, the effects can be summed up as negative, not only for the past but to some extent for the future of prosecution. Orange County’s district attorney must be prepared to refute the claims in the book that McNamara “borrowed” three dozen boxes of files from OC’s evidence lockers. A defense attorney can make much out of that. Ventura C must also be prepared because supposedly this is how  McNamara obtained Ventura’s restricted police report, copies of which resided in the same lockers. These claims obviously compromised the integrity of the evidence, both because mitigating evidence could have been removed and false evidence introduced.
Exposure of 7 years of promotion by the very “crowning achievement” of those 7 years may delight those with a perverse lust for irony, but the futility of those years by a sincere beginner should actually cause some pity. She had her detractors online not because of her actions but because of the septic nature of some of her chief protagonists. And the promotion of her book, from this same quarter, was ludicrously at odds with the contents. This did not stop even with the revelation of DeAngelo as the alleged perpetrator.
Despite the press conference clarification that the book had nothing to do with exposing DeAngelo, the marketing campaign began that McNamara had solved it; that the book contained the clue that had inspired LE to act along the lines she had pioneered 7 years ago. Yet few realized that DeAngelo was radically different than anything suggested in the book, proving the total irrelevance of McNamara’s work. After Paul Holes was allowed to speak, the complexity of the process and its true origins came to light, making the scattered notes in the book and the bogus  DNA of Herr Stroekel a sorry installment unseen before in the annals of true crime.
The closest publishing faux pas I can liken this to is when McGraw-Hill published Joe Gervais book in 1971 entitled Amelia Earhart Lives. The woman he claimed to be Amelia Earhart rancorously denounced it at a news conference and sued. Despite being the No 1 bestseller, McGraw-Hill took the book off the shelves in only 7 weeks.
Only now are people beginning to realize the book is a no start. There are those who have attempted to mitigate the oncoming crash by saying that “had McNamara lived. . .” but this unjustly places blame on her ghostwriters when, in truth, they have none. True, a living author could never claim that she had borrowed boxes of evidence without risking legal repercussions. But while alive McNamara played everything close to her vest and ultimately is responsible for the ghastly error of pursuing and promoting false DNA. If Jensen, and especially Haynes, had any inkling that the DNA was worthless they never would have nor could have proceeded. Why publish the very piece of evidence that exposes the book’s author as sloppy at worst, and at best so secretive that she confided in no “LE” source in order to be told what she had was worthless? McNamara clearly believed up to the end that she had the genuine article. If she had any doubts, she never confided them in her assistants/ghostwriters.
Dutifully they included the graph in the book and made it the center of the book’s promotion. The book is simply not publishable material without the hook it contains the clue by which others can follow in her footsteps and complete the task. The book’s relevance hangs on the faith there is a clue to EAR’s identity in the book (in the graph of Y Markers). Everything else was, essentially, incomplete filler to support the publication of the stepping stone guideline to EAR’s name. It was a great selling hook, but it was false. . . and it is not the fault of those living.
Further proof they the ghosts had total faith in the DNA is seen in how there was a forgivable attempt to steal thunder at the announcement of the arrest of DeAngelo. In one Twitter post, the strange rivalry of the message boards with law enforcement crept out. “We were constantly checking the public DNA databases to see if we could find any solid familial matches . . .It was just a  matter of time.” Actually, no, with Herr Stroekel’s DNA there was no chance. If a closer relative popped up, it would have been a closer relative to a bogus EAR. It was a burp in a whirlwind, a DOJ whirlwind: “Department of Justice Means Just Us. Not You!”
By bashing the ghostwriters, the polemics assume it was their responsibility to finish the investigation when it was not. Research and investigation are not the same thing. Investigation moves forward through a process with the ultimate goal of solution. Research uncovers what could be pertinent material and the investigator must analyze and assess its place in the overall work.
Jennifer Carole, the daughter of EAR murder victim Lyman Smith, said that no one ever came to speak to her or her family. This indicates that McNamara had not even persevered that far in her research after 5 years since she had obtained what she believed was surefire DNA.
Again, the “obsession” is merely marketing or she confined herself to tracing the pinched DNA of Herr Stroekel. Apparently she didn’t even ask how the graphs work and what matches must be returned in order to make tracing viable (It will be explained later in this article). The statement by Billy Jensen above is the only indication that the ghostwriters inquired a little further and knew a closer match was needed. (A seasoned true crime writer, however, would have checked with Orange Co. to verify if the graph was even accurate DNA).
This must be dwelt upon for a moment.
For just a brief comparative on the difficulties of lifting a DNA profile, we can turn to an interview with Paul Holes. He noted that while following Joseph DeAngelo, the first pick up of discarded DNA showed “some similarities” to EAR, but it wasn’t enough. They needed a better sample. They continued to follow him and finally obtained another discarded DNA source and got a 100% match. This conveys to the reader the difficulty of lifting a profile from a fresh DNA source. Orange Co. was trying to lift a profile from a 30 year old DNA source, and one of these attempts (presumably) is the one that McNamara encountered in the files. In all the time she possessed it, she did not bother to get it qualified from any authoritative source— unbelievable inertia. By comparison it took Michelle Cruz 6 years to finally track down the “kitten man” of legend who had appeared briefly in her late sister’s life shortly before she was murdered. McNamara displays such ennui she doesn’t even seem to suspect the complexity of DNA trial and error. That the DNA remained so pivotal in the book and in its promotion reflects the ghostwriters’ perception that McNamara had complete faith in the DNA readout and after all these years this had remained her ultimate trump card to play.
Overt statements in the book made by the ghostwriters, however, reveal their distance from McNamara’s actual involvement in and means of obtaining and verifying “source.” Statements that she could borrow libraries of files is a case in point. According to them, she read through purchased (and hence public) court transcripts pertaining to the pretrial of Joe Alsip, the man originally accused of the double murder of the Smiths. They write that she had come upon tantalizing references to the restricted Ventura police report. She coveted it now even more. On Page 122 the statement is made: “In January 2016, she finally got her hands on the file when she borrowed three dozen boxes of Golden State Killer material from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. She had read through much of that file . . .by the time of her death but she did not have time to weave it into the narrative.” [italics mine]
I queried several law enforcement investigators, including one former chief of police, and the collective response is “ridiculous.” It would even be criminal for an investigator to release private information on living people. She may have been allowed to go through the files under some controlled circumstances, but that much material would never be allowed off site, as the wording implies. At its most innocent the belief she could do so is naive; at worst if she did then DeAngelo’s defense attorney has much to consider.
Again, on page 285 it is claimed that she had 37 boxes of files from the Orange County Prosecutor’s Office (though they had not prosecuted anything yet), “which Michelle had lovingly dubbed the Mother Lode.” This may merely be a hasty mistake and the ghosts meant the Sheriff’s Department boxes she had “borrowed.” Or it may be the other way around.
Mother Lode of what, however? Nothing led anywhere in the files, and to assert they did is to imply that the official investigators were too stupid to exploit their own files.
Any protracted investigation of EAR-ONS would have after 5 years’ time uncovered that the villain had no background contacts with his victims. Reading police reports therefore wouldn’t really help in investigation. It would be of use only in writing down an historic narrative. And if McNamara did believe there was a viable clue therein, it reflects how she had become disillusioned by trying to trace the bogus DNA she somehow (unspecified) had obtained in the beginning of volunteering. A few months later she was dead of overdose.
In good faith her ghostwriters went through her files trying to organize a collection rather than an investigation without knowing (apparently) how indiscriminately she had acquired her information and mixed it with irrelevance and obsolescence. Her penchant to acquire at any cost restricted information could have led to a very accurate and intriguing historical narrative, but she did not have the ability for an investigative tome. Vision is also not a ghostwriter’s duty. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark ranks neither as a detailed, informative narrative nor does it have a treasure map guide therein that could ever have led anywhere to her “Golden State Killer.” Had it not been for the belief there was a true DNA chart to include therein the book never could have been published.
With the solution and Paul Holes coming to the fore, there should have been no attempt to steal thunder from those who had remained focused, from those who had really done the work. Had McNamara lived to publish such a book, the exposure of the false DNA, and the years of public confidence it had emboldened her to present, would have ruined her as quickly as Gervais was ruined for Amelia Earhart Lives and Colonel Corso for his Day After Roswell fantasy recollections, both of which tumbled after being No 1 bestsellers. That she was dead and ultimately not responsible for the final work, the book should have quietly been allowed to fade quickly away.
Let’s give you an idea of what Paul Holes’ group did.
This graph and the following commentary, pertaining to ethnic tracing on a branch of my own family, will help illustrate for the reader.
These results, from my cousin’s daughter, reflect both her mother’s family and my cousin’s (and hence my) heritage. An 18th century Italian ancestor went up to govern the Volga land for Catherine the Great. His son received a scholarship and then Astracan from the Czar, and my heritage became mixed with the German-Huguenots who had immigrated to settle the Steppes centered in the German colony of Norka. As you can see from the readout above, the DNA strands could still identify the remaining Italian heritage and identify strands unique to Germans from Russia. This branch above married into an old German family from Kansas, and even Germans from the Midwest could be identified. The accuracy was amazing, and when I was shown the full readout I recognized the names in the 1st to 2nd Cousin category and even a couple of the names in 4th to 6th Cousin category.
In terms of tracing lineage back to a mutual ancestor, the above ethnic readout really isn’t that useful, but I was essentially walked through the process of how tracing genealogy works for paternal Y STR Markers. The first run is 12 Y Markers. Putting a male suspect’s Y Markers in a database and getting a perfect 12 out of 12 match with another male in the database still could mean some intense genealogical work, for even a second cousin of the same male heritage should show a 12 out of 12 match. This would mean two males with the same great grandfather. The next run is 35 Y Markers, and the male whose heritage is being traced and his male second cousins here too would probably show a 35 out of 35 Y Marker match. Next run is 67, and then finally over 100 Y markers.
The less Y Markers used and the more in common the better. It means a closer relative. If the 12 Y Marker match came came back and it showed 11 out of 12 match, it would be a daunting task to trace the relationship. It would mean these two males being compared have a mutual ancestor about 150 years ago.
This is probably what the database returned for DeAngelo. There was a 4th cousin in the database. Just from this it took 8 months and 25 family trees for Holes’ group to narrow down to DeAngelo. By contrast the graph in McNamara’s book was just 35 Y STR Markers that showed wide and sporadic matches, and even if it was an accurate DNA run it would have been junk for tracing purposes.
For indeed, indeed, Herr Stroekel’s ancestors came from Germany through England, by the interpretation of the sporadic Y Marker matches. DeAngelo’s grandparents came from Italy and his Y chromosomes are Italian.
Little did I know that as I was being told how it was done, Paul Holes’ team was narrowing down 25 family trees to 2 men. Ironically, and understandably, the least of interest was DeAngelo since he had been a full time cop up the Sierra foothills.
The reason why more DNA and the genealogical approach was so desired by many in the hunt is obvious. It went quickly to the throat. But other avenues of investigation were bearing down at the same time, and the genealogical link, as noted, even crossed my own network of POIs, clear enough that I could recognize the person behind the October statement. The closest to uncovering a link could have been Ken Clark and the SSD team. It was becoming obvious that the Cordova Cat had been the East Area Rapist before he turned rapist. Not only was the prowling MO essentially the same, Clark discovered that in 1973 the Cat had used as cover a license plate lifted from a car that had been wrecked. The car in question had been wrecked a month previous to the Cat burglarizing a victim. Then using his stolen gas credit card, he went on jaunts around Sacramento. This meant the Cat had lifted the plate at the accident site or at a wrecking yard or had some connection thereto. Historical research was underway to uncover the yard, the towing company, and all those involved in that wreck. It may soon have uncovered the alleged perp’s name as an officer associated with it or to the various welders DeAngelo had worked for before, and welders frequently work with wrecking.
No summary of the EAR-ONS experience can ignore the Visalia Ransacker question and consider the years of debating whether they were one and the same perpetrator. The debate underscores the irony of 40 years of pursuit and the total lack of reliable information that haunted both professional investigators and amateurs alike.
The Ransacker really only came to the news with the reports of the murder of Claude Snelling on September 11, 1975, when wisps of information, and only wisps, reached Visalians’ ears that there had been for the previous year a burglar afoot vexing south Visalia known as the “ransacker.” No descriptions were given.
The first clear description came with the Officer Bill McGowen incident on Kaweah Drive on December 10, 1975. He had staked the area out sure from the clues reported by neighbors in the days prior that the Ransacker would strike here. He did. McGowen challenged him and as reward got his flashlight shot out of his hands. The perp was described as 200 pounds, about 5 foot 10 inches, blonde hair, wearing a knit cap pulled low. He was 25 to 35 years old. Over a few more Visalia Times Delta articles, the "Ransacker" evolved very little. He was between 180 and 200 pounds, baby face, short hair sandy colored. Visalia Police checked out barber shops in order to get a lead because the guy’s hair was so short.
  
The Visalia Ransacker as seen through the 3 dominant sketches.
After Sacramento’s East Area Rapist became state news (May 1977), Visalia PD wanted to forge a link because EAR was known to ransack his rape victims’ houses. Two of the detectives, Bill McGowen and John Vaughn, came to Sacramento and shared details and reports. Sacramento Sheriffs compared 9 points of MO and discounted 6 of them. Apparently there were some words between the two jurisdictions, and SSD got tired of the Visalia detectives and “cut off communication”— pretty strong language.
On July 22, 1978, it hit the fan. The Sacramento Union ran the story that the Ransacker and EAR were linked, relying heavily on Vaughn and McGowen’s input. This was a year after the two jurisdictions had shared information and Sacramento had rejected a link. SSD was stunned. Bill Miller, SSD’s venerable spokesman, was upset. He responded to press calls at his house. He said the Union was irresponsible for running that story. He said that Vaughn and McGowen were unprofessional and irresponsible. There was no link ever made except by those two.
In Miller’s polemic response, we get more snippets of the Ransacker’s description. “McGowen said in a report that the Ransacker ‘looked like a baby and acted like a homosexual; he did not run very fast and ran in a funny manner like his knees were together. He had large, round shoulders, large hips, large rump, large legs, fat thighs, fat calves, and fat short feet,’ Miller said quoting McGowen’s report.” Miller continued: “We’ve got 39 victims and none of them even come close to ever describing the East Area Rapist in that regard.”
In this July 23 response we also discover that SSD had the Visalia reports, and that in January 1976 the Ransacker had been seen again in Visalia. Miller said he flat out didn’t look like the description of the EAR as seen in the October 1975 rape (considered then to be EAR’s first, and being reconsidered today). It seems certain the Ransacker was still active in 1976 from the Times Delta as well, which ran a long article detailing his prowling on South Dollner Street in March 1976. He was even chased by a resident and described similar to the sketch based on McGowen’s sighting.
From just the above there was little reason to entertain the idea that the chubby, adolescent looking Ransacker was one and the same with the lean, gymnastic East Area Rapist, with shoulder length hair. Sacramento Police’s deputy chief wondered if he hadn’t lost his baby fat by the summer of 1976.
After the arrest of DeAngelo, there are those that came forward and insisted that McGowen always knew the Ransacker was a cop. In fact, he did not. Richard Shelby had accompanied McGowen on his pursuit of the Ransacker in Davis, California, and wrote about it in his book Hunting a Psychopath. The man they watched (which McGowen had traced from Visalia) was a utility worker and he fit the description McGowen had given. When watching him one day, McGowen squirmed, according to Shelby, and said he had seen too many suspects to be sure anymore. From what he knew of their investigation, Shelby believed this was their man and he most certainly was not EAR. He had massive calf muscles, a big rump, blond, everything McGowen and other witnesses had described. “Conversations with current Visalia detectives lead me to believe that they are mostly of one mind,” Shelby wrote, “and that being that EAR-ONS and VR are not one and the same.”
In truth, there may have been more than one Ransacker afoot in Visalia at the time. In the case of the Snelling Murder, the press uncovered that the block had had two prowlers in the weeks before— an older and younger one. Snelling had even chased one off.
Even today, with the revelation that the accused perpetrator Joseph DeAngelo had been a cop in the nearby  town of Exeter, there is little reason to believe he is the one that shot at McGowen on that December night in 1975, and it seems hard to believe he is the similar appearing Dollner Street prowler of March 1976. Despite the 1973 Exeter Police photo showing DeAngelo a bit chubby, he was by this time far leaner, and the reports of EAR’s description in the summer of 1976 would underline this if he is the EAR as he is alleged to be.
The only thing the Ransacker sketches capture accurately about DeAngelo is the thin eyebrows. He could be the Ransacker. He could be the man who shot at McGowen. But if so, McGowen’s description is horrendously inaccurate.
Was DeAngelo one of the Ransackers? It is possible. It is even possible that he is the murderer of Claude Snelling. The circumstances are very much those of EAR’s impromptu murders— cold blooded killing merely to protect his identity. But contemporarily, considering the radically different descriptions, there was no reason for anybody to be certain that EAR and VR could have been one and the same perpetrator. The Visalia files would have to be opened and carefully combed of information to establish DeAngelo as the probable.
Yet there is one thing the many sketches of “EAR-ONS” and the Ransacker sketches have in common when put up next to DeAngelo’s picture. They confirm that if DeAngelo was the sole single-o perpetrator— Cordova Cat-EAR-ONS-VR— he had never been seen. He had been that careful of a night stalker that no one had seen him day or night in any way clear enough to give us a good identikit or sketch.
More than anything the sketches, all being bogus, illustrate the meticulous nature of the night predator. He was a quarry unseen except for the footprints left behind and the terror left instilled in those he had attacked. Only Rose (Victim 3) thought he had the bearing of a cop or military man. Yet then she said that he was a small guy, and if it wasn’t for his gun she thought she could have taken him. DeAngelo is taller than most descriptions of EAR. He is 5 foot 11 inches. It is truly amazing that with a crime spree (or several) so prolific there was no solid report as to any to the perp’s (if they are not all DeAngelo) height, weight, hair color/length, or anything.
How smart as opposed to how lucky was the East Area Rapist-Night Stalker to have avoided being identified then or at least long before now? This is a question that will remain for a long time. If DeAngelo is proved to be all the various perps— EAR, Cordova Cat, Visalia Ransacker, Night Stalker— his unrelenting sense of security may have been the result of all the inaccurate reports of his appearance. Cops were not above suspicion, but living in Auburn at the time, far removed from the East Area, insulated him somewhat. Driving long distances to begin his attacks was truly his one bit of inspiration, if he turns out to be convicted. Still, had the Visalia Ransacker description not been so skewed some detective might have become suspicious, especially in 1979 when seeing that this Auburn cop had gotten fired for shoplifting a can of dog repellent. Discovering he had been a cop nearby to Visalia during the VR crimes, that the EAR crimes began soon after he had moved back to Sacramento’s area, that he had threatened the chief of Auburn police, might have been enough to start an investigation. But with the Ransacker likened to a very blonde and adolescent, effeminate petty pervert, why would anybody link VR to a cop in Exeter or in Auburn? For Night Stalker crimes down south there are no perp descriptions. He simply was not seen.
This is the summation of 7 years of the EAR-ONS experience— Hunting a phantom that had never been seen clearly, stalking him now as he slowly becomes famous under the guise of old sketches of young, shaggy hair 1970s males, debating inaccuracy, spring-boarding off unsure clues, grasping for any solid lead. Only a fraction of how he pulled off his incessant stalking is currently known. An apartment in Greenhaven should be suspected. An old hangout in Rancho Cordova seems certain. His whereabouts in So. Cal is still a public mystery, but the accused had connections to the industrial area, not surprising for a man who was a welder first. He bought a gun in Whittier in 1986 and more is now being uncovered.
The prolific nature of the crime spree reflects the evil preoccupation of the perpetrator to commit his thrill crimes. But now at the apparent summation of it all the experience of tracking him conveys to those who endured it that several factors came together, some outside of his control, to allow him to become the most prolific serial predator in history. If it is DeAngelo, it really wasn’t the badge. It was time, distance, and careful planning, and lots of mistaken identities thrown into the bargain. When all is put together, he became and remained the unsuspected.
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