From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the Daily.

Today,

Detective Paul Holes was on the verge of retirement, having never solved his decades-long mission to catch the Golden State Killer.

Then he had an idea to upload DNA evidence to a genealogy website. It's Friday, May 4th.

Paul, I want to start at the beginning of your career. What were you doing?

So in 1994, I became a deputy sheriff criminalist with the Contocosta County Sheriff's Crime Lab.

And what does that mean?

So I would be out at crime scenes, analyze those crime scenes, collecting the evidence, bringing the evidence back,

and performing the laboratory work in order to try to figure out what that evidence meant to try to solve the case.

The lab that I worked in had this amazing library of old, old textbooks and old, old forensic science books.

But there was this file cabinet tucked away in the corner. It wasn't labeled. It was just a plain, four-drow file cabinet.

So I decided, well, what's in here? And I started pulling open those drawers. And in the bottom two drawers were the series of Manila folders.

With the tab on the folder labeled with this red EAR.

EAR.

EAR.

EAR.

EAR. You know, what is this? This is weird looking. So I started opening up these folders. And in each folder was a case file.

And I started reading these case files and recognized that this was documentation of a series of rapes that had occurred predominantly in the East Bay.

Rancho San Miguel in Walnut Creek is said to be one of those areas where you could safely leave your doors unlocked when you go out to walk the dog at night.

But two recent rapes have at least temporarily changed that attitude.

The rapist moved into Contracostia County in October, striking three times in just over three weeks, twice in Concert, once in San Ramón.

Saturday night, he pride opened the back door and entered the bedroom of a 32-year-old Danville woman.

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