Paul Holes was a forensic investigator with the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office who had come across the East Area Rapist case files in 1994, when he joined that office. He returned to the case repeatedly over his career. He was cautious about testing the limited crime-scene DNA samples, because the technology of the mid-1990s and early 2000s consumed sample material, and a sample used without producing a match could be gone forever. He preserved evidence while working on identifying a suspect.
The 2001 DNA match — establishing that the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker were the same person — created the designation EARONS, for East Area Rapist / Original Night Stalker. It also created a combined case that attracted new investigative attention and gave investigators a larger body of evidence to work with. The connection also raised the profile of the investigation because linking the previously distinct cases meant understanding them as a single, extraordinarily extensive criminal record.
Michelle McNamara, a true-crime writer and the wife of comedian Patton Oswalt, began working on the EARONS case in her own investigative capacity around 2011. She corresponded with investigators including Paul Holes, conducted her own research into the case records, and coined the name “Golden State Killer” in an article she published in Los Angeles Magazine in 2013. The name was intended to unify the different labels under which the cases had been known and to increase public recognition of the ongoing cold case investigation. McNamara died in April 2016, before DeAngelo was identified, while working on the book that would be published posthumously in 2018 as “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark.”