Paul Holes and the dark side of Bay Area suburbia

Paul Holes was always rushing to murder scenes, hundreds of them in the 27 years he worked as a criminalist and crime lab chief for the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department. He looked for blood, bullets and other fragments of evidence from drug-fueled homicides in Richmond, the house-of-horrors property of Jaycee Dugard’s kidnappers and the remains of Laci and Connor Peterson after they washed up on the East Bay shore.

But Holes’ attention was always drawn back to the cold cases, the scores of unsolved Bay Area rapes and murders of girls and women in the 1970s. Those cases figure heavily in his new memoir, “Unmasked” (Celadon Books, $29), which paints a dark portrait of the Bay Area suburbs in that tumultuous decade, when Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, and at least five other notorious serial predators turned the upscale towns and burgeoning middle-class neighborhoods east of the Caldecott Tunnel into their hunting grounds.

“That’s part of what pulled me in. There was this pattern of what was going on in the late 1960s and 1970s that just fascinated me,” Holes said during an interview. “You have cases in towns like Moraga, Orinda, Lafayette, Walnut Creek, in Danville and San Ramon – low-crime areas. You have all these women and young girls being targeted in these sexually motivated crimes. I thought, ‘What’s going on here?’”

Even though Holes retired from the sheriff’s department and moved to Colorado in 2018, he maintains a database of 690 sexually-motivated attacks that occurred in Contra Costa during that time period. “The thought of good people suffering drives me, for better or worse, to the point of obsession,” he said.

Holes’ departure from law enforcement coincided with the big break in the case that made him a true-crime celebrity. In April 2018, authorities identified former Auburn police officer DeAngelo as the Golden State Killer, who was linked to at least 13 murders and 50 rapes throughout California, including in San Jose and the East Bay, from 1974 to 1986.

Holes began searching for the man who came to be known as “GSK” soon after joining the sheriff’s department in 1990, working with other investigators to find DNA links between the Contra Costa crimes and homicides in Southern California. As leads grew cold, he and other investigators employed a new technique — genetic genealogy — to finally locate DeAngelo, a father of three living a quiet life in a Sacramento County suburb.

Today DeAngelo is serving a life sentence. And Holes continues to pursue his obsessions on a national scale, emulating his childhood TV hero, “Quincy, M.E.,” the crusading medical examiner who used forensic science and intuition about human behavior to solve murders. Holes co-hosts the popular “Murder Squad” podcast and juggles various TV projects, including the 2020 HBO docuseries, “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” based on the memoir of his friend, the late Michelle McNamara, who shared his obsession.

Like McNamara, Holes gets personal in his memoir, talking about how his drive to find these predators took a toll on his marriages and his relationships with his children. “Even on Christmas Day, when the rest of the family opened presents, it was GSK on my mind,” he writes. He developed a drinking problem and began dreaming about decaying corpses.

Getting personal “was a big step for me because I’m a private person,” Holes said. “But I realized it was important for people to understand what others — death investigators, CSIs, dispatchers – go through. It’s a hidden aspect of law enforcement.”

But the through-line in “Unmasked” are Holes’ investigations, beginning with discovering long-forgotten reports in the lab library about the Golden State Killer’s nine Contra Costa attacks in 1978 and 1979. Like GSK’s burglary sprees in Visalia and his rapes in Sacramento, Stockton and Davis, the East Bay attacks were distinguished by an assailant who took his time scoping out victims before breaking into their homes. True to his pattern, the assailant also attacked couples in Concord, Danville and San Ramon, forcing a woman at gunpoint to tie up her husband, piling dishes on the man’s back to keep him him still, then sexually assaulting the woman in another room.

But he also targeted 17- and 13-year-old Walnut Creek neighbors in separate attacks, raping the younger girl in her bed while her father and sister slept in other rooms. “Mary was robbed of her innocence and her peace of mind,” Holes wrote. “She’d spend her life looking over her shoulder, wondering if he was still out there somewhere, watching.”

Meanwhile, at least three other serial predators were lurking in Lafayette and Moraga, where families considered themselves safe from such violence. Within seven months, 40-year-old Armida Wiltsey was killed while jogging at Lafayette Reservoir, and 11-year-old Cynthia Waxman was strangled after leaving a Saturday afternoon baseball game to search for a lost kitten.

For two decades, the killings were thought to be the work of Phillip Joseph Hughes, a former Moraga resident who hung out at the local bowling alley, Holes said. Hughes was arrested in 1980 and convicted of killing two women and a 15-year-old girl earlier, but DNA analysis revealed that Wiltsey and Waxman were killed by two other serial killers.

DNA technology, improved interagency communications and a greater awareness about personal safety have since made it difficult for serial predators to operate as they once did, Holes said. But that time span, from the late 1960s through the next decade, saw such a spike in serial homicides, including by the notorious Zodiac, across the Bay Area, that true crime historians have called it the “golden age of of serial murder.”  And holes still finds something intriguing about the patterns in Contra Costa. The obsession lives on.

Paul Holes has two book events in the Bay Area on Thursday, May 5. He’ll be at Book Passage in Corte Madera at 1 p.m. Tickets for the in-person and virtual events are $35 and come with a signed book. Holes will speak at the Commonwealth Club in  San Francisco at 6 p.m. Tickets for the in-person event are $25-$50, and $5-$30 for the online-only event, with signed books available.