My husband kind of rolls his eyes when I get involved in one of my true crime obsessions – I mean interests, whether it is a podcast, book, or movie/series. I have been reading true crime since In Cold Blood (1966), and while I’ve been known to appreciate a trashy, quick-read expose, I REALLY like a nonfiction book that reads like a novel, grabs my interest and holds it until the last page is turned.
The Forever Witness, by Edward Humes, is subtitled “How DNA and Genealogy Solved a Cold Case Double Murder,” which grabbed my interest right away and held it throughout the entire book. It is a complex story, and features both a cold case detective and an amateur sleuth as its heroes. For over thirty years, the cold case of a double murder of two teenagers who were just on a visit to Seattle baffled everyone.
I’ve always thought being a cold case detective would be incredibly frustrating about 98%of the time, and unbelievable gratifying on the rare occasion when your hard work can bring closure to the friends and families of victims. Detective Jim Scharf worked tirelessly on the case of the murdered teenagers, while evidence lay in storage, waiting for technology that didn’t exist when this case happened. A woman named CeCe Moore lived 1200 miles away from the scene, and many years ago she began a lifelong fascination with genetic genealogy. Its use as a crime-fighting tool didn’t come from a crime laboratory, but rather from the use of home DNA tests (such as Ancestry and 23 and Me). These have been purchased by millions of people in this country, and have become both a powerful forensic tool and a source of debate. There is an inherent ethical dilemma involved in the storage of private data and the subsequent submission of the DNA to a lab looking for a familial match…and it goes back to the fundamental question of ownership of the data. If you send your saliva (or whatever) to a lab or company such as Ancestry, do they now own it? And who gets to decide if it is tested, who gets the results? And is there any recourse if your family DNA turns up a match that might solve a crime?
The Forever Witness is very detailed, extremely readable, and will just be super interesting to crime buffs. With thanks to Penguin Group Dutton and NetGalley, I give this one four big stars.