How 23andMe will save the world

Welcome to Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Nestled slightly to the north on supernaturally stunning Vancouver Island is Saanich, Victoria’s sleepy sister burb. We do things like walk in the forest, roll our kayaks to the water’s edge, and keep chickens. It’s big news when local teens are murdered.

Jay Cook, twenty, was tall with soft feathered hair and brown eyes. Tanya Van Cuylenborg, eighteen, had strawberry blonde hair and a wide smile. We were close enough in age that I felt personally connected. On November 18, 1987, they took Jay’s father’s 1977 copper Ford Club Wagon on a road trip to Seattle, Washington, to pick up parts for Jay’s father’s furnace repair business. A trip I’ve made many times: take the Coho Black Ball ferry arriving in Port Angeles, hang a left, and drive the winding highway that grips the inlet coastline of the Pacific through dense forest to Seattle. Girl’s trips, running club trips, shopping trips, we know this road. Jay and Tanya didn’t. They got lost and missed the Hood Canal Bridge, ending up in Hoodsport, Washington, looking for snacks and directions. They were miles off track.

The cashier at the Hood Canal Grocery remembers them. She also remembers another young man entering the store right after them: rude and gruff in a brown rain slicker. It stuck in her mind that Tanya and Jay tried to avoid interacting with him.

The pair stopped again at Ben's Deli in Allyn. By this time it was after nine at night. They chatted with the cashier as they bought gas with Canadian money and commented that they were on track again to the Bremerton ferry.

A ticket for the 10:16 ferry was found in the van. After that, nothing.

On November 24, Tanya’s body was found in a ditch in Skagit County. She was naked from the waist down, except for her white socks, and had been bound with zip ties, sexually assaulted, and shot in the head. Investigators would find out that she was menstruating when they discovered a used tampon in the Ford. The next day, her wallet and keys were found under the porch at Essie’s Tavern in Bellingham. A closer look revealed her prescription, the keys to the Ford, ammunition similar to that with which she was shot, and two used surgical gloves. The Ford was found just blocks away. Inside the van was a blood-soaked comforter and more zip ties. In the ashtray, three types of cigarette butts: a Canadian brand, one with gold labelling in French, and Camels.

Jay’s body was found the following day, the 26th, sixty miles away. His upper body was wrapped in a blue blanket and he had been beaten with rocks and strangled with twine. He had two red dog collars around his neck and a pack of Camel cigarettes stuffed down his throat. He had died by asphyxiation.

Discarding the gloves with the rest of the evidence was a cocky move. Perhaps the killer had outfoxed investigators. The case went cold for thirty years.

But the evidence lay patient like a seed. The killer had left semen on Tanya’s pants (found inside the van) and on her body. Investigators could find no match, despite the conclusion that interpersonal violence of this intensity indicated it was not the suspect’s first time. On April 11, 2018, Parabon Nanolabs produced a composite sketch of the suspect using a technique called snapshot DNA phenotyping. There were no leads.

Enter at-home DNA kits. While DNA testing giants like AncestryDNA and 23andMe do not share client's data, there are opportunities for individuals to upload their deoxyribonucleic acid into sites like GEDmatch to find lost family connections. GEDmatch is available to law enforcement; it is the same database that investigators used to find the Golden State killer. Twenty-six million folks spit in a vial and uploaded their raw DNA data files online to increase the chance of finding distant relatives, expanding the scope of the search.

By chance, Chelsea Rustad won an AncesteryDNA kit and decided to give it a go, uploading the results to GEDmatch. Bingo! Her DNA was a 3% match to the suspect, indicating as per the match threshold that she was likely a second cousin. Another second cousin of the suspect took a similar test and uploaded results. These two second cousins were not from the same family but genetic genealogist CeCe Moore followed the family tree through marriage to narrow the potential suspect down to one nuclear family. The father of that family was disabled as a result of a motorcycle accident over a decade before the murders, making him an unlikely suspect. That family had four children. Three of them were girls. The son, William Earl Talbott II, would have been twenty four at the time.

In 2018 William Earl Talbott II was a 55 years old trucker. Plainclothes investigators tailed Talbott until a disposable coffee cup rolled out of his truck. Talbott was a match. He was taken into custody and a cheek swab confirmed the perfect match.

The murders of Jay Cook and Tanya Van Cuylenborg was the first case to be tried in the court of law on the basis of genetic genealogy and the first to have a conviction. William received two life sentences. His defense argued that the sex with Tanya was consensual, but prosecutors successfully argued that a teen would not be likely to engage in sex with a stranger, while with her boyfriend, while menstruating, without protection at the height of the AIDS crisis.

The way in which Jay and Tanya were killed led investigators to believe it was not Talbott's first time. How many times before and how many times in the thirty years that followed? How many times have we all been on the same highway, in the same gas station getting directions and snacks?

Rest in peace, you two.