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“Sure.”
Goring put her cell phone on the center console’s storage compartment. She opened a recording app and pressed the red button. She gave the date and time and named those in the car and then got down to it.
“Let’s start with Colleen. Tell me who she was.”
“She’s a—she was a divorced mother of two girls who are both away at college. I’m not sure where. About three or four years ago, after her kids were in high school, she took some online courses in IGG—do you know what that is?”
“The genetic-tracing stuff.”
“Yes, investigative genetic genealogy. She took classes and then started basically being a citizen sleuth online. Her thing was helping to identify unnamed victims of murder. Mostly women. There’s a whole network out there of people—mostly women—who are proficient at this. She became part of this network and that’s when I became aware of her. I was putting together an all-volunteer cold-case team and I started floating around online looking at some of these people. I reached out to her when I learned she was local. She came in, I vetted her, then gave her the job. She did some really good work for us. Right up to the end.”
Goring had taken a notebook out and was jotting a couple of things down, even though she was still recording everything said.
“Okay,” she said. “What do you mean, ‘right up to the end’? What was she working on?”
“We were all working a case,” Ballard said. “You probably are too young to have been in the department at the time, but do you remember the Pillowcase Rapist?”
“Oh, yeah, I was going to Pierce College in the Valley when that was going on. He did a bunch of rapes and then just disappeared, right?”
“Yeah. The last one was a rape and murder. We were on that because we had gotten a solid genetic lead. Our focus was on four men who were all high-school classmates in Pasadena. Class of ’99.”
Ballard watched Goring’s eyes sharpen.
“These four men,” she said. “Did they know you were looking at them?”
“It’s possible,” Ballard said. “We interviewed one in Vegas on Wednesday and he let us take a DNA swab. I felt we threw enough of a scare into him to convince him not to give the others a heads-up.”
Goring made ahmmsound that Ballard took as questioning her actions.
“He voluntarily gave us the swab,” Ballard said. “He wouldn’t have done that if he was the guy. I don’t see where he’d have any interest in warning the others, even if he knew that one was probably the suspect we were looking for.”
Ballard didn’t like her own tone of protest and defensiveness.
“You never know,” Goring said. “You said ‘we.’ Did Hatteras go with you over there?”
“Oh, no, that was Maddie Bosch—the other sworn officer in the unit. I wouldn’t have taken Colleen on something like that. She worked exclusively in the office, though she was not happy about it.”
“In what way?”
“She… wanted to go into the field and follow through on some of the leads she came up with through IGG. I told her many times that that wasn’t what I’d brought her into the unit to do.”
“And how did she take that?”
Ballard’s phone buzzed and she saw that the call was from Carol Plovc. She sent the call to voicemail.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “To answer your question, Colleenwas frustrated by not being able to go into the field. I told her more than once that she would need more training if she was ever going to go out on an investigation.”
Goring waited for further explanation but that was all Ballard offered.
“Okay,” she finally said. “Let’s go back to what put these four guys on your radar. You said it was a genetic link?”
Ballard spent the next ten minutes explaining the genetic connection between a man arrested recently for domestic violence and the rampage of the Pillowcase Rapist. She told Goring about the 1999 prom at the Huntington, Mallory Richardson’s vulnerable position in a hotel room, and the fact that at least four boys and maybe more had access to the room. She said the working theory was that someone used that access to enter the room and have sex with Mallory, leading to the birth of the man who had been arrested twenty-four years later.
Goring just listened and took notes until Ballard was finished.
“So you got a swab from the guy in Vegas—what about the other three suspects?” Goring asked. “Have you had any contact with them?”
“We weren’t really calling them suspects,” Ballard said. “Not yet. More like persons of interest at this point.”
