It should be noted that McNamara's 2013 LA Times article ushered in a huge wave of public interest in the case. Without that public interest, I'm not sure that the tremendous financial & human resources would have been allocated to the genealogy work.

That is not to say that she deserves any first hand credit for solving the case, because she doesn't. But it's foolish to underestimate what public interest can do (financially) for a case.

Holes to me is in a similar boat. He was one of the few folks working the case when it was largely forgotten in the 90s and deserves credit for that. I think he gets more credit than he deserves simply because he was the face of the investigation over the final decade.

Who ever it was that finally compared the EAR DNA to the ONS DNA in 2000 deserves a ton of credit. Without linking the 2 series, both would have been largely forgotten. I want to say that was Larry Poole but Holes may have been involved too.

Just my two cents. Don't take this as a Holes or McNamara bashing post because it's not. But it's over simplistic to choose one person to the exclusion of the other.