A Devil in the Valley Audible, 2021

In 1994, an aspiring cold case investigator in California’s East Bay, Paul Holes, put aside trying to solve the Golden State Killer case and wait for science to catch up.

Paul returned to an old file cabinet at the back of the Sheriff’s Department forensic lab to look for another cold case he could work—something with DNA. The folder he pulled out was the 1978 murder of a married mother who was killed while on a morning jog in a nearby park. The original investigators had assumed that a serial killer named Phillip Hughes was responsible for her death. Although they didn’t have the evidence to prove it, at least Hughes was headed to prison for three other gruesome homicides.

As years passed however, Hughes sat in prison with his secrets. And because of a brief fluke in the law, ever few years he came up for parole. One day, he might get out.

Paul realized that if he could prove that Hughes committed the 1978 murder, he could keep him in prison. Plus, the victim’s family deserved an answer.

But as Paul finds out, the truth is not so simple. It turns out that the small towns of Contra Costa County may have been a hotbed of serial killing in the 1970s. Many of the clues were still there. They just needed the right person, at the right time, to see them.

Creator, Writer (with Mark Gantt), Executive Producer