Unmasked: My Life Solving America's Cold Cases

“Cold cases were my passion; this one [the Golden State Killer] was an obsession. It had stumped every investigator who had looked into it—and believe me, there had been hundreds. […] There were other cases I hadn’t been able to crack, and I took each one personally, but that one weighed on me more than the others—mostly because the offender had outwitted some of the best criminal investigative minds in the business.”

It is partially the challenge that the Golden State Killer presents that attracts Holes to this cold case. He recognizes that many others have failed to accomplish what he hopes to: unmasking this serial rapist and killer. However, the differing connotations of “passion” and “obsession” suggest that this particular cold case may negatively impact Holes.

“The drive home to Vacaville seemed to take forever. I was filled with regret. I had just failed to wrap up my final suspect in a case that continued to elude me. If the Golden State Killer case was ever to be solved, I would not be a part of it. I felt defeated. The survivors had counted on me as their last chance for justice, and I had let them down. My career would end with a blemished footnote.”

Though Holes has had a successful career, he focuses on what he has not accomplished: capturing the Golden State Killer. This reflects his driven nature as well as his empathy for those impacted by the GSK’s crimes. At this time, he does not know that he ultimately will accomplish this goal.

“For me, it is social anxiety that I struggle with the most. I never have felt comfortable in social situations. I think my brain sees them as threatening, because they provoke deep fears of being embarrassed or rejected.”

Holes’s anxiety and discomfort with conflict are key personality traits that shape his interactions with the world but also impact his first marriage. He has difficulty exposing himself emotionally, which causes his wife, Lori, to feel that he is distant and uninterested in their family. Notably, Holes’s memoir is an exercise in vulnerability, as he discusses his personal life in detail; as Holes will later explain, therapy has helped him become more attuned to and expressive of his emotions.

“But at the time, I didn’t even know what a criminalist was. [Victor] Reeves explained that a criminalist was a forensic scientist who used their science expertise to help solve crimes.

‘That’s what I want to do,’ I told him.

It was the first time I had felt excited about a possible career.”

The discovery of this career field is a turning point in Holes’s life: He instantly knows that a career as a criminalist will provide the perfect intersection between his love of science and the intellectual puzzle of investigation. Holes’s account of this moment suggests that he was in some way meant to pursue the career he chose.

“All my life, I handled stress that way. When the conversation got tough, I walked away. People took it for indifference, but it wasn’t. It was fear. I could spend all day studying the most evil of killers, but it was emotional conflict I was terrified of. I was afraid of rejection, afraid that facing the conflict head-on would push my loved ones away.”

In retrospect, Holes understands how his coping strategies proved detrimental to his marriage. Confrontation makes him uncomfortable because he worries the other person will abandon him in anger. His wife, however, was not aware of what motivated Holes’s actions, which contributed to their relationship’s demise.

“It frustrated me that Lori didn’t understand how affected I was by the tragedies of others. With my work, I buried my emotions because it was required in my field. You have to show that you can handle the kinds of things we see every day. My way of doing that was to concentrate on the science and box up my emotions somewhere safe in my brain. Only a robot could look at a dead infant and not feel something. I wasn’t very good at expressing my feelings, but I was no robot. My heart broke with every victim, but rather than break down and cry, I focused on what might bring them some kind of justice.”

Holes’s first wife, Lori, views his fascination with the details of cold cases as a morbid obsession. He is unable to convey to her that he is indeed emotionally impacted by the crimes he studies and that this is why he devotes so much of himself to solving them. Holes’s passionate work ethic, as well as the strain it causes in his marriage, is part of The Human Impact of Crime.

“Back then, even more than now, the culture of sharing information between jurisdictions was very territorial. Why let someone else take a shot at solving something you couldn’t? It was ego driven and political and I’m certain there were many crimes that went unsolved because of a lack of cooperation between agencies.”

The territorial nature of police departments from the 1970s through the early 2000s is one of many stumbling blocks Holes faces as he attempts to uncover the identity of the Golden State Killer. The departmental bureaucracy hinders investigations that law enforcement officials are ostensibly intent on solving.

“My work wasn’t my job, I explained. It was my purpose. My worth. My reason for choosing to exist on this earth. How many times had I heard the story of someone who’d checked out because they’d lost their intention? Their significance. I was useful in my work. I felt like I was making a contribution when I could bring a victim some peace of mind. And I was good at it. How could I stop being that person? It was who I was. I wasn’t lost. I was right where I was supposed to be. The only place I felt lost was at home.”

This passage uses rhetorical questions and sentence fragments to mimic Holes’s internal thought process as he reflects on his work. Holes’s devotion to his job stems not from a desire to make money or to neglect his family but from genuine love of the work, which brings meaning to his life. This passion, coupled with his intelligence and other skills, are what make him so successful in his role.

“During autopsies, there is normally a lot of gallows humor and chatter. Depersonalizing death is a coping mechanism for all of us. If you dwell on the process and what is taking place on the table, you aren’t able to do the job.”

Holes explains that he is not the only person to disregard their emotions when confronted with the horrors of a crime: Others are equally disturbed by the gruesome work, and humor becomes a means of surviving. The effect that crime has on those who investigate it is a central theme of Unmasked.

“Watching how they [Conaty and Giacomelli] used their different personalities to their benefit, I quickly realized that my own chameleonlike quality could suit me well in my cold case work. I wasn’t someone who could go to a hard-core gang kingpin and speak his language the way they did, but I could get the most gun-shy victims to talk to me about the terrible traumas they’d suffered. That was my strength. I could empathize and make them feel comfortable telling me their stories and those stories were what drove me to turn over every stone in every case I took on.”

Holes is an observant assessor of his own strengths and weaknesses. Identifying these helps him determine how to go about his job effectively. In particular, he stresses that his compassion for survivors of violent crime is an asset, even as it exposes him to secondhand trauma.

“I relaxed. I was in my late thirties and finally felt free to be me. I talked about cases without worrying [Sherrie would] tire of listening.”

Much of Holes’s frustration in his first marriage involves Lori’s lack of interest in his work. He tries to explain that his work is not merely a means to earn a living but an activity that provides his life with meaning. As he begins to date Sherrie, he recognizes that their shared passion sets them up for a more successful partnership.

“The Vitale case was pivotal for me in that I realized I was making observations others were not. I am approaching this differently than others, I thought. They don’t look at a case as comprehensively as I do. They don’t do the deep dive. I say it over and over: ‘You don’t know until you look.’”

Holes develops and hones an investigative approach that stems not only from his textbook knowledge, his experience, and his research into other investigators’ methods but also from his ability to “think outside the box.” These skills, coupled with his dedication to his work, combine to make him a skilled crime scene investigator.

“A lot of investigators find that part of the job tedious, studying the voluminous files with comprehensive accounts from every person who might possibly contribute something about a particular investigation, but for me it was thrilling. You can’t finish a puzzle without all the pieces […] I think that’s one of the things that makes me good at what I do. I’m thorough to the point of obsession.”

When Holes obtains the files on the Original Night Stalker—discovered to be the same person as the East Area Rapist—he not only pours over them but also retraces the investigators’ findings to determine whether or not he would come to the same conclusions. He does so not because he distrust the work of others but because having a holistic understanding of the crimes is necessary. Holes’s methodical approach to investigation partly reflects his scientific background, gesturing toward The Importance of Science in Crime Solving.

“My trips to EAR’s attack locations were part of my desire to know him. I wanted to see what he saw when he selected a victim or a neighborhood, to feel the adrenaline he felt as he jumped fences and jimmied locks to snake into a house in the dark of night and surprise sleeping women and men. […] I had become so good at getting into the minds of serial predators that when I lay awake at night, thinking about cases, I wondered if I’d crossed some kind of boundary. If cops were only a fine line away from criminals, how close was I to the monsters I had spent my life following?”

Holes’s strategy of mentally placing himself in the scene of the crime helps him to uncover how the crime likely unfolded, which is useful in solving the case. However, this practice also feeds an underlying anxiety; Holes is generally able to detach from the horrors of the crimes he investigates, and here he worries that this may be a sign of a moral flaw. With its emphasis on the similar thrill that motivates both serial killers/rapists and those who investigate them, this passage foreshadows the revelation that the Golden State Killer is a cop.

“I had spent nearly two years of my life pursuing the wrong person. Two years of putting the case before everything. My obsession had impacted every aspect of my life. I’d set aside work assignments to pursue leads, certain I was on the right track. At home, I’d become emotionally and mentally absent. I thought back to all the times Sherrie was trying to tell me something, and I’d excused myself in the middle of what she was saying because I had to get on the computer […] Those two years had damaged my family. They’d damaged me.”

Holes laments the price he has paid for devoting two years to chasing the wrong perpetrator; he has received nothing in return and has further damaged his personal relationships. While Holes often defends his immersion in work, in this passage, the collateral damage of Holes’s quest to prove Potts guilty suggests the misguided nature of his approach.

“It was a dark period for me. I couldn’t find joy in anything. I felt iced out at work and alone at home. I didn’t feel like there was anyone I could talk to. Sherrie had stopped listening. She was done hearing about EAR after Potts didn’t work out. She’d distanced herself from me. The lack of intimacy between us bothered me, but I didn’t say anything. I have a tendency to go quiet when something is troubling me.”

Because identifying the EARONS perpetrator has become Holes’s life mission, it is devastating when he feels as though he has failed. The excitement he felt when certain that Potts was the killer grew exponentially the more he investigated. Thus, learning that Potts was not responsible after all is even more disappointing. That even Sherrie, who comes from a similar professional background, struggles to sympathize with Holes highlights how much Holes has neglected his family.

“I came across an article in a law enforcement journal by Dr. Kim Rossmo. Dr. Rossmo was highly regarded in my world. […] The article was about criminal investigation failures. Reading it was like watching myself in the Potts probe. I’d realized I’d made a critical mistake in the way I’d gone about it. Rossmo talks about how even the best investigators fall into the trap of using inductive rather than deductive reasoning. You hone in on a particular suspect and try to make things fit rather than allowing the investigation to take you to the truth […] I’d fallen into the same trap.”

Once he has some distance from the investigation, Holes is able to assess the mistakes he made in pursuing Potts as the EARONS perpetrator. He berates himself for this mistake but also learns from it and understands how to avoid making the same errors in the future.

“By then, I had come to consider Michelle my unofficial detective partner. We didn’t ride together, but we were in constant communication. She wanted information, but she could give as good as she got. We listened to each others’ theories and hunches and shared our misgivings if we thought the other was headed on a wild goose chase […] We shared the highs when one of us thought we’d found the guy, and the lows when they were eliminated. We supported each other. In that way, Michelle had taken Sherrie’s place in my life.”

As Holes discerns that Michelle McNamara’s interest in the EARONS case is genuine, she becomes an important person in his life. Finally, Holes has found a friend who shares his passion for the case; this validates Holes’s tireless efforts and encourages him to reengage in the case after the devastating disappointment of Potts.

“I found myself wishing [Michelle McNamara] had never embarked on the book. Wishing she had shared with me her struggles. I probably would have understood better than anyone. Had I known, I would have counseled her on the pitfalls of getting trapped in the case. The irony isn’t lost on me. What attracted me to Michelle in the first place was her obsession. It validated my own.”

Holes mourns the death of McNamara, whose death he feels was an indirect result of her obsession with investigating the Golden State Killer. He is in a unique position of being able to empathize with her, as he shares this obsession. Her death therefore serves as a warning of what could happen to Holes, generating suspense.

“We had a genetic map with a direct route to the door of the seventy-two-year-old former cop. Evil finally had a name […] I’d been on this journey for twenty-four years. Twenty-four years of the highest highs and desperately low lows. I’d chased the East Area Rapist through my first marriage and hunted the Golden State Killer during my second. The case had come before everything”

Holes experiences overwhelming satisfaction and relief when he finally garners a DNA match for the Golden State Killer. The work has been long and tedious, but his perseverance finally pays off, retroactively justifying the sacrifices he has made in his personal life. The extent to which this case has defined his professional career is evident in his use of “evil” as a synonym for the GSK; for Holes, DeAngelo embodies everything he has dedicated his life to combatting.

“That evening, all of the agencies with cases were notified that the killer was in custody […] Except for his evil scowl, he looked like your average Joe. I’d always thought he would. He was cuffed to the table in the interrogation room, a small room with gray walls and a two-way mirror. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. For the next hour, he never moved. Not even a twitch. ‘This is what he did when he was attacking,’ I said to Kramer as we watched. I thought about all the times victims of the East Area Rapist recalled him standing silently beside their beds—so still that they didn’t know he was there.”

When Holes finally observes the Golden State Killer’s demeanor and behavior, he instantly identifies behaviors noted in the police reports. This further confirms for him that Joseph DeAngelo is indeed the East Area Rapist and Golden State Killer.

“My words caught in my throat. I was looking at a tormented man who, as a boy the age of my youngest son, had been sentenced to a life tied to that cow culvert. How can that be justified? How could I not do whatever it took to help quiet his troubled mind and bring him the peace that only justice might? How could I not make Carla’s case a priority over everything else in my life when there was a chance I could help ease his suffering?”

Though Holes has achieved his goal of identifying the Golden State Killer, he continues to be motivated to solve cold cases. As he learns of the pain of family members of victims, he is moved to do as much as he can to close such cases. Given the strain that his work consistently puts on his family life, it is noteworthy that Holes thinks of his son when empathizing with those impacted by crime; for Holes, his personal and professional lives are not in conflict but rather aligned.

“‘You were a victim,’ I said, assuming that his story about what happened that night was true.

‘We are all victims,’ he said looking away, fighting for composure. ‘There are so many victims.’

It was such a poignant trip. The collateral damage of Carla’s murder was vast and unrelenting. From her parents to her siblings to her boyfriend and the entire Forth Worth community, so many had suffered. So many were trapped in that sad past, yet the person who had taken so much had just walked away.”

Holes’s thoughts speak directly to the human cost of crime: Murder not only takes the victim’s life but also significantly affects dozens of additional lives, which Holes emphasizes with his repetition of “so many”/“so much.” It is to provide peace and justice for these additional victims that Holes continues to work on cold cases after his retirement.