"In the span of just a few years, Barbara Rae-Venter went from researching her family history as a retiree to finding a serial killer who had baffled law enforcement for decades. [This book] tracks her improbable journey to becoming the nation's leading authority in investigative genetic genealogy, and to identifying the Golden State Killer. ... Rae-Venter also details other extraordinary cases that she has worked on, from the first criminal cold case she ever cracked--uncovering the long-lost identity of a child abductee--to the heartbreaking case of the Billboard Boy, which began with unidentified remains dumped along a North Carolina highway. When she looks at DNA data, Rae-Venter sees numbers, percentages, probabilities--but she also sees the very stuff that makes us who we are"--