I'll Be Gone in the Dark(79)

The saliva results eliminated Walther. He was a secretor. The





EAR was a nonsecretor. The task force dropped him as a suspect and moved on to fresher dirtbags.

*

MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS LATER, PAUL HOLES QUESTIONED THAT elimination. As a veteran of the crime lab, he knew that the secretor-status testing method back then was less than ideal. In the 1980s, quality-control experts had found serious glitches in the method. In the intervening years, scientists had also discovered that a small segment of the population are aberrant secretors, individuals who may express ABO type in some of their fluids but not others. Holes felt that suspect eliminations based on secretor status were unreliable.

Holes also had the benefit of retrospection, three decades’ worth. They knew much more about the EAR now. Holes could open Google Earth on his computer and fly over the attack locations and scenes of suspicious circumstances in chronological order, a dizzying flight from yellow pushpin to miniature blue car to little people representing footprints or witnesses. He could adjust for speed and height. He could sit at his desk and follow the killer’s trail with his eyes. The zigzag path looked random, but for someone, the One, it was not.

Holes regrets not making a switch to the investigations unit twenty years ago, when he was first tempted. Certainty won. He had two small kids. He was climbing the ranks in forensic science. You can see why he’s chief material. He’s blond and fit, with a handsome, genial face. He never winces or eye-rolls. His parents are from Minnesota, and he retains a hint of the long o. I once referred to Rupert Murdoch and he shrugged, not recognizing the name. “We run in different circles,” he said. Looking at him, you’d never guess that his parents once gave him the book Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives as a “thinking of you” gift.





DNA testing once required hours of tedious manual work. In a sexual assault case, for example, you would take a swab from a plastic tube, isolate the sperm, and locate the DNA markers via a dot-blot technique that involved a series of white strips, trays, and specialized washes. Increasingly, as technology advanced, robotic arms and instruments did the work. In turn, Holes had more time to dedicate to cold cases. Holes believed Walther might be the One.


When he first came across the “homework” evidence in the Sheriff’s Property Room that spring afternoon in 2011, he had been looking for a ski mask—Walther’s ski mask. He knew that back when Walther was suspect number one, task force investigators had interviewed his friend, a guy who’d been arrested with him for selling marijuana in Sacramento in ’77. The friend gave them a few of Walther’s belongings, including a black ski mask. Walther’s DNA profile wasn’t currently in the system; Holes wondered if he could develop a profile from hairs or skin cells extracted from the mask.

Unfortunately, Walther was in the wind. The man had disappeared off the face of the earth. He’d failed to appear for a court date related to a misdemeanor domestic violence charge in 2003, and there was a warrant out for his arrest. His driver’s license was suspended in June 2004. After that, nothing. No credit. No job trail. No welfare. Holes tried to reconstruct Walther’s messy life as best he could. He requested and received Walther’s school records and noted with interest that his sixth-grade teacher was male, somewhat unusual for the time. Holes got the teacher on the phone. The elderly man said he didn’t recall Walther. But sentence writing would fit with the kind of schoolroom punishment he meted out then, he said.

The teacher mentioned that about ten years ago an unidentified male called him and sang “Freedom Isn’t Free,” a song he’d made unruly kids sing in class. “Remember that,” the caller said,





and hung up. The call had upset the teacher enough that he changed his number and kept it unlisted. He told Holes he was sorry he couldn’t be more helpful.

Holes looked up the words to the song “Freedom Isn’t Free,” by Paul Colwell.

“There was a general by the name of George,” starts the fourth verse, “With a small band of men at Valley Forge.”

*

RON GREER* HAD TO BE THE ONE. HE WAS A THREE-PACK-A-DAY smoker living in a rundown apartment, and here they were, casually offering him what they knew through surveillance was his preferred brand of cigarettes, and he wouldn’t take a single smoke. He was tightly wound and wary. Sacramento Sheriff’s Detective Ken Clark and his partner did everything they could to relax the guy. They weren’t going to leave without eyeballing a direct DNA deposit. But Greer declined to take even a sip from a water bottle. He knows what’s up, Ken figured. Yep. Nervous and forensically wise. He’s the One.

Greer came to them via a thirty-year-old supplemental report. Many of the investigators share the belief that the EAR’s name is lost in the paperwork somewhere, jotted down on a vehicle stop or suspicious-circumstance report. His cover story was either airtight, or he was eliminated by a lousy but accepted alibi. Ken and his partner began methodically reviewing the old reports. Greer’s name popped up early.

He was stopped driving southbound on Sunrise Boulevard in a two-door yellow Datsun at 4:27 a.m. on April 15, 1977, just minutes after an EAR rape had been called in blocks away. He told police he was on his way to his job working as a janitor at a





rice mill. They noted that he was extremely quiet and cooperative. They opened his trunk; their interest grew considerably. He consented to a residence search. His mother had recently died, he told them, and he was living with his sister now. Or, more specifically, on his sister’s property, in a trashed storage trailer buried in some bushes on a steep hillside in Fair Oaks. The trailer couldn’t have been more than eight feet long and wasn’t tall enough to stand up in. He seemed to have a solid work alibi for an earlier EAR rape. Still, the investigators who dealt with Greer never forgot him. They couldn’t shake the memory of what they found inside his car.