MARTINEZ — Biological evidence that eventually led to arrests in decades-old Bay Area killings was readily available years earlier but languished untested in police evidence labs, a Bay Area News Group investigation found.
Blood found on the nightgown of a 1983 homicide victim linked in 2016 to Sherill Smothers, 55, sat in a crime lab for six years before it was tested, for example. And the arrest in 2015 of lifelong criminal William “Wild Bill” Huff for killings in 1987 and 1993 could have happened as early as 2006 when he went to prison for violating parole, if key DNA evidence had been tested at the time.
Several retired Contra Costa County homicide investigators contacted by this newspaper say the wait was typical in cold case killings, which were explicitly given a lower priority than more recent homicide investigations.
“When I was lab director, we had direction from above that cold cases were not to be prioritized, let’s put it that way,” said Paul Holes, a former Contra Costa chief of forensics. “So they would sit. … That led to some delays in catching Huff earlier, which could have been done if the technology had been employed earlier.”
Mark Harrison, a retired San Pablo police detective, said it was common for him and other detectives to bring cold case files home and work unpaid overtime hours investigating them, rather than asking higher-ups for resources. In some cases, police agencies had to wait for state or federal cold case grants, or ask for money to send evidence to private labs, he said.
“They had a backlog at the (county) crime lab for months, even years, on certain cold cases,” Harrison said. “I’ll be quite frank with you, managers didn’t really care. It was considered cost-prohibitive.”
Holes split his career between the Contra Costa County sheriff and district attorney’s offices, and gained some fame when his work on the Golden State Killer case led to the arrest of James Joseph DeAngelo. Holes said in recent years the backlog of cold case evidence has “diminished greatly” in Contra Costa but remains a nationwide problem.
“This is rampant throughout law enforcement,” he said. “There are all these cold cases that are sitting on shelves and have been overlooked.”
But getting a sense of just how many cases is difficult. California law requires police agencies to send homicide and clearance rate data to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but many states have no such mandates. Over the past 20 years, California’s homicide clearance rate, 62 percent, is around the national average of 66 percent, but dipped sharply from 2005-10.
“We do not have a mandatory global reporting system for unsolved homicides and that puts us behind most of the western world,” said Thomas Hargrove, a former journalist who founded the Murder Accountability Project to track unsolved homicides on a nationwide level. “If anyone’s going to do it, it’s the states.”
The California attorney general does not keep a list of unsolved or cold case killings, and leaves it up to individual police departments to track their own, an agency spokeswoman said. Many departments require a review of cold cases “every few years” to check for testable biological evidence or overlooked witness statements, said retired Antioch police Sgt. Tom Fuhrmann.
“Sadly, many cold cases have none of this, and investigators are at the mercy of somebody coming forward with information on their own,” Fuhrmann said. “When new and credible information does come forward, the case is no longer cold and becomes an active investigation again that is of high priority.”
Sometimes, a fresh look — not necessarily DNA testing — is all that’s needed to solve a cold case, said Gregg Oglesby, a retired detective who spent 18 years with the Daly City Police Department.
“In 2005, I solved a 1989 homicide simply by talking to witnesses who wouldn’t talk then but had no concern 16 years after the fact,” Oglesby said. “So there’s a side benefit to working cold cases that goes beyond simply taking evidence to the property room and sending it down to the crime lab.”
But in the case of Huff, and Smothers, authorities were aware of the evidence for years.
In 2006 Huff’s DNA was entered into a federal database when he went to prison for auto theft. Months later, it was linked to the 1987 rape and strangulation of Deanna Butterfield in Berkeley. Huff was interviewed, denied killing Butterfield and claimed they’d had consensual sex. Prosecutors determined there was insufficient evidence to charge him.
But years later, it was discovered that DNA linking Huff to a similar East Bay killing, the 1993 murder of Mueylin Saechao, had been sitting on evidence room shelves the entire time. It could have been entered into a federal database as early as 2001. Instead, police submitted it to the county lab in 2009. It was tested six years later, in 2015.
“If (the DNA) had been in the database in 2006, then when Huff was uploaded he would have hit on two people … at that point it becomes very obvious,” Holes said.
The narrative is similar to the 1983 killing of Marsha Carter, whose body was discovered in the trunk of a car miles away from her Richmond home. In 2009, a Contra Costa lab technician cut out a bloody piece of fabric from a nightgown Carter was wearing. When it was tested six years later, authorities linked it to Smothers, a longtime suspect in the case.
A technician at the county’s forensics lab testified at Smothers’ grand jury hearing she was “unaware” why there was a six-year delay. Smothers is still awaiting trial.
After avoiding murder charges in 2006, Huff was released from prison, and spent much of the next nine years out of custody. When he was interrogated again in 2015, after being linked to Saechao’s death, he said he liked to go “hunting” for women every six years, and the last time had been “eight years earlier.” He also said he hoped “they don’t dredge the East Area Reservoir” in Colusa County.
After that interrogation, Huff was charged with murdering Saechao and Butterfield. In June, he pleaded guilty to two murder charges, and will be sentenced to life without parole.
“I’m going to be be very angry if Huff provides info and it turns out other murders were committed between Mueylin being murdered and the DNA being processed,” said Melissa Silva, Deanna Butterfield’s daughter. She said she understood why newer cases were given priority, but added: “Let these cases be long-term jobs for people, because the consequences of that not happening are literally deadly. We see it all the time.”