I Know Who You Are
I consider this part 2 of the book “I’ll be gone in the dark”, or if not part 2, a very much needed companion book.
This book was written by the person who actually cracked the Golden State Killer (GSK) case, and she goes through the history and methodology of how she did it. Even though the subtitle prominently states the GSK in name, the truth of it is that only about 1/3 of the book IS about the GSK. She goes through her history of being interested in genetic genealogy, which is mostly drawing out family trees and the such, except in a high tech way. The advent of cheap and easily available spit tests in the 2000s and 2010s led to an explosion of data that lets you identify who your relatives are, even if you were not aware that you were related, however distantly.
This led her to some volunteer work, where she helps find and possibly unite adopted children with their birth mothers, and eventually, to identifying children who were entirely abandoned or kidnapped at such an early age they have no memories of who their parents might be. This was the case of the Bear Brook murders, a series of murders that was discovered through bodies in metal drums in a State Park in New Hampshire. The eulogy on their tombstone reflects their unknown origins “Here lies the mortal remains known only to God of a woman aged 23–33 and a girl child aged 8–10. Their slain bodies were found on November 10th, 1985, in Bear Brook State Park. May their souls find peace in God’s loving care.”
Through the science of genetics, the authoress managed to find out who the bodies might be related to, and the painstaking work of drawing up the family tree begins. The DNA is just the beginning, and the actual work of identifying and eliminating potential matches begins. The work sounds a lot like investigative jig-saw puzzling, because it is, except instead of a few hundreds of even a thousand pieces, you’re dealing with a few hundred thousand or even millions of possibilities, and it takes a lot of rigor and process to eliminate the wrong branches. As she mentions in the book, a lot of tech workers find this work stimulating and not unlike the puzzles that coders or IT people in general have to solve.
Through identifying the family of the Bear Brook murders, she discovered the killer because the killer was the father of one of the bodies. This killer was also responsible for more grisly murders, and was already caught for one of them, but this at least still let the folks in New Hamsphire close the books on one of the grisliest murder discoveries in their state.
This subsequently brought the authoress more attention from law enforcement, and Paul Holes, one of the lead investigators in the GSK brought the GSK to her attention. Through some miracles of preservation, they had a rape kit from one of the GSK’s victims still intact even though it was more than 30 years old. Through this genetic data, they found out that the GSK had numerous matches within the database and could narrow down to about 10 or so possibilities. Once that was done, it was just a matter of time to eliminate the 10 to the 1, and then in April 2018, the GSK was apprehended in a town near Sacramento.
The book is heavily technical, because the authoress does NOT shy away from going into a very deep technical dive about what the field of genetics is about. She goes through the painstaking details that is the work AFTER the genetics information is extracted, where the building of the family tree is the hardest part. She goes into how, unlike the investigators in the GSK who were convinced the GSK had green eyes becuase of eyewitness or other reports, the authoress KNEW that the GSK had blue eyes because she had the genetics data.
The rest of the book then goes to talk about the ethics of the methodology. A lot of unease and fear has sprung up about how genetics information could be abused for things other than crime solving, and even in the idea of crime solving, people feel that perhaps the 5th amendment (the one bout self-incrimination) is being violated. To me, this is bonkers. Your genetics data is all over the place, its like saying your public records shouldn’t be available. It is part and parcel of being a part of society, and if it can deter violent serious crimes, I feel that there should be no limitation on the use of genetics information in crime solving.
She also gives some tips on encouraging future genetics crime solver. To me, this was an interesting chapter, because the work is seriously detail oriented, requiring a good memory, a good problem solving mentality, and a LOT of patience.
All in all, this was a great follow-up to “I’ll be gone in the dark”, and is almost required for you to feel a good resolution to that previous book.
5* because she writes extremely well and she has great stories and even a moral ethics section on her work.
Highly recmmended!