Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist and local author Tamara Leitner will conduct an in-store signing of her book “Don’t Say a Thing,” 6 p.m. Wednesday, June 14 at Chaucer’s Books, 3321 State St., Santa Barbara.

In “Don’t Say a Thing: A Predator, A Pursuit, And The Women Who Persevered” comes a true-crime memoir. An Emmy Award-winning journalist seeks closure in a decades-long series of crimes and freedom from her own personal demons.

In April 1999, reporter Leitner woke to an active crime scene outside her Arizona apartment. Her neighbor had been sexually assaulted by a man who would later be identified as Claude Dean Hull II, a serial rapist who escaped justice for decades.

New identities; new states; new victims — more than 100 suspected across the country and thousands more victimized in myriad ways. Leitner’s 20-year compulsion to follow the investigation began.

She needed to question a failed system; to know the women whose lives were irrevocably altered; and to face the root of her obsession with Hull and his crimes.

In interviewing, befriending, and connecting with Hull’s survivors, Leitner crafts a true-crime narrative.

Leitner is a 12-time Emmy-award-winning journalist. She has worked as a network correspondent on The Today Show, Nightly News and MSNBC. Before that, she was an investigative reporter in New York City, Chicago and Phoenix.

Leitner was honored with George Foster Peabody and Edward R. Murrow awards for her international investigation into a U.S. government cover-up that revealed American soldiers had been forced to bury Agent Orange on a South Korean military base, leading to illnesses and deaths in innocent victims.
 
 
 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
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