Unmasked: My Life Solving America's Cold Cases

by Paul Holes, Robin Gaby Fisher (With)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

It’s been too long since we’ve had such a formidable contemporary true-crime book to add to your shelf. Place this one next to Michelle McNamara’s I'll Be Gone in the Dark and Billy Jensen’s Chase Darkness with Me.

**THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**

"It’s a mark of the highest honor when I say it’s even more riveting than an episode of 'Dateline'."
—The New York Times

From Paul Holes, the detective who found the Golden State Killer, Unmasked is a memoir that "grabs its reader in a stranglehold and proves more fascinating than fiction and darker than any noir narrative." (LA Magazine)

I order another bourbon, neat. This is the drink that will flip the switch. I don’t even know how I got here, to this place, to this point. Something is happening to me lately. I’m drinking too much. My sheets are soaking wet when I wake up from nightmares of decaying corpses. I order another drink and swig it, trying to forget about the latest case I can’t shake.

Crime solving for me is more complex than the challenge of the hunt, or the process of piecing together a scientific puzzle. The thought of good people suffering drives me, for better or worse, to the point of obsession. People always ask how I am able to detach from the horrors of my work. Part of it is an innate capacity to compartmentalize; the rest is experience and exposure, and I’ve had plenty of both. But I have always taken pride in the fact that I can keep my feelings locked up to get the job done. It’s only been recently that it feels like all that suppressed darkness is beginning to seep out.

When I look back at my long career, there is a lot I am proud of. I have caught some of the most notorious killers of the twenty-first century and brought justice and closure for their victims and families. I want to tell you about a lifetime solving these cold cases, from Laci Peterson to Jaycee Dugard to the Pittsburg homicides to, yes, my twenty-year-long hunt for the Golden State Killer.

But a deeper question eats at me as I ask myself, at what cost? I have sacrificed relationships, joy—even fatherhood—because the pursuit of evil always came first. Did I make the right choice? It’s something I grapple with every day. Yet as I stand in the spot where a young girl took her last breath, as I look into the eyes of her family, I know that, for me, there has never been a choice. “I don’t know if I can solve your case,” I whisper. “But I promise I will do my best.”

It is a promise I know I can keep.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250622792
Publisher:	Celadon Books
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	3,284
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

In 2018, Paul Holes retired as a cold case investigator after spending more than twenty-seven years working in Contra Costa County, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Paul specialized in cold case and serial predator crimes, lending his expertise to notable cases, including the murder of Laci Peterson and the kidnapping of Jaycee Dugard. Most prominently, Paul’s career culminated with his identification of the Golden State Killer, Joseph DeAngelo, the most notorious and cunning serial predator in U.S. history.

Since the arrest of DeAngelo, Holes has been very involved on the media side, continuing to assist law enforcement and victims’ families with their unsolved cases through the television shows The DNA of Murder with Paul Holes and America’s Most Wanted and the podcast Jensen & Holes: The Murder Squad.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

1 The End of the Road 6

2 Last Act 14

3 Beginnings 25

4 Lab Rat 34

5 Moving Up 40

6 Ear 44

7 CSI 51

8 Abernathy 57

9 Connecting the Dots 73

10 The End of a Marriage 87

11 Antioch 96

12 Conaty and Giacomelli 102

13 Bodfish 114

14 Serial Killers 128

15 Ear Breakthrough 148

16 Postmortem 156

17 Changes 165

18 Small Victories 174

19 Hurricane Holes 180

20 Ear Revisited 188

21 Him 197

22 Roller Coaster 206

23 Michelle 218

24 The Murders 236

25 Joseph James DeAngelo 241

26 Operation Golden State Killer 255

27 Is It Him? 260

28 A Sense of Purpose 263

Acknowledgments 271

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/21/2022

Retired cold case investigator Holes debuts with an exceptional memoir coauthored with bestseller Fisher (After the Fire). His unflinching look at the emotional toll the more than 27 years he spent working in Contra Costa County in the San Francisco Bay Area took on him and his family distinguishes this from similar true crime narratives. The grisly violence he witnessed responding to crime scenes so pervaded his consciousness that sometimes, as he writes, when he looked at a woman “rather than seeing the beauty of the female body, I dissected it, layer by layer, as if she were on the autopsy table.” Holes was drawn to criminalistics as a child, fascinated by the TV series Quincy, and when he was 22 began his law enforcement career as a forensic toxicologist. Holes rose through the ranks, eventually concentrating on older, unsolved cases. He spent decades hunting the predator originally known as the East Area Rapist in the 1970s before his work led to the 2018 arrest of Joseph DeAngelo, identified as the Golden State Killer via DNA evidence. Holes’s lifelong struggles with panic attacks only make his professional achievements more impressive. This is an essential companion to Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer. Agent: Meredith Miller, UTA. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

02/01/2022

In this candid, poignant memoir, Holes, with cowriter Fisher (After the Fire: A True Story of Friendship and Survival), reflects on a long career as a criminalist and detective. Though Holes was involved in high-profile investigations, including the murder of Laci Peterson and the kidnapping of Jaycee Dugard, it wasn't until he helped identify the Golden State Killer that he was catapulted into the public eye. Holes began searching for the Golden State Killer in 1994 after coming across an old file detailing years of crimes, and the case stayed with him over the course of his career. He retired in March 2018, and the alleged Golden State Killer was arrested the following month—in large part because of Holes's work gathering evidence and using emerging technology in DNA profiling. Holes effectively balances true crime and memoir, writing with empathy and self-awareness about the emotional impact of his work and the toll it took on his marriage. His refreshing honesty sets the book apart from similar memoirs by detectives, who aren't always this forthcoming about coping with trauma. VERDICT A captivating memoir of a life dedicated to cold cases. Hand to readers who appreciated Sue Black's All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes.—Kate Bellody

Library Journal

2022-02-09
Occasionally overwrought but absorbing tale of criminal investigation long after the crime has been committed.

A forensic specialist in California, Holes spent a long career studying cold-case crimes. When he started, four cities in the Bay Area were on the FBI’s list of 100 most dangerous places in the country. Many crimes went unnoticed by the general public, but then there were the cases such as Laci Peterson and her unborn son, washed up on a beach in Contra Costa County after her husband murdered her. “What kind of monster kills his eight-and-a-half-months pregnant wife and goes about his life knowing she and his unborn son are anchored to the cold ocean floor with concrete blocks?” asks the author, who chronicles the stories of many monsters, including the criminal first known as the East Area Rapist, later as the Golden State Killer. The author’s account of his chase for the GSK—much done surreptitiously since his boss ordered him to stop looking at cold cases—takes up much of this narrative. Interestingly, he writes, one helpful tool, besides DNA and other forms of biochemical and evidential analysis, is simply the use of genealogy websites to find relatives to help pinpoint the whereabouts of perpetrators (as well as collect corroborative DNA). Holes writes of panic attacks and PTSD, of marriages threatened and undone by his obsession to exact justice. The narrative is also occasionally gruesome. “We were on a steep slope,” he writes of one murder, “and decomposition fluid ran out of the plastic wrapping onto the ground, forming a puddle. One of the dead woman’s legs dropped down into the pool of foul liquid, splashing it up on my face and my leather crime scene boots.” Holes is sometimes a little too worked up and a little too focused on himself, but the stories he tells—and the solutions to the crimes—are fascinating.

Grisly, matter-of-fact, and just the thing for aspiring detectives.

Kirkus Reviews

"It’s a mark of the highest honor when I say it’s even more riveting than an episode of “Dateline."
—The New York Times

"[Paul Holes's] memoir grabs its reader in a stranglehold and proves more fascinating than fiction and darker than any noir narrative."
—Los Angeles Magazine

"Fans of true crime will love every page of Unmasked. It is a wildly engaging and painfully honest read that will appeal to anyone curious about the lives of those who pursue justice for voiceless victims."
—San Francisco Chronicle

"An exceptional memoir... his unflinching look at the emotional toll the more than 27 years he spent working in Contra Costa County in the San Francisco Bay Area took on him and his family distinguishes this from similar true crime narratives."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Paul Holes takes you on a fascinating and sometimes disturbing journey inside the mind of someone who hunts monsters for a living—and in order to live. And his insights on Michelle McNamara—whose loss I still feel every day—are incredible."
—Patton Oswalt

"True-crime superstar Holes takes readers on a gripping journey into the mind of a cold-case detective…a thoughtful yet fast-paced and absorbing amalgamation of personal memoir and true-crime novel. Crime junkies and nonfiction fans will clamor to get their hands on this book."
—Booklist

"The stories [Holes] tells—and the solutions to the crimes—are fascinating. Grisly, matter-of-fact, and just the thing for aspiring detectives."
—Kirkus

"Unmasked is a stunning, brutally honest memoir about a complex, highly gifted forensic scientist who sacrificed his own personal life, even his marriage and fatherhood, in his relentless pursuit of monsters."
—Mystery & Suspense Magazine

"Paul Holes is a natural criminal profiler with a talent for describing how the process works. In his book, Unmasked, he marches the reader into the real world of criminal behavior and blends his forensic expertise with his unfiltered personal life experiences as he tackles both cold cases and modern crimes. This is a book you will not be able to put down."
—Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess, author of A Killer By Design and co-author of Sexual Homicide

From the Publisher