One warm spring night in 1992, in the family-friendly Salt Lake City suburb of Riverdale near the banks of the Weber River, a man broke into an ordinary home.
The invader, tall and hulking, entered through a sliding glass door. He crept quietly in the dark until he found an eleven-year-old girl in her bedroom. He put a knife against the girl’s neck and told her not to scream. He then wrapped duct tape around her eyes. While he held her in silence she could hear one of her parents enter the kitchen and flick on the light. She heard the cupboard open and someone pour liquid into a glass. Her strange thought was how smooth the knife felt against her neck. Then she sent out a silent plea to whoever it was in the kitchen:
Please come around the corner and check on me.
But also: Please don’t come around the corner.
“I didn’t know what would happen if they checked on me,” she later recalled of that night.
The kitchen light flicked off. A bedroom door closed. Silence again. The man took the girl out of the house and into his Pontiac Firebird and drove her to a desolate parking lot.
There, he sexually assaulted her.
“I thought I was going to die,” she said.
The girl, Nichole Eyre, survived the ordeal, but the terror of that night never left her. It was a terror known to many others, at the hands of the very same man. In 1991 he crawled through a young girl’s bedroom window and raped her at gunpoint; in 1996 he attacked a woman in Laramie, Wyoming; in 2001 he broke into a home wearing a nylon stocking over his head, bound five family members, and raped the mother and her nineteen-year-old daughter. His methods were consistent: forcing open sliding glass doors, binding victims, using a knife or gun to force them to comply. The same assailant committed at least eleven sexual assaults and, after four attacks in the same city, earned a nickname.
The Clearfield Rapist.
He became one of the most hunted and wanted men in the country, yet he eluded detection throughout his ten-year crime spree.
Then he just stopped.
Police did not link him to any further crimes. Nor did they make any progress in identifying him. Detectives and investigators came and went, theories were developed and dropped, but the Clearfield Rapist case went cold, and the monster remained at large, a haunting unsolved mystery, for three long decades.
I first heard from Detective Kyle Jeffries of the Clearfield City Police Department on October 4, 2017. Detective Jeffries was familiar with my work on the Lisa Jensen case, and he had reached out to me a few months before the capture of the Golden State Killer.
Clearfield is the city in northern Utah where four of the Clearfield Rapist’s crimes occurred. The city’s police department first began an investigation in 2000 while the spree was ongoing. They even obtained a John Doe DNA warrant—issued for suspects known only by their genetic data—as a way of starting an official prosecution and stopping the running of the statute of limitations. Still, another decade passed without good leads, and the case went cold.
The Clearfield Police Department reopened the case in 2012 and arranged to feature it on the investigative true-crime TV show Cold Justice, hoping that would generate new leads. It did not. In 2017, the department assigned a new officer to be lead investigator on the Clearfield case: Detective Kyle Jeffries.
“I was given your contact information by Angela Williamson [of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children],” Detective Jeffries wrote to me in his 2017 email. “I have been working several cold case rapes over the last few years, and we have eleven known victims linked by DNA to one suspect.”
Detective Jeffries wondered if I might be able to help him.
We eventually got on the phone and talked about the case. The good news was that Jeffries had the rapist’s DNA, and a lot of it. The questions the detective and I discussed were numerous: Would the DNA from twenty-five-year-old crime scenes be good enough to use? Did too many hours pass between the time of the rape and the collection of the DNA sample? Was the sample handled properly, both at the time it was taken and over the next two decades?
But even before determining those answers, we had to turn the crime-scene DNA—in this case, contained in rape kits—into a SNP file that could be uploaded to GEDmatch.
For help, I suggested that we turn to Professor Ed Green.
Earlier, I described how Professor Green’s remarkable work on DNA retrieval from rootless hair helped my team on the Lisa Project identify three of the victims in the Bear Brook murders case. Professor Green was still interested in working with forensic samples, and he agreed to help me on the Clearfield Rapist case as well.
I asked Detective Jeffries to send a sample of crime-scene DNA to Professor Green so that he could create a SNP profile from DNA extracted from the semen sample. As he did with the hair samples, he performed whole-genome sequencing, but there was a difference. The hair DNA was already in small fragments; for the semen DNA, he first had to shear the DNA into fragments. From there, the procedure was essentially the same. It took him several months, but Professor Green came through again and sent me a SNP profile, which, in July 2018, I uploaded to both GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA.
A few days later, a list of matches was posted on both sites. Most of the Clearfield Rapist’s crimes had occurred in Utah, and many of our initial matches were from Utah, indicating that the rapist was probably from that state. One of them was a very good match with the rapist—a woman named Amelia who came in as an estimated first cousin with an 840.6 cM match. The best match that ever popped up in the Golden State Killer case, by comparison, was a second cousin, so having a first cousin among our initial matches was indeed a good break.
Or so I thought.
We researched Amelia, and one of my team members, Cynthia Stormer, found a small notice posted on a genealogy site by Amelia’s son. The notice referenced an Ohio adoption record for his mother. Our first-cousin match, it turned out, had been adopted. She knew who her biological mother was but not her biological father. We built out her maternal line, but it did not connect with any of the trees for other matches with our crime-scene DNA, which meant that most likely the connection was with Amelia’s paternal line.
That was bad break number one.
Detective Jeffries reached out to officials in Ohio and asked for Amelia’s adoption record, which would contain her birth name and, we hoped, the name of her biological father. But an official told Jeffries that the building that housed those adoption records had burned to the ground.
Bad break number two.
The only helpful information that Amelia could share with us when Detective Jeffries interviewed her was a memory that she had from long ago: her birth surname, she recalled, might possibly be Burns, although she could not be sure.
We also learned that Amelia’s son, Tucker, had done DNA testing at AncestryDNA. If Detective Jeffries could persuade Tucker to help by sharing his matches on Ancestry with me, I could poke around the site to identify any of his matches who did not match with his paternal relatives and ask them to upload their DNA profiles to GEDmatch, which would give me additional data points for the speculative tree that I was building. This would help me identify Amelia’s father—Tucker’s maternal grandfather—which would also help me identify the Clearfield Rapist. First cousins share a set of grandparents, so the Clearfield Rapist had to be the son of one of Amelia’s father’s siblings.
While Detective Jeffries worked on enlisting Tucker’s help, I researched our next best match, a more distant cousin named Madeline.
I located two people related to Madeline (Chester and Bailey), and also identified the most recent common ancestor to these matches, a man named Evan. Theoretically, the next step would be to build down Evan’s descendant lines.
But there was another problem.
Both Chester and Bailey were from Utah, and both were parents of multiple children. As for the MRCA, Evan had four sister-wives; he practiced plural marriage, and he and his wives collectively had twenty-five children—many of whom had large families of their own. Building down all of the MRCA’s children’s descendant lines would require an extraordinary, almost unfathomable, amount of work and time.
Bad break number three.
I was aware there could be challenges when working with families in Utah, but I had not previously encountered such a daunting number of descendant lines (the number potentially was in the thousands). I could only guess at how long it would take to build down just a fraction of those lines—a period of time measured not in days or weeks but in months and maybe years. One of my team members on this case was herself a Mormon who often worked on cases out of Utah, and she understood how I felt. “Welcome to my world,” she said.
Still, it seemed that I had no choice but to at least try to sort through this multitude of descendants. Through Detective Jeffries I requested consensual DNA reference samples from a couple of people on one of the more promising-looking lines, but neither of them was a match with the Clearfield Rapist. Early on, I realized I would have to be very lucky to land on the right line, and if I did not, then the investigation would be hopelessly slowed down. I made the decision to temporarily abandon the research on Evan’s family and concentrate instead on sorting out who Amelia’s father was, using Tucker’s AncestryDNA matches.
Unfortunately, Tucker was reluctant to help us. Through Detective Jeffries, I offered him a deal: I would identify his maternal grandparents for him, which was what he was trying to do, if he would share his AncestryDNA matches with me.
Tucker agreed to the deal. Finally, a good break.
And then, once again, another new technological improvement appeared just in time.
This new tool was called What Are The Odds? (WATO). The tool uses the amount of matching DNA that the person of unknown parentage—in this case, Amelia—has with various persons we have been able to place in a speculative tree. This allows us to compute the odds of where in the tree the unidentified person might fit. This was precisely what I needed to know to sort out who both Amelia and the Clearfield Rapist were.
I came up with a plan: I would focus on Amelia, our initial best match to the Clearfield Rapist’s crime-scene DNA. Amelia was likely a first cousin, so if I could find the name of Amelia’s father, that would get me closer to identifying the Clearfield Rapist. Unfortunately, Amelia did not have many close matches on FamilyTreeDNA, but her son Tucker did have a great many solid maternal-line matches on AncestryDNA. One of the matches was a woman named Norah. Norah matched as a first cousin once removed to Tucker, which would make her Amelia’s first cousin. I hunkered down and built out Norah’s tree.
And then—there he was: Norah’s maternal grandfather.
The grandfather’s surname, I learned, was Burns.
Burns! That was the name Amelia had heard could be her birth surname.
I was now ready to use the new What Are The Odds? tool to pinpoint where Amelia belonged on my speculative family tree. But since I did not have any matches to Amelia (who was adopted) on AncestryDNA, I had to come up with a little workaround. Had Amelia been on Ancestry, she would theoretically have had twice as much matching DNA as her son Tucker did with his maternal-line matches. So I entered Tucker’s AncestryDNA matches into the speculative tree as Amelia’s matches and just doubled the amount of matching DNA. For example, Tucker matched with Norah at 426 cM. So in the tree, I entered Norah as an 852 cM match with Amelia.
Next, I entered Amelia’s speculative tree and her matching information into WATO.
The utility estimated that the highest odds were for Amelia fitting into the tree as the granddaughter of Joseph Burns and his wife.
This couple had three sons—George, John, and Jack—and four daughters—one of whom was Norah’s mother. But which brother was Amelia’s father?
Amelia was born in 1947. I had estimated that the Clearfield Rapist was born in about 1971. Joseph’s sons George and John were born in 1925 and 1927, respectively, but Jack was not born until 1937—making him too young to be Amelia’s father. Which meant that, in theory, either George or John Burns was Amelia’s father.
Next, I found an obituary for George. He died at the age of forty-two and had no known children. That left the other son, Jack.
But my research into Jack revealed that he had no sons, only daughters.
I went back and researched Joseph’s third son, John Burns, and I found the name of his only listed son: Rex. By then, Detective Josh Carlson, a new Clearfield City Police Department officer, had taken over the case from Detective Jeffries. I asked Detective Carlson to dig up Rex’s driver’s license photo. If Rex resembled the police sketches of the Clearfield Rapist, it would seem we had our man.
However, Rex looked nothing like the composite sketches—not even close.
It was a dispiriting moment—we had all been waiting for the dramatic moment of discovery that, it seemed, we were on the verge of. But I did not allow myself to wallow for long. I had enough experience from the other sprawling criminal cases I had worked on to understand that twists and setbacks were simply part of the game. The right question to ask was: What does this setback tell us about where to look next?
John was the only one of Joseph’s three sons who had a son of his own, and Rex was John’s only son. Following the logic of my carefully assembled speculative tree, Rex had to be the Clearfield Rapist. But at least according to the police sketch, he was not. Which could only mean one thing: someone was missing from our tree.
I called Detective Carlson and said, “There has to be another man in this family.” Someone who, for whatever reason, was not showing up.
I needed Detective Carlson to obtain a DNA sample from Rex. It would not be a consensual, or voluntarily surrendered, sample—we could not risk directly approaching this man, because he was likely a close relative to the actual Clearfield Rapist. Instead, Detective Carlson called for surreptitious DNA retrieval, or what is sometimes referred to as a “trash pull”—meaning Rex would not know that his DNA was being sought (no federal law prohibits this type of DNA collection, though you cannot obtain DNA from someone’s body without a search warrant or judicial order). Carlson’s officers staked out Rex and discreetly picked up a piece of trash they saw him throw out. They collected several items and ran the DNA obtained from the items through the FBI’s extensive criminal database, CODIS.
There was no hit for Rex. Since DNA from the Clearfield Rapist was in CODIS, without question Rex was not the rapist.
This, too, was disappointing. But there was a silver lining.
The Clearfield police chief decided to take the risk of approaching Rex directly and asking him to submit a consensual DNA sample. Rex agreed and sent in a test kit to FamilyTreeDNA, which uploaded his DNA profile to the FamilyTreeDNA database.
Now that we had Rex’s DNA, it should have pointed to exactly who was missing from our tree. When the sample finished processing, the results confirmed yet again what we already knew: Rex was not the Clearfield Rapist.
But they also revealed that Rex was the rapist’s half sibling.
This was an enormous break. We now knew that there was a half brother out there who had not been identified in our research but who existed and who had to be the Clearfield Rapist. But how were we going to find him?
We researched Rex’s father, John Burns, and learned that he had been a long-haul trucker. That was not the best news, since it meant he could have fathered a child anywhere along whatever trucking routes he was on. Next we reviewed John Burns’s obituary, but it did not mention anything about our mysterious half sibling or name any unaccounted for children.
The obituary did mention that one of Burns’s sons had predeceased him. We dug frantically for any other reference to this deceased son, and we found another obituary.
This obituary said that the deceased son had died at two and a half months old: another seeming dead end. But the obituary went on to report that this deceased son was survived by a half brother.
Just like that, we had him—the missing male descendant.
The obituary even listed a name for the half brother: Mark Douglas Burns.
We quickly researched Mark Douglas Burns and made two consequential discoveries.
The first was that he was also a long-haul trucker, and his primary route had been Interstate 80—a transcontinental freeway that crosses through Utah and Wyoming. All of the known rape victims lived in apartment complexes along Interstate 80.
The other shocking fact: in 1974, Mark Douglas Burns was convicted of a crime and sentenced to death in North Carolina’s gas chamber. His lawyers filed several appeals based on a law that commuted death sentences for crimes committed after a certain date. Burns committed his crime before that date, but his lawyers appealed anyway and a judge vacated the death sentence. Burns served his time and was eventually released from prison and returned to his home in Utah.
The crime that put him on death row?
Rape.
Detective Carlson arranged to bring in Mark Douglas Burns for questioning as soon as he returned home from a trucking run. On September 25, 2019, two years after I was first contacted by Detective Jeffries, officers from the Clearfield City Police Department gathered outside the front door of Burns’s pleasant suburban home in Ogden, Utah, their body cameras on. Detective Steve Swenson knocked on the door, and a few seconds later an elderly man in blue jeans, a red T-shirt, and gray socks opened it.
“Mark?” the officer asked.
“Yes?”
“Hi, Detective Swenson, how you doing?”
“I’m well, and yourself?” Burns replied.
“Hey, I need you to come and talk to me for a minute,” Swenson said, motioning for Burns to step outside.
“Sure,” Burns said.
“We need to take you up to the office with us. I have some questions for you, and I have another investigator who’d like to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“Uh, you know, I have no idea.”
Detective Swenson frisked Burns, and another investigator went into his home to retrieve his blue Nike tennis shoes from his back bedroom closet, and his house keys from a basket on his bedroom dresser.
“What is this about?” Burns asked again. “You’re really handcuffing me?”
“I have to,” Detective Swenson said. “I’ve got no choice.”
Police conclusively linked Mark Douglas Burns to eleven sexual assaults between 1991 and 2001. The oldest victim was fifty-two, the youngest eleven. In February 2020, Burns pleaded guilty to seventeen charges—including eight counts of aggravated sexual assault and six more of aggravated kidnapping (the statute of limitations had run on some of his earlier crimes, and he was initially only charged for crimes committed between 2000 and 2001).
“My brain does not function properly,” Burns proclaimed during his April 2020 sentencing. “I am a sexual deviant. I am a predator. I had a compulsion that was irresistible. It was unsatisfiable…. I never admitted it to anyone.”
Burns also expressed a wish that he be given the death penalty. “Pleading guilty and going to prison doesn’t fix what I did,” he said. “I would ask that the court show me no mercy, because I deserve none.”
Burns’s courtroom wish was not granted. Instead, Davis County district judge John Morris sentenced Burns to fourteen terms of sixteen years to life, plus three more terms of six years to life, all to be served one after the other—a total sentence of at least 242 years in prison.
But that was not all. During their investigation, police had learned that Burns had not necessarily stopped his crime spree in 2001. In fact, in 2001 he resigned from the trucking company he had worked for and had joined a different company, presumably so he could get a new route, and this opened up the possibility that there were other as yet unlinked crimes. Under questioning, Burns confessed to many other rapes, as well as to his participation in a nearly two-decades-old cold case: the heinous 2001 murder of Sue Ellen Gunderson Higgins in Evanston, Wyoming. He told police he grew “bored” with rapes and moved to Evanston to commit an armed robbery. Burns watched Sue Ellen, twenty-eight years old, pull into her driveway, then knocked on her door posing as a chamber of commerce member who had lost his pen. Inside the home, Burns shot Sue Ellen in the head before stealing some money and credit cards—all while her two-year-old son played in the backyard.
In December 2020 Wyoming judge Joseph Bluemel gave Burns an additional sentence of life in prison for the murder of Sue Ellen Higgins. He also ordered Burns to pay the sum of $7,200 to the family of his victim to cover the cost of Sue Ellen’s funeral and the replacement of the blood-drenched carpet in her home.
The Clearfield Rapist case remains one of the most difficult and complicated cases that I have worked on. There were times when it seemed a solution might remain forever out of reach. By then, however, I had learned to trust the DNA. The DNA was like a climbing rope on a very steep mountain: if we kept following it and pulling on it, eventually it would take us to where we needed to be. And, once again, it did.
I was still working on the Clearfield sexual assaults when the Golden State Killer was arrested in April 2018—and when the fallout from the arrest of Joseph DeAngelo shook the genetic genealogy field to its core.
Catching such a notorious serial killer after forty years would have made international news no matter what method was used to find him, but from the start, media coverage of the story was just as breathless about how he was found as it was about the fact that he was finally captured. The revelation that law enforcement used popular genetic genealogy websites to identify DeAngelo drew a firestorm of attention to the case.
“How a Genealogy Site Led to the Front Door of the Golden State Killer Suspect,” announced The New York Times.
Another Times article declared, “Want to See My Genes? Get a Warrant.”
“What the Golden State Killer Case Means for Your Genetic Privacy,” read a CNN headline.
And from The Washington Post: “The Ingenious and ‘Dystopian’ Technique Police Used to Hunt the ‘Golden State Killer’ Suspect.”
Dystopian? The initial media reaction to the arrest suggested we had crossed some fateful ethical line that could never be uncrossed. I was surprised by this reaction, which I believed was overwrought. As I wrote earlier, I have seen how new technology can produce emotional reactions that don’t always align with the facts at hand. For instance, it was not as if we invented a new DNA technique to find the killer—I had been using the Methodology developed by DNAAdoption for years in my unknown-parentage cases, without any controversy. The only new development was that we had used the technique to identify a violent criminal suspect rather than an unknown biological parent.
In the weeks and months after DeAngelo’s arrest, the early questions developed into a full-blown controversy.
In a 2019 article entitled “The Messy Consequences of the Golden State Killer Case,” The Atlantic magazine quoted one experienced genealogist as saying, “It was built for finding ancestors. It was built for reuniting families, and now it is being used essentially to get families to put their members in jail.”
Several articles suggested we had violated the Fourth Amendment—which guarantees “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”—by accessing data on genealogy sites. The blowback against genetic genealogy sites was just as harsh. Critics seized on the fact that site users were not informed that their DNA data could be used by law enforcement.
In May 2019, reporters learned that GEDmatch had helped investigators on another case in a way that violated the site’s revised terms of service. These new terms permitted use of the site by law officers only in cases involving violent crimes—which it defined as homicide and sexual assault—or in the identification of unknown human remains, and only if law enforcement files were identified as such.
In the newly reported case, GEDmatch allowed a DNA-testing lab to upload a file to GEDmatch so that law enforcement could use investigative genetic genealogy to identify a criminal suspect. The crime in question: a man attacking an elderly woman in a church. The attack was bloody but not fatal, nor had the victim been raped. Technically, the assault was not one of the two violent crimes that made it permissible for law enforcement to upload crime-scene DNA to GEDmatch.
GEDmatch co-founder Curtis Rogers explained his decision to take on the case by saying, “Well, look, he didn’t kill her but came within inches of it. Okay, I’ll let it go this one time.” The criticism that followed his decision was not especially widespread, but it was intense enough to lead him to make another major change to GEDmatch’s terms of service in May 2018.
Before the criticism, GEDmatch users were automatically enlisted to help law enforcement upon signing up. Rogers eliminated that feature and automatically opted out every user in the database. Now users had to deliberately opt in to allow their data to be matched with law enforcement files.
Overnight, the pool of DNA profiles available for matching through GEDmatch dropped from well over a million to exactly zero.
Luckily, just before that happened, Gene by Gene, the parent company of FamilyTreeDNA, had changed its terms of service to allow the upload of forensic files to its database. That meant that even after GEDmatch opted all its users out of helping law enforcement, we still had a fairly good database to work with. Even so, it seemed clear that the extraordinary window of opportunity that had opened to crime fighters in 2017 with our work on the Lisa Jensen case had now, for the first time, begun to creep closed.
This move by GEDmatch caused controversy in the genealogical community, and a good many people objected to the change. But no matter who complained, the damage was done—a site that was enormously helpful to me in my cold-case work was, suddenly, not. Yes, users had the option of opting in and making their data available to law enforcement matching, and many did—I am told that some 350,000 users have given their permission by “opting in” thus far. But this is still only a fraction of the number of users whose DNA profiles were previously available for matching. Investigative genetic genealogy is a numbers game. However you looked at it, this was a major setback.
Not much later, another controversy erupted. The news site BuzzFeed reported—for the first time—that Bennett Greenspan and his company’s site, FamilyTreeDNA, had been working with the FBI on the Golden State Killer case without alerting its users. Bennett was heavily criticized for secretly changing the site’s terms of service to accommodate law enforcement, and for personally approving the upload of the DNA profile for the Golden State Killer to FamilyTreeDNA at the request of FBI attorney Steve Kramer.
Eventually, Bennett made terms of service changes, too, though not as drastic as those made by GEDmatch: FamilyTreeDNA users in the United States are automatically opted in to law enforcement matching but also are given the opportunity to opt out. The changes also stipulated that law enforcement files would be uploaded to the FamilyTreeDNA database only after a formal review on a case-by-case basis, and only for homicides, sexual assaults, child abductions, or the identification of unidentified human remains.
I had not realized it in my first two years of working with law enforcement, but those years represented a unique time for investigative genetic genealogists like me. The number of people who signed up with the growing genetic genealogy sites such as GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA increased the odds of matches with close family members and made the capture of criminals like the Golden State Killer possible, specifically by exposing a vulnerability these criminals did not even know they had, and also could not escape: their genetic makeup.
Suddenly, however, that vulnerability was dramatically reduced, and it remained to be seen if we would ever have as big a pool of potential matches to the DNA of perpetrators of violent crimes again.
But it is not just the changes at FamilyTreeDNA and GEDmatch that impacted the use of IGG. In the aftermath of the Golden State Killer case, the genealogical site MyHeritage also changed its terms of service to prohibit the upload of DNA files for the purpose of solving a crime. The match that was instrumental in identifying the Golden State Killer? I found it on MyHeritage. If I were beginning the search for the Golden State Killer under the current restrictions—assuming no significant new genetic matches suddenly appeared on FamilyTreeDNA or GEDmatch (where they would have to opt in)—I would not be able to identify Joseph James DeAngelo today.
All the early coverage of DeAngelo’s arrest made no mention of me by name, since I had asked to remain anonymous. Three things happened, however, that made me reconsider remaining in the background.
In the months after DeAngelo’s capture, other genealogists working on different criminal cases stepped forward into the spotlight to discuss their work. If they were not afraid to go public, perhaps I did not need to be, either.
Then my son, Christopher, approached me one day and told me he believed I should finally step forward and acknowledge my role in solving the case.
“People need to know what you did,” he said simply.
I was touched by his pride in me, and I drew a lot of strength from it. If Christopher was not afraid of me going public about my involvement in identifying Joseph DeAngelo, then why should I be? Having him by my side, ready to face whatever came next, made all the difference in the world to me.
On top of that, I received a call from Deputy Peter Headley. He had just watched a presentation in which another genealogist seemed to suggest she had solved the Golden State Killer case. In his call, Headley insisted that I go public to set the record straight. I finally told him I was okay with being identified, and he contacted Paul Holes. Paul sent out a tweet on August 22, 2018:
The genetic genealogist who helped find #GSK has given me permission to divulge her name—Barbara Rae-Venter. Without Barbara’s help, we would probably still be building family trees. She gave us structure and her expertise was invaluable.
And that was that. Suddenly reporters were calling. Requests to speak at events and forums poured in. Nature magazine named me in their 2019 list of “10 People Who Mattered in Science in 2018.” Time magazine included me as one of 2019’s “100 Most Influential People.” In the Time piece about me, Paul Holes said, “Rae-Venter has provided law enforcement with its most revolutionary tool since the advent of forensic DNA testing in the 1980s.”
This was all extremely flattering and far beyond any reaction I had ever imagined. It was also a bit overwhelming. It felt a little like opening a door and not at all being sure what was waiting on the other side. On one hand, I considered myself a private person with no desire to be famous or even a public figure. I was quite content with the lovely, quiet retired life I had fashioned for myself, and I certainly did not want to disrupt that. On the other hand, part of me wondered if remaining anonymous had been a mistake. So many different people were speaking out and claiming to have identified the Golden State Killer—even people who, as far as I knew, had had nothing to do with the case. And that, to me, was just plain wrong. I felt compelled to set the record straight, even if the resulting spotlight made me uncomfortable.
There was one other reason I decided to finally go public.
I thought back to my time as a young woman breaking into traditionally male fields. I recalled how I was treated differently from, and paid less than, my male colleagues, and I remembered the artificial barriers to advancing beyond a certain point. I thought about how I had spent my life bashing up against those barriers and fighting through them. And I realized that it was incumbent upon me to help other women to do the same, and maybe even have an easier time of it than I had.
Based on earnings data from the 2020 U.S. Census survey, full-time, year-round female employees in all jobs across the country earn eighty-three cents for every dollar earned by men—a 17 percent wage gap. This gap certainly exists in the field of science. According to a study published in the American Journal of Sociology, male scientists working for U.S. federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency have earned, as the journal Nature put it, “more money than their female counterparts…due to hiring practices that circumvent rules intended to ensure equity, and to higher salaries for the types of positions that the agencies hire men to fill.”
Women trying to enter the field of law enforcement face a similar cultural bias. In fact, in 2020 only 13 percent of all full-time law enforcement officers in the United States were female.
This needs to be corrected. One of my goals is to see more women enter into the sciences, a discipline long dominated by men. More and more women have become scientists over the years, and the gender pay disparity tends to lessen the higher up in a company a woman goes. Still, I would like to see things change faster and more dramatically. I want to encourage even more women to become scientists, not because of any small measure of fame they may achieve, but because of what women can bring to the work: a different way of thinking and reasoning and seeing the world. It was the sum of my individual traits and experiences as a woman, and even my personal quirks, that allowed me to do what I did. And now I would love to see more women bring their unique perspectives and intelligence to the sciences. The field will be much better off with them in it.
So if my story can inspire a budding young scientist somewhere to pursue her dreams, then my story is a story worth telling.
