DNA Exposed the Truth After 31 Years of Hiding

Yesterday, we took into custody a 55-year-old SeaTac man who is suspected of the 1987 murders of Jay Cook and Tanya Ben Kylin Burf. >> Investigators in Washington State are pushing hard tonight for a breakthrough in a cold case murder that has been unsolved for more than two decades. >> The last time her family saw Tanya or her boyfriend Jay Cook was November 1987.

 The young Victoria couple had taken the ferry from the capitol to Seattle headed to a business. On the evening of November 18th, 1987, a young couple stood on the deck of a ferry leaving Sydney, British Columbia, watching the lights of the harbor shrink behind them. Tanya Van Kylenborg had brought her Minulta camera slung over one shoulder because she wanted pictures of this trip.

 It was the first time she and her boyfriend Jay Cook had gone anywhere together that was really just theirs. Even if the reason for the trip was about as unromantic as it gets. His father needed furnace parts from a supplier in Seattle and Jay had volunteered to make the drive. He could have taken the interstate and been there in a few hours.

 Instead, he mapped out a longer route, fairies and back roads and small towns because he knew Tanya loved to see new places. And he wanted this to feel like something more than an errand. It meant more driving, more stops, more time spent just the two of them in his father’s old van. And that was exactly the point.

 She had her camera ready for exactly that reason. She meant to fill it with photographs of a trip that, as far as anyone could tell, was going to be simple and good and completely unremarkable. But those photographs were never taken because somewhere between that fairy dock and whatever came next, the camera disappeared along with everything else.

Welcome back to Tira True Crime. Today we’re covering the case of Jay Cook and Tanya Van Kylenborg, two young people from Vancouver Island whose disappearance in 1987 turned into one of the most important cold cases in American criminal history. Not just because of what happened to them, but because of how 31 years later, a stranger who had never heard their names helped bring their killer’s name into the light.

 If you’re new here, go ahead and subscribe and drop a comment letting us know where you’re watching from. We read every single one. Now, let’s get into it. Tanya Van Kylenborg was born on March 7th, 1969 and was 18 years old. Freshly out of high school in Sonnage, a quiet town on Vancouver Island. She’d been seeing Jay for about 6 months, and by most accounts, she was still figuring out whether she wanted anything serious, while he had already decided he was in love with her.

 Her father would later say he wasn’t worried in the slightest about letting the two of them go off together, the kind of trust parents only extend when they’re certain their child is in good hands. Jay was 20, the only son in his family, working for his father’s small heating business alongside his sisters, still trying to work out what he wanted to do with his life.

 He wasn’t sure yet whether heating and furnace repair was the path he wanted, and he’d even begun quietly considering something in marine biology instead, though nothing about that plan had solidified. Neither of them had any way of knowing that this one trip taken for the plainest reason imaginable would be the last thing either family ever watched them do.

They crossed to Port Angeles that afternoon, stopped for snacks along the way, and continued down through some of the most sparsely populated stretches of Washington state, past dense stands of trees and long gaps between towns where a person could drive for miles without passing another car.

 A grocery clerk in the small town of Hoodsport later remembered giving them directions after Jay missed a turn, which meant that as of that evening, both of them were still alive and still on schedule, still laughing off a wrong turn, the way any couple would on a long drive. By 10:16 that night, they had reached Breton and bought tickets for the last ferry crossing into Seattle.

 That’s where the trail ends. Ferry workers recalled seeing them bored. No one can say for certain what happened once they reached the other side, but the physical evidence would later confirm they did make it across the water. What nobody could explain was why the next morning they never showed up to collect the furnace parts they’d driven all that way to pick up.

Hours passed at the suppliers counter with no sign of them. And more troubling than that, at least to anyone who knew them, was the silence that followed. Tanya called her parents constantly, no matter where she was, using payoneses and borrowed lines whenever she needed to. And this time, the phone in her family’s house simply didn’t ring.

 By November 20th, both families had gone to the police, only to be told that a formal search couldn’t begin until 3 days had passed since there was no evidence yet of foul play. Tanya’s father, a lawyer, understood the legal reasoning behind that rule better than most people would have, but understanding it didn’t make it easier to sit and wait.

 He hired a helicopter and searched the countryside himself, handing out flyers through Seattle while trying not to think about what kind of place Washington State had already proven itself to be for people who went missing and were never seen again. He kept coming back to the same quiet hope that maybe they had simply gotten delayed somewhere.

 Maybe there was still an explanation that didn’t end the way he feared it would. On November 24th, 6 days after the ferry pulled away from Sydney, a man out walking near Alger, Washington, collecting cans along a rural stretch of road, found a body lying in a ditch below a steep embankment. It was Tanya. She had been shot once in the back of the head.

 her hands bound behind her with plastic zip ties. And she had clearly been sexually assaulted before she died. She had been left there alone for nearly a week before anyone found her in a place no one would have thought to look unless they happened to be walking exactly that stretch of road that morning.

 That same day, a bartender at a tavern in Bellingham discovered a wallet and a set of keys behind the building while he was out on a smoke break. The wallet belonged to Tanya. Police searching the area found more zip ties matching the ones used to bind her. And not far away, in a parking lot near the Greyhound station, they found the Cook family van, the one Jay had borrowed for the trip, its interior covered in blood belonging to both of them.

 For a brief and painful stretch, investigators had to consider Jay as a suspect simply because he was the last person known to have been with her, and he was still missing. Both families rejected the idea immediately and angrily, insisting it made no sense, but police couldn’t rule it out on Faith alone.

 That suspicion didn’t survive long. 2 days later, on November 26th, a hunter came across a second body under a bridge in Snowomish County. nearly 60 miles from where Tanya had been found. It was Jay. Where Tanya’s death had been quick, his had not. He’d been beaten, strangled with twine and a pair of dog collars, and left with a pack of cigarettes shoved down his throat.

Almost as if the person responsible wanted to make sure there was no mistaking the cruelty involved. Two bodies 60 mi apart. Two entirely different methods of killing. And yet the same type of zip ties turned up at every scene beside Tanya inside the van at the tavern near Jay. Whoever had done this had moved across four different counties with total control over the situation, discarding evidence and bodies as he went.

 And somewhere in all of that, he left behind something he couldn’t take back. His own DNA. recovered from semen on the black pants Tanya had been wearing. It became known in the case file simply as individual A. And in 1987, having a DNA sample without a suspect to compare it to meant having almost nothing at all. The science existed just barely.

 DNA had only been used in an American criminal case for the first time the year before. But there was no wide database yet. No easy way to run a sample against millions of strangers. A sample without a name attached to it was for all practical purposes a dead end waiting to happen. The investigation spread across four jurisdictions and produced very little that held together.

 Two known serial killers active in the region at the time, Robert Yates and Charles Sinclair, were both looked at closely and both ruled out through DNA. A man who was later revealed to have serious mental illness sent taunting letters to both families for years, claiming responsibility, and it would take until 2010 to confirm he had nothing to do with the murders at all.

 More than two decades spent partly chasing someone who had simply wanted attention. Someone who had latched on to a tragedy that wasn’t his to claim. More than 200 names passed through the file over the years. Convicted felons, opportunists, men who fit some rough physical description or another. None of them matched.

 In 1995, Snowomish County Detective Jim Sharf helped start a cold case unit, and this became one of the first files the unit picked up. He would end up spending the better part of the next 23 years connected to it in one way or another, watching DNA technology slowly improve while the answer he needed kept refusing to surface.

 In 2003, he ran individual A’s profile through the national codas database, which by then held DNA from millions of offenders across the country. Nothing came back. The man who had left his DNA at four separate crime scenes had simply never been convicted of anything that would have put him in that system in the first place, which meant that no matter how good the technology got, it was searching a room he had never once set foot in.

Meanwhile, on Vancouver Island, both families kept living inside a question that refused to close. Jay’s mother, Leona, never stopped believing that answers would eventually come, even as the years stretched on with nothing to show for it. Birthdays and holidays passing the way they do for everyone else, while her son’s case sat untouched in a filing cabinet 300 m away.

 In 2017, 30 years after the murders, Sharf tried something new. He sent individual A’s DNA to a company called Parabon Nanolabs, which used a technique called phenotyping to estimate physical traits directly from a genetic sample, skin tone, eye color, the rough shape of a face at different ages. For the first time in three decades, Sharf had something resembling a picture instead of just a code sitting in a database.

Though even that image would only ever be an approximation, a guess built from probability rather than a photograph. But the real turning point came through a connection at that same lab, a genetic genealogologist named CC Moore, who would soon do something with individual A’s DNA that no traditional investigative technique had managed to do in 31 years.

In 2015, a woman in Washington State named Chelsea Rustad took a DNA test out of Simple Curiosity, the same reason millions of other people were doing it that year, and uploaded her results to a public genealogy database called GED Match, so she could learn more about her own family tree.

 She had never heard of Jay Cook or Tanya Van Kylenborg. She had no idea that a distant unknown branch of her own family carried a secret that would eventually connect back to her computer screen, waiting there quietly for 3 years until someone came looking. In 2018, Moore uploaded individual A’s profile to that same database and began comparing it against roughly a million other users, searching for anyone who shared enough DNA to be a close relative.

 She found two people who each appeared to be second cousins of the killer, though the two of them weren’t related to each other in any way that was immediately obvious, which meant they belonged to two separate branches of the same unknown family tree. One of those matches was Chelsea Rustad. Working from those two starting points, Moore began building family trees outward, tracing shared ancestors and following the branches back down again, narrowing the possibilities by gender, by age, by geography, until the two separate family lines converged on a

single household. A woman named Patricia Talbett had married a man named William Earl Talbett, and the couple had four children, three daughters, and one son. Since the DNA evidence made clear the killer was male, that left exactly one name, William Earl Talbett II. It took Moore about 2 hours to get there.

 2 hours to do what 31 years of traditional police work had not been able to accomplish. When Sharf got the call, he later admitted he wasn’t sure he believed it at first. Talbot had no criminal record of any kind. His name had never once appeared anywhere in the case file. Not on a tip sheet, not in a witness statement, nowhere.

 But when detectives looked closer, the details started lining up in a way that was hard to dismiss. In 1987, Talbot had worked as a delivery driver with roots running straight through the area Jay and Tanya had been heading toward, and he’d been let go from that job only a few months before the murders, leaving him with free time and few obligations.

He lived only a handful of miles from the bridge, where Jay’s body was eventually found. A genetic match built from public genealogy records was enough to point investigators in the right direction, but it wasn’t enough on its own to bring charges. For that, Sharf needed a direct sample of Talbot’s own DNA, obtained without tipping him off that he was a suspect in a double murder.

 Talbot was working as a truck driver by then, largely cut off from his family and living a quiet, solitary existence, which made him difficult to approach and easy to overlook. a man who kept almost no footprint online and had drifted out of contact with nearly everyone who once knew him. So, investigators began following him, waiting for the one ordinary moment that would hand them what they needed.

 It happened at a red light. Talbot opened his truck door for a second and a paper coffee cup dropped out onto the street, rolling in the wind as he drove off without noticing. Detectives collected it immediately and rushed it to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. When forensic scientist Lisa Collins compared the DNA on that cup to the profile that had waited in storage since 1987, she found a perfect match.

 The statistical odds against it belonging to anyone else were placed at roughly 1 in 180 quadrillion. A number so large it barely functions as a number at all. more like a way of saying there was no longer any real doubt. On May 18th, 2018, exactly 31 years to the day after the ferry pulled away from Sydney, William Earl Talbett II was arrested and charged with Tanya’s murder.

 Charges for Jay’s murder followed soon after once prosecutors had built out the full case against him. At the press conference announcing the arrest, Jay’s sister described a feeling of relief and joy sitting right beside a deep and lasting sadness. Leona Cook, Jay’s mother, put it more plainly than anyone.

 She said they were moving toward closure, but she still didn’t have her only son. The trial began in June of 2019 in Everett, Washington, and it carried weight far beyond this one case since it was among the very first trials anywhere to test whether evidence built through public genetic genealogy could hold up in a courtroom with legal experts across the country watching closely to see what precedent it might set.

 The defense didn’t dispute that the DNA belonged to Talbot. Instead, they argued that he and Tanya had consensual sex that night and that someone else, unnamed, unproven, entirely hypothetical, had gone on to kill both of them afterward. Prosecutors dismantled that theory with a detail that was as simple as it was damning. Tanya had been found without her pants or underwear out in the cold of a Washington November days after the encounter the defense was describing as consensual.

 If that story were true, she would have had every reason to get dressed again afterward. She hadn’t. That fact, combined with the matching zip ties recovered at every single crime scene and a palm print on the van that matched Talbot’s own, left very little room for the defense’s version of events to survive.

 The jury reached its verdict on June 28th, 2019. Guilty on two counts of aggravated first-degree murder. One for Tanya, one for Jay. William Earl Talbot II was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole. 31 years and 7 months after he left two teenagers dead in the woods of Washington State, and simply drove home to a life no one thought to look at twice.

 He was never going to be found through fingerprints or witnesses or a lucky tip. He was found because a woman named Chelsea Rustad, who had no connection to any of this beyond blood she didn’t know she shared, decided one afternoon to spit into a plastic tube out of curiosity about where her family came from.

 In December 2021, that guilty verdict was briefly thrown out on appeal after it came to light that one of the seated jurors may have carried an undisclosed bias from her own history with domestic abuse. For a moment, both families had to face the possibility of living through the entire process again, of sitting through another trial, another set of testimonies, another wait for a jury to decide.

 But in December 2022, the Washington Supreme Court reinstated the conviction in full, ruling that the defense had every opportunity to challenge that juror during selection and simply hadn’t used it. The life sentences stood. They still stand today. Individual A had a name now, a face, a cell he will not leave for the rest of his life.

 35 years after that ferry pulled away from the dock, justice finally arrived. later than anyone would have wanted, but complete and no longer able to be taken back. If this case stayed with you, let us know in the comments. And if you’re new here, don’t forget to subscribe. There are more stories where this one came from.

We’ll see you in the next one. Thank you.