Unmasked: My Life Solving America’s Cold Cases is a memoir by Paul Holes, a former detective of the Contra Costa County Police Department in the San Francisco area of California. Holes worked for more than 27 years as a criminal investigator before retiring in 2018. Since then, Holes has been active in media, authoring books and hosting the podcasts The Murder Squad and Buried Bones as well as the television show The DNA of Murder with Paul Holes. Holes also provides consultation to law enforcement nationwide.

During his career, Holes was instrumental on several high-profile cases, including the identification and arrest of Joseph DeAngelo—a serial killer dubbed the “Golden State Killer.” Unmasked recounts Holes’s career, which he began as a criminalist gathering crime scene evidence and assessing it in a lab, sparking his passion for examining cold cases. Holes also traces the impact his career has had on his personal life, exploring themes of The Work-Life Balance Struggle, The Human Impact of Crime, and The Importance of Science in Crime Solving.

Robin Gaby Fisher, who provided writing assistance on Holes’s memoir, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has authored 13 New York Times best-selling nonfiction books.

This guide references the 2022 hardcover by Celedon Books.

Content Warning: This guide and the memoir reference violence, abuse, rape, and homicide.

Summary

The book opens on the cusp of Holes’s retirement in 2018. He is zeroing in on the perpetrator of a high-profile case—dubbed the Golden State Killer—and fears his retirement date will come before the perpetrator is caught.

Holes then backtracks to recount his life and career in chronological order. He is an anxious and reserved child, prone to panic attacks into his adulthood. He dates a girl named Lori off and on throughout high school and college. As their college graduation date approaches, they make plans to marry. A chemistry student, Holes attends a job fair where he stumbles on the field of criminology; he instantly knows that this is where he wants to apply his knowledge of science. After college, he begins work in the lab for California’s Contra Costa County Police Department, conducting tests on crime scene evidence. Despite his lack of experience, he soon obtains a job as a criminalist. Instead of working behind a microscope, Holes now collects evidence from crime scenes, studying them to piece together how the crimes occurred and who the perpetrator might be. He thrives in this work, but Lori complains about his frequent absences—along with the emotional distance when he is present. They struggle to raise their two children and to remain connected.

In 1994, Holes opens the drawer of an old filing cabinet at work and stumbles on a cold case: a series of crimes believed to have been committed by the same perpetrator. Dubbed the “East Area Rapist,” or “EAR,” the perpetrator broke into homes and raped women from 1977 to 1980 throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. The attacks abruptly stopped, but the case was never solved. Holes is fascinated and will spend the next 24 years obsessed with solving this case.

As the 1990s unfold, Holes investigates numerous homicide scenes. The testing of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a new and developing field, and Holes becomes an expert in using it to link suspects to crimes. Through such testing, he is able to prove what law enforcement suspected in the 1970s: that one person was behind the series of rapes throughout central California.

In 1998, Holes is called to a crime scene investigation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, he meets detectives John Conaty and Ray Giacomelli, renowned as one of the most successful investigative teams. A camaraderie instantly develops among the men, and they and Holes go on to aid one another on cases and have a meaningful friendship. As the 1990s end, Holes and Lori struggle to maintain their marriage, enter marital counseling, but then separate.

As the new millennium gets underway, Holes becomes increasingly interested in the EAR cold case. He has spoken with former task force members and other law enforcement involved in the case. One suspects that the EAR attacks stopped because the perpetrator moved to Southern California and escalated to murder. Holes learns that a series of cold case murders perpetrated by a man dubbed the Original Night Stalker (ONS) parallel the crimes of the EAR. Holes is able to prove that the same man was responsible for both crime sprees through DNA (and references to the cases now use the combined moniker EARONS to represent both names). Meanwhile, Giacomelli is killed on duty in 2003, a time when Holes is heavily involved in investigating the high-profile murder of Laci Peterson.

Holes begins dating a colleague named Sherrie, and they marry in 2004. In 2009, Holes accepts a promotion and is named chief of forensics. It is a managerial position, and Holes is not suited to its paperwork and bureaucratic tasks. Later that year, a moratorium is placed on cold cases, so Holes must do his EAR investigating in secret.

Holes is able to narrow the EARONS perpetrator to 24 suspects. One sticks out: a man he assigns the pseudonym Robert Lewis Potts. Holes examines the crimes that Potts is known to have committed, comparing them to the EAR crimes. Potts was eliminated as a suspect in 1979 due to blood type, but Holes believes that the current, more sophisticated DNA testing is worth applying to Potts. Law enforcement in Sacramento is also investigating EARONS, and a new task force is formed. Holes meets with his fellow members, sharing his suspicions about Potts. However, DNA testing ultimately indicates that Potts is not the EARONS. Frustrated to have spent two years examining Potts, Holes sinks into a depression, and his relationship with Sherrie becomes strained.

Holes’s interest in EARONS is renewed when a journalist named Michelle McNamara contacts him. An amateur sleuth, McNamara has been following the crimes closely. The two meet and a bond develops between them. They work together on the case, McNamara having obtained information from other counties that are outside of Holes’s jurisdiction. In McNamara, Holes finally finds someone as who shares his passion about this notorious cold case. The case consumes him once again. McNamara has dubbed the perpetrator the “Golden State Killer,” and this moniker replaces the EARONS one. McNamara herself, however, dies suddenly in 2016.

Two years pass and Holes has no success identifying the Golden State Killer. A breakthrough occurs when he learns of a form of DNA testing geneticists use to identify parents of adopted children. Holes fights through red tape and jurisdictional boundaries to submit the DNA profile of the killer to a genealogy service called FamilyTreeDNA. This allows him to see who among the site’s 2.5 million profiles might be related to the Golden State Killer. Another breakthrough occurs when a second cousin of the Golden State Killer is located through a second genealogy website.

The best match is a man named Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer whose name never before came up as a suspect. By this time, it is late March of 2018, and Holes’s retirement date is only two weeks away. Holes frantically begins to investigate DeAngelo, learning he was fired from the police force when found guilty of shoplifting. FBI surveillance of DeAngelo begins, and law enforcement is able to obtain several discarded items containing DNA: It matches that of the Golden State Killer. Holes learns of this just as he is beginning retirement. He is able to see DeAngelo in person, putting a name and face to the killer he has hunted for 24 years.

In his retirement, Holes becomes involved in media and continues to work as a consultant to police forces while privately solving cold cases.