Casefile True Crime - Case 53: Bonus 2 – Interview

Episode Date: June 17, 2017

EAR/ONS BONUS EPISODE #2 Interview with Paul Holes Contra Costa County DA Cold Case Investigator Paul Holes spoke with us for the series. You heard him discussing the “Homework Papers" found in Danville as well as his role in finding the DNA match between the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker. We spoke to Paul about his theories and some key questions from our research.

You heard Contra Costa County DA cold case investigator Paul Hulls speak with us in the series about the homework papers found in Danville, as well as Israel in finding the DNA match that linked the East area rapist and the original Night Stalker. We spoke to Paul about his theories, and he answered some key questions while we were researching. Firstly, Paul talked about where the offender may have lived. The small paint chips, flakes, and smear that were found at a few crime scenes were retested in recent years.

We asked Paul his thoughts on this, and about the possibility the offender worked as a tradesman of some sort. So that's very important. I did scrutinize the lab reports, and basically what you have in one case, they took vacuum sweepings of different areas within the house, and in one of the rooms, they found these blue paint chips, and that's where it was determined through qualitative testing, you know. That is basically how well does this paint dissolve in different solvents, flame tests,

very crude methodologies relative to the instrumental analysis that could be done today. So that you have to understand. But they determined that it was probably an architectural paint, and it had a certain chemical component within it that you would find in architectural paint. Part of the problem with that evidence is where he's most intimately in contact with the environment and with the victim during the sexual assault, they're not finding those blue paint chips, and you would think that if he had those on his person, they would be there in greater preponderance than someplace else where he's just wandering around the

house. This is part of the theory of dealing with trace evidence. The other thing to recognize is that house that he was in where that attack occurred was brand new. It had just been built, and all the houses on that court were under construction. They were just wood studs. This is an active construction site. I can tell you, having been somebody who has done vacuum sweepings, done trace analysis

in a lab, that evidence has no weight whatsoever. You cannot attribute that evidence to the offender. There's a second Sacramento case in which there's like a blue smear on the fence next to where there was sort of a shoe scuff on the fence board, like where the ear had jumped over the fence, and so their thought was, is that a soft bag that he was carrying has a blue paint on the outside, and it hit the side of the fence and transferred that paint smear, and the color of that paint smear matched the color of the paint to chips from that other house, and so they're saying, okay, so he's, you know, they're trying to make

a link there. I put no weight on that. Maybe he had some sort of bag or something on his shoes or something that could have transferred the paint, but you can't draw any conclusions that, oh, he has to be a painter because of it. The third item of paint evidence in the series is in the Whittoon Homicide in Irvine, and a screwdriver had been used to pry her door, and the screwdriver is found out, you know, on the yard, and the screwdriver, there is some brown paint on the screwdriver.

It doesn't mean a thing to me, you know, because it's one of those things where I've got plenty of screwdrivers in my tool cabinet that paint on it because I'm a homeowner, and I paint. We know our offender would steal items from other houses, it's probable that that screwdriver was something that he stole from another house, and he used it as a pry tool. You know, it's one thing if we had caught a suspect back in 1977, 1978, and he did have items that possibly had the same paint on there, and he could do complex analysis on it and show it's the same paint, then it would elevate in terms of its significance. Almost 40 years have passed, you know, that trace evidence, whatever he had that possibly

could have been, the source of that is long gone. We will never be able to answer, use it for anything. I don't look at that at all. Physically, there's no relevance to it, investigatively, it doesn't help me at all. Another thing that comes up often are the links to the military and real estate. We asked Paul what way he currently puts on those links. Remember my railroad guy? One of the things, and this is a lessons learned, you know, I started paying attention,

oh, I've got railroad tracks near all these various locations where the victims are being attacked, right? You kind of get so focused that you fail to look at the common sense thing. Every place has railroad tracks. You can draw, if you go out far enough from a certain location, you're going to run across a railroad track. If you look at all these jurisdictions, all these jurisdictions have air bases. People outside those jurisdictions were places where he did an attack.

They have military installations. You can find something related to the military everywhere. So it's a coincidental thing, but people put much more weight on it than what I think it is. Now, does he have a military connection in some capacity? I think he potentially could have been in the military at one point, could have been in the military at the beginning of the series, could have had a father in the military absolutely. But I don't think that that military connection explains his pattern, his movement patterns

and where he's attacking. I can't draw that conclusion. I most certainly have paid attention to where the victims were working and could he have crossed paths with them because he had a reason to visit those particular locations. And you do see, particularly up in Sacramento, a handful of victims that were working for state agencies, but Sacramento, the biggest employer in Sacramento is state government because that's the capital of California. So that's again, I think that's like a coincidental thing.

Even you get it into like the real estate, sort of the area that I'm looking into. And early on the investigators are noting, wow, he's attacking a lot of locations where houses are for sale. And I was like, yeah, you know, and that is true, I tabulated that out. But then when I've gone and I visit the very crime scene, I've gone to all the crime scenes in this series, many of them over and over and over again, I'm always seeing houses for sales in these neighborhoods. It's just one of those things where that's just real life that happens.

Maybe he's drawn to these areas because those houses were for sale, they're open houses. But there isn't enough, investigatively at the time would have been interesting to pursue who's coming in and out because of the houses, what real estate agents are involved, et cetera. But it also could just be again, a coincidental observation. Now the one thing that I will say that I've put more weight on, and I think other investigators kind of hit my thought kind of like what I'm hitting the military is once he moves out of Sacramento and you take a look at where he's attacking, there is a prevalence of attacks in or right next to brand new construction that is actively going on.

And I've put more weight on that because I've got this diagram that's evidence-based. So if he's somebody, if he drew that diagram, and he's an adult, it's his occupation. He drew that diagram for his work. And now I'm focusing in on, okay, he's going to these jurisdictions and attacking while he's out in those locations for his work. There are lingering questions around the escalation from attacking lone women to attacking couples. We know it's likely he was spurred on by the news article mentioning that he never attacked when men were in the house.

And we know that the man who stood up and spoke out at the community meeting in 1976 was himself attacked seven months later. We asked Paul his thoughts on the offender's escalation. I don't know if he was planning it before then, but I do know that once he did it, he had perfected the MO to successfully do it. You know, from that first attack with the man, throwing, you know, blinding them with a flashlight, and he always had a gun if there was a man pressing. If it was just a woman, sometimes he didn't have a gun, but with a man, he always had

a gun basically making her tie the male up. And now the male is somewhat at least contained. And then he goes and binds the female up and then double checks the man. And then he puts dishes on the man's back and puts blankets and pillows on the man's head. He is making sure that that man is not a threat to him while he takes the woman out to sexually assault her. He did that from day one with the man.

This is, again, going back to the intellect of the offender, is he sat down and if he goes, okay, I'll show him, I can attack with a man present. He got to sit there and now he had to just kind of, hmm, how am I going to do this? I don't want to get killed. I don't want to get into a fight with the guy. How am I going to do this? And he developed a plan. The focus of the investigation after each attack was usually on the female survivor,

where they worked, and the possibility they may have come into contact with the hysteria rapist before. Paul talked to us about going back and looking into the male survivors and whether their stories may also hold a key in some way. A lot of the male victims, we don't know anything about them because they weren't the focus of the investigation. We know a lot about the women, but we don't know a lot about the men. And I personally feel that our offender chose some of his victims based on who the man was.

And of course, he sexually assaulted the wife, but he did that in that case to get at the man. Who are these men? What jobs did they have? Who were they interacting with? Because I think this is an offender who's vindictive. And let's say in a business setting, some guy ticks him up. He's going to go, you don't know who I am, I'm going to show you.

There has always been a question of whether the hysteria rapist, the original night stalker, was the same person as the Vysalia ransacker. There were similarities in ammo, but the evidence was never strong enough to formally link the two. So we asked Paul Halls his thoughts on this. Vysalia ransacker is there are two very credible witnesses that saw or face to face with him in decent lighting, saw his face, saw his entire physique, his entire build. And they both consistently described him as he had, you know, this round face with pug

nose and bunny looking ears and kind of a humped neck and just rounded shoulders and fat through the hips and fat through the thighs and fat calves and short, fat fingers. You know, one of the witnesses is Officer McGowan who gets shot by the Vysalia ransacker. The other witnesses is a 22 year old anthropology student, somebody who at least has some training and taking a look at humans, right, more so than the, and this person is this anthropology student. He kind of looked mongoloid to him. He had mongoloid type features and his behaviors were weird and he's acting.

He's talking to a high woman's voice and he's acting kind of scared and, and, and don't hurt me. Don't hurt me and screaming like a woman when he's being confronted. That is not who the East area rapist is. East area rapist is a dominant personality. Once he gets the women and men under control, he is dominating them. Yeah. Yeah.

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