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Throughout the narrative, Holes is candid about his struggle to maintain a work-life balance. This struggle is partly a function of the kind of work Holes is doing, but it also stems from his own temperament, and it becomes a key source of friction in his personal life.
From the beginning, Holes does not merely enjoy his work but regards it as a passion and his life’s purpose. Solving crimes—especially cold cases—and bringing closure and justice to families infuse his work with meaning. This factor draws Holes’s attention away from his personal life—including the needs of his partners and children—and proves to be detrimental to his relationships with others. Likewise, Holes becomes accustomed to detaching emotionally in order to carry out his job. This practice becomes habit and makes it more challenging for Holes, already prone to anxiety in social situations, to be emotionally vulnerable and available to his family. Among other things, this means that he has a difficult time explaining his passion to his first wife, Lori, who finds his interest in crime disturbing: Though rooted in empathy, Holes’s passion for his work ironically reads as coldness in his personal life, exacerbating the marital disconnect.
Holes therefore finds his relationships harmed as his career progresses. The cycle Holes enters into is partially responsible for the break-up of his first marriage and even threatens his second—all the more notably given that his second wife, Sherrie, is in the same field. As his career ends, Sherrie stresses the need for Holes to receive professional counseling to learn more effective coping strategies for dealing with the horrors of crime than detachment. He begins going to therapy and learns how the trauma he has suppressed impacts him; as the book ends, Holes is committed to effectively balancing his personal life with his passion for investigating cold cases.
Besides improving Holes’s mental health, this balance in some ways reflects what Holes has been striving for all along. Much of Holes’s struggle to weigh the demands of his job against those of his family stems from the fact that he does not see the two areas of his life as discrete. He repeatedly refers to his work as his “life,” and when working on a case, he is often motivated by thoughts of how he would feel if his own loved ones were caught up in a violent crime. Rather than learning to compartmentalize, Holes therefore learns how to embrace this synthesis of the personal and professional in a healthier way.
Although Holes stresses that he must detach emotionally from the crimes he works on to do his job effectively, he also clarifies that he is driven to solve crimes, particularly cold cases, out of a deep sense of compassion for the victims and their families. Through recounting of specific cases, he illustrates the lasting impact of violent crimes, which leaves multiple victims in its wake.
Though Holes does not downplay the severity of the crimes themselves, he repeatedly pushes back against the idea that victimization begins and ends at the crime scene. For the survivors of the East Area Rapist, the impact of their experience is long lasting. In speaking to these women, Holes learns of the trauma that plagues their lives, causing them to live in constant fear of another attack. As long as the perpetrator goes uncaught, the fear that he will return to strike again compounds the impact of the assaults themselves. In cases of homicide, the loss of a life is itself a tragedy, but so too is the impact of this death on family members and other loved ones. The book describes instances of the regret some experience at not having been able to keep a loved one safe or the guilt that they were spared while the loved one was not. Cold cases prove especially painful for victims’ families, as the failure to identify the perpetrator may give the impression that law enforcement officials are uncaring or that the victims’ lives do not matter. Likewise, the thwarted desire to see a perpetrator brought to justice for their crimes can further upset and traumatize survivors.
As the memoir of someone involved in law enforcement, Unmasked also stresses the impact crime has on those who deal with it professionally on a daily basis. Though police and others involved in the criminal justice system acquire coping skills—such as emotionally detaching or using humor when approaching horrific circumstances—the emotional and psychological toll such work takes is inevitably great. Holes himself learns, via the help of a therapist, how trauma has deadened him, impacting his ability to connect with his loved ones. In a similar vein, Holes cites Michelle McNamara as one of the victims of the Golden State Killer, though her life was not directly taken by him. The deep interest she takes in the case grows to an obsession, and she finds her life consumed by solving the case. Not only does McNamara devote a great deal of time to the investigation, but the horrors of the crimes also invade her psyche, causing her to have difficulty sleeping and to become dependent on the substances that ultimately kill her.
It is telling that Holes’s skill and education in science, particularly chemistry, lead him to his career. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes increasingly apparent that scientific testing of evidence from crime scenes is instrumental in solving crimes. As much as Unmasked testifies to Holes’s passion for investigative work, it also celebrates the rigors of the scientific process.
Holes walks readers through that process as it pertains to police work, stressing the importance of methodical collection of evidence and openness to new ideas. As Holes assesses a crime scene, he is careful to capture anything that might offer a trace of the perpetrator’s identity. This includes tasks such as dusting for fingerprints and capturing any potential matter that could include the perpetrator’s DNA, which is found in bodily fluids such as blood, saliva, and semen but also in skin, hair, and fingernail clippings. Holes gradually learns to look for these materials in unconventional places and to swab the victim’s entire body as well. Importantly, the ability to perform DNA testing on evidence collected at crime scenes is still a new and emerging field as Holes begins his career. At this time, its capabilities are limited; a large amount of human material is needed for a reliable test. The process of testing is a slow one at first but becomes quicker and more reliable as technology advances, and Holes is often among the first to embrace new techniques, as when he uses a novel form of DNA testing to find the Golden State Killer’s relatives.
What makes DNA evidence so valuable is its objectivity (assuming tests are performed correctly and without contamination of the material). As Holes’s own account reveals, investigators can be prone to bias or tunnel vision in determining suspects. By contrast, science provides firm proof, getting around individual subjectivity and furnishing a more compelling court case. Because DNA is a code that is unique to each individual, its presence at a crime scene can not only rule out some suspects but also provide strong proof of the perpetrator’s presence and, by implication, their guilt.
The narrative illustrates that DNA evidence is especially invaluable in the solving of cold cases. If properly preserved, evidence such as the victims’ clothing or other objects removed from a crime scene can still be tested for DNA decades after the crime has been committed. A degree of it will degrade over time, but Holes emphasizes that technology has only become more and more adept at extracting DNA from even the smallest samples. Such forensic material is more reliable than forms of evidence like witness testimonies, which can change as time passes. Thus, Holes is able to close several cold cases that might have otherwise remained permanently unsolved.
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