Anyone who has spent time building family trees knows how absorbing the process can be. You sit down at the computer and before you know it five hours have passed, or ten, or more. Temporal matters fade away as you dig deeper and deeper into records—appointments are missed; cats go unfed and plants unwatered. It is so easy to lose yourself in the work, with the jumble of names and dates rattling in your brain and pushing out everything else. For me, few activities have ever been quite as compelling, maybe even as addictive.
With the Golden State Killer case, I also felt something else: a pressing urgency based on the nature of the crimes. The killer’s atrocities were never too far from my mind, and the absolute horror of his actions was just too overwhelming to ignore. When I first steeped myself in the details of the case, my eyes were opened to a side of human nature I had never had to consider before. Not just bad or ugly, but monstrous, unthinkable, absent of remorse or humanity.
“He punched me in the face and broke my nose,” remembered Patricia Murphy, who was raped in her parents’ Sacramento home in 1976, the fourth known victim of the assailant then known as the East Area Rapist. “I had a concussion from falling backward and hitting my head on the pavement. I did what I had to do to survive. He truly is an evil monster with no soul.”
“He broke into my home, blindfolded me, tied me up, threatened my life with a knife, and raped me,” Phyllis Henneman said of her assault in 1976, when she was just twenty-two. “Life as I knew it irrevocably changed that day. He is the devil incarnate.” The rapist phoned Henneman two years after the attack just to taunt her, and after that, the mere ringing of a telephone terrified her.
These brutal details are impossible to forget, and I did not want to forget them. I did not want to lose the urgency I felt to finally attach a name and face to this nameless and faceless creature. That urgency is what drove me to work as hard as I did—sometimes twelve or fourteen hours a day, sometimes more. I truly felt I was on a mission, and that the work I was doing was meaningful and worthwhile. And it would not end until we had our man.
What I did not realize was that working on the Golden State Killer case was changing me, in both subtle and fundamental ways.
Every time you undertake an absorbing, immersive new task—going to university or starting a new job, for instance—your life begins to change around you. And you change, too. You spend more time with colleagues and less with other friends; you let go of some time-consuming pursuits; you begin to see the world differently, through the prism of the new environment that you are entering. This is what was happening to me, although I did not realize it—not until a friend who is a detective invited me to dinner.
After the dinner my friend’s husband, a retired assistant chief of police, asked if I would like to attend a workshop he was going to be presenting to two hundred California game wardens. (California has more than four hundred game wardens, I learned, who are all sworn peace officers.) I joined my friend’s husband at the workshop and listened intently as he lectured about the emotional impact of working in law enforcement.
“When you are dealing with the dregs of society and untold horrors on a day-to-day basis, things that are not particularly important begin to irritate you,” he explained. “You will hear someone go on about something trivial, and you will think in your head, ‘This is bullshit.’ ”
I thought: Yes. That is happening to me.
I remembered having dinner with a group of friends a few weeks earlier and listening to one woman complain endlessly about a matter that struck me as fairly unimportant. And I remembered just how irritated I was by what seemed to me to be petty and privileged whining. Ordinarily I would have ordered another glass of wine and simply let her go on, but on this night, the more she complained, the more my patience wore thin. After several more minutes I simply could not stand it any longer, and I excused myself and left.
I don’t want to waste my time being around this woman, I thought. I would rather be home, working on my cases.
During the Golden State Killer case I got to the point where I valued my time so highly that I could not bear to waste it. Working on a case, finding answers for people, spending time with people I cared about—these things were good and worthwhile. These were the things I wanted to do. So I chose not to be around certain types of people, and I focused on my work.
Being exposed to the evils of humanity, the extremes of depraved behavior, can change you. And the Golden State Killer case was changing me.
Finding a second-cousin match to the Golden State Killer was a breakthrough moment. There was still a lot of work to be done, but it seemed not only doable, but also something we could do fairly quickly. Having people common to both trees meant that we could combine two of the twenty-five separate trees we were working on into one speculative tree. And in this combined tree we were able to identify our first most recent common ancestor, a set of great-grandparents of the second-cousin match. Now that we had identified a most recent common ancestor in our speculative tree, we could start building down the descendant lines from the MRCA to the time that I had estimated the Golden State Killer was born. We would continue that build-down until we were sure that we had all the descendants of the MRCA in the tree who had been born in the relevant time period.
Once that build-down was complete, we could look for men who matched the little bits of information that we had about the Golden State Killer: his likely date of birth, places he had lived, and bioancestry and phenotypic characteristics based on victim statements and his DNA.
What we were doing, in essence, was putting together a list of potential suspects.
To do this, the only tool available to me at the time was a Kinship Report, which I had used in the Lisa Jensen case to identify Adam Keim’s father’s family, and which shows how people in a particular family tree are related to any one specific person. There are more sophisticated tools available today for narrowing down candidates, such as DNA Painter’s What Are The Odds? (WATO), but Kinship Reports were all that I had available to me at the time.
From the amount of matching DNA and the relative ages involved, I knew that the GSK was most likely a second cousin to the new match who had appeared on MyHeritage. So I ran two Kinship Reports: one for all the people in the speculative tree who were second cousins to the new match (Person C), and another for all the people who were third cousins to the original match from FamilyTreeDNA (Person B).
It took just a few minutes to run the reports, which produced quite a few names common to both lists. Now I took two of the earliest deductions I had made about the killer—that he was likely born in 1956 or earlier, and that he had at some point lived in California, the scene of all of the crimes—and I applied these two basic criteria to all the men who appeared on both Person B’s and Person C’s Kinship Reports. Applying the age and geographical criteria to these men produced my first list of suspects.
This list contained just nine names.
This was a breathtaking moment. We now had something that had never before existed in the forty-year search for the Golden State Killer.
An honest-to-goodness suspect list.
One of these nine men, I was certain, was the monster who dwelt in darkness. Now all we had to do was identify him and drag him into the light.
