Saanich residents Tanya Van Cuylenborg, 18 and Jay Cook, 20 were murdered while on an overnight trip to Washington State in 1987. Episode includes interviews with Detective Jim Scharf of the Snohomish Country Sheriff’s Office and CeCe Moore, Chief Genetic Genealogist at Parabon Nanolabs, who cracked this case three decades later.
On November 18, 1987, Tanya Van Cuylenborg, 18 and Jay Cook, 20 left their homes in Saanich on Vancouver Island for an overnight trip to Seattle. The high school sweethearts were picking up furnace parts for Jay’s father’s business and planned to spend the night in Jay’s 1977 Ford van. The couple caught the 10:16 pm ferry from Bremerton to Seattle which should have put them in Seattle by just after 11:30 p.m., but where Jay and Tanya went next is a mystery.
Missing:
When these two normally dependable young people didn’t return by the following night, both families started to worry. And when they still hadn’t heard from either the next day, Tanya’s father reported them missing. Four days later Tanya’s body was found in a ditch by a man who was collecting bottles for recycling. She had been raped and killed by a shot to the back of her head. Jay’s van was found the next day in a Bellingham parking lot. His body was found in High Bridge, about 125 kilometres away.
Murdered:
The crime scenes covered four counties in Washington state: King County, where Jay and Tanya were kidnapped; Skagit County, where Tanya’s body was found; Whatcom County, where Jay’s van was found; and Snohomish County, where Jay’s body was discovered. The only evidence police had to go on was an unidentified palm print from Jay’s van and DNA from semen found on Tanya’s pants. By 2017, when the print and the DNA still did not produce any hits, police approached Parabon NanoLabs. The lab produced a computer image of the suspect based on his DNA and enlisted CeCe Moore to do the genetic genealogy.
Genetic Genealogy:
When Moore logged on to GEDmatch, out of the roughly one million DNA profiles available to her, she found two distant relatives of the murderer. It took her another two hours to find out his name. William Earl Talbott was 24 years old in 1987.
Now they had the name, detectives had to get the proof. Members of a task force followed Talbott, a truck driver, in hopes of finding his cast-off DNA to test against the profile at the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory. They got lucky when a coffee cup fell out of Talbott’s truck while he was stopped at a traffic light. His DNA was a match to the killer’s. “The chance of finding another person with the same profile other than Talbott is one in 180 quadrillion,” says Snohomish County Detective Jim Scharf.
Guilty:
In 2019, Talbott was found guilty of Tanya and Jay’s murders and sentenced to life in prison. He appealed the conviction, arguing that his right to a fair trial was violated because a juror who’d expressed bias had been seated and allowed to deliberate on his case. He won the right to an appeal in December 2021, and his case is currently under review.
Parabon’s CeCe Moore tells me that genetic genealogy has helped to identify a new class of criminal. Killers like William Talbott have gone undetected because they appear to have committed only one violent crime. “It looks like the reason that they’ve been able to stay under the radar is because they did something really violent, really horrible one time and then never again. We are seeing it in case after case after case,” she said.
Update: Detective Jim Scharf of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s office tells me that the Supreme Court heard Talbott’s review last Thursday (September 22, 2022), but thinks it will be another few months before they render a decision. If the Court agrees with Talbott, expect to see the families and friends dragged through another murder trial.
Show Notes:
Sponsors: Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours and Arsenal Pulp Press
Music: Andreas Schuld ‘Waiting for You’
Intro and voice overs: Mark Dunn
Interviews: May Robson (Tanya’s best friend); Detective Jim Scharf, Snohomish County, CeCe Moore, Genetic Genealogist
Buy me a coffee promo: McBride Communications and Media
Promo: True Crime Files Podcast
Source: Cold Case BC: The stories behind the province’s most sensational murder and missing person cases