The Binge Crimes: Deadly Fortune - The Doodler 8 Rays Of Hope

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Since the reactivation of the Doodler case in 2018, Dan Cunningham has been eyeing a key person of interest. Cunningham met with him and even got a sample of his DNA. The SFPD is comparing that DNA with blood from the original crime scenes. Kevin and Mike convince Cunningham that another unsolved murder from 1975 may be the work of the Doodler, and they uncover the likely identity of “Dr. Priest,” too. With several avenues opening up for the SFPD to investigate, Kevin and Mike ask: What could this mean for the victim’s families, the queer community, and for justice in the Doodler case? This is a re-released series from The Binge archives. Binge all episodes of The Doodler, ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Crimes on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access. From serial killer nurses to psychic scammers – The Binge is your home for true crime stories that pull you in and never let go. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. A Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠⁠podcastchoices.com/adchoices⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The binge. You're listening to The Doodler, a re-released series from The Binge archives. If you're a subscriber to The Binge, you can listen to all episodes ad-free right now. Visit the binge channel on Apple Podcasts or getthebinge.com to browse all the great shows on the channel. The Binge. Feed your true crime obsession. This series contains depictions of violent assault and murder. Listener discretion is advised. Listen to this series carefully and let us know if anything you hear in this show jogs a memory of yours.

And if you've got a tip, you can call us at 415-570-929. The San Francisco Police Department held a press conference in February of 2019. It was an update on the Doodler case from Commander Greg McKeckern. We know that in the 1970s this was gripping the gay community in San Francisco. in Cisco. And so Inspector Cunningham reopened all the cases that were involved at that time to see if we could identify who that is so that we could get closure for those victims and hopefully make an arrest in those cases. We played some of this press conference at the beginning of this podcast. I was there, but it happened months before I began working on this series in earnest. The conference was to announce

the reactivation of the Dooler Cold case. We have submitted DNA evidence in this, case from a couple of the homicides, and we are still waiting for results of those DNA tests, but we do have DNA evidence that was submitted and is being tested. They're also giving an incentive for people to come forward if they have information that could help the SFPD. We are now offering a $100,000 reward for anyone that can identify the suspect in the assaults from the caricature picture or the sketch that have been drawn back in 1975. Along with that large reward, they released an age-progressed sketch of the suspect.

If you look at that crime bulletin that is posted, there is an enhanced picture of what the suspect would look like today. It resembles the young man with the Navy watch cat from the original, but he's decades older with a bald head, thick lines across his cheeks and brow, and the same blank expression. There was five victims of homicides that we believe this individual is responsible for, maybe more. We're here today in the hopes that you as the media will put out into the public that these are still open cases and families that don't have closure and the hopes that someone will provide us some information. When I attended this press conference two years ago, I didn't know nearly as much as I know today about the person SFPDs focused on. But now I know a lot. He's the person that Rotea Gilford and Earl Sanders' original investigation pointed towards. My investigation with Mike points in the same direction.

To the same guy, the patient identified by Dr. Priest. And we're hoping that someone in the public may be able to provide information as to who the psychiatrist is with the last name of Priest and help us identify him so that we can interview him for information that may assist us in ultimately leading to the arrest of this suspect. This press conference happened because SFPD believes that suspect, is still alive, living in the East Bay. So after all these years, and with all these details, I wondered, why haven't police been able to bring this guy in? Actually, they have.

I'm Kevin Fagan. From the San Francisco Chronicle, Ugly Duckling Films, and Neon Hum Media, this is the untold story of the doodler. The doodler case, like all cold cases, gets harder to solve the more time passes. The original inspectors are dead. Rotei Guelford died in 1998 and Earl Sanders died in January of this year. Most potential witnesses are dead or uncooperative. Documentation is thin.

But there is hope. This case has an individual to focus on, Dr. Priest's patient. Cold case investigator Dan Cunningham can't even call this guy a suspect yet. For now, this guy is a person of interest, or P-O-I for short. So what I would say about him is basically the same that Retail Gilford said back in 1977, that he was an individual that was seeking psychiatric help. He had some issues with his sexuality. He had been going out with a female at some point.

He was living in the East Bay back at that time period. I believe that the same person that he's referring to is the person that I'm still looking at. Cunningham isn't just reading from the case file for this. information. He knows this guy is still alive because he met him. I've interviewed him, gotten his DNA, was willing to talk somewhat to have a good conversation with him. And I believe that based on the information he told me in the interview, that this is the same person that they looked at as the suspect back in 1977. Cunningham met him in the East Bay, where he lives now. And Dan says their conversation confirmed

details that made this guy a suspect in the 1970s. He wasn't an emotional person. He wasn't really upset. Denied everything. However, at the same time, he was pretty calm about it for the most part. Is he living as a gay man today? Yes. This interview happened in 2018, before they went public with the case's reactivation. Cunningham told me they could.

compared the person of interest voice with the voice on that original emergency dispatch call we played for you on our very first episode. He said that a match couldn't conclusively be ruled out, but DNA is a big focus. After all, that's what nailed the Golden State Killer after so many years. Cunningham got a sample of the person of interest DNA during their interview. But how? he waffled. That person to interest gave his DNA willingly, was my understanding, right?

Like a swab or something? So he was, yeah, he was, as far as actually performing the task, he didn't, you know, he's been, I mean, apparently he's been arrested, he has been arrested throughout the years, different types of incidents, nothing violent. And he has had his DNA upload, his DNA has already been uploaded. Sounds like this fresh sample of DNA. He didn't know you got it. Was that right? Yeah, he knows we got it. We took it from him.

Okay, all right. He provided it for us during an interview. Cunningham is being careful, as usual, but I'm not sure why he's being cagey about this. Nevertheless, Cunningham has already sent a few samples of the DNA to a lab for testing. It's being compared with the bits of evidence they have from the Doodler murder scenes, mostly blood from the victim's clothes. All of it that we could trace so far as only been out of the victim.

Right. Because it was pretty gory sights. So there's no secondary DNA as of yet. The hope is that as DNA technology advances, the police will be able to find other DNA in that blood, traces from a small amount of the killer's blood or semen. But waiting for those advances sure isn't a quick way to put someone behind bars. Inspectors on the Zodiac case have been waiting decades for DNA technology. to help them solve their case.

So in 2018, when Cunningham brought the person of interest in, but couldn't arrest him, the frustration just continued. The Doodler mystery is still so confounding that Cunningham leaves open the very slim possibility that the killer actually picked out his victims at the beaches and parks, the cruising spots, not picked up with doodles in bars. That maybe all those tips and conclusions made back in the 1970s were off somehow, were just bar myth based on creepy guys doing sketches.

But that's nowhere approaching a conclusion. And it contradicts what investigators said back then. It seems to me that they got pretty close to catching the doodler by following those theories. What they have in this case could fit into a normal size box, you know, like a liquor box or a wine box. As far as we know, they have not brought this to the district attorney's office. Which means no charges have been filed with the... that office. And other than me and Dan Cunningham, I think Mike Taylor's the person who knows the most about the Doodler case. He's been on this thing with me since nearly the beginning. To get a sense of

where we stand on actually closing this, Mike called up a retired prosecutor, Doug Munson. What do we have here? What do we have as a case, if anything? Is there... You got nothing. Okay. It's already disappoint you. Right. You got nothing? Because the standard of proof is so high, it's beyond a reasonable doubt to a moral certainty. Mike also called a former defense attorney, Richard Zitrin, and explained everything.

The diplomat, Dr. Priest, the person of interest. That's not going to get by a preliminary hearing on probable cause, much less trial. That's going to get knocked out of preliminary hearing. Okay. This is the same wall that inspectors Rotei Guilford and Earl Sanders ran up against in 1976. But I've got reason to keep working on this. Three reasons, actually. Three potential breaks in the case.

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Yeah, they're even picking it up tomorrow. Talk about fast. Wow, way to go. So about that picture frame. Oh, forget about it. Until Carvana makes one, I'm not interested. Car selling made easy. On Carvana.

Pick up these may apply. Want more true crime? Subscribe to The Binge to get all episodes of the Crimes of Margo Freshwater add free today and get instant access to over 50 other jaw-dropping true crime stories. Plus, subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series on the first of every month. Every month. Search for the Binge channel on Apple Podcasts or head to Get TheBinge.com to subscribe today. The Binge. Feed your true crime obsession. There are three new developments on

the doodler hunt that I want to tell you about. The first has to do with Dr. Priest, the psychiatrist who claims his patient confessed back in 1975. Just to refresh you, my hunch is that this shrink called the cops in 1975, pointed them toward the patient, and said, leave me out of it. And patient doctor privilege means anything from their session likely can't be used in court. But if we could find this Dr. Priest all these years later, he might open up to us. Mike and I have been looking for Dr. Priest for months now. Frankly, I've been baffled by the lack of documents on this guy. Remember, we set a public records request to Highland Hospital, where he likely worked.

Here's an update. It was rejected because Highland Hospital says they don't have personnel records from that far back. Earl and Rotea's notes make no mention of Dr. Priest's full name. And so we've had nothing but his last name to go on. I got a list of about 100 psychiatrists who practiced in this part of the world in 1975 and just started calling them one by one. I called the ones that were alive, and about half of them were dead. And when I got to about psychiatrist number 20,

and each one I asked, did you know a doctor priest? And this guy said, you mean Howard Priest? And I said, could be. And he said, how do you spell it? And I said, P-R-I-E-E-S-T like someone in a church. And he said, no, the guy I knew was spelled P-R-E-E-C-E. This could be the shrink, the one Dan has been looking for for three years. So if you take Dr. Howard Priest, P-R-E-C-E-C-E, and Google him and then do some research and make calls, et cetera,

you find out that he was a psychiatrist in private practice here. and according to his first wife and his daughter, he did do gigs at Highland. Priest, not priest. I could easily see how Earl or Ritea could misunderstand priest for priest over the phone. Hell, you can hardly tell the difference the way I just said it. So I'm about 80 to 85% sure that this is the guy. Obviously, I wanted to talk to priests immediately,

but like with most people involved in this case, Well, he died at 79. He would have been, what, 95 now or so? When did he die? 2005, July of 2005, the day after his 79th birthday. He was cremated, and they scattered his ashes at sea. He was a big sailor. Just because he's dead doesn't mean that this angle is kaput. The fact that we might have the right name for the psychiatrist opens a lot of doors. Mike called Dr. Priest's daughter, Holly.

What do you think the likelihood is that he might be the person who did these consults? Well, my mother feels that it's, you know, not very likely. It was him. But considering his interest and something other than, you know, housewife problems in the suburbs, you know, he was looking for something different. Dr. Howard Priest was interested in a challenge. He always seemed to have an interest in, you know, troublemakers, I guess, and wanting to figure them out. And that led him to start working with prisoners.

But then he kind of joined up with the penal system and was seeing patients, level four patients, up and down the state. By level four patients, she means inmates who are kept in a high security prison. Often, there are people who have committed violent crimes. So, you know, with his interest in that, it, It just seems very likely that he might be, you know, somebody who would have had a patient like this guy, your person of interest. Holly Priest has a folder of personal letters that her father left behind. Mike's gotten a hold of those, and there's a chance the family might have more. Mike also asked Holly about the secretary who called the police for Dr. Priest.

She's definitely someone we'd want to get in touch with. I asked about the secretary, and apparently he didn't have a secretary. and like a lot of guys who did freelance work, he just, whatever secretary was there at Highland that day was his secretary. So it might have been just some bureaucratic foul-ups, you know. He asks his secretary to call and says, when you get them, if you get a cop on the line, let me talk to him. So she calls and she doesn't get anybody or she leaves a voicemail

and someone calls her back when the shrink is left to go back to his head. house, all these kinds of mundane things that can happen. Finding that secretary will be a little easier with Dr. Howard Priest's name attached. But I was hoping Holly would know her name. And the other possibility is that one of the other kids may remember dinner conversation where, because she said her father used to tell interesting stories at the dinner table about patients without giving names and details. stuff. Mike and I are still working on getting in touch with more of Dr. Howard Priest's relatives

and colleagues. With any luck, they might remember some details. But the list of people still around from back then is getting shorter and shorter. So time is of the essence. Here's the second new development in the Doodler case. I've learned from Dan Cunningham that shortly after the person of interest sat down with Rotei Guilford in 1976, he left town and took a trip around the U.S. Cunningham thinks that trip could reveal new evidence that would implicate the person of interest. So there's been some incidents of similar type of homicides that occurred throughout the United States. Yeah. And some of them are, you know, I'm basing this on, you know, some of these locations.

I don't want to say specifically where they are, but kind of based around general area of where this individual said that he took a little tour of the United States. This is after he got interviewed by Ritea and Earl. Right, this after he was a suspect. Yeah, he took up at some point and traveled kind of a strange way through the south and I think up the East Coast and came back to the Midwest or something like that. But there's several different incidents that we're interested in looking at. Cunningham is communicating with other police departments through an FBI tool called the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or ViCap. He shared details about the circumstances of the dundler crimes to see if police in other cities had cases that matched.

His VICAP message came back with 15 hits from police departments in the south, the east, and the Midwest. That means there are 15 cases that could be connected with the travels of the person of interest back in 1976. We have to see what they have and what they don't have. If there's any other potential evidence we could review or determine and see if we can get a hold of that, And, you know, it might come back to this individual we did take from looking at him as a possible in the Syrian murders in San Francisco. Those Vycap cases might be a stretch, but they make some sense. Around the time Earl and Rotea talked to the person of interest, the Dooler murders in San Francisco stopped. But what if he didn't stop killing?

What if the Dooler continued his killing spree somewhere else? It's possible that the case of this San Francisco serial killer is actually much larger. And if the case is larger, the pool of available evidence is, too. There might be fingerprints or DNA evidence in another state that match the person of interest. And I got to tell you, we're getting good tips from all over California and even outside. There's a set of eerily similar crimes in Louisiana that we're looking into. So that's two new developments. Dr. Priest is likely Dr. Howard Priest, and there's a potential wealth of new evidence that

may come to us from outside San Francisco. That leaves one more big break. Cunningham and I are out at Lans Inn, around where Harold Goldberg's body was found by a golf course. Goldberg was the fifth and final confirmed victim. Cunningham's cold case partner, Dan Dedette, is with us. He's got a salt and pepper mustache, slick back hair, and an easy smile. And then you don't know what's in the mind of the investigator

because, you know, there's a lot of information that's in people's heads regarding any specific event. It all doesn't make it on the paper, though. Yeah. You know, so it's a challenge. This is the site of a murder we haven't talked about yet, one that Mike and I think might be the work of the doodler. Cunningham is coming around to the idea, too.

He was found at 9.30, I believe, in the morning, on a Sunday morning, moaning on a service road, not far from a service road, right behind this monument up here. His name was Warren Andrews, attacked in April 1975. He was 52 years old. When a passerby found him, he was alive. He had been attacked with apparently what they thought. It was a large rock to the head, blood trauma to his head.

After nearly two months in a coma, he died. He was never able to describe. as attacker. Mike got in touch with Andrew's sister Nancy. She told us that he served in the Navy during World War II. After that, he was a merchant Marine, like Harold Goldberg. And in the latter years of his life, he was a lawyer out of Tacoma, Washington. But he was a very private person. He kept his personal life close to the vest. Now, since Warren Andrews wasn't stabbed, Cunningham initially ruled him out as a doodler victim. But Nancy thinks that Warren was probably gay. And for Dan, that changes things.

He's possibly a gay man. This area up here is some of these spots close to the ocean are notorious for rendezvous. And I'm not saying that's what happened. We don't know for sure. But it's kind of consistent with that. The Andrews murder happened around the same time as the Goldberg murder, too.

We see a pattern, you know, in the first five where there's injuries, the upper torso of the front and the back knife wounds. This individual with blunt trauma to the head. Well, those other ones

were rage killings. This one, the guy took a tree branch to him and a rock. Right. It sounds like he was pretty damn dedicated.

Right. Angry. So it's possible. You've got to think to yourself, well, you know what, this time period, these other ones were going on

very close in proximity and time to the other ones is very possible maybe he had a knife, and for whatever reason he dropped it or there's a struggle and maybe somebody interfered with it, you know, or he heard somebody when he was about to take his knife and fled. We don't know. But just because the fact of the location, the time period, some of the, you know, the victimology makes me think that it might be connected. I'm not going to say it is for sure, but I'd be a fool to say that it wasn't. Standing at the spot where Andrews lay bleeding,

I can see how the knife could have gone flying. Just a few steps away is a steep incline to a cliff. And if the doodler was fighting this man, he could easily have lost his footing on that slope as they tussled, losing the knife in the process. The nearest available replacement weapons? A rock. A branch. The hope with the Warren Andrews case is that there may be DNA

on one of the three key pieces of evidence found at the scene. And with any luck, that DNA will match someone in the police database, perhaps the person of interest. Mike and I looked at the medical examiner's report and the incident report on it. There was a rock, a tree branch, and a handkerchief. And I thought, well, you know, the rock and the tree branch, just assuming it would probably just have the victim's blood on it, like the clothing from the other scenes. But a handkerchief? Maybe the guy wiped himself and the attacker wiped himself and threw it down on the...

What's the chances of finding that stuff? Cunningham's partner, Detective Dan Dett, tried to explain. So there's a section within property from where old property may have been put back in a day that never made it into our digitized system because they couldn't input it. Dett says he and Cunningham are still looking for the evidence. SFPD changed its evidence filing system since the 70s, so some old cases are labeled with outdated filing numbers. There's been an effort to give old cases new numbers,

but that hasn't happened with every case yet. If there isn't documentation within the case file that that's been done, and it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack, what happened to the property? There must be thousands of cases in that warehouse. If you look back at 60 years, 70 years. In the basement of the property, in the basement down the hall of justice, as well as 606. Oh, man. Raiders of the Lost Ark.

That image just keeps coming in. That sounds massive. It's going to be a challenge to find that evidence, but it's not impossible. It's just a matter of time. The payoff could be huge. At the very least, it could help police solve the Warren Andrews case, whether it has anything to do with a doodler or not. In particular, that handkerchief. I just can't shake the thought that something like that has a better chance than most things in this case of having the DNA, maybe blood splotches, of whoever killed Andrews. That would be a triumph some 46 years later. In fact, today's episode marks the day Warren Andrews was attacked,

and with any luck, that DNA will give them evidence enough to bring charges against the doodler. All together, we're looking at three avenues for new evidence to surface. There's the documents and memories of Dr. Howard Priest, the 15 cases outside San Francisco that seem to match the person of interest travels, and lastly, the Warren Andrews murder, a potential sixth dudler victim. For a case that's lain dormant for nearly half a century, that's three rays of hope. Big rays of hope. Ron Huberman was close to this investigation.

He'd been following the case for years by the time he became an investigator for the district attorney. And to see it all fall apart was hard. If SFPD had ever made an arrest, that case would have brought to me redemption of why I went into this, why I went through all the academy, all the stuff, why I was there? Because that case was the only case that I knew of, where people that were in the same bars that I went to, and people that entertained them under the bars, and people who knew, I knew them by sight.

They weren't friends, but they were family. So to me, that was a huge thing. The issues the Doodler case brought up in the 70s aren't entirely in the rear view. The SFPD's interactions with the LGBTQ community are still complicated. When I came in in 1995, life wasn't so different as far as people having the fear of being out. Teresa Ewens is a commander and the highest-ranking LGBTQ officer in the San Francisco

Police Department, a prime example of progress. I remember, I worked in the castle for a really long time, that I was the LGBT liaison there, and really people still have these fears of being in a police report. You know, how do we stop that? I think we've progressed as a community. But still, when you talk about crimes like this, many people don't report. It's easy to look back on an old case like the doodler and think it's something that happened in a less civilized time when expressing your queerness was an act of resistance. But Josh Stickney from Equality, California, says it's not something we can just chalk up to past prejudice.

Whether it's 2021 or the 1970s, when society villainizes and disqualify and, demonizes and restricts the visibility and education of a marginalized people, a marginalized group, of course, you're going to have one of the results of that be hate crimes. That's what these doodler murders were, hate crimes, even if the law didn't categorize them that way back then. And queer people today are still being victimized for expressing themselves openly. Throughout, again, the last 30, 40, 50 years, We need to be cognizant that incidences of violence and hate were still happening, whether they were reported or not. You see hate crimes happening today on the most marginalized within the LGBTQ community, which are transgender people of color, specifically trans women of color.

Look at the way trans people are treated today. They've become the target of restrictive legislation in states all over the U.S. rules about which bathroom kids can use, what sports they can play, and whether doctors are allowed to provide them the care they want and need. But this discrimination is about more than any single law. Trans people face hate on and offline. As long as groups are otherized and marginalized, the ground will be fertile for violent people to strike,

for killers like the doodler to take advantage of the hate that's already buried so many and maybe get away with it too. You probably remember Jay Stevens, the drag queen murdered by the doodler on June 25th, 1974. Jay was the second confirmed doodler victim. Recently, I called Jay's sister Melissa at her home in Sebastopol. Well, it'd be great to have some answers,

to have some closure, number one, because that's certainly not there. and to have answers would be just divine, but I don't know if we're going to get them. If this guy's even alive, if he's even the guy that did it, you know, is I think probably our biggest question. I knew when I called her that I didn't have the news she was hoping for. The doodler's still out there.

That hasn't changed. You know, if I would come face to face with him, I might, like, hit him and scratch him and pull his hair. Losing her older brother, Jen, could have hung like a dark cloud over her for the past 47 years. But she somehow managed to hold on to optimism. I've learned enough in my life like to just move on and move on and do the best we can with every day. I don't want to sound too bad, but that's the truth.

You know, do the best with every day. Well, what would you ask this guy if Cunningham is able to actually arrest a suspect and get him convicted? What was it like to kill my brother? That's what I'd ask him. Yeah. Because it sure rained havoc on our lives. You know, and was it that satisfying? And why?

Why? Melissa turned to look out her living room window. Oh, my gosh. There's the deer. There's Tom, come look real quick. Hurry. Come here. There's a deer just standing right outside my front living room window.

just standing there looking at me. Maybe I'm just being sappy, but I can't help but think of Jay's doe eyes staring into Melissa's. He's just standing there watching me. No kidding. Yeah. I think of all the memories Melissa shared with me,

and I feel profoundly honored that I get to hold a piece of Jay in my mind, too. All of them. Gerald, Klaus, Fred, Harold, Warren. I've learned so much about them, and I still know so little. But they're with them. me, and they always will be. It's not my job to possess their memories, though. It's my job to shine a

light on them, and to pass their memory on to you, you who have stuck around and listened to their stories and maybe opened your heart to them and their families. Melissa and others close to these victims will always carry the bulk of that burden. But I hope it's some consolation that now we all carry a small portion of that weight. Hey, Mike's Kevin. Hi. Hey. Are we on tape?

Are we recording? This is what I always say. You do. And we are. Mike Taylor and I have been on this case together for a year now, scraping, digging, snuffling, and dredging for details all around the world. This reminds me of when I used to do stories on the 1906 earthquake survivors. You know, for the first several years, there were many years there where there would be people who remembered bricks falling on the, you know, on the ground. running, screaming from buildings,

gradually year after year after year. Now there's no one left. That's going to happen in this case. And the other thing is, this is a criminal case. It's a murder case. Murder has a statute of limitations. So, you know,

somebody who was murdered 45 years ago, if the killer has not been caught, that person is still open to being charged, tried, convicted. The question is, how realistically, how much evidence do they have? If this were any other year, a year without a hobbling pandemic,

we would have spent more hours and days traveling to Montreal, Sweden, Kaiser Slout in Germany, and huddling in library archives around the world. It's amazing what we've been able to find since the COVID lockdown began. We haven't come as far as I would have liked, which is to say the doodler hasn't been caught, but we've uncovered details that have been locked away for, decades. That's no small thing. Now, this investigation has to expand. A lot of this has to do,

I think, with the public's involvement. I mean, one always hopes in a story like this, where you have a mystery out there that's still a mystery. Someone out in the public has seen something. A neighbor, or a son or a daughter, or an uncle, someone who heard something after the guy had two beers in them and got loose lips. All that, or that secretary of Dr. Priest, you know, who may not have been a secretary at all, but he just hoping that if word of this whole thing ripples out further, someone could, you know, pick up the phone and, you know, unlock everything for us, or at least unlock a big part of it. When I was out at the side of Warren Andrews's murder with Dan Cunningham and Dan Dedette,

I wanted to get a sense of how close we are. How much work is there to do before we can put this story to rest? So, again, like I said, it was a football game. And I think when we started the balls on the one or two yard line, I think we got it out to midfield. So it still needs, sometimes that's the hardest, is getting the last 50 yards is pushing it forward. So that's, I think, where we are.

We need some more information, some more documentation, some more evidence, some more witnesses. Cunningham's optimism is contagious. At least I can trust that he's giving it is all. There's so many ways that this thing could still break. There are the new revelations about Dr. Howard Priest's. Cunningham tells me he thinks we're on the right track there. Also, the Warren Andrews evidence and the 15 cases around the U.S.

that could provide crucial DNA evidence. And then there's you. Throughout this series, we've been asking you to send us tips, and many of you have sent us great leads. Like I said before, we're looking into crimes that resemble the dooders' MO, stretching from around California all the way to Louisiana. We've also gotten calls on sightings in the East Bay, folks who may fit the description of the doodler. Our work continues on all this, and we'll be updating this podcast feed if anything develops. So keep the tips coming.

We're still hoping to talk to the diplomat, the actor, the secretary at Highland Hospital, of course the doodler himself. You can call our tip line at 415-570-9299. And our email is the doodler line at gmail.com. All it takes is one phone call. Keeping your mouth shut can be pretty hard for decade after decade after decade. You've got to think that there's a good chance that he spilled to someone. Yep.

Well, let's hope that call comes in. Yep. Indeed. All right. Hey, I'll talk to you later, right? All right. Okay, bye. Okay.

The doodler is created by the San Francisco Chronicle and Ugly Duckling Films and produced an association with neon hum media and Sony Music Entertainment. It's reported by me, the host, Kevin Fagan, and Mike Taylor. Produced and written by Tanner Robbins. Natalie Wren is our co-producer and Odelia Rubin, our supervising producer. Associate producers are Chloe Chobel and Ryan J. Brown. Our sound designer and composer is Hansdale's suit. Our editor is Nick White,

and our executive editor is Catherine St. Louis. Editorial support from King Kaufman and Tim O'Rourke for the San Francisco Chronicle. Executive producers are Sophia Gibber and Lena Bousager for Ugly Duckling Films, and Jonathan Hirsch for Neon Hum Media.