Unmasked: My Life Solving America's Cold Cases

Unmasked: My Life Solving America's Cold Cases

Unmasked: My Life Solving America's Cold Cases

Unmasked: My Life Solving America's Cold Cases

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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: 117,457
Product dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

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

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