Before the family-tree work, investigators were already screening possible suspects.
That was easy to lose in a story organized around the man eventually arrested. The FBI's interview with Marcus Knutson described an investigation moving through possibilities, checking histories and seeking comparisons. The eventual answer was absent from that recording. Its absence gave the earlier work back its difficulty.
Knutson spoke as the FBI case agent in Sacramento. He described assisting local agencies and their Southern California partners. A potential candidate was not simply placed beside a sketch and declared plausible. Investigators considered whether the person's circumstances could fit the history. A fact that ruled someone out could be more useful than an appearance that seemed to fit.
The recording offered no promise that the next candidate would be the last. It described work that could end with an exclusion and then have to continue. By 2016, the public request for information and the effort to examine possible suspects were operating beside a long history of connected evidence. A comparison could answer a question about someone already under consideration. It could not, by itself, supply every person who ought to be considered.
The fall 2017 proposal changed that starting point.
Paul Holes asked for Schubert's assistance in pursuing investigative genetic genealogy. Steve Rhodss located the preserved material associated with the Smith case. In January 2018, the prosecution's account said, a specialized profile was developed for this different investigative use. Instead of beginning only with a suspected individual and testing a comparison, the work could begin with evidence and explore family relationships capable of leading toward an individual.
The practical consequence was a new route into the identification problem. It was not a sudden acquisition of the offender's name. A list of possible relatives still had to be turned into a carefully examined history. The work lay between receiving possibilities and understanding which of them could lead somewhere relevant.
The group named in the prosecution's introduction brought different kinds of experience to that work. Alongside Holes were FBI division counsel Steve Kramer, a genealogist, and Sacramento District Attorney's Office personnel, Lieutenant Kirk Campbell and investigative assistant Monica Czajkowski. The account described them building family trees. It gave the labor a team, rather than a single figure who could stand in for everyone.
I placed that group beside the earlier laboratory chronology. The work in January had depended on a case whose material had survived from 1980. It also depended on a question sharpened by comparisons across other cases. New expertise had entered an inquiry that carried an older foundation with it. The change in method did not make the earlier preservation and comparisons obsolete.
The route also made the scope of responsibility especially important. The people appearing in a possible family connection were not thereby accused of the crimes. Their place in a relationship could help an investigation move toward a candidate without making their own lives part of the offense history. The account I was following did not need their private names to make its next development intelligible.
January passed into the next part of the record without a daily diary. I could not follow each person at a desk or reconstruct the moment one branch became more promising than another. What the public introduction did preserve was the point at which the team's work produced another man to consider.
The date was March 18, 2018. Czajkowski notified the group of that development.
For the first time in this sequence, the next page would follow a particular biography. The inquiry had moved from asking the public to help identify an unknown offender to examining a man whose movements and employment could be set against the known history.
The earlier national search had brought potential suspects forward for examination. The new avenue had now generated a candidate of its own. The candidate would have to meet the same stubborn requirement that had kept the question open for so long: something must connect this person, rather than simply a plausible life, to the crimes.