They talk about how Michelle was a good writer. The first true crime thing she ever wrote was a post about EAR-ONS back in 2011. They talk about how Michelle was constantly interviewing people connected to EAR-ONS crimes. In this case it's a fellow named Andrew Marquette. He had this fun deal where he heard the EAR-ONS in his back yard and he had a gun and didn't catch him or call the cops or anything. When Michelle interviewed him about it years later, the first word that came to mind about the EAR-ONS is "schoolboy" They talk about a list that Michelle has called EAR clues.
Finding the killer with geo-profiling
They're doing this thing where they take the white pages from Sacramento in the late seventies and compare them to white pages from the eighties in Santa Barbara and the east bay where we know the EAR-ONS was active. They're using computers to compare all this and narrow down suspects. THE KID is going through the list and elliminating the many false possitives. We end up with a HUGE list that THE KID is investigating.
geo-profiling is real sciencey. You've got hard data you use to try and pinpoint your suspects. As opposed to personality profiling and psychological profiling of suspects which this book ascertains is more arty than geo-prfiling.
That said, they're now talking about Paul trying to geo-profile like it's jazz and improvise. He's taking google maps and putting them in photoshop and just drawing lines. Fun pictures.
Finding the killer with Familial DNA
Paul Holes is in this one. Not only is he a good hang, but he's digging up DNA to try and find a Brother, father, uncle, etc. with a matching bit of DNA. The theory that EAR might have been been well off and his family similarly respectible seems to hold as they don't have any matchesin the criminal databases. Now Paul is trying to dig into some geneology databases to see if he can find a match.
Paul is obsessed with EAR. He goes on weekly crime scene rides. Every few weeeks he submits EAR's dna to a geneological DNA database to see if he can find any matches. Paul thought he had a match. Turns out it was some other do gooder that had also uploaded EAR's dna so it was EAR matching with EAR. On Anscestry.com they kinda found a match. But that match was very distant. 11 generations distant. They'd have had to go back 330 years to that common ancestor and then find all of that person's descendents. That would make for a pretty big suspect pool. And there would need to be A LOT of luck for even that to work.
They they get into talking about male last names. That if you find the common ancestor you might get their last name and from that get useful information. Like now they seem to think the EAR has a german last name but is of UK decent. The problem with all this ancestory.com and 23 and me investigation stuff is that it's kinda gotta be done hush hush unofficial like cause both of those companies are very serious about their client's privacy.
Michelle had TONS of files on the EAR cases. But it was all just sitting there on paper. Big game changer was scanning all these documents so they can be digitally cross referenced.
When Michelle wrote that La times article she got a lot of responses and blogged a lot about those responses. It's all a big jigsaw puzzle. But it's unbounded. Imagine trying to do a puzzle without any edge pieces to contain it.
After her passing Paul, THE KID and Billy Jensen have been working on Michelle's to do lists.
The main point ofthe book is to put the ideas out there and see if more people can get involved maybe we can find the EAR.
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