Book Review: I Know Who You Are: How an Amateur DNA Sleuth Unmasked the Golden State Killer and Changed Crime Fighting Forever by Barbara Rae-Venter

Book #58 of 2023:

I Know Who You Are: How an Amateur DNA Sleuth Unmasked the Golden State Killer and Changed Crime Fighting Forever by Barbara Rae-Venter

Author Barbara Rae-Venter is a retired patent lawyer who in recent years has found a new career in the burgeoning field of genetic genealogical research, and specifically its application in aiding law enforcement. Most notably, she was on the team that used partial DNA matches with relatives to finally identify a suspect as the Golden State Killer, a notorious serial rapist and murderer who had represented an agonizing cold case across California for decades. This book is about several of the writer’s criminal investigations, but primarily that one and her first, which involved finding the birth family of a woman who had been kidnapped as an infant and abandoned by her captor at age 5 with no documentation or knowledge of her past.

The resulting text is partly in the true crime genre, but the focus is more on Rae-Venter’s role in using new tools and investigative legwork to solve these long-standing puzzles by building out family trees around victims and potential suspects. It’s certainly not as comprehensive an account of the GSK’s body of crimes as Michelle McNamara’s excellent posthumous work I’ll Be Gone in the Dark — written before Joseph DeAngelo’s arrest — but it’s a good complement to that one, describing how the man was caught and following him through to sentencing. (And because the killer’s atrocities were so extensive, the researcher is even able to pull out specific illustrative examples that I don’t remember McNamara mentioning.)

Where this volume falters for me is in its author’s approach to the ethics of her newfound profession. While she acknowledges that the use of genetic material submitted to companies like 23andMe to identify related criminal suspects is controversial (and oftentimes nonconsensual / beyond a site’s agreed-upon terms of service), she doesn’t give a fair consideration of these objections in my opinion, instead seeming frustrated and performatively outraged that people are daring to stand in the way of justice. She’s dismissive of privacy concerns and hesitations over expanding the scope of police surveillance into personal lives and medical records, and generally uninterested in even framing the matter as a subject of reasonable debate. Likewise, she repeatedly complains about some crime or another being past the statute of limitations for prosecution by the time she’s located a suspected offender, but spends no time addressing why the protections of such expiration dates exist in the law / why we as a society might want them to. And in general, she positions her findings as clear smoking guns for guilt, rather than as pieces of evidence that a jury might eventually consider and weigh alongside the limitations of the science and anything else potentially exculpatory. That reflects a repeated bias towards the prosecution and police that a stronger title could have addressed and attempted to mitigate.

Overall, then, I would call this an interesting yet flawed overview of a topic that is less straightforward than its writer suggests. Her expertise helps illuminate her activities, but it also leads her to overstate the reliability and acceptedness of what is still a relatively new and contested domain.

[Content warning for gore, gun violence, domestic abuse, and violence against children including rape.]

★★★☆☆

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