WASHINGTON 1987 Cold Case Solved — The First Genetic Genealogy Jury Verdict 

On a Tuesday morning in May 2018, a white paper coffee cup tumbled out of a semitr at a red light in South Seattle. The driver didn’t notice. He kept going. Two plain officers in an unmarked car watched it fall. One of them stepped out, picked it up with a gloved hand, sealed it in an evidence bag, and called in the words a detective had waited 31 years to hear.

 The DNA on that coffee cup matched a killer who had been walking free since November 1987. a killer who had murdered two young Canadians on a simple overnight trip, dumped their bodies 60 m apart in two different Washington counties, and never left a single fingerprint. For three decades, nobody knew his name. Not the FBI, not two county sheriff’s departments, not the families who buried their children and spent every Thanksgiving wondering who had taken them.

 Then a genealogologist sat down at her computer, uploaded a DNA profile to a public database, and found him in 2 hours. His name was William Earl Talbot II. That was June 2019. 13 months after his arrest, a jury in Snowomish County convicted him of two counts of aggravated [music] first-degree murder. It was the first jury conviction in American history built on genetic genealogy evidence.

This is the story of how a cold case that haunted two countries for 31 years was cracked open by a science that didn’t exist when the crime happened and why the verdict almost didn’t survive. If this is your first time on Cold Case Redemption, this is what we do. We go deep on the cases that everyone thought would stay buried.

 the victims who waited decades for justice and the people who refuse to give up on them. If that sounds like something you want more of, drop a like on this video and hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. But this story doesn’t start with a coffee cup on a Seattle street corner. [music] It starts with two kids on Vancouver Island who had their entire lives ahead of them.

Tanya Van Kylenborg was 18 years old in November 1987. [music] She had graduated from Oak Bay High School in Seyanic, British Columbia just 5 months earlier in June of that year. Her yearbook noted she played on the senior girls basketball team, a team she had actually lobbyed the school to create.

 That detail tells you something about her. She didn’t wait [music] for somebody else to make the thing she wanted happen. She went and made it happen herself. Her friends knew her for her sarcasm and what they called her many different laughs. She was a sailor who grew up on family boating trips through the cold green waters around the sish sea.

 A casual guitar player whose favorite band was You too. and an animal lover who took care of cats, fish, gerbles, and a golden retriever named Tessa that she had begged her mother for years to get. She dreamed of working with animals, maybe as a veterinarian, maybe as a photographer. She was saving money for a trip to Holland to visit family on her father’s side.

 She had already been to Paris on a high school trip. She lived with her parents William and John Van Kylinborg on an acre property with a tennis court where she played her older brother John. John was 21 and studying at the University of British Columbia at the time about an hour and a half away by ferry and car. The Van Kylenborg family was close.

 [music] They had roots in both Canada and the Netherlands and they had built a quiet, comfortable life on Vancouver Island. [music] The kind of life where the biggest drama was Tanya lobbying for a dog. Jay Cook was 20. He stood 6’4, broad-shouldered and left-handed. He had worked on a commercial fishing boat out on the Pacific and at a pizza restaurant closer to home. He played bass guitar.

His uncle once said that Jay had no rough edges, and everyone who knew him seemed to agree with that. He was the kind of guy who took his younger sister Laura out for high tea using money he earned on the fishing boat. Not because anyone asked him to, just because he thought she’d enjoy it. He was also close with his other sister, Kelly, and both of them would later say that Jay was the steady presence in the family, the one who showed up and made things feel safe just by being in the room.

Jay and Tanya met at Oak Bay High School, though they were in different years. [music] They had been dating for about 5 or 6 months by November 1987, having gotten together sometime in the spring or summer of that year. They lived in the same neighborhood in Sanich on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, a quiet suburb of Victoria, British Columbia.

Jay’s parents, Gordon and Leona Cook, ran a furnace and heating business. Jay had two sisters, Laura and Kelly. The trip that brought them to Washington State was supposed to be the most ordinary thing in the world. Jay needed to pick up some recycled furnace parts and a money order, about $750, from a company called Gensco in Seattle’s Sodo Industrial District.

Gordon lent Jay his bronze 1977 Ford Club wagon van. The plan was simple. Drive down, sleep in the van near the store, pick up the parts in the morning, and drive back to Sanage the next day. They left on a Wednesday afternoon. And that’s worth pausing on for a second because every detail of Tanya and Jay’s lives before this trip be matters.

 Not because it changes the facts of the case, but because when a crime like this defines how people are remembered, the first thing that gets erased is who they actually were. Tanya was a girl who fought to get a basketball team started at her school. Jay was a guy who took his sister to high tea. Those are the people at the center of this story, not just names attached to a case file.

 If you’re watching this and you appreciate that we take the time to tell you who these people were before we tell you what happened to them, that means a lot. Consider subscribing to Cold Case Redemption. Every case we cover starts right here with the people who deserved better. On November 18th, 1987, a Wednesday afternoon, Jay and Tanya boarded the 4pm MV COO ferry from Victoria to Port Angeles, Washington.

 The coo runs across the straight of Juan Fuca, about 90 minutes of open water between Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula. They arrived on the American side around 5:30 in the evening, driving the Bronze Ford van off the ramp and onto Highway 101. As the last light faded over the mountains to the west from Port Angeles, they needed to drive east and then south towards Seattle.

Investigators later believed that they missed a turn somewhere in the dark, possibly the exit for the Hood Canal Bridge and ended up heading south through Mason County instead of cutting across the peninsula on the more direct route. November on the Olympic Peninsula means rain, fog, and dark country roads. Two young Canadians who had never made the drive before, navigating by paper maps in an unfamiliar state, could easily miss a turnoff.

Around 8:00 p.m., they were spotted buying snacks at the Hoodport Grocery, a small store in Mason County along the western shore of Hood Canal. About 90 minutes later, around 9:29 p.m., a clerk at Ben’s Deli in the small town of Allen, about 30 mi further south, remembered them coming in.

 That sighting at Ben’s Deli in Allen, Washington, was the last confirmed time anyone saw Tanya Van Kylenborg and Jay Cook alive together. At some point after that, they made their way to a ferry terminal in Breton and boarded a boat across Puet Sound to Seattle. A ferry ticket found later in the van was stamped 10:16 p.m. on November 18th.

 That ticket is the last trace of their movements. After 10:16 p.m. on that Wednesday night, there is nothing. No phone calls, no fuel receipts, no [music] sightings, just silence. November 19th came and went. Jay and Tanya were supposed to pick up the furnace parts from Gensko that morning and drive home. They didn’t show up at the warehouse.

 They didn’t call home. Nobody heard from them. On November 20th, both the Cook and Van Kylenborg families reported them missing. This was 1987. There were no cell phones, no GPS tracking, no way to ping a location or trace a route. When someone went quiet, you had to physically go looking for them.

 John Van Kylinborg and his father, Bill, traveled from Victoria to the Seattle area. Retracing [music] the route they thought Jay and Tanya would have taken. They drove the highways. They checked rest stops and motel. A friend of Bills actually flew a small plane over the Olympic Peninsula, scanning the roads and pulloffs from the air for the bronze Ford van.

They found nothing. The silence lasted 6 days and then the worst possible thing happened. On November 24th, 1987, a man walking along Parson’s Creek Road [music] near the tiny community of Alger in Scadget County, about 80 mi north of Seattle, was collecting aluminum cans along the roadside.

 In a ditch off the rural road, he found the body of Tanya Vanquenborg. Tanya had been bound with plastic zip ties. She had been sexually assaulted. She had been shot once in the back of the head at close [music] range with a 380 caliber pistol. A spent shell casing was found near her body. Her father Bill and her brother John drove to a funeral home in Mount Vernon, Washington to identify her.

 That identification is something Jon has carried with him for the rest of his life. The next day, November 25th, 1987, police found more evidence in the city of Bellingham, about 20 m north of where Tanya’s body was discovered. Under the back porch of a tavern called Essies near the Greyhound bus station, they recovered Tanya’s wallet, the van keys, a box of 380 caliber ammunition, and a single surgical glove.

 A few blocks away, the bronze 1977 Ford van was found locked and abandoned in a parking lot. Inside the van, investigators found more zip ties that matched the ones [music] used to bind Tanya, additional surgical gloves, fuel, and food receipts, including the Breton ferry ticket, and clothing belonging to Tanya. That clothing would later yield the most critical piece of evidence in the entire case.

 DNA from an unknown male, eventually cataloged as individual A. Tanya’s Manulta camera was missing from the van. Its lens was later traced to a pawn shop in Portland, Oregon in 1990, but the camera body was never recovered. That loose thread has never been explained. 2 days after Tanya was found on November 26th, Thanksgiving Day, two hunters walked beneath a bridge near the city of Monroe in Snowhomeish County.

Monroe sits in the Skycomish River Valley surrounded by foothills in farmland about 30 mi northeast of Seattle. Under that bridge, they found the body of Jay Cook. He was roughly 60 mi south of where Tanya had been found in Scadget County. He had been beaten with rocks and strangled with twine and two red dog collars.

A pack of cigarettes had been forced down his [music] throat. His body was partially covered with a light blue blanket that did not belong to the couple and has never been traced to its owner. Jay was 20 years old, 6’4, a guy who played bass guitar and took his sister to high tea. And he was found under a bridge on Thanksgiving, 60 mi from his girlfriend.

 Killed in a completely different way. Tanya was shot. Jay was beaten and strangled. Different weapons, different locations, different counties. But one detail linked every single scene. Zip ties. The same type of plastic zip ties were found binding Tanya’s wrists at Jay’s crime scene near Monroe, [music] inside the Ford van in Bellingham, and at the tavern where Tanya’s belongings were discarded.

 Investigators also lifted a palm print from the rear window of the van. The same person had been at every location. The same person had done all of this. And whatever happened between the Breton Ferry at 10:16 p.m. and the discovery of Tanya’s body 6 days later, this person had taken the time to drive those two victims to two separate locations, kill them in two separate ways, and scatter evidence across three counties. That’s not a panicked act.

That’s someone who had time, who had a vehicle, and who knew the roads. This is where the story takes a turn nobody expected. Or rather, a turn that didn’t come because the investigation that followed should have been one of the biggest manhunts in the Pacific Northwest. Instead, it became one of the longest cold cases in Washington state history.

The case was a jurisdictional puzzle from the start. Two victims found in two different counties, Scadget and Snowhomeish, with evidence scattered across a third county, Wattcom, [music] and a crime that likely began in a fourth King County near the Seattle Ferry Terminal. Add in the fact that the victims were Canadian citizens from British Columbia, and you had two countries, multiple ferry systems, and [music] at least four law enforcement agencies trying to coordinate.

 In the early days of the investigation, before Jay’s body was discovered, some investigators briefly floated the idea that Jay himself might have been involved in Tanya’s murder. Both families rejected that theory completely. When Jay’s body was found on Thanksgiving Day beaten and strangled under that bridge near Monroe, the theory died with it.

 Detectives recovered a DNA profile from the biological evidence connected to the assault on Tanya. The unknown male donor was designated individual A. But in 1987, forensic DNA analysis, was still in its infancy. The technology existed barely, but the databases needed to match an unknown profile to a known person simply did not.

 Over the following months and years, investigators pursued more than 200 leads. They canvased vehicles along the route from Port Angeles to Seattle. They interviewed truckers, ferry workers, gas station attendants, and locals in every town the couple had passed through. They looked at [music] convicted sex offenders. They looked at people with connections to the Monroe area.

 One lead focused on the Monroe Honor Farm, a prison facility near where Jay’s body was found, based on a theory that the method [music] of killing suggested someone with a prison background. That theory went [music] nowhere. A known serial offender named Charles Sinclair was investigated and definitively ruled out by DNA. And then there were the postcards.

 In the months after the murders, both the Van Kylenborg and Cook families began receiving greeting cards and postcards in the mail. The messages [music] described the crimes in disturbing detail. They were postmarked from Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York, all written by the same hand. For years, the families and investigators wondered if the killer was taunting them.

 In 2010, police finally identified the author. He was a 78-year-old Canadian transient with mental health issues who had somehow obtained the family’s home addresses. DNA confirmed he was not the killer, just a deeply disturbed person who had read about the case and decided to [music] inject himself into the family’s grief.

 I mean, think about that for a second. As if losing a child to murder wasn’t enough, these families then spent years receiving handwritten cards from someone describing how their children died. And every time one arrived, they had to wonder whether the person writing was the person responsible. For years, that question hung in the air.

 Was the killer watching them? Was he close? The answer turned out to be no. But they didn’t know that until 2010. 23 years of wondering. Seattle police detective Robert Gibo, [music] who was involved in the early stages of the investigation, noted something about the surgical gloves found in the van and at the tavern in Bellingham.

 the killer had left them behind in plain view. Gibo believed that was deliberate. He said the killer left those gloves as a sign to the police, a taunt. You needn’t look for fingerprints because I wore these gloves. Whether that was actually the killer’s intention or simply carelessness, [music] it pointed to someone who had thought about what he was doing.

 Someone [music] who came prepared. In 1995, Detective Jim Sharf of the Snowhomeish County Sheriff’s Office helped form a cold case team, and the Cook and Van Kylenborg murders became one of the first cases they picked up. Sharf was a meticulous investigator, the kind of detective who doesn’t let a case go, even when it lets go of him.

 He would go on to work the Van Kylenborg and Cook case for well over a decade, carrying the files from one year to the next, [music] running down new leads whenever they surfaced and keeping in touch with both families. In 2003, with DNA database technology finally mature enough to be useful, [music] the Washington State Patrol uploaded individual A’s DNA profile to Kotus, the FBI’s national criminal offender database.

Millions of convicted felons were in that system by then. The search came back with no matches. Whoever killed Tanya and Jay had never been arrested for a felony anywhere in the United States. He wasn’t in the system. He was, for all practical purposes, a ghost. The families kept waiting. They kept the case alive with media appearances, newspaper interviews, [music] and a reward that eventually grew to $50,000.

But the years stacked up and the leads dried out and the case settled into the particular kind of limbo that cold cases occupy. Not closed, but not moving. The file sits on a shelf. The detective checks it once a year. The family calls on the anniversary and nothing changes. Tanya’s father, Bill Van Kylenborg, [music] died on May 14, 1997 at the age of 61.

 He never learned who murdered his daughter. John Van Kylenborg, Tanya’s brother, became the family’s point of contact with investigators after his father’s death. He later wrote to the court that for years after losing Tanya, he couldn’t enjoy music or movies because happiness felt like a betrayal of his sister’s memory.

 Jay’s mother, Leona Cook, set Jay’s place at the family dinner table for an entire year after his death. She kept one of his old sweaters. She would hold it up to her face just to smell him. 31 years is a [music] long time to carry that weight, but neither family let go of it. Not for a single day. If you’ve stayed with us this far into the story, [music] you already know this case doesn’t stay cold.

 But I want you to understand what 31 years of nothing actually feels like for the people living through it before we get to the [music] part where everything changes. If you don’t want to miss how this case finally breaks open, now is a good time to make sure you’re subscribed. By April of 2018, the landscape of forensic investigation was about to shift in a way that nobody in law enforcement fully anticipated.

On April 25th, 2018, authorities in California announced the arrest of Joseph James D’Angelo, better known as the Golden State Killer. He had terrorized California for over a decade in the 1970s and 80s, [music] committing at least 13 murders and more than 50 sexual assaults. For 40 years, nobody knew who he was.

 Then investigators uploaded his crime scene DNA to a free public genealogy database called GED Match, found distant relatives, built a family tree, and landed on D’Angelo. The arrest made international news [music] and in Snowhomeish County, Washington, Detective Jim Sharf was watching. He had already been working with a virginiabased forensic science company called Parabon Nanolabs, which had [music] produced composite images of what the Van Kylenborg and Cook Killer might look like at ages 25, 45, and 65 using [music] a technology called

snapshot DNA phenotyping. The composits suggested a man with fair skin, hazel eyes, freckles, reddish blonde hair, and a gene associated with male pattern baldness. Those composits were useful, but they weren’t a name. Sharf needed a name. And the Golden State Killer arrest showed him exactly how to get one.

Parabon connected Sharf with their chief genetic genealogologist, a woman named CC Moore. Moore was [music] a self-taught genealogy expert who had spent years building her reputation in the public genealogy world. She was best known for her work on the PBS series Finding Your Roots with Henry Lewis Gates Jr.

 where she helped celebrities and public figures trace their family histories through DNA analysis. She was meticulous, fast, and deeply knowledgeable about how DNA inheritance works [music] across generations. But she had never worked a criminal case, not once. Moore had actually struggled [music] with the ethical implications of using public DNA databases for law enforcement purposes.

 These databases, GED match being the largest at the time, were built by ordinary people, hobbyists, ancestry enthusiasts, people looking for biological parents or distant relatives. They uploaded their DNA profiles voluntarily for personal reasons. Using that data to catch criminals was a fundamentally different proposition, and Moore had wrestled with it.

 But after GED Match updated its terms of service to explicitly permit searches related to violent crimes and after the Golden State Killer arrest demonstrated the technique’s potential, Moore decided she was ready. The Van Kylenborg and Cook case would be CC Moore’s first criminal investigation. The case that launched her career in forensic work, and the way it unfolded was something she never could have predicted.

Here’s how forensic genetic genealogy works in simple terms. When a crime scene yields DNA from an unknown person, that DNA profile can be uploaded to a public genealogy database like GED Match, where hundreds of thousands of ordinary people have already uploaded their own DNA for ancestry research. [music] The database doesn’t need to contain the suspect’s own DNA.

 It just needs to contain DNA from the suspect’s relatives, even distant ones. If the system finds someone who shares a significant amount of DNA with the unknown profile, a genealogologist can estimate how closely related they are. Sharing about 3% of your DNA with someone, for example, typically means you share great grandparents.

 You’re probably second cousins. From there, the genealogologist builds family trees. You start with the known relative and work backward [music] through generations. Then trace the branches forward to identify living descendants. If you can find relatives on both the mother’s side and the father’s side of the suspect’s family, you can build two trees and look for the place where they intersect.

Where two independent family lines converge on a single person, you have your lead. That’s the theory. [music] In practice, it can take weeks or months of painstaking genealogical research, sifting through census records, birth certificates, marriage records, and obituaries. Sometimes the trees branch into hundreds of possible candidates.

Sometimes the matches are so distant that the family connection spans five or six generations. But that’s not what happened with this case. On April 27th, 2018, Parabon uploaded individual A’s DNA profile to GED Match. The database contained fewer than 1 million users at the time.

 The next day, April [music] 28th, 2018, CC Moore sat down at her computer and began looking at the results. She found two matches, two people in the database who each shared approximately 3% of their DNA with the unknown killer. One appeared to be related on the maternal side, the other on the paternal side. Exactly the scenario a genetic genealogologist hopes for, two independent entry points into the suspect’s family tree.

 Moore built both trees backward. She traced each match to the great-grandparent level, mapping out who those great-grandparents were, where they lived, who they married, [music] and how many children they had. Then she traced the branches forward generation by generation, following the descendants through marriages and births, watching the two independent family lines converge.

 Both trees pointed to a couple in the Woodenville and Monroe area of Washington State. William Talbot, Senior, and Patricia Talbot. They had one son. CeCe Moore found the name in approximately two hours. She later told CBS News that she had never had another case where the pieces came together that fast.

 She spent several more days verifying the identification before telling anyone, cross-referencing records, and checking for errors. But the core discovery, [music] the name at the center of those two converging family trees, took about 2 hours. One detail stood out immediately. The man at the end of those family lines had almost no online footprint.

 In 2018, that was unusual. No social media, no public records trail beyond the basics. Moore noticed it. One of the second cousins whose GED match upload had made the match possible. [music] A woman named Chelsea Roostad from Tumbwater, Washington noticed it, too. The man’s name was William Earl Talbett II.

 Born around 1963, he was 24 years old at the time of the murders. In 1987, he lived in the Woodenville area of Washington, and his parents’ home sat less than seven miles from the bridge near Monroe, where Jay Cook’s [music] body had been found. That’s a straight shot drive with one turn. He had worked as a delivery driver, and an acquaintance later told investigators that Talbot’s route in 1987 passed directly by Gensko, the Seattle warehouse where Jay and Tanya had been headed, to pick up those furnace parts.

He had been fired from his job a few months before the murders. He had no felony criminal record. His only known encounter with the justice system was a 1984 misdemeanor assault charge in King County, which he resolved with a guilty plea and a deferred sentence that required anger management counseling. A misdemeanor does not put your DNA into COS.

 It does not put you on a sex offender registry. It barely leaves a trace. Talbot had never appeared on any suspect list in 31 years of investigation. Over 200 names had been examined by detectives across three decades, and his was not among them. But knowing a name and proving a murder are very different things. CC Moore was careful to emphasize that her identification was an investigative lead, a tip, not proof.

 Genetic genealogy can tell you who a person’s relatives are. It can tell you which family the DNA belongs to, but it cannot by itself prove that a specific individual committed a specific crime. To make a case that would hold up in court, investigators needed Talbot’s actual DNA collected independently to compare against individual A’s profile.

and they couldn’t just knock on his door and ask for a cheek swab. That would tip him off. If he was the killer and he realized he was under suspicion, he could run. He could destroy evidence. He could lawyer up before they had anything to charge him with. They needed his DNA without him knowing they were looking.

Detective Sharf’s team began surveillance. They followed Talbot, now 55 years old, and working as a semi-truck driver living in SeaTac, Washington. He was unmarried with no children. He had been estranged from his own family for nearly 20 years. He lived a quiet, solitary life. They watched him. They waited.

 And they looked for what law enforcement calls an abandoned DNA sample. Something he discarded voluntarily in a public space. a cigarette butt, a napkin, a straw, anything that would carry his DNA, and that he had no expectation of keeping. On May 8th, 2018, it happened. A white paper coffee cup fell from Talbot’s truck cab at a red light in South Seattle.

 Officers retrieved it with gloved hands and rushed it to the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory. The next day, May 9th, forensic scientist Lisa Collins confirmed what CC Moore’s family trees had predicted. The DNA on that coffee cup was a match to individual A. The man who had left his DNA at the crime scene where Tanya Vanquenborg was found in 1987 was William Earl Talbot II.

 On May 17th, 2018, Talbot was arrested as he left work around 6:00 in the evening. The arrest was publicly announced the following day. He was initially charged with first-degree murder in the death of Tanya. In June 2018, a second charge was added for the murder of Jay Cook. When Detective Sharf made the call to tell John Van Kyenborg that an arrest had been made, Jon later recalled that it sent a shiver down his spine.

 After 31 years, the man who killed his sister was finally in custody seeing Talbot for the first time. John said he felt just reviled. Jay’s sister, Laura Banstra, put it differently. She said that yesterday the killer had his last sleep in his own bed. His last coffee break, his last day of freedom. William Earl Talba II pleaded not guilty.

His trial began with jury selection on June 11th, 2019 in Snowhomeish County Superior [music] Court with Judge Linda Crease presiding. Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecutor Matthew Balddock led the case for the state. Public defenders Rachel Ford and John [music] Scott represented Talbot. From the start, everyone involved understood that this trial was different.

 Not just because of the horrific nature of the crimes, and not just because of the 31-year gap [music] between the murders and the arrest. This was the first time in American history that a suspect identified through investigative genetic genealogy was going before a jury. The legal community was watching. The forensic science community was watching.

 CC Moore and Parabon Nanolabs were watching because this trial would determine whether a technology that could find suspects nobody else could find would actually produce a conviction that a jury would support. Other suspects found through the same technology had already pleaded guilty, including the Golden State killer, Joseph James D’Angelo, who would eventually plead guilty in June 2020 to 13 counts of first-degree murder to avoid the death [music] penalty.

 He never faced a jury. At least two other genetic genealogy suspects had also entered guilty p before Talbot’s trial date arrived, [music] but Talbot refused to plead. He maintained his innocence and that meant his case, this case from 1987, would be the first to actually put genetic genealogy to the test in front of 12 ordinary citizens and ask them to deliver a verdict.

 And then something happened that surprised almost everyone. Before the trial began, the prosecution and defense reached a stipulation. They agreed as a matter of accepted fact that the DNA from individual A belonged to William Earl Talbot II. The genetic genealogy method, the GED match upload, the family tree construction, none of it was going to be challenged.

 If you’re wondering how that’s even legal, so is everyone else. Balddock, the prosecutor, had deliberately proposed the stipulation to keep the focus on the murder evidence and minimize controversy around the genealogy technique. He later said he wanted to downplay the importance of the genetic genealogy aspect of the case, even though he knew full well that it was the part that [music] fascinated people the most. The defense accepted.

The result was that CC Moore never testified at the trial. Detective Sharf summarized how Talbot came under suspicion, but the genealogy science itself was never examined or contested in court. Moore later called the stipulation a huge relief, saying it was really the best possible outcome. So, what did the jury actually hear? The prosecution built its case on three pillars. First, the DNA.

Talbot’s biological material had been found on Tanya Vanquilborg’s clothing and on evidence from the sexual assault. Second, a palm print lifted from the rear window of the van. Third, the zip ties. The same type of plastic zip ties had been found on Tanya’s body at Jay’s scene inside the van and at the tavern in Bellingham.

 Baldock argued that the zip ties together with the surgical gloves found in the van constituted a premeditated kit. This wasn’t an impulsive act. Someone had prepared for this. The state’s theory of the case was straightforward. [music] Tanya was traveling with her boyfriend in a country she didn’t live in and would not have had consensual contact with a stranger under those circumstances.

The DNA proved assault and Talbot had killed both victims in furtherance of or in flight from that assault. The defense led by Rachel Ford pushed back hard. Ford argued that the DNA proved only that Talbot and Tanya had physical contact and that the contact could have been consensual. She told the jury that DNA on the hem of one of the victim’s pants doesn’t tell you who killed her and why.

 The defense also noted that Talbot had never been known to own guns, had never been known to smoke cigarettes, and had never been known to own a dog. Cigarettes and dog collars were among the items found at Jay’s scene. If Talbot was the killer, where did those things come from? Talbot did not take the stand. He did not testify in his own defense.

 The jury of five men and seven women deliberated for roughly 2 and 1/2 days. On June 28th, 2019, they returned to the courtroom with their verdict. Guilty on both counts of aggravated first-degree murder. When the word guilty was read aloud, Talbot gasped. He said, “No, I didn’t do it.” He was wheeled from the courtroom.

On July 24th, 2019, Judge Crease sentenced Talba to two consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Under Washington law, that was the only available sentence for aggravated first-degree murder after the state supreme court had previously struck down the death penalty.

 Before sentencing, Talbot addressed the court. He said, “I stand before you a man convicted of a crime that I did not commit. I’ve gone all my life as a very passive person, never raising my hand towards anyone. I rarely even get angry.” After the verdict and sentencing, a sealed lab report was made public. New testing equipment at the Washington State Crime Lab better at analyzing mixed DNA samples than the tools available during the original investigation or even at trial had found Talbot’s DNA on one of the zip ties.

That evidence had not been presented to the jury, but it was now part of the case record. The family spoke. Jay’s sister Laura Banstra said by Talbot not pleading guilty, he’s put a whole new generation of people through his horror. She was talking about herself, her sister Kelly, John Van Kylinborg, and everyone in both families who had sat in that courtroom and listened to weeks of testimony about how their loved ones died.

Laura had been the last person in her family to see Jay alive. He had asked for a bite of her sandwich before walking out the door. That was the last normal moment. And now, 32 years later, she had to sit in a room and hear a defense attorney argue that maybe it was all consensual, that maybe the DNA meant nothing.

 Jay’s mother, Leona, spoke about keeping his sweater and holding it to her nose to smell him, even decades later. She talked about what it was like to lose a child and then live with that absence for 31 years while the person responsible walked free. Jay’s sister, Kelly, described Talbot as someone who had led an unremarkable life.

 And she was right. He had lived quietly for three decades, working, driving his truck, sleeping in his own bed, drinking his coffee in the morning, all while two families in British Columbia wondered every single day who had done this to their children. John Van Kylinborg told reporters that it was justice delayed, but not justice denied for Tanya and Jay.

 He said the family had felt an open wound for 31 years and that seeing Talbot convicted had finally begun to close it. This decision, the one Talbot made to plead [music] not guilty, seemed small at the time compared to the weight of the verdict itself, but it ended up defining the next three years of this case’s legal journey.

 Because Talbot appealed, the central issue in the appeal was a single juror. During jury selection, a woman identified only as juror 40 had raised concerns about her own ability to be fair. She was a new mother who had grown up in a single parent household where her mother experienced domestic abuse. When questioned about whether she could be impartial in a case involving violence against a young woman, she said if there was some action taken towards a young woman, I might take that personally and not be able to be impartial. She also

described herself as a fact-based person and said she could try to be fair. Talbot’s defense team asked the judge to remove juror 40 for cause, arguing she had expressed actual bias. The judge denied the request. Then critically, the defense did not use one of their remaining perempary challenges, the no questions asked removals available to both sides to strike her from the panel.

They still had at least two perempary challenges available. They accepted the jury as it was. On December 6th and 7th, 2021, the Washington Court of Appeals reversed both of Talbot’s convictions. In their opinion, the appeals judges wrote that after juror 40’s clear and repeated expressions of actual bias as [music] to the precise as to the precise nature of the allegations at the heart of this trial, the court could not conclude she had been sufficiently rehabilitated to provide Talbot a fair and impartial jury. The convictions were

thrown out after everything. After 31 years of cold silence, after the DNA match, after the coffee cup, after the trial, after the [music] verdict, a three judge panel ruled that juror 40 should not have been seated. And just like that, both convictions vanished. For the Van Quilenborg and Cook families, this was a nightmare inside a nightmare.

 They had already endured three decades of waiting. They had endured a trial where the defense argued the contact with Tanya might have been consensual. They had watched the man they believed killed their children proclaim his innocence and show no remorse. And now the legal system was telling them it might all have to happen again. A second trial, a second jury, a second chance for Talba to walk free.

Prosecutors in Snowomish County, led by prosecuting attorney Adam Cornell, appealed to the Washington Supreme Court while simultaneously preparing for [music] a potential retrial. The families waited again. They were used to waiting by now, but this time the [music] waiting felt different. This time, they had tasted something like closure, and it was being [music] pulled back.

 On December 22nd, 2022, the Washington Supreme Court issued its ruling. It was unanimous 9 to0. Justice Mary U wrote the opinion, holding that Talbot’s claim was foreclosed by a long line of legal precedent. The court’s reasoning was straightforward and rooted in a principle that has been part of American trial law for decades.

 If a party allows a juror to be seated and does not exhaust their perempter challenges, they cannot later appeal on the basis that the juror should have been excused for cause. Talbot’s defense team had at least two perempter challenges still available when they accepted the jury panel with juror 40 on it. They had the ability to remove her.

 They chose not to. That choice was binding. The Supreme Court reinstated both convictions and sent the case back to the Court of Appeals to address remaining issues the lower court hadn’t reached the first time around. In February 2024, the Court of Appeals issued a substitute opinion affirming the convictions on remand.

 The court acknowledged that Talbot correctly identified conflicting evidence and gaps in the state’s case, but held that a rational jury could still have found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. William Earl Talbot II [music] is currently serving two consecutive life sentences without parole at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walaw Wala.

 The case [music] was over, but its aftershocks were just beginning. The Talbot case holds a specific and unusual place in the history of forensic science. [music] It was the first American case in which a suspect identified through genetic genealogy was convicted at a jury trial. That distinction matters more than it might seem at first glance because of what it is not.

 It is not the first case solved by genetic genealogy. That distinction belongs to the Golden State Killer Investigation where Joseph James D’Angelo was identified slightly earlier in April 2018 using the same GED match approach, but D’Angelo pleaded guilty in June 2020 to 13 counts of firstdegree murder.

 He took a plea deal to avoid the death penalty. He never sat in front of a jury. His case proved that the technology could find killers. Talbot’s case proved that a jury would convict based on the evidence it produced. And yet, there’s an irony that nobody in the legal world has missed. The genetic genealogy method itself was never actually tested in the Talbot trial.

Because both sides stipulated to the DNA match, CC Moore never took the stand. The science was never cross-examined. No legal precedent was set on whether the technique is admissible. The first jury conviction in the genetic genealogy era happened without the genealogy ever being challenged.

 Defenders of the technology celebrated the verdict. Critics pointed out that the courtroom had dodged the hardest questions. CC Moore’s career after the Talbot case followed the trajectory of the technology itself, which is to say it accelerated at a pace nobody anticipated. She went on to identify nearly 200 unknown suspects and victims for law enforcement in her first 3 and 1/2 years of forensic work.

 By January 2024, her team at Parabon had reportedly solved more than 300 cases. The woman who found her first criminal suspect in 2 hours went on to become the most prolific genetic genealogologist in the history of law enforcement. But the speed of adoption came with consequences. In May 2019, just months after Talbot’s arrest, G De Match changed its terms of service.

 Previously, any user’s DNA profile was searchable by law enforcement by default. After the backlash over the Golden State Killer and Talbot cases, GED match switched to an opt-in model. Users now had to actively choose to make their DNA available for law enforcement searches. The searchable pool shrank dramatically.

 In December 2019, GED Match was acquired by a forensic science company called Verigen, which was itself later acquired by the diagnostics giant Kagen. The United States Department of Justice issued an interim policy on forensic genetic genealogy in November 2019, establishing guidelines for how federal investigators could use the technology.

Nobody disputes that genetic genealogy catches killers. The Talbot case proved it. The Golden State Killer case proved it. The 300 plus cases CC Moore’s team has solved since then prove it. But the question that remains and will likely define the next decade of forensic law is how to balance the power of this tool against the privacy of the millions of people who uploaded their DNA to find out if they’re 12% Scandinavian and never imagined it would be used to hunt their distant relatives.

 Because here’s what makes genetic genealogy different from every other forensic tool. You don’t have to commit a crime to be in the database. You don’t even have to upload your own DNA. If your second cousin uploaded their DNA to GED Match for a family history project in 2015, your genetic information is effectively searchable, too. You didn’t consent.

 You may not even know your cousin did it. And yet, if a crime scene DNA profile matches that cousin closely enough, a genealogologist can build a tree that leads to you. For investigators trying to solve cold cases with no other leads, that reach is exactly what makes the technology so effective. For privacy advocates, it’s exactly what makes it so dangerous.

There’s one more person in the story who deserves mention. Chelsea Rustad from Tumbwater, Washington. She was one of the two second cousins whose GED match profile made CC Moore’s identification possible. Rustad had uploaded her DNA to GED match in 2015, years before anyone imagined it would be used this way.

 She was a relative of Talbotz connected through shared greatgrandparents, though she had never met him. After the verdict, Chelsea Rustad attended the sentencing hearing. She sat between John Van Kylinborg and Gordon Cook, the two families joined by the most unlikely of circumstances. She brought Jon a bouquet of flowers on behalf of the Roostad family.

 She later wrote a book about her connection to the case called Inherited Secrets. She remains the only member of Talbot’s extended family who showed up to watch him be sentenced. John Van Kylinborg became an advocate for forensic genetic genealogy after the case. He told reporters that society really owes an obligation to these kids and to itself to make use of this tool.

His mother, Jean, Tanya’s mother, lived long enough to see the arrest and the conviction. She died on March 3rd, 2020 at the age of 87 before the appeals process was resolved. The case became the subject of Edward Humes’s 2022 book, The Forever Witness, a CBS 48 Hours episode titled A Killer in the Family Tree, a CBC Fifth Estate documentary, an episode of ABC’s The Genetic Detective, and an episode of Forensic Files II.

In May of 2018, a coffee cup fell from a truck at a red light in South Seattle. A small, careless, ordinary moment. The kind of thing that happens a thousand times a day in any city. A paper cup tumbling off a dashboard, rolling across asphalt. But that cup carried the DNA of a man who had been hiding in plain sight for 31 years.

A man who lived 7 miles from where he left Jay Cook’s body under a bridge near Monroe. a man whose truck route ran past the Gensko warehouse in Seattle’s Sodo district, the exact place where two young Canadians were supposed to pick up furnace parts on a routine overnight trip.

 A man who had no felony record, no online presence, no connection to any suspect list in any database. A man who would have lived the rest of his unremarkable life completely undetected if a genealogologist in Virginia hadn’t sat down at her computer and followed two family trees until they met at his front door. Tanya Vanquenborg was 18 years old.

 She played basketball, loved you, too, sailed the cold waters around Vancouver Island, and dreamed of working with animals. She fought to get a girls basketball team started at her school and she won. Jay Cook was 20. He stood 6’4, [music] played bass guitar, worked on fishing boats, and took his little sister out for high tea with money he earned himself.

 They left home on a Wednesday afternoon in November, headed south on the ferry, and never came back. Their families waited 31 years. Tanya’s father, Bill, died in 1997 without ever knowing who killed his daughter. Her mother, Jean, lived to see the arrest and the conviction, but died before the appeals were finished. Jay’s mother, Leona, held his old sweater to her face for decades and breathed in what was left of him.

 John Van Kylenborg, couldn’t listen to music for years because it felt wrong to feel anything good [music] while his sister’s killer was out there unnamed and free. Then science caught up. A genealogologist built two family [music] trees. A coffee cup confirmed a name. A jury listened. And the system bent under the weight of a procedural [music] challenge.

 Bent hard enough that the verdict disappeared for a full year and then held. Justice delayed but not denied. If this story stayed with you, if you believe these cases deserve to be told with [music] this kind of depth, subscribe to Cold Case Redemption. We cover the cases that went cold and the people who refuse to let them stay that way.

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