Yeardley: [00:00:01] Hey, super podcast Fams, it’s Yeardley. I just wanted to pop in with a quick announcement about Small Town Dicks, Season 12. It drops on April 21st. April 21st. Mark your calendars. We will see you there.

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Yeardley: [00:00:28] When a serious crime is committed in a small town, a handful of detectives are charged with solving the case. I’m Yeardley, and I’m fascinated by these stories. So, I invited my friends, detectives Dan and Dave, to help me gather the best true crime cases from around the country, and have the men and women who investigated them, tell us how it happened.

Dan: [00:00:53] I’m Dan.

Dave: [00:00:54] And I’m Dave.

Dan: [00:00:55] We’re identical twins.

Dave: [00:00:56] And we’re detectives in Small Town, USA.

Dan: [00:00:59] Dave investigates sex crimes and child abuse.

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

Dan: [00:01:10] Names, places, and certain details, including relationships have been altered to protect the privacy of the victims and their families. 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.

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Yeardley: [00:01:38] Today on Small Town Dicks, we have the usual suspects. We have Detective Dan.

Dan: [00:01:44] Happy to be here.

Yeardley: [00:01:45] Detective Dave.

Dave: [00:01:46] Good afternoon.

Yeardley: [00:01:47] And, Small Town Fam, we are very excited to have one of our favorite guests back, Paul Holes.

Paul: [00:01:53] Hi.

Yeardley: [00:01:54] Hi.

Paul: [00:01:55] How’s it going?

Yeardley: [00:01:56] Good.

Paul: [00:01:56] Good.

Yeardley: [00:01:56] So, Paul, for the one and a half listeners who may not know, you are most famous for helping to break the Golden State Killer case, a phenomenal achievement. But you have a long and storied and successful career before that amazing moment in time. And so, we’re going to walk you back and we’d love to hear about some of your other memorable cases that you are most proud of.

Paul: [00:02:24] I’ve got a story I’ll tell. It’s not necessarily the most memorable case. It’s a very interesting case, but as you’ll see, it was very memorable for me. In this case, this is one where we knew the offender before we knew anything else.

Yeardley: [00:02:38] Oh.

Paul: [00:02:39] So, this offender had a brother who was sitting in a bar and talking to his bar friend and was basically saying, “Guess what my dumb brother’s done?” And proceeds to tell this bar friend how his brother has killed two women and didn’t realize that his bar friend was a confidential informant for one of the local agencies.

Yeardley: [00:03:00] Oh. [laughs]

Dave: [00:03:01] Know your audience.

Yeardley: [00:03:02] Wow.

Paul: [00:03:03] Exactly.

Dave: [00:03:03] [laughs]

Paul: [00:03:04] So, the details initially that were provided was the first victim. She was a sex worker out of San Francisco. Actually, a higher-class type of sex worker. The offender is interesting in the fact that he’s deaf and mute. So, could you imagine trying to negotiate a deal?

Yeardley: [00:03:24] So, there is potential there for some miscommunication.

Paul: [00:03:28] Right. But he was a repeat customer. At a certain point, he had formed in his mind a relationship with this woman. They’re sitting in the front of his truck, and he communicates, “You’re my girlfriend.” And she goes, “No, I’m not. This is a business relationship.” He proceeds to pull out a knife and stabs the woman to death. This is where he goes to his brother, the one that’s sitting in the bar. I’ll call him Ray. And communicates to Ray, “I’ve got this body.” They proceed to take the body out the end of the road where they’re living, which is a hillside, and they strip all the clothing off, wrap this nude body in plastic, and bury it in a shallow grave on the side of this hill.

[00:04:13] Six months goes by. The offender has now formed another relationship with another sex worker out of San Francisco. Same type of interaction. “You’re my girlfriend.” “No, this is a business relationship.” He ends up stabbing her. Goes back to Ray, and Ray is going, “Uh-huh, I’m not helping you this time.” So, now the offender is left to his own devices. He goes out to one of our local towns and disposes the body just on the side of the road and puts a bunch of trash on top of the body. And then two weeks later, that’s when Ray is sitting inside the bar saying, “Guess what my dumb brother’s done.”

Yeardley: [00:04:49] It’s an interesting characterization that you would only call it dumb instead of vicious, evil, misguided, all of the other more depraved things, descriptions you could give him.

Paul: [00:04:59] Yeah, I’m just relaying how Ray described his brother, right?

Yeardley: [00:05:02] Fair enough. [Dave chuckles]

Paul: [00:05:03] So, anyways, now we have a shallow grave that we have to locate. We bring some dogs out, the dog hits on a location on the side of the hill. I’m rolling out on this as a crime scene investigator, and my job is to recover the body, and get it turned over to the coroner’s office.

Yeardley: [00:05:20] How did you know where to search?

Paul: [00:05:21] So, what ended up happening was, when Ray told the confidential informant, the local agency, that agency, the detective who I knew well went out onto the side of this hill with a shovel trying to find this grave, but couldn’t. Sheriff’s office rolls out at that point, and it becomes a sheriff’s case. That’s now how I’m out there. So, we end up going down the side of this hill, clearing all the brush around the location where the dog hit, and we recover a body wrapped in plastic that’s only buried maybe eight inches down, which is pretty typical for bodies that are buried, because it is hard to dig deep. It takes a long time.

[00:05:55] So, usually, bodies are buried very surface. It’s very superficial. So, me being me, I’m thinking, “You know, this guy killed two women six months apart. Maybe he’s got more victims out here that we don’t know about.” So, now I’m going all over, crawling all over the side of this hill, going through all this brush, and I don’t find another grave. All that brush I was going through was poison oak.

Yeardley: [00:06:18] [gasps] Oh. [laughs]

Dan: [00:06:20] I’m immune to it, but I know people who aren’t, and, oh, my God.

Dave: [00:06:23] I’m already itching right now.

Yeardley: [00:06:25] God.

Paul: [00:06:25] I’ll revisit that issue in a second.

Dave: [00:06:27] Oh.

Yeardley: [00:06:27] [laughs]

Paul: [00:06:29] So, now it’s a matter of processing where the offender lived. The offender lived with his mom right down the road from where that grave site was. And Ray lived in a fifth wheel on the driveway. So, the family basically is in this location.

Yeardley: [00:06:43] A fifth wheel?

Paul: [00:06:44] Like one of those RVs that doesn’t drive itself. You have to hook it up to a pickup.

Yeardley: [00:06:48] Oh, okay.

Paul: [00:06:49] Ray actually was cooking dope out of the fifth wheel.

Yeardley: [00:06:52] Awesome.

Dave: [00:06:52] Pretty standard.

Paul: [00:06:53] Yeah. You start getting a picture of the type of location that this is. So, go into the offender’s room, searching for evidence, and he has one of those craftsmen tool chests inside his room, and it’s locked. I can’t pull the drawers open, so I end up popping the lock, and I pull open one of the drawers, and the drawer is filled with Polaroid photographs of women, random women that he’s photoed while walking down the street. Hard bodies, like, at bars where he’s got his arms around these women or at the racetracks. You’re starting to wonder, “Are all these women safe or are any of them missing?” So, we don’t know. Now, it’s like, we’ve got to start identifying all these women.

[00:07:28] Inside his room, he had a brochure for the local deaf school. Like I said, he’s deaf and mute. On the back of this brochure, he had written each of the women’s names that he had killed and the dates he had killed them. He had started a list.

Yeardley: [00:07:42] There was a list?

Paul: [00:07:44] Yeah. We knew the identity of the two women that he had killed, and it was their names and the dates. And so, we could determine how long the one had been in the grave, which was over six months.

Dave: [00:07:54] This list, is it just the two names?

Paul: [00:07:57] It’s just the two names. And so, that’s where we think he only had the two victims.

Dave: [00:08:02] Because he would have written them down.

Paul: [00:08:03] Yeah, I think so. One of the aspects about this case, the first victim in the grave had been buried in, I believe it was August, and then we’re recovering her after the rainy season, and she’s been wrapped in plastic. So, when we go to pull her out of the grave, when you decompose, there’s a lot of fluids, not nice smelling fluids that end up building up in the body. Well, it had all been contained in this plastic. When we pick her up, all this fluid starts running out and pooling in the grave. The coroner’s deputy who is up slope from where I’m at, he ends up slipping. He’s able to recover, but that jostles the body where the woman’s leg ends up falling out of the plastic and falling right into the pool of decomp fluid, and where does it go? It splashes all over me.

Dave: [00:08:54] On top of your poison oak.

Paul: [00:08:55] Yeah.

Yeardley: [00:08:56] God. [laughs]

Paul: [00:08:56] Anyways, this is a big case, obviously, and we’re still working this case for a week. Two days after I recovered the body from the graveside, I get a little red dot forming on my forearm. Looks like a flea bite, right? It itched and I go, “Oh, maybe that’s poison oak.” I’ve never had poison oak. That’s all poison oak is. That’s no big deal. The next day, I had oozing pustules on the back of my neck, on my forearms, and down my legs, my lower legs. But I’m still having to go into work. I’m still having to work. This evidence, he had tried to burn each of the victim’s clothing in the fireplace. So, I’m sifting through ashes while my arms are wrapped in gauze to try to prevent the pus from dripping. I didn’t know what the heck was going on. I was like, “Oh, this is bad.”

[00:09:41] I would stand in the shower, and put it all the way on hot, and put my arms in the scalding water because the burning sensation felt so much better than the itch. It was like the only relief. After about a week of that, I finally went into the doctor and I go, “Yeah, now you should have come in.” Got put on the prednisone, which is like instantaneously, all of a sudden, the body is recovering.

Yeardley: [00:10:00] Oh. So, does a decomp poison oak cocktail have any lasting effects?

Paul: [00:10:06] Well, the poison oak, it eventually cleared up on me. Though I’ve got some scars on my neck and I think that’s from the poison oak. The decomp fluid, imagine the bacteria in that. I was garbed up in this Tyvek type suit. It’s like to prevent from being splashed. But I didn’t have any protection over my eyes or my mouth, and I was feeling the droplets strike my face. So, you run a serious risk of exposure at these types of cases, whether it’s because of decomp or just being in a very bloody car. In order to photograph all the blood patterns inside a car, I’m now inside the car and there’s blood all around me.

Dave: [00:10:48] There’s particulate in the air too. So, you’re breathing it in. I went to a– unfortunately, it was a suicide. Within minutes of this suicide, I’m clearing this house and we get to the last room. When we open the door, you can smell a, the gunpowder from the weapon, but I can also smell the iron in the air from the blood. When I walked out of the house after we found the victim, I wiped my face off and I had blood all over my hands. It was just in the air. It had vaporized in the air. That’s how fresh this scene was when I got there. Your mucous membrane, so your eyes and your nose and your mouth, all those things, they absorb these pathogens, and it can be really bad for you. You can get sick.

Paul: [00:11:36] Yeah, you can actually contract some serious diseases from that exposure.

Yeardley: [00:11:39] So, is there any disinfection process, like, in silkwood, they wash you off for radiation? Is there any protocol for that?

Paul: [00:11:45] We always would practice or try to practice, what we call, this universal precautions when it comes to biohazards. When you’re out in the field, it becomes much more difficult and you just use common sense. I thought I was protected in this case, and I wasn’t. I had something very unexpected happening, and next thing I know, I’ve got decomp fluid flying up and hitting me in the face.

Yeardley: [00:12:05] Gross. Oh.

Paul: [00:12:06] Yeah.

Yeardley: [00:12:07] Paul, before we get too far away from it, what happened with this guy? Was he convicted? Did he go to jail?

Paul: [00:12:14] So, he confessed. That’s how we know a lot of the details on this case. The interesting thing about him is that he never stood trial. He was found mentally incompetent. So, he got sent down to one of our mental institutions in California. I haven’t checked. I don’t know, because sometimes these guys get released from there and he could be out. I just don’t know. I hope not.

Dave: [00:12:36] That’s what’s nuts. These guys, once they’re determined to not need mental health care or supervision anymore, you can’t hold them criminally responsible because their sanction was going to the mental hospital and get found competent, and they get released back out into the populace.

Yeardley: [00:12:55] That’s disturbing. So, how did the police conduct the interview with this particular suspect? Did he show any signs of remorse?

Paul: [00:13:03] Well, again, the interview process. I wasn’t part of this. I was out there as a CSI. The two long now retired investigators had interviewed him. They literally were writing questions on a piece of paper, and sliding the piece of paper, and it was going back and forth. He doesn’t talk, he can’t hear. So, in terms of his confession, he just provided the details of what he did. I don’t know anything in terms of, was he expressing remorse or not.

Dave: [00:13:26] What happened to Ray?

Yeardley: [00:13:27] Yeah. Did you arrest him for cooking meth?

Paul: [00:13:30] So, Ray got popped for cooking the dope and he died in prison.

Yeardley: [00:13:49] I think one of the things that I’ve learned on this podcast that’s really surprised me is that there are a lot of gooey, icky, sticky, gross biological hazards that you all encounter in law enforcement. You don’t even have to be the CSI technician for that to happen. You can just be taking pictures of the crime scene, and stepping around pools of blood, and things like that. It’s just not something that you think about as a layperson when you think of police work. Hats off to all of you, honestly.

Paul: [00:14:21] This case is an example of some of the serious aspects when it comes to dealing with decomposing bodies, and biohazards, and natural hazards. There’s a case that comes to mind that I think would really underscore that. This was a horrific situation where a guy is a fugitive, he’s wanted for murder. He ends up sneaking back into town, a town in Contra Costa County, and breaking into his wife’s house where he shared two young daughters with this woman. The wife wasn’t there, but the two girls were, and he ends up taking them hostage. So, now we have a standoff. SWAT rolls out, and they’ve surrounded the house, and hostage negotiators are on the phone with the guy. The guy is basically saying, “I want my wife on the phone.” The hostage negotiators are going, “No way, he’s going to kill the two little girls while mom is listening.”

Yeardley: [00:15:18] [gasps] Oh.

Paul: [00:15:19] So, they refused. Then this standoff, I believe, lasted for almost three days. This guy has a gun inside the house. And so, he’s shooting out of the house, out of the garage where he thinks the SWAT guys are. But then eventually, he kills the two little girls and himself.

Yeardley: [00:15:33] Oh, God.

Paul: [00:15:35] They were six and three. I’m not going to go into details, but it’s just wrong when you see, like, a baby bottle with blood on it or those Velcro shoes with the cartoon characters. My kids were the same age at that time, and they had the same toys, the same shoes. You see the kids, the photos of them alive and happy up on the shelf.

[00:15:55] So, anyways, we’re processing this scene. This was like a hoarder house, but they weren’t hoarders. Some people just live in atrocious conditions. So, we’re there for days, largely because so much crap is inside this house. We’re trying to document everything. I go out. I’m out at the crime scene tape, and this woman comes up to me, and it’s the kid’s mom. She’s now in the process of trying to arrange the funeral for her two little daughters, and she’s saying the youngest, the three-year-old, had this doll that she would drag around with her everywhere called Baby Doll. She goes, “I need to bury my daughter with Baby Doll.” And I was like, “Okay, I’ll get you Baby Doll.”

[00:16:30] So, now my life’s mission at this point is to find Baby Doll. I go inside this house where it’s just piled with stuff. I’m in there, and I can’t find Baby Doll. I go, “Are you sure Baby Doll is out there?” And she says, “Absolutely in there. You got to find it.” So, I’m back and forth, like, five times. I just can’t find it. She’s starting to get frantic. She’s going, “She has to be buried with Baby Doll.” After probably two hours of me looking for Baby Doll, I just happened to pick up, there was a sports coat that one of the investigators had laid over a dining room chair and there was Baby Doll. So, I’m coming out with Baby Doll, giving it to mom. She’s in tears at this point.

Dave: [00:17:06] No blood on the doll or anything like that?

Paul: [00:17:08] No.

Dave: [00:17:09] I’ve had parents with suicide victims, and you give the gun back to the parents, and it’s got blood on it, and they’ll lose it.

Paul: [00:17:17] Yeah.

Dave: [00:17:17] You try to soften the blow at the beginning and say, “Hey, so this gun, it’s in a bag. It has your son’s blood on it. I want you to be prepared to see that.”

Yeardley: [00:17:27] If you’re giving the gun back, why don’t you clean it off before you hand it back to them?

Dave: [00:17:31] That’s a great question. I’ve actually had a father say, “I want the blood to be on there. That’s my son that is on that gun still.” I can’t even imagine.

Yeardley: [00:17:41] Yeah, me too.

Dave: [00:17:42] That’s an age-old question. I’ve had teenagers die in suicides, or a kid, probably 19 or 20 years old. He’d been drinking with his buddies all night, and he passed out drunk. He vomited and he drowned in his own vomit. He was discovered the next morning. So, he lives with his roommates. His roommates are crushed. The parents show up after one of the roommates calls the parents and says, “Johnny passed away last night.” The parents want answers and I get that, but we’ve got a job to do, because I need to figure out if there’s another reason for why this happened. Parents are demanding to see their child.

[00:18:20] It’s not a very flattering picture when you see this child with vomit on his face. And he’s passed away with vomit on his face. But who am I to tell that parent that you can’t see your child after I’ve finished that crime scene? I wouldn’t want to look at my brother in that position, and that be the lasting image that I have, but I can’t speak for a parent.

Yeardley: [00:18:40] They just want to see their child.

Dave: [00:18:41] They do. They want to say goodbye, and they want to say goodbye on their terms, and I’m never going to be the person to deny them that.

Yeardley: [00:18:48] Right.

Paul: [00:18:48] But it’s those types of things where you recognize these are real people, these are real emotions, and that lives with you.

Yeardley: [00:18:57] So, speaking of that, where does it go? Where do you put it?

Paul: [00:19:03] It gets buried. Anybody that’s in this field experiences that type of real life. It has an impact. We’re smarter now about it in terms of getting counseling for people, but back in the 1990s, no, you just had tough it out.

Yeardley: [00:19:19] Did any of your FTOs, your field training officers or any mentors that you had in your profession attempt to prepare you for moments like that?

Paul: [00:19:28] When I first got hired, no. That was something that you just started living. You started experiencing. As we got better with that, there was, what we call, peer counselors. People would be available that were in the agency or the county to go talk to wasn’t part of a health type of benefit. It was more of these are people who know exactly what you’ve gone through.

Yeardley: [00:19:51] Was there any shame in, say, if you sought out somebody in that peer group who said, “I know what you’ve been through,” or was it sanctioned and people like, “No, no, you definitely should take advantage of that?”

Paul: [00:20:02] It’s one of those things where I think most of the people in the field don’t take advantage of it, because you don’t want to be perceived as weak. But once I moved into management, I did have some people that had expressed some emotional distress, and you’re providing them resources, and giving them access to whether it be these peer counselors or even through the mental health benefits. But at least under this type of situation, you can’t force them to go.

Dave: [00:20:30] There’s a stigma in the industry about you don’t want to be perceived as soft, or not to say you care too much, but that you let it affect you too much. So, you talk to cops and first responders, firefighters, paramedics. People that see human tragedy often, you definitely compartmentalize it and you just stuff it away. Sometimes, you deal with it. Sometimes, it deals with you. So, having a twin brother who’s a first responder, and certainly, when we talk to other detectives and Paul Holes, there’s this brotherhood type relationship where we’re on this side of the table, and you guys are over there, and we know that you’ll never know what we know and you won’t feel what we feel. We don’t judge you for it. It’s different. There’s a connection.

Yeardley: [00:21:17] Right. Do you ever worry that the cumulative compartmentalization will impede your ability to remain empathetic?

Dave: [00:21:28] For me, we’ve always talked about the gallows humor and the comedy, the inappropriate jokes. That’s kind of my way of maybe revealing that I’m affected by something that it’s bothering me. But to me, my day-to-day, I need to have that compartmentalization and I need to be able to not be impacted to the point where I’m overanalyzing, and now it’s affecting my performance in the way I’m actually able to cope from day-to-day. I don’t want it to affect my poise in the job. So, I’ve said it before, but talking about these cases on the podcast is helpful for me, because I get to see from the other side how it affects you, Yeardley. That’s an added perspective I hadn’t thought of, because I’m on this side of things. But certainly, talking to other first responders is really helpful too, because you know that they know.

Dan: [00:22:20] Compartmentalizing it for me allowed me to be empathetic. It was like I was putting in its own little box over here, and I could just put it away, and forget about it. If it was still on my mind and I was thinking about it too much, then it would make me angry and I’d be upset. I probably wouldn’t be empathetic when I am talking to someone who’s been victimized because it would harden me too much. So, if I can stuff it in this little box, lock it away, and just deal with it later, deal with it when I talk to Dave or whenever, that allowed me to move past it.

Yeardley: [00:22:54] And you, Paul?

Paul: [00:22:56] I think you have to compartmentalize. I’m naturally just empathetic and that’s in many ways why I’ve chosen the types of cases that I go after. It’s usually the women and children cases. Those are the ones that I have focused on. In part, just because I’m so empathetic to that victim. I think what Dan and Dave was saying, in terms of just functioning day-to-day, you have to just separate yourself, because you have to still be able to do the job and don’t let the emotions influence how that job is done.

Dave: [00:23:27] This job has taught me a lot about what’s important that we see so many times where life for a family or life for a significant other changes in an instant. Their loved one is maimed, harmed, killed, and life has changed forever. So, the little things that used to irritate me in life, say, it takes a while for you to get your steak at dinner, that shit doesn’t bother me. It’s so insignificant in my life with the stuff that I actually deal with on a day-to-day basis, especially when I was doing sex crimes and child abuse investigations that the little stuff that people would complain about, I used to always look at them and be like, “Get over it. Deal with it.”

Yeardley: [00:24:10] That makes sense to me. Like, Paul, you finding Baby Doll for that mother, so that she could have the one thing that she needed in the midst of the greatest tragedy of her life. That’s empathy. I get it.

Paul: [00:24:25] Well, that case, yeah, just from a psychological standpoint, emotional standpoint, it has hit me just about as hard as any case.

Yeardley: [00:24:32] It’s always amazing talking to you, Paul. Thank you so much for sharing that.

[00:24:39] Small Town Dicks is produced by Gary Scott and Yeardley Smith, and coproduced by Detectives Dan and Dave. This episode was edited by Soren Begin, Gary Scott, and me, Yeardley Smith. Our associate producers are Erin Gaynor and the Real Nick Smitty. Our music is composed by John Forest. Our editors extraordinaire are Logan Heftel and Soren Begin, and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.

Dan: [00:25:07] If you like what you hear and want to stay up to date with the show, visit us on our website at smalltowndicks.com. And join the Small Town Fam by following us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @smalltowndicks. We love hearing from you.

Dave: [00:25:22] And if you support us on Patreon, your subscription will give you access to exclusive content and merchandise that isn’t available anywhere else. Go to patreon.com/smalltowndickspodcast.

Yeardley: [00:25:34] That’s right. Your subscription also makes it possible for us to keep going to small towns across the country-

Dan: [00:25:40] -in search of the finest-

Dave: [00:25:42] -rare-

Dan: [00:25:42] -true crime cases told as always, by the detectives who investigated them.

Dave: [00:25:47] So, thanks for listening, Small Town Fam.

Yeardley: [00:25:50] Nobody’s better than you.

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