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  • I Know Who You Are

  • How an Amateur DNA Sleuth Unmasked the Golden State Killer and Changed Crime Fighting Forever
  • By: Barbara Rae-Venter
  • Narrated by: Barbara Rae-Venter
  • Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins

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I Know Who You Are

By: Barbara Rae-Venter
Narrated by: Barbara Rae-Venter
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Publisher's Summary

EDGAR AWARD FINALIST • “A true-crime masterpiece written by a cold-case-cracking master.”—John Douglas, New York Times bestselling co-author of Mindhunter

“Barbara Rae-Venter isn’t just the genealogy expert who helped capture the Golden State Killer—she’s an unsung hero who has given murdered women and children their faces and names back.”—Maureen Callahan, New York Times bestselling author of American Predator

“Echoes the dedication displayed by such fictional police detectives as California novelist Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch.”—The Wall Street Journal

For twelve years the Golden State Killer terrorized California, stalking victims and killing without remorse. Then he simply disappeared, for the next forty-four years, until an amateur DNA sleuth opened her laptop. In I Know Who You Are, Barbara Rae-Venter reveals how she went from researching her family history as a retiree to hunting for a notorious serial killer—and how she became the nation’s leading authority on investigative genetic genealogy, the most dazzling new crime-fighting weapon to appear in decades.

Rae-Venter shares haunting, often thrilling accounts of how she helped solve some of America’s most chilling cold cases in the span of just three years, frequently starting with little more than a DNA sample. She brings listeners inside her unique “grasshopper mind” as she pores through obituaries, marriage records, and old newspaper articles. Listeners join in on urgent calls with sheriffs, FBI agents, and district attorneys as she details the struggle to obtain usable crime scene DNA samples, until, finally, a critical piece of the puzzle clicks into place.

I Know Who You Are captures both the exhilaration of these discoveries and the deep-rooted emotions that linger around cold cases. It is a story of relentless curiosity and reinvention, and of human beings striving to answer the most elemental questions about themselves: What defines identity? Where do we belong? And are we truly who we think we are?

©2023 Barbara Rae-Venter (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic Reviews

“Like a good crime writer, Ms. Rae-Venter has a gift for storytelling. Her scientific explanations are concise and her revelations are dramatic. I Know Who You Are is a remarkably exciting book. . . . Her description of the obsessive zeal with which she sought this personification of evil echoes the dedication displayed by such fictional police detectives as California novelist Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch.”The Wall Street Journal

“A lucid and entertaining detective story . . . Rae-Venter is a scientist at heart, and driven by a scientist’s particular, almost possessive hunger for knowledge.”Slate

“A gripping story tracing the hundreds of hours spent rifling through people’s family ties to find killers and identify bodies.”Nature

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