The Smith case arrived on my chart with two dates.
March 13, 1980, appeared in the heading of the later factual basis. March 16 appeared in the older public appeal's list of events. The dates did not need to be forced into agreement. They referred to different points in the same history.
The factual basis placed Lyman and Charlene Smith's last known time alive on the evening of March 13. It described a family conversation in which ordinary plans for dinner and a skiing trip still lay ahead. On March 16, a family member came to the Ventura home to do chores and discovered their deaths.
The record's ordinary details made the interval harder to reduce to a date. Plans had existed. Someone expected a visit for chores to be a visit for chores. The account then moved to a call to police and a wait outside the house. There was no need to reconstruct the violence to understand how completely the meaning of that visit had changed.
The charged-offense heading used March 13. The discovery occurred on March 16. Three days separated the two entries, and the later source explained why both dates could appear in a record of the case.
Lyman Smith had been a deputy district attorney in Ventura County, according to the factual basis. That background was part of the life named in the file; it was not an explanation for the crime. The later investigation would involve multiple agencies. Its account placed the couple's deaths within the wider history eventually attributed to DeAngelo.
In the years represented by those documents, the case was an investigation into particular people killed in a particular home. In the later identification sequence, preserved evidence from it acquired another role. Both meanings had to remain visible. The Smiths were not simply the names attached to the material that helped advance a famous investigation.
The prosecution's introduction described that later development in the fall of 2017. Contra Costa investigator Paul Holes proposed pursuing investigative genetic genealogy with Schubert's assistance. Ventura County investigator Steve Rhodss located preserved evidence associated with the Smith murders. The new avenue and the retained material came together in the account.
At that point, the proposal was still a possibility. The identification, arrest, and guilty pleas lay ahead. The preserved material did not carry a label announcing all those outcomes. Its importance would emerge through what could be done with it next.
That next step depended on a change in use rather than a new crime. Evidence associated with an event in 1980 could become relevant to an investigative approach being pursued decades later. The history was moving forward by returning to something already held.
The January 2018 entry would describe the development of a specialized profile intended for genealogical work. It was the next stage in the account, not something that could be presumed to have occurred when the evidence was first collected. The change in method belonged to the later investigation.
I kept the dates on separate rows: the Smith case in 1980, the proposed avenue and located evidence in 2017, the profile development in 2018. The rows made the causal movement visible without compressing the years into an instant.
The earlier loss remained where it had occurred. The later work could not change that event, but it could change the prospect of identifying the person responsible. A record preserved from one investigation was about to contribute to a search reaching across several parts of California.
The new question concerned family relationships. That was a striking turn in a history that had so far been organized around places, crimes, encounters, and physical comparisons. A family connection could point toward someone to consider. It would still leave the investigation with the task of establishing what, if anything, connected that person to the crimes.