On a Tuesday morning in May 2018, a white paper coffee cup tumbled out of a semi-truck at a red light in South Seattle. The driver did not notice. Two plainclothes 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 cup matched a killer who had been walking free since November 1987, a man who had murdered two young Canadians on a routine overnight trip, dumped their bodies sixty miles 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 holiday wondering who had taken them. Then a genealogist sat down at her computer, uploaded a DNA profile to a public database, and found him in two hours.
His name was William Earl Talbot II. That was June 2019, thirteen months after his arrest. A jury in Snohomish County convicted him of two counts of aggravated first-degree murder. It was the first jury conviction in American history built on genetic genealogy evidence.
The story does not begin with a coffee cup. It begins with two young people from Vancouver Island. Tanya Van Cuylenborg was eighteen in November 1987. She had graduated from Oak Bay High School in Saanich, British Columbia, just five months earlier.
Her yearbook noted she had lobbied the school to create a senior girls basketball team, and she played on it. She was a sailor who grew up on family boating trips, a casual guitar player, and an animal lover who dreamed of working with animals, perhaps as a veterinarian or a photographer. Jay Cook was twenty. He stood six-foot-four, broad-shouldered, and left-handed.
He had worked on a commercial fishing boat and at a pizza restaurant. He played bass guitar and had taken his younger sister out for high tea using money he earned himself. He was the steady presence in his family, the one who made things feel safe just by being in the room. Jay and Tanya had been dating for about six months.
The trip that brought them to Washington State was supposed to be ordinary. Jay needed to pick up recycled furnace parts and a money order from a company called Gensco in Seattle’s Sodo industrial district. Gordon Cook 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 home the next day.
On Wednesday, November 18, 1987, they boarded the 4:00 p. m. ferry from Victoria to Port Angeles, Washington. They arrived on the American side around 5:30 in the evening and drove onto Highway 101.
Investigators later believed 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 taking the more direct route. Around 8:00 p. m. , they were spotted buying snacks at the Hoodsport Grocery.
About ninety minutes later, a clerk at Ben’s Deli in the small town of Allen, some thirty miles further south, remembered them coming in. That sighting was the last confirmed time anyone saw Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook alive together. At some point after that, they drove to a ferry terminal in Bremerton and boarded a boat across Puget Sound to Seattle. A ferry ticket found later in the van was stamped 10:16 p.
m. on November 18. After that, there was silence. No phone calls, no fuel receipts, no sightings.
On November 20, both families reported them missing. This was 1987. There were no cell phones, no GPS. When someone went quiet, you had to physically go looking for them.
Tanya’s father and brother traveled from Victoria to the Seattle area, retracing the route they thought the couple would have taken. They drove the highways, checked rest stops and motels. A family friend flew a small plane over the Olympic Peninsula, scanning the roads for the bronze van. They found nothing.
On November 24, a man collecting aluminum cans along Parson’s Creek Road near the tiny community of Alger in Skagit County found Tanya’s body in a ditch. She had been bound with plastic zip ties, sexually assaulted, and shot once in the back of the head at close range with a . 380 caliber pistol. Her father and brother drove to a funeral home in Mount Vernon to identify her.
The next day, police recovered her wallet, the van keys, a box of . 380 ammunition, and a single surgical glove under the back porch of a tavern in Bellingham. A few blocks away, the bronze van was found locked and abandoned in a parking lot. Inside, investigators found more zip ties matching the ones used to bind Tanya, additional surgical gloves, receipts, and clothing belonging to her.
That clothing would later yield the most critical piece of evidence: DNA from an unknown male, eventually cataloged as Individual A. Two days later, on Thanksgiving Day, two hunters walked beneath a bridge near the city of Monroe in Snohomish County and found Jay Cook’s body, roughly sixty miles south of where Tanya had been discovered. He had been beaten with rocks and strangled with twine and two red dog collars. A pack of cigarettes had been forced down his throat.
He was partially covered with a light blue blanket that did not belong to the couple and was never traced. The murders were committed differently. Tanya was shot. Jay was beaten and strangled.
Different weapons, different locations, different counties. But one detail linked every scene: zip ties. The same type of plastic zip ties were found binding Tanya’s wrists, at Jay’s crime scene, inside the van, 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. Whoever had done this had taken the time to drive the two victims to separate locations, kill them in separate ways, and scatter evidence across three counties. That was not a panicked act. That was someone with time, a vehicle, and knowledge of the roads.
The investigation became a jurisdictional puzzle from the start. Two victims in two counties, evidence scattered across a third, and a crime that likely began in a fourth, near the Seattle ferry terminal. The victims were Canadian citizens, so two countries and at least four law enforcement agencies were involved. In the early days, some investigators briefly floated the theory that Jay himself might have been involved in Tanya’s murder.
Both families rejected it completely. When Jay’s body was found, the theory died with it. Detectives recovered a DNA profile from the biological evidence connected to the assault on Tanya. But in 1987, forensic DNA analysis was barely in its infancy, and the databases needed to match an unknown profile to a known person did not exist.
Over the following months and years, investigators pursued more than two hundred leads. They canvassed vehicles along the route, interviewed truckers, ferry workers, gas station attendants, and locals. They looked at convicted sex offenders and people with connections to the Monroe area. One theory focused on a prison farm near where Jay’s body was found; it went nowhere.
A known serial offender was investigated and ruled out by DNA. In the months after the murders, both families began receiving greeting cards and postcards in the mail. The messages 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 wondered if the killer was taunting them. In 2010, police finally identified the author: a seventy-eight-year-old Canadian transient with mental health issues who had somehow obtained the family’s addresses. DNA confirmed he was not the killer, just a deeply disturbed person who had read about the case and decided to inject himself into the family’s grief. In 1995, Detective Jim Sharf of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office helped form a cold case team, and the Van Cuylenborg and Cook murders became one of the first cases they picked up.
Sharf carried the files for over a decade, running down leads whenever they surfaced and keeping in touch with both families. In 2003, with DNA database technology finally mature, the Washington State Patrol uploaded Individual A’s profile to CODIS, the FBI’s national criminal offender database. 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 was, for all practical purposes, a ghost. The years stacked up. Tanya’s father, Bill Van Cuylenborg, died on May 14, 1997, at the age of sixty-one. He never learned who murdered his daughter.
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 and would hold it up to her face just to smell him. In April 2018, the landscape shifted. Authorities in California announced the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, after investigators uploaded his crime scene DNA to a free public genealogy database called GEDmatch, found distant relatives, built a family tree, and landed on his name.
Detective Jim Sharf was watching. He had already been working with a forensic science company called Parabon Nanolabs, which had produced composite images of what the Van Cuylenborg and Cook killer might look like. But a composite is not a name. Sharf needed a name, and the Golden State Killer arrest showed him exactly how to get one.
Parabon connected Sharf with CeCe Moore, a self-taught genealogy expert who had spent years building her reputation in the public genealogy world, best known for her work on the PBS series Finding Your Roots. She had never worked a criminal case. She had struggled with the ethical implications of using public DNA databases for law enforcement purposes, but after GEDmatch updated its terms of service to permit searches related to violent crimes, she decided she was ready. The Van Cuylenborg and Cook case would be her first criminal investigation.
On April 27, 2018, Parabon uploaded Individual A’s DNA profile to GEDmatch. The next day, Moore sat down at her computer. She found two matches, two people who each shared approximately three percent of their DNA with the unknown killer. One appeared related on the maternal side, the other on the paternal side.
Moore built both trees backward to the great-grandparent level, then traced the branches forward, watching the two independent family lines converge. Both trees pointed to a couple in the Woodinville 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 said she had never had another case where the pieces came together that fast. The man at the end of those family lines had almost no online footprint. His name was William Earl Talbot II. Born around 1963, he was twenty-four at the time of the murders.
In 1987, he lived in the Woodinville area, and his parents’ home sat less than seven miles from the bridge near Monroe where Jay Cook’s body had been found. He had worked as a delivery driver, and an acquaintance later told investigators that his route in 1987 passed directly by Gensco, the Seattle warehouse where Jay and Tanya had been headed. He had been fired from his job a few months before the murders. He had no felony record.
His only known encounter with the justice system was a 1984 misdemeanor assault charge, which he resolved with a guilty plea and a deferred sentence that required anger management counseling. A misdemeanor does not put your DNA into CODIS. Talbot had never appeared on any suspect list in thirty-one years of investigation. But knowing a name and proving a murder are very different things.
Genetic genealogy can tell you which family the DNA belongs to, but it cannot by itself prove that a specific individual committed a specific crime. Investigators needed Talbot’s actual DNA collected independently, and they could not just knock on his door. Detective Sharf’s team began surveillance. Talbot, now fifty-five, was a semi-truck driver living in SeaTac, unmarried, estranged from his family, living a quiet, solitary life.
They watched him and waited for what law enforcement calls an abandoned DNA sample: a cigarette butt, a napkin, a straw, anything he discarded in a public space. On May 8, 2018, a white paper coffee cup fell from his truck cab at a red light. Officers retrieved it and rushed it to the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory. The next day, forensic scientist Lisa Collins confirmed what the family trees had predicted.
The DNA on that cup was a match to Individual A. The man who had left his DNA at the crime scene where Tanya Van Cuylenborg was found in 1987 was William Earl Talbot II. On May 17, 2018, Talbot was arrested as he left work around six in the evening. He was initially charged with first-degree murder in the death of Tanya.
In June, a second charge was added for the murder of Jay Cook. When Detective Sharf called John Van Cuylenborg to tell him an arrest had been made, John later said it sent a shiver down his spine. After thirty-one years, the man who killed his sister was finally in custody. William Earl Talbot II pleaded not guilty.
His trial began with jury selection on June 11, 2019, in Snohomish County Superior Court. Everyone understood the trial was different. This was the first time in American history that a suspect identified through investigative genetic genealogy was going before a jury. Other suspects found through the same technology had already pleaded guilty, including the Golden State Killer, but Talbot refused to plead.
His case would put genetic genealogy to the test in front of twelve ordinary citizens. 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 would not be challenged. CeCe Moore never testified. 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.
The prosecution built its case on three pillars: the DNA, a palm print from the rear window of the van, and the zip ties. The prosecutor argued that the zip ties, together with the surgical gloves found in the van, constituted a premeditated kit. This was not an impulsive act. Someone had prepared.
The defense pushed back hard, arguing that the DNA proved only that Talbot and Tanya had physical contact, and that the contact could have been consensual. The defense also noted that Talbot had never been known to own guns, smoke cigarettes, or own a dog. Cigarettes and dog collars had been found at Jay’s scene. Where did those come from?
Talbot did not take the stand. The jury of five men and seven women deliberated for roughly two and a half days. On June 28, 2019, they returned with their verdict: guilty on both counts of aggravated first-degree murder. When the word guilty was read aloud, Talbot gasped and said, “No, I didn’t do it.
” He was wheeled from the courtroom. On July 24, 2019, Judge Linda Krese sentenced him 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. Before sentencing, Talbot told the court, “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. ”
After the verdict, 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, 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.
Then Talbot appealed, and the central issue was a single juror. During jury selection, Juror 40, a new mother who had grown up in a single-parent household where her mother experienced domestic abuse, had said that if an action was taken towards a young woman, she might take that personally and not be able to be impartial. The defense asked the judge to remove her for cause. The judge denied the request.
The defense did not use one of their remaining peremptory challenges to strike her. On December 6 and 7, 2021, the Washington Court of Appeals reversed both convictions, ruling that the juror had expressed actual bias and that the court could not conclude she had been sufficiently rehabilitated. After everything, both convictions were thrown out. The families faced the prospect of a second trial.
Prosecutors appealed to the Washington Supreme Court while preparing for a potential retrial. On December 22, 2022, the Washington Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9-0 ruling. If a party allows a juror to be seated and does not exhaust their peremptory challenges, they cannot later appeal on the basis that the juror should have been excused for cause. Talbot’s defense had at least two peremptory challenges still available when they accepted the jury panel.
Their choice was binding. The court reinstated both convictions. In February 2024, the Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions on remand. William Earl Talbot II is currently serving two consecutive life sentences without parole at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
The Talbot case holds a specific and unusual place in the history of forensic science. It was the first American case in which a suspect identified through genetic genealogy was convicted at a jury trial. It was not the first case solved by genetic genealogy; that distinction belongs to the Golden State Killer investigation. But DeAngelo pleaded guilty and never faced a jury.
His case proved the technology could find killers. Talbot’s case proved a jury would convict based on the evidence it produced. Yet there is an irony nobody in the legal world has missed: the genetic genealogy method itself was never actually tested in the trial. Because both sides stipulated to the DNA match, the science was never cross-examined.
No legal precedent was set on whether the technique is admissible. CeCe Moore went on to become the most prolific genetic genealogist in the history of law enforcement. By January 2024, her team at Parabon had reportedly solved more than three hundred cases. The speed of adoption came with consequences.
In May 2019, GEDmatch changed its terms of service to an opt-in model for law enforcement searches, and the searchable pool shrank dramatically. The Department of Justice issued interim policy guidelines for how federal investigators could use the technology. There is one more person in the story who deserves mention. Chelsea Rustad from Tumwater, Washington, was one of the two second cousins whose GEDmatch profile made the identification possible.
She had uploaded her DNA in 2015, years before anyone imagined it would be used this way. She had never met Talbot. After the verdict, she attended the sentencing hearing and sat between John Van Cuylenborg and Gordon Cook, the two families joined by the most unlikely of circumstances. She brought John a bouquet of flowers on behalf of her family.
She remains the only member of Talbot’s extended family who showed up to watch him be sentenced. John Van Cuylenborg became an advocate for forensic genetic genealogy after the case. He told reporters that society 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 3, 2020, at the age of eighty-seven, before the appeals process was resolved. In May 2018, a coffee cup fell from a truck at a red light in South Seattle. A small, careless, ordinary moment. But that cup carried the DNA of a man who had been hiding in plain sight for thirty-one years.
A man who lived seven miles from where he left Jay Cook’s body under a bridge near Monroe. A man whose truck route passed the Gensco warehouse, the exact place where two young Canadians were supposed to pick up furnace parts on a routine overnight trip. A man with no felony record, no online presence, no connection to any suspect list in any database.
He would have lived the rest of his unremarkable life completely undetected if a genealogist in Virginia had not sat down at her computer and followed two family trees until they met at his front door.