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We sit down with world-renowned forensic scientist and cold-case investigator, Paul Holes, to hear about one of his first cold cases, as well as the profiling techniques he developed over the years to catch the serial sexual predators he hunted.

WARNING: This episode deals with graphic descriptions of sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.

Special Guest: Paul Holes

Paul Holes spent the majority of his 27-year career investigating cold cases and serial-predator crimes in the Bay Area of California. Just before he retired in April 2018, Paul led the team that broke the Golden State Killer case, which brought him worldwide acclaim. Other notable cases he’s worked on include The Zodiac, Laci Peterson, Jaycee Dugard, Darryl Kemp, Joseph Naso, and Joseph Cordova Jr. Paul recently released an audiobook titled “Evil Has a Name” which is available on Audible. You can also hear him on the true-crime podcast, “The Murder Squad.” which he co-hosts with investigative journalist Billy Jensen.

Read Transcript

Paul: [00:00:01] Hey, Small Town Fam, this is Paul Holes. Make sure you subscribe to The Briefing Room with Detectives Dan and Dave. Season 2 is out now. Subscribe now and thanks.

[music]

Yeardley: [00:00:17] In this episode, we sit down with Paul Holes, the now world-famous cold case investigator and forensic scientist who in 2018 made headlines when his team finally identified Joseph DeAngelo as the Golden State Killer, bringing a 24-year manhunt to its close. But today, we have the rare opportunity to sit down with Paul and talk about one of his first cold cases, as well as some of the profiling techniques he uses to catch these serial predators. Please be warned that this episode contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault and may not be suitable for all listeners.

Yeardley: [00:01:01] I’m Yeardley.

Zibby: [00:01:01] I’m Zibby and we’re fascinated by true crime.

Yeardley: [00:01:04] So, we invited our friends, Detectives Dan and Dave.

Zibby: [00:01:07] To sit down with us and share their most interesting cases.

Dan: [00:01:12] I am Dan.

Dave: [00:01:13] And I’m Dave. We’re identical twins and we’re detectives in small town USA.

Dan: [00:01:17] Dave investigates sex crimes and child abuse.

Dave: [00:01:20] Dan investigates violent crimes. And together we’ve worked on hundreds of cases including assaults, robberies, murders, burglaries, sex abuse, and child abuse.

Dan: [00:01:29] Names, places, and certain details including relationships have been altered to protect the privacy of the victims and their families.

Dave: [00:01:38] Though we realize that some of our listeners may be familiar with these cases, we hope you’ll join us in continuing to protect the true identities of those involved out of respect for what they’ve been through. Thank you.

[Small Town Dicks theme]

Yeardley: [00:01:57] Today, on Small Town Dicks, we have the usual suspects. We have Detective Dan.

Dan: [00:02:04] Good morning.

Yeardley: [00:02:05] And we have Detective Dave.

Dave: [00:02:07] Happy to see you guys again.

Yeardley: [00:02:09] And brace yourselves, Small Town Fam. We have a very special guest. We have back with us, Paul holes.

Paul: [00:02:16] How you guys doing?

Yeardley: [00:02:17] We’re so happy to see you.

Paul: [00:02:19] It’s great to be here.

Yeardley: [00:02:20] So, Paul, you’re obviously best known now all over the world for leading the team that broke The Golden State Killer case, or GSK as it’s also known, and for identifying the Golden State Killer as being Joseph DeAngelo. Small Town Fam, listen to me. If you don’t already know about The Golden State Killer case, google it. It is a horrific litany of crimes, the investigation is fascinating, and the whole thing will keep you up at night. But Paul, before that moment last spring which shot you into the spotlight, we’d really love to know about some of your earlier cases. Why don’t you just tell us about one that you’re most proud of that happened before this big moment in your life?

Paul: [00:03:05] Well, yeah, I started out in law enforcement back in 1990. Initially it was just as a forensic scientist and then eventually got involved on the crime scene investigation side, going out into the field, but always fascinated and pulled into the cold cases and serial predators. I started that about 1994. One of the cases, is a 1969 case of a missing girl, Elaine 17 years old. Her mom, about 10:30 at night goes to pick up her dad, who’s working downtown. And Elaine has a younger sister that’s about two years old that’s in a crib in the back room. And Elaine had been told, empty the dishwasher, and she also had to sew a button on a peacoat. Mom comes home with dad half hour later, around 11 o’clock at night, and Elaine is not inside the house. So, now they’re searching for Elaine, and they’re saying, “This is really out of character.” She’s a straight A student, very responsible. She would not leave the baby home alone.

Zibby: [00:04:04] Were there any signs of breaking in or was anything amiss in her home?

Paul: [00:04:09] No. So, when mom and dad come home, everything looks normal outside the fact that it didn’t look like Elaine had finished emptying the dishwasher. So, whoever took Elaine probably was just lying in wait, saw mom leave, and I kind of wondered, was this person able to go in and grab Elaine without showing any signs of forced entry and/or struggle inside the house? Or was this somebody that Elaine maybe knew and he just knocked on the door? Once law enforcement responds, they’re doing a search and they find the button on the street about two blocks away. And it’s like, “Okay, something’s up here.”

Yeardley: [00:04:48] Right. But she had put her coat on.

Paul: [00:04:50] Well, she had the coat with her and she had the button with her that she was supposed to sew and had dropped the button. And I think the button probably was dropped where the offender’s vehicle had been parked.

Yeardley: [00:05:00] Huh.

Dave: [00:05:01] Going back to the moment that abduction happens, you put yourself in that house and just watch what happened. It’s really eerie to think about the last moments that girl was in that house and what was going through her mind. I mean, there’re so many scenarios. Did she know the person? Did the guy like Golden State Killer, he had been watching the house, and he goes in and snatches this girl and she’s never seen again. That’s the stuff that creeps me out on these things.

Dan: [00:05:28] What’s significant to me too is that button is found two blocks away, correct?

Paul: [00:05:32] Right.

Dan: [00:05:33] Were they on foot?

Paul: [00:05:34] I think so.

Dan: [00:05:34] I don’t think that he just happened to have the button and he tossed it out the window.

Paul: [00:05:39] No, I think he pulled her or walked her to his vehicle a couple of blocks away and that button was dropped.

Zibby: [00:05:44] And no one saw anything?

Paul: [00:05:46] No. So, Highway 17 is the primary road that connects the Contra Costa County area down to Santa Cruz. And on the side of Highway 17, her peacoat was found.

Zibby: [00:06:00] No.

Yeardley: [00:06:00] Oh, my God. How far is Santa Cruz from Contra Costa?

Paul: [00:06:04] Without Google mapping it, I’m guessing about 100 miles. I mean, this is a significant distance. And it’s amazing when you think about it because it was so far away. How is that linked to this missing girl’s case? Well, there was headlines in the newspapers about Elaine being missing. They had published in the newspaper article that the peacoat that she was supposed to sew the button on was also missing. Somebody prior to reading that article had just been driving along Highway 17 and saw the peacoat sitting on the side of the Highway and said, “That looks like a nice coat,” and stopped and grabbed it. And then they read the article, and they go, “I wonder if this is Elaine’s.” And sure enough, it was.

Yeardley: [00:06:40] Oh, my God. If you put that in a movie, nobody would believe it,

Paul: [00:06:44] Right. And then her shoe had been found. It was an off ramp from this road in Contra Costa County, like it had been tossed out of a vehicle. So, this was a missing person’s case. So, when I’m looking at this case file, I was like, “What happened to Elaine? What is going on here?” And local detective for the agency, really bright guy, he started digging into the case. And one of the things that stood out to him is about two weeks after Elaine went missing, a body had washed up on the beach in Santa Cruz, and it was a Jane Doe. Back in the day, they had considered this body as being, “Well, is this our missing girl?”

[00:07:29] But a radiologist out of a General Hospital in San Francisco had looked at some x-rays of the body and said, this has got the bone structure of a female that’s 25 to 30 years old. And Elaine was 17, so they said, “No.” And so, this Jane Doe had been buried in a cemetery down in Santa Cruz shortly after having washed up on the beach. This detective had asked me, “Is that accurate? Could that radiologist have concluded that?” I said, “Let me take a look.” And I’m looking at the case going, no way. That is not accurate. And so, we got to figure out, is that our victim or not?

Zibby: [00:08:06] Do you have to get the body out of the ground?

Paul: [00:08:07] That’s exactly what we had to do.

Zibby: [00:08:09] Now, I have a quick question. Who’s responsible for burying a Jane Doe or John Doe?

Paul: [00:08:15] That becomes the coroner’s responsibility. And over the decades, coroners have changed how they handle Does. But this coroner’s office worked with the local cemetery and the policy and the practice at that time was Does would be put into, in essence, a cardboard casket and then buried in an unmarked grave. So that local detective ends up working with that cemetery, saying, “Okay, I’ve got to find this body that was buried end of 1969 beginning 1970.”

Yeardley: [00:08:47] When is this exhumation taking place?

Paul: [00:08:48] This exhumation is taking place in 2001.

Yeardley: [00:08:51] Oh, okay.

Paul: [00:08:52] Over the years, it turns out that where this Doe’s body had been buried was on a side of a hill. The cemetery had filled in on top and had put in about 15ft of dirt on top of where this gray site supposedly was at.

Yeardley: [00:09:09] And other bodies in that 15ft.

Paul: [00:09:11] And there’s going to be other bodies all over the place surrounding this. This is where they would bury their Does.

Yeardley: [00:09:18] So, you’re exhuming the body of a Jane Doe 32 years after she was originally buried in a cardboard box at a gravesite that’s been backfilled and reused multiple times over the decades.

Paul: [00:09:29] Correct.

Yeardley: [00:09:29] Okay, where do you start?

Paul: [00:09:32] Well, I had read this book. It’s an awesome book called Forensic Taphonomy, which is the study of death. And one of the authors for a chapter in the book was Dr. Alison Galloway, forensic anthropologist out of UC Santa Cruz. And her expertise was dealing with bodies that have, of course, washed up because she’s dealing with that all the time being from that area.

Yeardley: [00:09:54] Because Santa Cruz is by the ocean.

Paul: [00:09:56] Right. So, I reached out to Dr. Alison Galloway, and between myself and the local agency’s detective, we coordinated with the coroner’s office to get an exhumation and worked with the cemetery to get us. “Okay, where approximately is this body buried?” We end up driving down there, we have the anthropologist and her grad students helping, and the cemetery now has a backhoe to dig down deep. This is not just a tiny grave. We ended up basically digging a huge, huge hole. And at one point, the anthropologist stops and she’s going down to the bottom of the hole, and she’s going “hmm,” and she’s looking at something, and it looks just like a piece of wood. We pull it up and we throw it underneath the popup tent that we have up on the surface, we continue to dig.

[00:10:43] And we’re down now a good 15ft and it’s just this monster pit. And it’s like we’re not finding this body. And it was getting frustrating because we’d been there a long time. And then the anthropologist like, “Hold on.” And she goes up to that, what looks like a piece of wood. Well, it turned out it was a body bag. And inside the body bag were bones.

Dave: [00:11:04] I have to ask, you mentioned cardboard coffin, and I would imagine that that presented some really specific challenges to you guys, because a wood casket is going to contain and it’s going to survive being underground and moisture and things like that. But cardboard is not.

Paul: [00:11:22] No. So, our expectation was that all we would have would be bones, maybe remnants of the container. Well, it turns out they didn’t even use a cardboard casket. They just zipped up a body bag and threw her in an unmarked grave.

Zibby: [00:11:36] No.

Paul: [00:11:37] So what ended up happening was the body bag itself is what looked like a piece of wood, like a thin piece of plywood. And you think about it, that thing had been underground with all the degradation that’s going on over the decades and being crushed by tons of dirt on top. So, everything just got compressed and just smashed down.

Yeardley: [00:12:00] So, it was rigid.

Paul: [00:12:00] It had a rigidity to it, absolutely.

Yeardley: [00:12:03] Because I’m thinking body bag, like made of, I don’t know, Tyvek or some sort of malleable material.

Paul: [00:12:09] It did not look like body bags look like today. It had a very different look. And it wasn’t until the anthropologist decided to take a second look at it and she’s like, “Oh, hold on, we got something here.”

Yeardley: [00:12:19] Wow. Now if this is the plot where they bury the Does, did you find other bones?

Paul: [00:12:24] No. And that was what was surprising is, is considering the size of the pit, we were even wondering, are we in the right spot? But now we had recovered at least a body and went back to the anthropologist’s office there on the campus, and she was able to take some x-rays. These bones were so fragile, you touch them and they would start to break apart. And the body that had washed up on the beach was missing its head, was missing its arms from the elbows down and missing the legs from the knees down. And this is pretty typical of bodies that have been submerged and there’s wave action just because these parts of the body get smashed up against rocks and start getting pulled off as the body decomposes. Well, the remains that we had were consistent with that.

[00:13:07] So, that was like, “Okay, this at least appears to be the Jane Doe that washed up on the beach.” Now we had x-rays from Elaine that had been taken when she was alive and it was x-rays of her head and neck. And this body didn’t have the head except for the lower bone, the occipital bone, but it had the vertebrae. And the anthropologist has got an x-ray of our body from the gravesite and Elaine’s x-rays and is able to physically match and show all the various unique anomalies that are within the bone structure. It’s almost like a fingerprint. And she was able to identify that this body that washed up back in 1969 was Elaine Davis.

Yeardley: [00:13:53] Even with the bones being that old, they weren’t so decomposed that she could actually make that comparison from the x-ray to the bones that you had exhumed.

Paul: [00:14:03] That’s right. She was able to actually identify, even though this was like the worst condition that you could imagine any type of skeletal remains being in. Now this is an unsolved case to this day, but one of the things that was so gratifying is that unfortunately, Elaine’s dad had passed away, but her mom was still alive and her younger sister was in the house, you know as a baby, basically. So, the local agency detectives went up and met with mom and told her that they had recovered her daughter. And of course, the sister found out. Mom died two weeks later.

Zibby: [00:14:40] You’re kidding.

Yeardley: [00:14:40] Oh My God.

Paul: [00:14:41] Yeah.

Dave: [00:14:42] I imagine the closure that would provide a family that has gone decades without knowing if and when their daughter died or the circumstances that once they’re told, “Hey, we’ve got her and she’s been buried,” that would be pretty extraordinary for a family.

Paul: [00:14:59] Yeah. You’re dealing with real life and real people. And even though this is an unsolved case, it’s almost like mom hung on until her daughter came home.

Yeardley: [00:15:09] Right.

Paul: [00:15:09] It’s one of those things where you go, “Okay, I’m doing something real.”

Yeardley: [00:15:12] Do you continue to attempt to solve the case?

Paul: [00:15:15] There has been a lot of effort. We have those items that were recovered that we know were Elaine’s.

Yeardley: [00:15:21] You’re talking about the button and the peacoat.

Paul: [00:15:23] Yeah. And so, of course, we’ve gone after those items to see if we can find offender DNA on those items. And that’s still an ongoing thing. We’ve addressed that several times. As technology has improved. Unfortunately, we just have not been successful to work the case to get something to be able to identify what happened. And this was during a time in Central Contra Costa County, we had a hotbed of predatory type crimes occurring where women and girls were either being killed or going missing. And it turns out we had multiple serial predators or serial killers that were attacking in this area in the 1970s. And it’s very possible that she was a victim of one of these guys.

[00:16:07]

[Break 1]

[00:16:17]

Dave: [00:16:21] There’s just a confluence of killers in Central California that you guys are having to sift through, like, “Is this more this killer’s profile or is it this one?” It’s amazing how much of that you guys had going on back then.

Paul: [00:16:34] What’s interesting is you think back the 1960s, 1970s, everybody was so free with their kids, right. And so, a 17-year-old girl goes missing, and it did make headlines, and then it disappears out of the headlines, and then everything is normal in the neighborhoods, and everybody has this misconception that kids were safe to play on the streets back then. “Oh, no, they weren’t.” With Elaine, this offender got her all the way down to Santa Cruz, somehow killed her. Because of the state of her body, we don’t know the cause of death with her, likely was strangulation, dumped her in the ocean but her peacoat was on the side of the highway as if he’s coming back from Santa Cruz.

Yeardley: [00:17:11] Oh.

Paul: [00:17:12] And her shoe was on the off ramp as if he’s continuing to drive up north. So, he’s somebody from the area is the way I’m interpreting things. He pulls her and for whatever reason, dumps her all the way down in Santa Cruz, but then he comes back into Contra Costa County.

Dan: [00:17:28] Something that struck me, Santa Cruz. And this is right around the time that Edmund Kemper is active?

Paul: [00:17:33] Yes.

Dan: [00:17:33] And he’s active in that area. I know he was usually picking up hitchhikers and such, and that was his MO. Not breaking into a house and pulling someone out. But you wonder the copycat factor where whoever this offender is knows that things are happening in Santa Cruz and maybe I can go dump a body there and they won’t attribute it to me, I live in the East Bay.

Paul: [00:17:55] That’s actually a very good observation. And Kemper is somebody that has at least been considered. I don’t believe he’s responsible for Elaine’s case, but absolutely an offender could be taken advantage of all these cases happening down in Santa Cruz and deciding, I’m going to basically hide in plain sight, so to speak, with all those other cases.

Yeardley: [00:18:15] Just for our listener’s edification, can either of you give a brief description of what Kemper’s specific MO was? Was it sexual assault and murder or?

Paul: [00:18:23] If I remember right, Kemper had been released from some sort of juvenile detention and was living with his grandparents, I think. And I think he ended up killing his grandparents.

Dan: [00:18:35] Yes. And when he got released, he went and lived with his mother.

Paul: [00:18:38] That’s right.

Dan: [00:18:39] Here’s some really interesting things about Kemper. He was huge man, 6’8”. 6’9”?

Paul: [00:18:44] Yeah,

Dan: [00:18:45] He was enormous, very smart, 145 IQ. He had done things with his locks, where he had shaved the locks down, where if you were inside the car, you couldn’t unlock the door. He would pick up hitchhikers and sexually assault them. He would strangle them.

Yeardley: [00:19:02] Were they sex workers?

Paul: [00:19:02] No. This is back in the day where girls were just hitchhiking left and right and these guys were taking advantage of it.

Yeardley: [00:19:09] Right. So, Paul, getting back to Elaine, what piqued your interest about that case? Did you choose it or were you handed that cold case?

Paul: [00:19:19] I never was handed any cold case. I just went and grabbed all cases that I worked on the cold case side. So, I was working all sorts of cold cases and I focused in on this cluster from the late 1960s through the 1970s of women and girls that had been killed or went missing out of this very– back then, I wouldn’t say it was upper class. Today, it’s a very upper scale community.

Yeardley: [00:19:44] This is California.

Paul: [00:19:46] Yeah. This is in Contra Costa County and was very low crime area at the time, but there was this predatory type of activity going on. I started focusing in on those cases, and so Elaine was one of them. And it just happened to that, fortunately, there was a detective with that local agency that also was very interested and he was the one that made that observation about, “Hey, could that radiologist do that?”

Yeardley: [00:20:12] Make a false ID on that body that washed up on the beach?

Paul: [00:20:15] Yeah. It’s so important not to be so narrow that you see people today in terms of their areas of expertise from the forensic side. if you have that breadth, you can look at it and go, yeah, that is not right. Really, that was what snowballed in order to allow us to actually find Elaine and return her to her family. It’s just unfortunate we have not been able to figure out who killed her.

Yeardley: [00:20:38] Right.

Dave: [00:20:38] As you review this case, was the peacoat still in evidence?

Paul: [00:20:42] Yes. So, the peacoat and the button were still in evidence and the shoe. So, of course, those are prime items, because we know the offender likely touched those items or did more with those items. That’s always the hope he’s left more DNA on these than just sheer touch. But unfortunately, right now, we’re still trying to figure out if we can recover some evidence to identify who he is.

Dave: [00:21:03] A lot of that has to do with the way these items are stored too and back then nobody was thinking about DNA. So, the way you store an item like that might not be conducive to preserving that evidence.

Paul: [00:21:15] No. And it’s so funny because you can have as an example, my former sheriff’s property room. It was a typical property room, just a warehouse that had no environmental controls. And it just so happened somebody made the decision that all the homicide evidence would be stored up on the second floor. Well, that’s where the heat goes in the summertime. So, all the homicide evidence, all this biological evidence that had been collected before the days of being stored in freezers, was being heated, cooked at 120 and 130 degrees every summer.

Dave: [00:21:46] Yeah. That’s not good for biological trace evidence. It degrades completely.

Paul: [00:21:53] Right. But as an example, a 1978 case, the woman’s fingernails had been collected. There was a tiny, tiny spot of blood underneath that fingernail, and it had been stored this way. We’re able to get a full DNA profile and ultimately identify and convict the guy off of that. But there’s other cases that probably had better DNA being deposited where the DNA is degraded to where we can’t do anything. That’s just the nature of how it happens. But, yeah, back then, the way that they handled biological evidence is very different than today and that could have an impact on why we have not been successful in Elaine’s case.

Dan: [00:22:27] So, Paul, you mentioned that you’re never assigned these cold cases, that you actually get to pick them yourself. Why do you pick certain cases and not others?

Paul: [00:22:37] I started out on this cluster of women because of this one convicted serial killer, this guy by the name of Philip Hughes.

Dan: [00:22:43] I’ve heard of Philip Hughes. He was a serial rapist and murderer. And guess what? He started by killing animals.

Yeardley: [00:22:49] Oh, God.

Paul: [00:22:50] Yeah. And he was out of this very area. He was convicted of three, the three cases he was convicted of, none of them were death eligible cases because they occurred after that Rose Bird decision.

Yeardley: [00:23:00] What’s that?

Paul: [00:23:01] It was a moratorium on death. So, Judge Rose Bird had ruled that the death sentence was basically cruel and unusual. So, all these guys on death row ended up having their death sentences commuted or changed over to life without, some of them actually got paroled. But Phil never had a death case. And so, when he was convicted of three murders, he was sentenced to seven years to life.

Yeardley: [00:23:21] Wow. That’s not very much.

Dan: [00:23:22] Boy.

Paul: [00:23:23] No, but he’s been eligible for parole after serving 20. I went to his very first parole hearing, but my goal had always been, I’m looking for a death eligible case to hang on Phil. And this wasn’t for him to get the death penalty. This was to hang over him and say, “Tell us everything you did because I think you’ve done a lot more than just those three.” In that process of marching down on Phil and opening those cases, we ended up uncovering a couple other serial killers. Everybody assumed Phil was responsible for and it was very much a lesson learned both for what the original investigators just assumed and then for me, because I also had the blindfolds on in terms of these are all Phil’s. And then the DNA comes back and it’s not Phil. That really underscores you really need to not get locked in on any particular person just like in Elaine’s case. Phil could be responsible for Elaine, but you can’t say it’s him.

Zibby: [00:24:22] So, what is your theory, if you have one, about this pocket of time and location where there’re just a ton of serial rapists and killers?

Paul: [00:24:32] It’s so bizarre. And I’ve been asked that before and I’ve thought about it because, you see, starting in the late 60s through the 70s in Contra Costa County, we just have multiple serial killers and serial rapists that are just coming and attacking over and over again. But you see that down in Santa Cruz. Dan brought up Ed Kemper. He was attacking and there was another serial killer that was committing crimes in Santa Cruz at the same time. San Francisco has a cluster in the 1970s. Sonoma has a cluster in the 1970s. So, it was just an odd time, and I don’t know, I don’t have answer. And we saw it fade in the 1980s at least in my area, and then it picked up again in the 1990s, and then it faded in the 2000s. It’s like this almost cyclical type of phenomenon at least within my observations in the area that I was working.

Dan: [00:25:22] You see a striking difference in the methodology from GSK, where he was very detail oriented, he was organized, and someone like Gary Ridgway, who was the Green River Killer, who they just drive down the road, get them in the car, and off they go. And the difference between a person like that and somebody who’s actually stalking their victim like they are is frightening.

Paul: [00:25:45] And that’s one of those things that before we knew who the Golden State Killer was, I had been pretty vocal in saying, “I’m not looking for the troll under the bridge. I’m dealing with an intelligent and sophisticated offender.” And I actually had some people get offended when I’m starting to describe the Golden State Killer as having those traits, saying, “Well, you’re glorifying him.” And it’s like, “Well, no, I’m not. I’m hunting.” And you have to understand who you’re hunting or you’re going to be wrong. Because when I first started on Golden State Killer, I thought, like many people thought, I’m looking for this just semi-transient sex fiend that’s just roving the countryside and breaking into houses, because that’s how he was portraying himself. Once you realize his kind of gig what he was doing, he’s smart enough to portray himself that way because he knows that will throw law enforcement off.

Dave: [00:26:32] He wants you to underestimate him.

Paul: [00:26:34] Right. But one of the things that is important when you start looking at these types of cases is when you evaluate the background of the people for the cases you mentioned, Gary Ridgway. When I look at these guys, I see what I call barriers to offense. And I use this sometimes when I would talk to investigators and train them on an introduction and recognition as a serial predator, is that you have to understand that for these guys, they’re going to have a stepwise progression to get to the point of committing these types of crimes. So, I use the example of, let’s say, guys like a Golden State Killer break into a house and killing people. Well, before he got to that point, he had to cross multiple barriers. I know the way I am.

[00:27:19] If I’m out walking and I accidentally walk on my neighbor’s front lawn, I get nervous, “Oh, he’s going to come out and yell at me.” Because socially, most people are going to go, no. Well, imagine somebody who’s going up and looking inside a house, a peeper. He obviously has crossed that barrier. He’s comfortable enough, “Hey, I’m going to go up and do this, and I’m starting to look inside a house.” Then he’s going into a house maybe when there’s nobody present, but he’s crossed a significant barrier. He’s got to get comfortable with his skill set and his psychology to break into that dwelling. Then he’s got to get into that next step, breaking into that dwelling when there’s somebody inside, and then going hands on with somebody.

[00:28:02] So, when you’re looking at these cases and let’s say we talk about somebody who is going after the sex workers that are in the stroll, this is just common sense, but at the same time, that person has to be comfortable in that world. I’ve never shopped a sex worker in a stroll area. I don’t know how to do that. So, am I going to be comfortable to say for the first time, I’m going to go into the stroll area and pick up a woman and kill her or rape her? I’m going to get comfortable first. And that’s where a lot of times when you find out you got these guys that are preying on the sex workers in the stroll areas. Well, they’re Johns because they know that culture. They’re comfortable with that. So, you start looking at, “Okay, who are the Johns in the area? Who’s been FI’d in the area?

Yeardley: [00:28:45] FI’d?

Paul: [00:28:46] Field interrogations.

Dan: [00:28:47] An FI is a little 3×5 index card where we can put the person’s horsepower on there. Name, date of birth, address, phone number, height, weight, the car they’re driving. If they’re on a bicycle, what that bicycle looks like. There are a lot of things that we can mark on that. And it basically says, at this time on this date, I had contact with this person in this spot.

Yeardley: [00:29:10] Oh, got it.

Paul: [00:29:11] And if you look at Golden State Killer DeAngelo, who is breaking into houses and raping and ultimately killing people, how did he start out?

Yeardley: [00:29:20] He was a burglar first.

Paul: [00:29:21] Right. He was the Visalia Ransacker, in fact, for Exeter PD, he was on anti-burglary task force and had gone to training on how to investigate burglaries. And, of course, you learn how burglars commit to their crimes, how they break in houses as part of that training. So, on taxpayer money, he was trained to become this serial killer.

Yeardley: [00:29:42] That is harrowing.

[00:29:44]

[Break 2]

[00:29:54]

Dave: [00:29:58] I think we had talked about it a little bit during the live show out in DC. But DeAngelo, in the GSK cases, there was one point where he’s killing, that it’s more of a means of escape, that he’s trying to overcome the physical battle between him and somebody that’s now confronted him. And then there’s this evolution to later on in the cases where he’s killing and it seems like he’s killing people, beating them to death just because that’s what he needs now.

Paul: [00:30:26] That’s right. With DeAngelo, what you saw is he was all about self-preservation. And so, when he had to kill because let’s say the male came after him, he shot the guy. That wasn’t what he wanted to do. It was just to basically be defensive. But he got to where now he’s bludgeoning the couples to death. And this is somebody who was getting very angry. He’s somebody that in his normal life, he’s getting upset, and now he’s taking that anger out on these victims.

Dan: [00:30:52] Over the years, we’ve had people who expose themselves to women and Dave can speak to how they progress. These guys who are masturbators in public.

Yeardley: [00:31:00] Does that often escalate into something more serious?

Dave: [00:31:03] That’s the consideration. For the normal person, they would never think about masturbating in public. They wouldn’t even think about exposing themselves, much less doing the self-pleasure aspect of that. There’s a barrier there.

Dan: [00:31:14] Yeah. So, when these offenders move on to doing it with the idea of drawing attention to themselves, that’s the turn on for them. That’s their fix.

Dave: [00:31:23] Right. You can understand that’s a pretty significant leap to get to that point. And then we have others who will do it while they’re peeping into somebody’s window. Now they’re up on somebody’s property. Person might not know, but the next day they walk outside and they find footprints in the mud right below their window. You can imagine how creepy that is. And then they get to the point where that’s not giving them the fix that they need. So now they’re breaking into the house or they’re grabbing somebody.

[00:31:50] We had a guy a few years ago saw a female walking through the park, and he’s one of these masturbators, and he actually needed to have physical contact with her. And the moment that he was able to grab her, he climaxed and actually ejaculated onto one of her garments. And that’s how we end up identifying the guy. He needed that physical contact for him to get off at that point. So, there’s this escalation with these people and those are the really dangerous ones because they don’t adhere to the norms that the rest of us would that you can imagine. If you get to that point, you don’t really have any barriers to your behavior. It’s all about you and getting off.

Paul: [00:32:29] Yeah. Some will go further up to the point to where now you’re on that spectrum marching towards rape and/or homicide. There’s one serial killer that, with his consensual sexual partners, he would routinely strangle them to the point of unconsciousness, and in some instances, they would start having consensual sex, and he’d push up, walk away, come back with a gun, and then have to hold the gun to the woman’s head while he’s having consensual sex because that’s what he needed.

Yeardley: [00:32:54] I don’t understand how anything can be consensual when you’re talking about rape.

Dave: [00:32:58] So, what Paul is describing are these offenders in their personal relationships, sexual partners that they know, they’re not the victims that they’re targeting. These are actual people that are in their lives. And during their consensual sex acts, the offender will need to resort to some violence, like strangling or putting someone in fear, like holding a gun to their head. Something that allows this offender to get their fix or get their sexual fantasy satisfied.

Paul: [00:33:29] Right.

Yeardley: [00:33:29] Ah, God.

Paul: [00:33:31] So, that’s his fantasy and that’s where the profilers come in. That’s when you’re looking at these crime scenes, you’re looking for that fantasy signature. Can you interpret, okay, what is getting this guy off? What does he need internally? And is there evidence that would show that because that will give you insight in terms of who this guy is, what’s driving him. Sometimes, you don’t see that. Sometimes you can see that in terms of evidence of the fantasy that he wants.

Zibby: [00:33:59] I always wondered about rapists who then kill after because the rape aspect would speak to sexual fantasy and whatever else goes into that, I think. And then killing someone, those feel like two very separate things. So, I always wonder about the progression from rape to murder.

Paul: [00:34:19] It’s so different from offender to offender. Now, when you talk about rape, there’re different types of rape in terms of what the offender is getting from that interaction. And of course, they say rape is all about power and control and it is. However, it is also about sex. And this offender has sexualized that violence. He’s feeding that fantasy by having that power and control over the female or male depending on what type of victim we’re talking about. But there’re different types offenders and what they need. And this is where I come out of this rapist typology. It’s called Groth’s rapist typology, where the psychologist basically said there’s four general categories of these rapists. You’ve got your power assertive, your power reassurance, your anger excitation, and then your sexual sadist.

[00:35:14] And the FBI profilers don’t break these serial killers or serial rapists down this way. But for me, from an investigative standpoint, it’s very helpful. If I’m looking at an unsolved case, can I generally classify what kind of offender I’m looking at, to go to the extreme is your sexual sadist. This is the guy that has to inflict that pain. Whether it be like with DeAngelo was the psychological pain, the psychological torture, or that physical pain, that’s what he gets off on. It’s the guy just talked about who needs to get the gun to put to his consensual partner’s head. He needs to see that woman suffer in order to get off. These are your most horrific types of offenders. There’s one guy that was up in the Northwest and he had a victim survive him.

[00:36:03] He was a sexual sadist, and he’s a guy that would cut and he’d have to basically make all these stab wounds and incisive wounds to get off as he’s sexually assaulting the woman. This one woman, she’s struggling with him in the front of a pickup truck and he’s cutting on her. She’s trying to fight and she’s realizing, I’m not going to win this. And she goes, “I give up.” She goes limp thinking I’m dead. And as soon as she goes limp, she said the guy just stopped, looked at her, pushed up, and walked away.

Yeardley: [00:36:33] Oh, my God.

Paul: [00:36:33] She wasn’t giving him what he needed at that point. He wanted her to struggle. He wanted to see her suffer. This is so different than the other types of guys that are trying to get the female to be subdued. Sometimes, I’m talking at Citizens Academies and I’ll have women in the class ask, “Okay, so if I’m confronted and being raped, what are your recommendations?” And it’s like, well, you got to gauge who this guy is because there are some guys that if you fight them, they’re just going to amp up on you. If you’ve got that sexual sadist, he’s just getting off. And other guys, you fight them, they’re going to run away. And I always say, you fight until you realize uh-oh, I’m not going to win this fight. Maybe the opposite is what I need to do, because he’s wanting that. That’s where it really does come down to what the guy wants out of it. There is that physical pleasure, but there is so much more going on internally with these guys than what they need.

Yeardley: [00:37:24] Would you go back just for a second? You said there are four rape typologies. Would you quickly define each one?

Paul: [00:37:31] Sure. Initially, you have your power reassurance, and this is a guy that is exerting power and control over the victim, but he’s trying to get reassurance to his own inadequacies on how he interacts with women. So, once he’s got this woman and he’s sexually assaulting them, he’s wanting to basically reenact sort of a consensual encounter. So, he’s possibly trying to kiss the woman like it’s a consensual type of sexual interaction. He will snuggle with them and stroke their hair, whisper sweet nothings into their ear, and he will demand that they say positive things back to him. I liked it. Yes, you were good. He’s looking for that reassurance. Then you have your power assertive. This is your true power and control guy. He is just now wanting to dominate this woman. He’s wanting to get that sexual interaction and show that woman, I can control you. I’m going to have sex with you. You can’t do anything about it.

[00:38:24] The anger excitation, this is the guy that gets angry. He gets angry in his normal life at whatever is making him angry. Let’s say it’s the wife at home nagging him to do whatever and he gets pissed off and then he goes out and finds a woman and ends up taking that anger out. Often these are very violent type of attacks, but he also gets off on expressing that type of violence, but he’s getting that anger out. Roger Kibbe is a prototypical anger excitation type of offender.

Yeardley: [00:38:54] Who is he?

Paul: [00:38:54] Roger Kibbe was known as the I-5 killer and there’s multiple I-5 killers that went by that moniker, but he was one that was in the Sacramento and San Joaquin area back in the 1970s, 1980s killing women. When his wife was interviewed after he was caught, she had no idea he was going out killing women. But she said, I’d be sitting at home and I’d just berating about something he failed to do or this and that. He would just sit there quiet, and then he’d just get up and walk out of the house. What do you think he was going to do? He was getting pissed at her. And now he’s going out and taking that anger out on these victims.

[00:39:24] Some of them were sex workers. Some of them were women that he saw that their cars had mechanical issues and had broken down on the side of the freeway or he had somehow used a ruse to get them to pull over. So that is an example of anger excitation-type of offender. And then there’s that sexual sadist. And that’s that offender that he gets off sexually on inflicting pain and that’s what he needs. And those are the worst of the worst in terms of the types of traumas they inflict on the victims.

Yeardley: [00:39:55] And for somebody like a sexual sadist, if the climax comes from inflicting pain, is there often not even any penetration? Is it just the pain is enough.

Paul: [00:40:05] It’s everything. Dave brought up the guy just by reaching out and grabbing somebody would end up having a climax. Just the sheer act of whatever is feeding their fantasy is going to cause them to have that sexual release. Then you also have guys, they get sexually charged up by doing these actions, but they can’t get it up. They have ED in essence and then they basically go and relive that experience at home.

Dave: [00:40:29] BTK, bind, torture, kill. He was in Wichita, Kansas, and operated for a couple decades.

Paul: [00:40:34] He did? Yeah.

Dan: [00:40:36] He’s an odd guy because he didn’t sexually violate his victims. He would kill them, but he would also photograph them, he would photograph himself, and those were his trophies that he would take home and he would masturbate.

Paul: [00:40:47] Right. In fact, I think in that first case, the Otero family is a horrific crime. He kills this entire family mother, father, and the kids and the young girl. He ends up hanging down in the basement. I believe he’s masturbating at the crime scene while he’s looking at this girl hanging. He’s a guy that would like to bind himself up and take photos of himself all in these very elaborate bondage type of wrappings almost. It’s unreal what these guys will do themselves.

[00:41:13]

[Break 3]

[00:41:25]

Yeardley: [00:41:28] If you don’t have any survivors, how do you start to build a serial killer or a serial rapist profile if you don’t have somebody who says, “He was cutting me and I went limp, and now you know he’s a sexual sadist,” how do you do it?

Paul: [00:41:42] That’s where you’re assessing what was done to the victim. This is where the documentation at autopsy, the documentation of the crime scene is so important because you are looking for that type of information without getting into any specific case, I’ll give you an example of having, let’s say, a body that’s been dumped on the side of the road. The victim’s face has been completely carved up. Numerous incisive injuries, none of them fatal, but they’re hemorrhaging, they’re bleeding. Her heart is still pumping at the time that the offender is actually carving her face. This is a sexual sadist. So, you look at that going, okay, he is somebody who needs to do this. And so, when you have other bodies being found, are you seeing similar sadistic types of acts? It may not necessarily be incisive injuries. It could be something else.

[00:42:33] Numerous blunt force traumas, like he’s constantly just punching her over and over and over again. His fantasy is being exhibited in the types of injuries that the victim’s body is showing. The crime scenes also can show certain things in terms of what the offender has used. Has he accessed a certain type of weapon? Is he doing anything elaborate with the knots in terms of the binding? So, you need to pay attention to those things.

Yeardley: [00:42:58] Right. So interesting.

Paul: [00:43:00] I have one case which the original agency investigated as a dope rip. It was a sex worker that ended up being killed and they thought she must have just ripped off some drugs. And that’s it. Well, her body was found nude from the waist down. And she had over 20 superficial stab wounds to her right upper back. None of those stab wounds were fatal and they were hemorrhaging. She was alive. This is what’s called picquerism.

Yeardley: [00:43:25] Picquerism?

Paul: [00:43:26] Picquerism is where an offender will take something like a knife or an ice pick or a screwdriver and basically do these punctures into the victim’s body. And the behavioralists are saying, well, it’s penile substitution. He’s getting off basically by thrusting this weapon into the women’s body over and over again. This is a fantasy type of act. So, I’m looking at this picquerism on this woman’s body and I’m going, no, this is a predator that did this. This is a fantasy driven crime. This was not a dope rip. A guy who’s just killing because she stiffed him for some drugs isn’t going to take the time to do that.

Zibby: [00:44:01] Where the hell do these fantasies come from, honestly? Is that on the internet somewhere? And then somebody’s like that’s what I want to do. Am I just so naive?

Dave: [00:44:09] It’s amazing the fetishes that we come across in law enforcement. I mean, we were talking in detectives earlier this morning. Somebody brought up furries and a term called bronies, which is males who have a sexual fetish about My Little Pony?

Zibby: [00:44:24] No way.

Dan: [00:44:25] You think about the spectrum of what gets people off.

Paul: [00:44:28] It’s absolutely crazy.

Yeardley: [00:44:29] What’s a furry.

Dave: [00:44:30] People who like dressing up in furry mascot costumes and that’s their fetish.

Yeardley: [00:44:34] And that’s a thing.

Paul: [00:44:35] It’s a paraphilia.

Yeardley: [00:44:37] What’s paraphilia?

Paul: [00:44:38] So, paraphilia is basically you have abnormal or deviant sexual desires towards something. A fetish is very specific. You have a sexual desire towards an inanimate object. And the most common fetish out there and almost all men have this is women’s undergarments, lingerie. Men get turned on by that. That technically is classified as a fetish. But when you start talking about these really bizarro types of things, for example, there are guys that get off on just touching. They’re the guys that on the subways, on the stations will sit down next to you and get up close and they want touch you. Or they’ll be standing and all of a sudden, they’re putting their hands on the woman’s ass.

Yeardley: [00:45:19] What.

Paul: [00:45:20] They are getting off, that’s a type of paraphilia and it just gets really bizarre from there. When I talk to sexual assault investigators, homicide investigators, crime scene investigators, forensic scientists, what I tell them is, it’s know thy enemy. You have to start recognizing that these guys don’t think like you and I. And so, when you start investigating that or you’re starting to look for evidence, you have to consider the really, really bizarre.

[00:45:48] And I’ll use an example like Gary Ridgway. Gary Ridgway was killing these sex workers and then he was depositing their bodies, but he would go back to the bodies and have sex with them after they’re dead, necrophilia. He even says in his interview, sometimes it got to where he’s brushing maggots off the body before he’d have sex with him. And then he says at a certain point, they get so bad that he can’t have sex with them.

[00:46:09] Oftentimes a pathologist at autopsy with these decomposed bodies were going, I’m not going to collect a sex kit. There’s just no way DNA based on the condition of the body is still going to exist. Well, what happens if the guy just had sex with that body the other day? Take the damn sex kit. It’s just a couple of swabs. We need to recover that DNA because you have to understand that you do have those weirdos out there. You have a Ted Bundy who is having sex with severed heads and not necessarily orally, the opening of the neck. There are some guys that ejaculate into stab wounds. Look for evidence. You have to understand how these guys operate. And so that’s where you have to take it to the next step.

[00:46:47] And that’s where it’s so important because it’s so rare for most law enforcement agencies to have a predatory or fantasy-motivated crime. It’s so critical to recognize that early on to maximize getting the evidence, getting the investigative leads right then and there. Otherwise, you may let that evidence go away.

Dan: [00:47:05] Speaking of Gary Ridgway and this speaks a little to his psyche, I guess. He was actually embarrassed to the point of him having sex with these bodies after they were dead, that he started burying them, so he would not have sex with them anymore.

Yeardley: [00:47:20] Did it work?

Dan: [00:47:20] I don’t think in every case, it really goes to show you how much that urge burns in him, that he would have sex with a dead body. And he’s aware of it enough to be ashamed of it.

Zibby: [00:47:31] But he can’t help himself.

Dan: [00:47:32] He can’t help himself.

Zibby: [00:47:33] All of these stories involve men and the fetishes of men and how deep that goes. Have you in your career ever come across a woman with a sexual fantasy or fetish that involves harming or hurting or murdering someone?

Paul: [00:47:48] I think it depends on what you say, harming or hurting. Not to the point where you’ve got this power and control or homicidal act as a result to get a sexual gratification. Generally, where I’ve had cases or aware of cases out of my jurisdiction that involve women offenders. It’s usually on younger kids. They’re molesting the younger kids and it’s rare. But you do sometimes have an adult female who will make sexual advances towards an underage girl. And so obviously there is a component there, but it’s a very different type of act. And it’s one of those things where you see at the newspapers all the time, the 20 something school teachers, sometimes older female teachers, that are having sex with these teenage boys. And it’s one of those things, obviously, that it’s a crime, but you look at that differently.

[00:48:34] And this may not be politically correct, but that teenage boy is not in fear. Unlike a teenage girl with an adult male sexually assaulting. Even if maybe there’s a consensual component, I do see that victim as having a different type of trauma when it’s somebody who physically is able to take care of themselves in that situation versus somebody who can’t. Whether it be the young kid or the girl that has a male that could physically dominate her.

Yeardley: [00:49:01] Dave, you’re nodding over there. You have found that to be true.

Dave: [00:49:04] Yeah. And I’ve only investigated sex crimes and child abuse for six plus years. And during that time, I had just a handful of female offenders, which is why when I would do presentations, I always use the he and him pronouns because statistically, in the high 90s on offenders are males. But the interaction and the dynamic between victim and offender is different. When the female is the offender, it’s a completely different dynamic, there’s a different kind of trauma, there’s a different kind of fear attached to male and female offenders.

Yeardley: [00:49:39] Do women not necessarily use fear as a reason for their victim to comply? Is it much more I’m going to cajole, flatter, gain your trust.

Dave: [00:49:49] The female offenders I had, there was a seduction component there. There was some fantasy component for them. None of my female offenders were violent towards their male victims. There was no violence. It was a seduction-type scenario.

Paul: [00:50:07] Kind of along these lines, there is an interesting psychology with these women that partner up with the men that are going out there and hurting. You do see that and it’s interesting. There’s a Dr. Park Dietz, who’s a forensic psychiatrist, has a whole study on what’s called the compliant victims of the sexual sadist. And these are women that have fallen in love with a predator and then pretty soon they are now assisting the guy with the crimes, whether it be with victim selection, whether it be actually holding the victim down while her male partner is sexually assaulting the female or killing the victim and then body disposal. Dr. Dietz argues that these women are actually victims. And I’ve seen that, I have cases that have that type of phenomena going on. And these women get into a situation to where they’re trapped.

[00:50:55] They don’t feel they can do anything else because this guy’s going to kill them if they don’t abide by his wishes. Sometimes, they may even be involved in the violence on the victims, but it’s usually at the direction of the male. Men are the ones that are responsible for these crimes by a huge margin. When you see women doing predatory-type crimes, it’s more along the lines of they have a mission. Aileen Wuornos.

Yeardley: [00:51:20] That’s who Charlize Theron played in that movie Monster, that serial killer.

Dan: [00:51:24] Yeah. Wuornos, she was a sex worker and she’d been abused.

Yeardley: [00:51:27] Right.

Paul: [00:51:28] Correct. She had an issue and she’s going around killing these Johns. Or you have the black widow. They’re marrying these men and killing them for financial gain, etc., But you don’t see women going out there doing fantasy-motivated crimes.

Dan: [00:51:41] Yeah, I would echo that what we find in our department too. It’s usually mostly men that do these things. Paul, once again, really powerful stuff. Can’t thank you enough for joining us.

Yeardley: [00:51:52] Really amazing. We always cover so much ground with you, Paul, thank you for coming back.

Paul: [00:51:56] Yeah, it’s my pleasure.

[music]

Yeardley: [00:51:59] Small Town Fam, go to wherever you love to get your podcasts and download Paul’s own new podcast called The Murder Squad, which he cohosts with Billy Jensen and Small Town Fam, if you want to hear our first conversation with Paul Holes, which we recorded live at The Brightest Young Things Death Becomes Us festival in Washington DC, last fall, you can hear it at the end of Season 3. We talk about the Golden State Killer. I mean, duh. Paul, once again, you’re a rockstar. Please come back and see us. Thank you.

Yeardley: [00:52:33] Small Town Dicks is produced by Zibby Allen and Yeardley Smith and coproduced by Detectives Dan and Dave.

Zibby: [00:52:40] This episode was edited by Soren Begin, Yeardley Smith, and Zibby Allen.

Yeardley: [00:52:44] Music for the show was composed by John Forest. Our associate producer is Erin Gaynor and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.

Zibby: [00:52:54] If you like what you hear and want to stay up to date with the show, head on over to smalltowndicks.com and become our pal on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @smalltowndicks. We love hearing from our Small Town Fam, so hit us up.

Yeardley: [00:53:08] Yeah. And also, we have a YouTube channel where you can see trailers for past and forthcoming episodes.

Zibby: [00:53:14] That’s right. If you choose to subscribe, you’ll be supporting our podcast. That way we can keep going to small towns across the country and bringing you the finest in rare true crime cases, told, as always, by the detectives who investigated them. Thanks for listening, Small Town Fam.

Yeardley: [00:53:31] Nobody’s better than you.

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