18 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY SEPTEMBER 18-24, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com JUDGE ANDREW G. LIU, who presided over the trial, addressed the jurors after the attorneys gave their closing statements. He likened the trial to a Broadway show: “There is a lot going on behind the scenes to present in a smooth, efficient way,” he said. “But it’s also like an improv show, and the judge’s job is to manage that show as it unfolds.” Behind the scenes, L’Heureux, who is the main prosecutor on the Cold Case Task Force, spends much of his time outside of the courtroom deep in the paperwork, assisting investigators with reviewing cases and planning their investigative strategy. He’ll handle the review and the filing of cases that get submitted. Then, if a case is on track to go to trial, he’ll be deep in the weeds interviewing and preparing for the testimony of all the witnesses. “I’ve learned over the time I’ve been doing this that every person who goes through this is going to view it differently, no matter how long it’s been,” L’Heureux says, reflecting on working with families of victims over the years. “They don’t all have the same desires or the same feelings toward whether the case is reopened, whether it’s prosecuted, whether they want to go to trial or not.” Since the task force was created in 2020, they received a $535,000 federal grant from the U.S. Department of Justice and have reviewed more than 100 cases, solved 19 homicide cases, one sexual assault case, and identified 10 previously unidentified human remains. After federal support ran dry, the Cold Case Project nonprofit was established to help sustain the task force through continued funding. “The technology has really advanced, even since 2018,” says Ann Kern, Cold Case Project president. “In regards to these cold cases, it is a new day.” IN GENETICS, DNA is often likened to a “cookbook,” where chromosomes are the chapters and genes are the recipes. We all have the same cookbook, and the same recipes on each page. But the ingredient lists vary slightly (the reason people don’t look the same) and those differences create a unique fingerprint. In an investigation, forensic experts analyze these “ingredients”—things like skin cells, blood, hair, semen—collected like torn scraps from someone’s cookbook. Then these recipes are compared to the suspect’s, or to a list of profiles in a DNA database like CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) which is an FBI program that links crimescene evidence to a database of convicted offenders. If the patterns line up, analysts may have a match. In the courtroom, attorneys bring forward these torn pages from the cookbook: DNA samples from the nightshirt, the knife, the shoes, showing the jury that these recipes match only certain people’s cookbook—like Ira Bastian and Eva Thompson—with odds against a random match being extraordinarily low. In criminal investigations like these, investigators interpret the DNA against the probability that a random person might, by chance, match with the sample. The lower the probability, the higher the confidence the correct suspect has been identified. DNA can “answer questions of identity that previously had to be answered through other evidence,” L’Heureux says, “and can provide a conclusive answer as to whether someone is the source or a contributor to an item with a very high degree of certainty.” While a powerful tool, L’Heureux adds DNA can’t be used alone, but alongside other pieces of evidence that tie that person to the crime scene. “It’s always going to require context to understand what it means. If you get a DNA result that is from someone who is known to the victim, and their DNA could have been there for innocent reasons not related to the crime, then that doesn’t necessarily prove anything.” Before the turn of the 21st century, detectives weren’t thinking about DNA preservation when collecting evidence—at least not in the way they are today, says Gary Harmor, Chief Forensic DNA Analyst with SERI (Serological Research Institute), a private lab based in Richmond, California. Protocols that are standard now didn’t exist in the 1990s and earlier. Back then, evidence was often handled without gloves, and storing it properly—in freezers or specialized bags—wasn’t common practice, which made detecting DNA more difficult when the technology to do so did emerge. “There were no masks or anything,” Harmor says. “[Detectives] would pass a garment around. When they put it in the paper bag, wet blood from other parts [may have] transferred to the unstained parts, which may have had the DNA from the perpetrator.” In the early 2000s, the precision by which researchers were able to pick up DNA from older pieces of evidence started to improve, along with the ability to distinguish individuals more accurately. And around 2018, genetic genealogy—a method of using DNA test results to locate relatives—began to rise and became a game changer. Most famously, DNA profiles pulled from ancestry websites were used to identify and arrest “The Golden State Killer” who committed at least 13 murders across California in the 1970s and ’80s. “The sensitivity has gotten a lot better. I can get DNA off stuff from the 1950s and 1960s,” Harmor says. “So we can go back many years. But of course, when you go back that far, who’s left alive?” In the case George Smith’s wife and Eva Thompson’s daughter, Anna Smith, she died in 2008—17 years before an answer was found. ON MARCH 28, 2021, a fisherman pulled up partial skeletal human remains in a net just outside the boundaries Before the turn of the 21st century, detectives weren’t thinking about DNA preservation when collecting evidence. Top: Ira Bastian, now 86, sits in a wheelchair in a Salinas courtroom for his trial. He was convicted of a double homicide on Aug. 26, over 30 years after the crime occurred. Bottom: Assistant District Attorney Matthew L’Heureux, who prosecuted the Ira Bastian case, is the main prosecutor on the Cold Case Task Force. DANIEL DREIFUSS DANIEL DREIFUSS
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