Paul Holes:
He had 50 official attacks on the list up in Northern California, where there were 75 adults that were either bound or sexually assaulted. None of the men were ever sexually assaulted. But he also interacted with children. Some children he bound because they were interfering with his you know what he wanted to do, which was to basically emasculate their father and rape the mom.
Robert Riggs:
Cold Case investigator Paul holes played a major role in ending a decades long reign of terror by the Golden State killer. You're about to hear how the mysterious case was finally solved. I'm Robert Riggs, reporting from inside the yellow crime scene tape. This is a true crime reporter, extra from Dallas, Texas. You
Robert Riggs:
the East Area Rapist, a mass psychological sadist, assaulted 50 women in Northern California between 1976 and 1979 he progressed from burglaries to vicious sexual assaults in the middle of the night to bludgeoning his victims to death along the way, he called 911, to taunt the police, and suddenly it seemed he had disappeared, but he had moved to a new hunting ground in Southern California, where he murdered 13 people and became known as The original night stalker. And then in 1986 it stopped. In 2011 DNA testing revealed that the East Area Rapist and the original night stalker were one in the same man. True crime writer Michelle McNamara gave the elusive criminal the moniker the Golden State killer. McNamara the wife of comedian actor Patton Oswell, became obsessed with the long abandoned case for six years, focusing attention on it until her untimely death. Enter investigator Paul holes. Holes talked with me about his newly released book, unmask my life, solving America's cold cases. We discussed the Golden State killer, notorious cases in Texas and breakthroughs in forensic genealogy. So Paul, thank you for joining the true crime reporter podcast. You devoted a quarter century of your life to pursuing the Golden State killer. Would you give our listeners a brief timeline, you know, starting back when you first saw the case, I guess it was 74 till Kelly was captured.
Paul Holes:
You know, he, in terms of his crimes, he had an active crime spree from 1974 to 1986 I got involved with the case back in 1994 when I had just been promoted to a deputy sheriff criminalist position within a crime lab, and I found these old files that were labeled with a red ear and that stood for East Area Rapist. And I decided, hey, I wanted to pursue this case and then, not knowing where it would lead. But ultimately, in 2001 I linked those rape attacks in Northern California to homicides down in Southern California, where the offender was known as the original night stalker. So this case, all of a sudden, blew up into something very big, but then it just got bigger and bigger as the public attention was put on it. And then eventually it got great notoriety when a true crime writer, Michelle McNamara, ended up writing Los Angeles magazine article and renamed the offender the Golden State killer. And unfortunately, Michelle passed away before she could finish a book on the case. And I want to
Robert Riggs:
tell our listeners, that's Pat nozzles wife like, why That's right,
Paul Holes:
yes. And you know, she had become very close to me, and she was my, in many ways, a civilian investigative partner on the Golden State killer case, and after she passed, I just kept plugging away, and then ultimately formed a partnership with an attorney out of the FBI who's General Counsel down in Los Angeles, is Steve Kramer, and we both agreed that we needed to be pursuing the genealogy aspect On Golden State killer and through our efforts and through a relationship with a genetic genealogist by the name of Barbara Ray Venter, we use this genetic genealogy in an unsolved case to identify Joseph D'Angelo as the Golden State killer, and that was in April of two. Of 2018
Robert Riggs:
Well, there was a point that you really described his profile. Tell us what you described, and it turned out that was him, and how you came to that conclusion, and that he was a police I had been a police officer,
Paul Holes:
yeah, you know, there were some things that, as I worked the case and I developed various suspects and then ultimately eliminate the suspects, I would always push back and go, Okay, how did I, you know, read this wrong, because I truly thought I had solved this case multiple times. And as I was assessing the information in the case files about what was known about the offender, and then taking a look at his geographic profile, I realized, Oh, this is an individual that is much more intelligent and sophisticated in committing crimes than what anybody thought. And as I started going down that path, I started recognizing that he was staging his crimes. He was acting like a drug addict. In certain instances, he was feeding information to the victims, knowing that they would tell investigators to misdirect the investigation. And this is where Now, anytime somebody stages a crime, whether it be physical evidence, to make a homicide look like a suicide, or, in this instance, to make him look like something different than what he was, he's trying to point the investigation away from himself. So now you take a look at those statements, and that's what I was doing. Was looking at those statements, and his geographic profiler going, this guy is Sacramento based. He's possibly still alive today. I believe you know he was in a married relationship and possibly never even really left the Sacramento area, even though he was committing crimes all over California. And turns out, you know that part of my profile was correct. Now, I didn't predict that he would be a police officer, but the strategies and tactics that he was using in order to commit his crimes were something, of course, that law enforcement officers are well versed in, but I took the position that, due to this offenders intelligence, he naturally would employ these types of tactics in order to minimize the risk to himself. It turns out well, he was actually trained in how to do these tactics
Robert Riggs:
well and walk us through his escalation that were the kind of crimes he starts in just an overview to then rape and onto murder. And he's really into psychological terror of his victims.
Paul Holes:
He is, you know, D'Angelo is what I've termed a psychological sadist. He wasn't doing the physical sadistic acts that we've seen other offenders do in terms of the physical torture. But the best that we know right now, it appears that D'Angelo was committing burglaries for financial means back in high school age, and this was relayed by a friend, high school friend, who said that he was one of his burglary partners at that that time. And then it right around 1973 and this is not confirmed, though. I believe this to be the case, as does the the detective that discovered this, Ken Clark from Sac sheriff's office. He in Rancho Cordova, was committing a series of cat burglaries, where he's breaking into houses with people inside the houses. The next confirmed types of crimes he was doing when he was a cop down in Exeter, which is in kind of the South Central Valley of California, and in a nearby town Visalia, he was breaking into houses, doing residential Bergs, but they were fetish Bergs. He was going after women's undergarments. He was stealing photos of women out of their photo albums, taking souvenirs like single earrings, and then just doing a lot of odd things, and he committed over 100 of these fetish Bergs between 1974 and 1975 at one point, he tries to abduct a 16 year old girl out of her bed in the middle of the night, and her Dad, Claude snowing, tries to come to her rescue outside the house, and that's when D'Angelo drops the girl, shoots the father, killing him, kicks the girl in the head three times and runs off. But he doesn't leave. Isilie, he continues to commit the burglaries, and then is confronted by an officer and. Shoots the officer. Fortunately, the officers flashlight saved him. But then nothing else happens in Visalia for six months up in June of 1976 in the East area of Sacramento, we now have a series of sexual assaults occurring where an offender, a masked offender, is breaking into the houses in the middle of the night. Women are asleep, though there's some variance in terms of his MO, but he would bind the women and sexually assault them. Sacramento Bee is writing an article about this, now termed East Area Rapist because of the East area Sacramento and in one of the articles, the Sacramento Bee reporter writes, he has never attacked when a man is present. Two attacks later, he's now attacking a couple where he's bounding up the man, putting dishes on the man's back as an alarm system, and then taking the woman out to the family room and repeatedly sexually assaulting her. And from that point on, as East Area Rapist, 75% of his attacks involve males. He's purposely choosing to attack when there's a male present.
Robert Riggs:
And in case I'm going to show you, I'm thumbing my nose at you.
Paul Holes:
Yeah. This is absolutely it. He This is a very vindictive offender, and he is, you know, when he's challenged, he wants to rise to that challenge, and I'll show you. And that's where we actually saw that, at his sentencing, after he had heard all these victim impact statements in court, telling them what a coward he was. He wouldn't even look at them, and he's in a wheelchair pretending to be an invalid. Well, when he's being sentenced, he's given an opportunity to speak. He pushes back from the desk, stands up out of the wheelchair and turns to the victims, and he, you know, mutters his apology. But what he was doing there was saying, I'm showing you I'm not a coward, and nor am I this physical invalid that I've been pretending to be. That was he just couldn't help himself. But with D'Angelo, you know, you have this the series of sexual assaults in Northern California, and then he disappears. And it turns out this is after he's arrested for shoplifting a dog repellent and a hammer up in the Sacramento area. He's fired from his law enforcement job. He then goes down south and starts killing and in fact, the very first attack down south in Santa Barbara, the female the couple lived because the attack went sideways, the couple was able to escape, but the female heard D'Angelo pacing back and forth saying, I'm going to kill him. I'm going to kill him this time. I'm going to kill him like he's psyching himself up. So this is that evolution you were kind of referring to, where now he's going from a feather burglar to a rapist in Northern California, and then his life fell apart. He lost the thing that he really wanted, which was being a police officer up in Auburn. He had all the power and authority of a law enforcement officer, even though he is, you know, a serial predator, you know, and and then. But when he loses that, he loses his badge. Now that stressor is is flipping that switch to where, probably what his true fantasy, what he always wanted to do was to commit these sexually motivated homicides,
Robert Riggs:
and how many victims over the course of all this, and what was the death toll? So
Paul Holes:
you know, victims are, in fact, very hard to to enumerate in this series. Now, he had 50 official attacks on the list up in Northern California, where there were 75 adults that were either bound or sexually assaulted. None of the men were ever sexually assaulted. But he also interacted with children. Some children he bound because they were interfering with his you know what he wanted to do, which was to basically emasculate their father and rape the mom. And then when he moves down to Southern California, he has six attacks or six homicide cases. Four of those cases are double homicides and two are single homicides. So there was 10 victims in this original night stalker series. He had a double homicide in Sacramento, and then prior to that Claude Snelling down in Visalia, he shot and killed. So he was charged, and he pled guilty to 13 homicides. As well as admitted or pled guilty to all the other attacks that were on the official list.
Robert Riggs:
So the first season of our podcast was about sadistic, sexual serial killer Kenneth Macduff, who'd been to death row, got out. And we have a television show the same on Fox nation streaming, called freed to kill. The question I always get, we always get, was it nature or nurture,
Paul Holes:
right? And, you know, from my perspective, I do think that there is a nature or a genetic element to these serial predators. There is very possibly an environmental factor that contributes, you know, it's though, you know, I'm not as well versed on the the more recent studies that have been done in this instance, as you know what was done in the past. But I do believe that there are individuals that are born with a predisposition, and if there is an environmental aspect that causes that predisposition, that trigger, to go off. Now you have somebody who is sexualizing violence and fantasizing about that violence. They get sexual pleasure out of committing this violence, and it's in a wide variety of different ways per different offenders, and that is innate to that person. It's not something that they will ever get over,
Robert Riggs:
is it the forensic psychiatrist part Dietz that talks about the homicidal triad that you will see in the chat. Let's walk through that. I mean, if there's bed wetting, animal killing animals, fire setting and fire setting. You have trouble. It's coming.
Paul Holes:
Oh, absolutely. And you know, as far as the triad, for me, the big predictor is the animal cruelty. If you have a kid or young adult that is willing to torture and take the life of another living creature in that way, that really causes a red flag to go up in my mind, that this is somebody that is very close and is very willing to possibly take that up to doing that to a fellow human, the fire setting. Most certainly, there are individuals that set fires with the hope to inflict, you know, the pain and death on others. But then there are fire setters that truly just get off. They're sexually motivated by burning down structures, the bedwetting. I don't know, you know, the, it appears that that's probably something that, you know, further study is needed. But I really don't put much weight on that. It's, it's the animals. If I hear somebody is torturing and killing animals, in fact, when I was with the DAs office, I'd have da s who are handling juvenile cases, saying, hey, this this kid has tortured and killed two cats. You know, what should we do? And it's like that kid needs help right now, and he needs to be flagged as possibly a problem in the future.
Robert Riggs:
Now, in the case of McDuff, interestingly, his mother complained when he was a kid that he was always choking her chickens to death with a stick. Later on, he would say to his accomplices, you know, when you kill a woman, they squawk like a chicken. And the first series of murders he got that he got caught doing, he had choked the female to death with a broken broomstick across her throat, and for that, he was known as the broomstick killer. Now, what was interesting is that he was the prince in the family, put on the pedestal could do no wrong, whereas his siblings were subjected to severe abuse by their father, the mother, which, when he got put off the school bus for misbehaving, the mother showed up with a pistol and, you know, and confronted the school bus driver and became known as the pistol packing mama. He could do no wrong, and they a little town in Texas, lived in fear of this family, you
Paul Holes:
know. And isn't that interesting that during his formative years, he is committing a form of violence that he continues to commit when he becomes a predator. And I think back to Roger Kibbe, who's one of the i Five killers out here in California, who as a as a kid, his mom was a nurse, and used like these nursing shears and stuff. And he would steal those and go to laundry lines and cut, you know, clothing and stuff. And then when he ultimately became a predator and was killing women, he would cut their clothings, and what profilers were calling, well, these are non functional cuts. You know, he just had this, this predilection to want and desire to do that, even though it didn't contribute to committing the crime. So it sounds like McDuff. Had, you know, something got ingrained psychologically with what he was doing to the chickens, and he liked it, and he continued it on with humans. Paul,
Robert Riggs:
we're going to take a break, and when we come back, we'll pick it back up with your book. Unmask your pursuit of the Golden State killer. You foreign
Robert Riggs:
we're back with Paul holes, the author of unmask this for you true crime lovers, this is a book to be read. Paul talks about his long journey into darkness of pursuing the Golden State killer who is later caught. So we're going to pick back up in when you are pursuing him, you come across someone who ends up in Texas named Darryl Kemp and Darrell had been paroled out of prison in California. Talk, talk about that and how that came about, and what kind of offender he
Paul Holes:
was. Yeah, you know, I early on in my career, I started working unsolved cases of women in a kind of a specific area in Contra Costa County, which was a relatively safe middle to upper class neighborhood, but there was a really strong cluster of unsolved cases, and back in 1979 a serial killer by the name of Philip Hughes had been caught, and everybody assumed that Hughes was good for all those cases, and so I took it upon myself to prove that he was good for all These other cases. And in one case, it was a 42 year old female jogger around this Lafayette Reservoir. This is a highly trafficked reservoir jogging trail recreational area in a very quaint and nice town in the middle of Contra Costa County, and she failed to come home, and when they found her, she had been pulled off the trail. She was nude from the waist down, and she had evidence of ligature strangulation around her neck as well as bindings on her wrist, but the binding material in the ligature had been removed, so I took it upon myself to start pursuing Phil and Phil Hughes for this case, and we had a small amount of blood underneath her fingernail, and once DNA matured to be able to go after this small sample, it turns out it wasn't Phil Hughes DNA, it was some other males DNA. I had a detective friend, because I was frustrated. Had a detective friend by the name of Roxanne gruenhaid said, let me look at that case file. And then she said, Hey, what about this parolee named Daryl Kemp? And I was like, Okay, well, I think he we have a sample of his, turns out, a hair sample that had been collected back in 1979 and had that run and it matched the DNA underneath the victim's fingernail. So here's like, Okay, who is this? Darryl Kemp? Well, it turns out Darryl Kemp was a serial killer out of the Los Angeles area from the late 1950s had been convicted of, I believe those two homicides, was sentenced to death and was on death row in California from the early 60s up until when he was paroled in 1978 to Contra Costa County And then, obviously he had killed armita wiltse, the victim around the Lafayette Reservoir. It was like, Well, where is he today? And this is now in believe it was 2001 timeframe. He was tracked down. And he was tracked down to the Texas prison system, where he was just finishing up another prison sentence for six rapes out in the Texas
Robert Riggs:
area. Do we know what became of him? Because we had a revolving door running in this
Paul Holes:
Yeah. Well, fortunately, he, you know, Roxanne, went out to talk to him out in the Texas prisons. And I can't tell you which prison I know you'd be familiar with, but I can't remember he. He did not talk. He was extradited to California to Contra Costa County, and was convicted of the armido wilty case, and is now back on death row in California. Yeah,
Robert Riggs:
and I want to tell our listeners The reason he got off death row is across the country in 1972 when the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty. All of the death row inmate sentences were commuted to life, which meant someday they would be eligible for parole. But my God, we never imagined anybody in their right mind would let any of these people out, which goes to the case of in Texas, the parole board was a. Political deal, a political plum. Nobody had any criminal justice background, nothing. And they're making these decisions and and I even find in the public, there's this, this innocence that they It's on. It's unthinkable that people do this. What do you what do you say to the public about, you know, there is a percentage of the population, if they're not behind bars, they're going to be killing
Paul Holes:
us, yes, and, and, you know, for these types of individuals, like a Darryl Kemp, like a Philip Hughes, like, like a Macduff, you know, these, these are predators. You know they that is core to their nature. And even when they have been into prison, and we see this over and over again, not necessarily on death row, but just being incarcerated and released, they pick right up to where, when they stopped, you know, they continue to do these types of crimes, and that that's the tragedy is at one point, law enforcement, the justice system, caught these guys, but especially back then, didn't recognize that these guys are are a continuing threat to public safety. No matter how old they are. They are not going to be rehabilitated, in my opinion. And so, you know that's that's unfortunate when you see that you have people who have lost their lives and it's due to somebody who had been captured and then released. It's a failing on the criminal justice system, because now this person has just happened too many times. A person who had so much to live for. Their life is gone. Their loved ones are now, you know, tragically suffering for the rest of their lives, wondering what would have been, you know, if he or she had lived.
Robert Riggs:
So one of the things I saw throughout my career and today is that once their crimes come to your awareness, they're described as monsters, and they're scary. And you look at the mug shot, and it's scary, but what I found is that they're very normal. Kenneth McDuff was a big man, but if he had been standing behind me in the convenience store to pay for gas, you wouldn't. He's kind of goofy, you know, you wouldn't have paid him a second thing, you know, he didn't. He didn't look like you didn't have horns or anything. And what's your
Paul Holes:
experience? No, you know that is, you know, with the various predators that I have had, you know that I've pursued, they are very good, for the most part, blending into society. They look normal. They have been able to compartmentalize their crimes like Joseph D'Angelo did. He was just your ordinary Joe, you know, working as a truck mechanic up in Sacramento. You'd go fishing with his fishing buddies. You know, he was taking his grandkid around for Halloween, you know, trick or treating, you know. So he just blended in, without anybody suspecting that he was, you know, one of the most notorious serial predators in America history. And that seems to be consistent. Yet when Pete, when you start, you know, talking to people, they may pull out an oddity of the personality here or there, you know, but I have one serial predator, Wild Bill Huff, you know, which right now, he's, he's pled guilty to two cases, you know. But he does look like the boogeyman, you know. He's somebody that would scare anybody walking down the street, just the way he looks. But that's tends to be unusual, unless, if you're dealing with your more organized offender, you know they they generally look like a normal person. It's your psychotic offenders. They're the ones that have the crazy hair and unkempt clothes and just bizarre behavior. The Charlie Mansons, yes, absolutely,
Robert Riggs:
yeah. Well, let's talk DNA. Lead us through how you catch DeAngelo with the DNA trail. And did you use a newer, advanced DNA tool like was used in the Carla Walker case here in Fort Worth? And we'll get into that in a
Paul Holes:
minute. Yes. So, you know, I had been pursuing, you know, DNA on the Golden State killer case. Since I started that case back in 94 and each evolving technology, DNA technology, I went ahead and attempted to use. And as far back as 2012 I started pursuing a type of genealogy tool with the DNA that was unsuccessful, but in 2017 I just coincidentally, had another case in which you're not, not going into too much details, but had to identify this girl that had been abandoned. Back in 1986 by turns out, another serious, serial predator, and we didn't know she stayed alive. She was a living victim, but we didn't know who she was, and we felt that she had been abducted from somewhere in the United States, and tried traditional law enforcement tools to try to identify her, and kept failing. And then I got a call from a detective down in San Bernardino saying, Hey, we finally identified her, and she was identified as a missing girl out of New Hampshire. And I was like, Well, how did you do that? Well, he had used a genealogist at DNA adoption.com you know, there's volunteers at this entity that help adoptees find their biological parents using a genetic genealogy tool. And so I immediately call up one of the genetic genealogists, this Barbara Ray Venter, and I was like, Can this be used to identify an unknown offender, and her response was, Well, I see no reason why not. And eventually myself and my partner on this stage of the investigation, Steve Kramer from the FBI, we start doing a deep dive into utilizing how this tool is used, as well as the legalities of the tool, and then ultimately get a DNA sample that we employ utilizing a different DNA typing technique. It's the same DNA typing that is used by like ancestry.com and 23andme and my heritage, etc, and we are very much under the radar with the rest rest of the task force, and Barbara is giving us guidance, and we have a small team cobbled in order to do this genealogy process. And in essence, this process, you take the Golden State killer's DNA, and we had it done by family tree. DNA is lab. We got individuals that had shared a certain percentage with the Golden State killer in terms of their DNA, and then I uploaded, as did Barbara, this Golden State killer profile up into gedmatch, which is like the Tower of Babel for this DNA genealogy testing, and got additional results. And then now it's just doing genealogy, basically taking these distant relatives of the Golden State killer and building family trees back until you get two of those distant relatives to intersect back in time with common ancestors. And we met, we actually found that we linked a third cousin and a second cousin back to their great, great grandparents, who were born back in the 1840s and theoretically Golden State killer is a descendant of those same great, great grandparents. So now it's just building the tree down into current time, the genealogy tree down into current time, and taking a look we know we have a male offender taking a look at the men in those in that tree who were born in the years that we felt that the Golden State killer had been born, and we had a handful of men that we looked at, and then ultimately, with some eliminations here and there, either investigatively or with one, with what we call a target test focused on D'Angelo, and then got a direct sample from D'Angelo, and turns out he matched using traditional law enforcement DNA, the Golden State killer's DNA profile,
Robert Riggs:
and you got that match by in the middle of the night, picking
Paul Holes:
up trash, right? So D'Angelo had been put under surveillance, and initially a first sample. He was constantly going to Hobby Lobby. He had this hobby of building these balsa wood airplanes, remote controlled airplanes. And at one point he goes into the Hobby Lobby and an undercover agent goes up and swabs his car door handle, and that came back basically consistent with the Golden State killer, but there was another DNA sample on there, and the DA said that we want something better. And then Sacramento sheriff's office did a trash grab where they in essence grabbed his trash after he had put it out on the curb. And one of the samples in the trash grab, which was a piece of tissue, came back single source, 100% match to the Golden
Robert Riggs:
State killer. Were you there when they took him into custody?
Paul Holes:
I was there. I was at Sacramento homicide. I was not physically present at the arrest that was done by a specialty team due to the. Your officer safety issues. But yes, I was what I was listening to the arrest. I've seen the video of the arrest, and then I was there during the interviews. In fact, I was supposed to help this Ken Clark from Sacramento homicide interview him at a certain stage during the the interview process, and then the way D'Angelo was responding, we had to kind of abandon that and get some southern California investigators in front of him to ask about their homicides. What was his
Robert Riggs:
reaction?
Paul Holes:
Initially, he was completely taken by surprise when he was apprehended, and then when he was in the interview room, he sat motionless, head down, dejected, with one arm on his knee, just you could tell he did not expect this day to come. He was absolutely floored. And then eventually, when he was being talked to, he never engaged with any of the people interviewing him, and to this day, he has never made any bona fide statement related to his crimes outside of what he admitted to or pled guilty to in court.
Robert Riggs:
In your book unmasked, you have a statistic that 1/3 of homicides in this country go unsolved. What is, what's the difficulty? If there was more money and resources for homicide detectives, would that record be better,
Paul Holes:
you know? It could be, you know. And this is where you know, what sometimes is referred to as closure rates with homicides can be a very misleading number, depending on the jurisdiction and the types of cases that they have. Law enforcement is very good at solving domestic violence homicides. You know, it's very obvious who the killer is. In those instances, law enforcement oftentimes has a good idea who has committed the drug related or gang related homicides, just because of the the tit for tat nature of those types of crimes. But when you start dealing with cases involving strangers to the victim, such as most, most of the time with serial predators, that's where the traditional law enforcement investigative techniques don't necessarily work. You can't start with the victim and their social circles and work out. You now have to find somebody out of thin air that is the killer, and this is where physical evidence comes in. So for that 1/3 of unsolved cases, for those cases in which there appears to have been an intimate connection between the offender and the victim or the offender and the environment, and where you possibly have offender DNA identifying DNA being left behind. Yes. Now more resources are needed for the testing of that, both doing traditional law enforcement DNA testing and then pursuing or pursuing first genetic genealogy, but then you need the boots on the ground. No matter what with DNA, you have to prove the case you or you need to follow up with witnesses and and so read more resources for sure, but that's you know, one jurisdiction they you know, as an example, let's say, like in Oakland, out in the bay area, where they have a lot of gang bang homicides, low closure rate. They know who's committed the homicides, but they can't get a DA to file on those because it's, it's they don't have the physical evidence. They have no witnesses that are cooperating, versus maybe a different type of agency that doesn't have that high percentage of gang bang homicides. You know, maybe they have mostly domestic violence cases and they have a 90% closure rate. Doesn't mean they're better at what they do. It's the nature of the crimes within that jurisdiction.
Robert Riggs:
Do we know how the Golden State killer selected his victims? You know, sometimes it's just a case where a victim has been it could have been a dry cleaner, a plumber, somebody just casual contact. How did he select his victims? Do we know?
Paul Holes:
Well, we don't know for sure, because he, you know, he's the only one that really knows that, I will say, you know, based on my assessment, as D'Angelo was multi modal in his victim selection, I do believe that there's most certainly victims of opportunity the case file, the way that the crime occurred. He just ran across that victim, and then there's victims that he likely followed home from seeing them out and about at a shopping mall or wherever else. And he will go into a neighborhood and burglarize a neighborhood, Prowl and possibly select victims to come back to down the road. But I. Also believe he interacted with some of his victims, most notably, maybe some of the males, where it may have just been, you know, he bumped shoulders with a man in, you know, a grocery store. And, you know, they shared hard looks at each other, right? And then he's like, Okay, I'll come back and show you who I am, because he's such a vindictive offender. So I think all of those are possibilities, but until he talks, you know, we don't know. And none of the victims that have been contacted, that are still alive have said, Oh, I remember him. You know, he could have, he could have pulled one of them over as a patrol officer, but they don't remember that.
Robert Riggs:
After you retired, you became involved in a very high profile case here that involves 17 year old caller Walker, who you know, 47 years after her murder, she was abducted after a Valentine's Day dance and her her date assaulted. That case is solved by genealogy and DNA. Talk to us about how you got involved in in that case,
Paul Holes:
you know, I was, I was doing a series for the oxygen network called the DNA of murder, and the Carla Walker case was one of the cases that I had reviewed. And said, Yes, I would love to get involved. And I initially talked with detective Jeff Bennett about, you know, how we could make this happen, to see if I could come in and help solve the case, as well as tell the story of what happened to Carla and Fort Worth. PD agreed. So I came out and did you know, interviewed the family, interviewed some witnesses, of course, sat down with detective Jeff Bennett and Detective Leah Wagner, and, you know, got their assessment. And then we paid for additional DNA testing on that case to help Fort Worth PD out. And then, ultimately, after the episode aired, and it was aired as an unsolved case, I was talking to the DNA analyst about a sample, and we had it forwarded at with Jeff Bennett's permission, to a laboratory down in Houston, author Labs, which I to this day have a great relationship with, an othram was able to get a good genealogy DNA profile. And doing the genealogy, they landed on a name of a male still living in the Fort Worth area at the time, and a name that was in the Carla Walker case file.
Robert Riggs:
And it always seems to be turned out that way. They they were, they were talked to by police, but there were so many suspects and not enough evidence. Well, and
Paul Holes:
that's part of the difficulty of working this type of case in the 1970s is you don't have the DNA technology. You know you're dealing with alibis, and it's like, well, I've got, I don't have a sample to corroborate and refute that alibi. So yes, it was, it was tough on the original investigators. And you know, the the boyfriend who was assaulted, you know he was under suspicion for his entire adult life, until this genealogy tool, in essence, cleared him by identifying the offender,
Robert Riggs:
this tool in othram, out of Houston. Is this a game changer? As far as solving cases,
Paul Holes:
it's absolutely revolutionary. You know, the former law or the existing law enforcement DNA technology is predicated on the repeat offender. This person, the offender, has either left DNA behind at a crime scene and then got caught on another crime and then got their reference DNA profile put up into the FBI system, or they've committed multiple crimes that get linked. If you don't have a repeat offender, the FBI is CODIS. Does you no good? So what we're seeing with genealogy, these offenders may commit one crime and then go, I can't afford to have law enforcement contact me. I can't afford to have my DNA put up. But with genealogy, if they have a distant relative who decides to put their DNA in the system, they can't control that. And now, using the genealogy tool, law enforcement can drill down on that type of offender. Now, they may be predators, they may be serial but we're also now seeing individuals that are committing what appear to be fantasy motivated crimes that are just one off offenders. You know, they've only committed this type of crime once, and then, for whatever reason, they never did it again.
Robert Riggs:
Let's talk. You really are very open in the book, and you talk about the toll that these investigations have taken on your personal life. And you know, it sounds like PTSD that I later knew soldiers I was with in Iraq suffered from, yeah,
Paul Holes:
yeah, you know. And. Yeah, and this is something where I didn't recognize over the course of my career, you know, the kind of the trauma that one experiences working these cases, being out at the crime scene, being at the autopsies, you know, looking at the photos over and over again. And what really was the Carla Walker case, which all of a sudden, you know, I'm retired. I've been doing this for 30 years at that point, and I'm just having this emotional outpouring after talking to Carla's family, and I just psychologically cratered. And ultimately, I went in to see a therapist. I live in Colorado Springs, huge military town, and she's dealt with a lot of soldiers, a lot of special forces type guys, and she listened to what I had experienced and and, you know, it's it's different. It's not the acute trauma like a patrol officer may undergo when he has to take the life of somebody, has to shoot somebody, but it's a series of smaller traumas that she likened to little nicks. And each Nick bleeds, but it's not a lot of blood at each Nick, but when you do it for 25 years now, you're bleeding out. And that's what was happening to me, and I just had never addressed it. And you know, law enforcement is a, you know, kind of you, if you show weakness, people will will question whether or not you're you're competent. And so you always bury it and go, I can handle this. And that's where we need to change. You know? We need to recognize and be proactive about addressing that type of trauma.
Robert Riggs:
And in old school news, same attitude, same in the military. I saw this among the key investigators in the Kenneth McDuff case. Something unique about this case was that one of the victims, 29 year old accountant who was abducted out of a car wash around Christmas, in plain sight, gone, vanished. He had an accomplice. He liked to have accomplices. My sense was it was performance art. He needed to perform. There were always men of, you know, weak will, low intelligence, that were actually impressed that he'd been on death row. But we get from this man, page after page, confession and description of what he did to that woman, hour after hour. And I remember reading it, and I, you know, I've been in two wars, and I'm like, this is this unthinkable? I just, you can't even think this up. And it really got to a lot of the investigators that really got in their head, and, you know, it made them come back as he approached execution, to really work on him in prison, to get him to reveal where her body was and other bodies were. But, you know, I know that two of the people that worked the case ended up divorced. You could just, you know, I got a homicide detective to come on and talk in our television show, free to kill. He had never done a television interview, any interview with the press, in 30 years, and he sits down in the chair, and he looks at me and he says, okay, Riggs, thank you for bringing this nightmare back to my life. I'd gotten rid of it, but I'm here for you. Others talked about they still had nightmares. There was a tough Marshal, an inspector from the Marshals Service was regarded as one of their top fugitive hunters internationally, done everything gone in after Noriega with the armed troops, everything he gets in the interview and starts crying. The tough guy is crying. And it just it had taken, I realized it taken a piece of of everybody. And one of my objectives in the television show is in my wife says, you know these detective these are hard men and women, but at least you captured their sensitivity, their sensitivity for the victim, and how they were determined to put this, you know, to rest and bring him to justice
Paul Holes:
well. And that's, I think, to underscore is, you know, they were hard men and women, but inside, they're human, and so these these things impact them, just like anybody else.
Robert Riggs:
And I think they're human more than the public realizes it, you know, yeah, I the public these days is, you know, gotten it ahead there the street cops are gonna kill you and stuff like that. But, you know, I've met so many dedicated officers, and they're leaving a piece of their life out on the street.
Paul Holes:
And that's, that's really, you know, what I hope the readers get out of my book is, is that it is something where I personally sacrifice my life. In part, there's an obsessive aspect to me. This is what I I'm good at, and I pursue it. But you know, others that are in the field, you. Are sacrificing themselves, and they might even been validated. I had a law enforcement friend who had an advanced copy of the book, and after reading my prolog, he texted me saying that hit me hard, and this is where it's trying to my hope is is that gets a better understanding of people who are in the field, to recognize they are suffering some some level of trauma, to go get help, but also people who are in a relationship with those individuals to recognize why they are behaving the way they are.
Robert Riggs:
Well, Paul, I want to thank you for your sacrifice. I know the listeners will of what your dedication the book again, bringing the book up, unmask my life, solving America's cold cases. Paul holes, now we like to say in our podcast that Bill Johnson and I take you inside the crime scene. Tape, well, this is the real thing. Paul's going to take you inside that crime scene. Tape, it's real life crime cases from his history. And Paul, I know we're going to be hearing more about you, because this is the kind of thing you can't
Paul Holes:
let go now. No, I'm I continue to consult with law enforcement and on the media side, I continue to, you know, try to help families, you know, get attention on their cases. So I will be around
Robert Riggs:
Paul hose, that's the last word. Thank you so much. I
Paul Holes:
so appreciate it. Thank you.
Robert Riggs:
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