The hunt to find the
Golden State Killer, spanning nearly four decades, felt less like a relay race
than a group of fanatics tethered together climbing an impossible mountain.
From an Internet
search I learned that boys' names beginning in N were relatively rare,
appearing only once in the top one hundred names of the 1930s and '40s.
When the Orange
County Crime Lab began incorporating DNA testing in the early 1990s, it would
take up to four weeks for a criminalist to work one case. The biological sample
being tested needed to be sizable -- a bloodstain the size of a quarter, for
example -- and in good shape. Now a
smattering of skin cells can reveal someone's genetic fingerprint in a matter
of hours.
