In his 27 years as a criminalist and crime lab chief for the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department, Paul Holes helped investigate hundreds of murders and other crimes. But some continue to haunt him, even after his 2018 retirement from law enforcement, and he continues to look into cases as a true-crime author.
Holes looks into some of those unanswered questions in his new book, “Unmasked” (Celadon Books, $29) and in a recent interview with this news organization:
Why did the Golden State Killer prey on women in the East Bay and San Jose?
From October 1978 to July 1979, the Golden State Killer, then known as the East Area Rapist, traveled far outside his usual “watering holes” in the Sacramento area to break into homes and target women, girls and couples in 11 overnight attacks in the Bay Area, from Concord to San Jose. Eight of the attacks took place in Contra Costa County, with the victims including a 17-year-old babysitter in Walnut Creek and her 13-year-old neighbor.
Holes said authorities haven’t disclosed possible reasons for why Joseph DeAngelo briefly terrorized the East Bay. But what’s remarkable, he said, is that during those nine months, DeAngelo was married and worked full-time as a police officer in Auburn, an hour and a half drive from Concord.
Holes believes DeAngelo had a “function” for being in Contra Costa and doubts that he was randomly popping into neighborhoods off I-680. Many victims’ homes were not close to freeway exits, and “GSK” appeared to take his time to scope out his victims, Holes explained.
As with the attacks in Sacramento, there are reports suggesting the assailant prowled around the victims’ homes for hours or days. He also didn’t rush his attacks, but methodically forced women with male partners to tie them up with shoelaces. He helped himself to food from their kitchens, rummaged through rooms to steal items and was known to sexually assault his victims more than once before breaking down in tears afterward. In his first Bay Area attack — in Concord on Oct. 7, 1978 — he called the woman by name and said, while raping her, “I’ve been seeing you a long time.”
If Holes had the opportunity to interview DeAngelo, he wouldn’t expect him to share any dark, psychological secrets, but Holes said the ex-cop might take some pride in talking about his methods for selecting victims and eluding capture. Holes thinks DeAngelo may have moonlighted as a security guard for new subdivisions being built in Contra Costa in the late 1970s. One clue supporting this theory is that neighbors of the woman in the first Concord attack found a security officer’s badge in their front yard the next day.
Before DeAngelo was sentenced to life in prison in 2020 for 13 murders and other crimes, his ex-wife, attorney Sharon Huddle, said she had no idea what her husband was doing when he was away from home overnight or for long stretches of time. When he was gone, she was working graveyard shifts at Jack in the Box or at Placer County Juvenile Hall or staying late to study at law school.
“I trusted the defendant when he told me he had to work or was going pheasant hunting or going to visit his parents hundreds of miles away,” Huddle said in a statement. “When I was not around, I trusted he was doing what he told me he was doing.”
Did Phillip Garrido, Jaycee Dugard’s kidnapper, have even more victims?
For several weeks in 2009, investigators used dogs, radar and bulldozers to search for human remains in the sprawling, garbage-strewn Antioch backyard of Phillip and Nancy Garrido, Holes recounts in his book.
In 1991, Garrido, a paroled sex offender, kidnapped 11-year-old Jaycee Degard from her school bus stop in South Lake Tahoe. He held her captive in his backyard, with its run of tents, lean-tos and dirt-dug toilets, for 18 years. He raped her repeatedly, and she gave birth to two daughters and tried to raise them as best as she could in those conditions. But even before kidnapping Dugard, Garrido had proven himself to be “a dangerous sexual predator.” Holes wrote. “His depravity was staggering.”
After police discovered Dugard and her daughters, 11 and 15, Holes and other investigators went looking for more victims. For Holes, his “white whale” cases included the murder of 15-year-old Lisa Norrell of Antioch in November 1998. The girl was kidnapped leaving a rehearsal for her best friend’s quinceañera. Her body was found eight days later, dumped in an industrial area along the Pittsburg-Antioch Highway. Within six weeks of her killing, the bodies of three Pittsburg sex workers also were found dumped in that area.
After Garrido was arrested, Holes revisited the idea that Lisa and the women were victims of the same predator. “(Garrido) certainly fit the profile of a sadistic stalker, and his geographic profile put him right in the heart of the industrial area where the bodies of Lisa Norrell and the bludgeoned Pittsburg sex workers were found,” Holes wrote. Teams bulldozed the property and left no soil “unturned,” Holes wrote: “Ultimately, though, the search of Garrido’s property turned up nothing of value in the unsolved Pittsburg homicides.”
What really happened to the reclusive Orinda millionaire?
Holes also wasn’t satisfied with the view that Emmon Bodfish, the heir to a Chicago banking fortune, was bludgeoned to death in his Orinda home by his troubled son.
In a 1999 case that was “a mind twister from start to finish,” Holes encountered Bodfish’s body on an oppressively hot July day, lying face up on a Persian rug in his medieval-looking living room in a particularly “old money” section of affluent Orinda.
Bodfish, 56, was a transgender man, but the twists in the case had to do with other issues. Several days after Bodfish’s death, his, 33-year-old son, Max Wills, was found in a Santa Monica motel, dead by suicide. It also emerged that Bodfish was deeply involved in a neo-pagan group called the Reformed Druids of North America and had hosted gatherings in the woods behind his Orinda home while developing an interest in the “magical” idea of making himself disappear.
While investigators focused on Wills as a possible suspect, Holes read Bodfish’s diaries, which showed him becoming increasingly miserable and paranoid, because he felt he was losing his battle to the “demon” in his head. Holes’ theory is that Bodfish orchestrated his own death and secretly transferred money to whoever killed him. However, the case has never officially been closed.
Were Elaine Davis and Cosette Ellison killed by the same serial predator?
The 50-year-old cold-case murders of two teenage girls, three months apart in Walnut Creek and Moraga, continue to haunt Holes.
Still, Holes said one of his “proudest moments” was finding a partial resolution in one of the cases, the Dec. 1, 1969 kidnapping of Elaine Davis of Walnut Creek.
That night, the 17-year-old was abducted while briefly home alone with her 3-year-old sister. Over the next few days, her shoe was found dumped along Highway 680 in Alamo, and her Navy-style peacoat was found along Highway 17 in Scotts Valley.
For the next 30 years, Elaine’s family didn’t know what had happened to her. But in 2000, Walnut Creek police detective Lew Doty reopened the case. Holes and a forensic anthropologist helped Doty establish that Elaine’s body had actually been found two weeks after her kidnapping, floating off Lighthouse Point in Santa Cruz.
Back in 1969, coroners thought the body belonged to a woman, ages 25 to 30, so it was never connected to Elaine, and she was buried as a Jane Doe. Holes said Elaine’s mother died two weeks after her daughter was identified and buried. “It was like she was waiting for her daughter to come home,” Holes said.
Holes believes Davis could have been a victim of Philip Joseph Hughes. The serial killer from Moraga was convicted in 1980 of the murders of three others: a 15-year-old girl, who was kidnapped near an Oakland home; and two women, including Maureen Field, a 19-year-old former neighbor of his from Moraga. “Unfortunately, the physical evidence hasn’t panned out,” linking Hughes to Davis’ killing, Holes said.
But Holes also wonders if Hughes was responsible for the killing of 15-year-old Cosette Ellison, who was kidnapped on March 3, 1970, after getting off a school bus near her Moraga home. Hughes was named as a person of interest in Cosette’s death.
A composite of a man Cosette was seen talking to before she disappeared matched a photo of Hughes wearing his favorite fishing hat, Holes writes in his book. Cosette’s body was found dumped near the foot of Mount Diablo, in the same area where Hughes dumped Maureen’s body in 1972. Unfortunately, Holes said again, there’s no hard evidence linking Hughes to Cosette’s murder.
