♪♪
Up next,
a young couple's road trip
ends in m*rder.
That wasn't long before
everything turned to hell.
What was done to them
was so horrifying.
Police have plenty of evidence
but can't connect
their victims to a k*ller.
Where did they cross paths,
and what exactly happened?
Those questions
finally get answered
after technology available
to anyone on the Internet
breaks the case wide open.
♪♪
♪♪
In the summer of 1987,
a young Canadian couple
had just started dating.
Jay Cook was 20.
His girlfriend,
Tanya Van Cuylenborg, was 18.
They both went to Oak Bay High,
but they weren't in
the same year at school,
and so it was through
some mutual friends they met.
Jay was 6'4", broad shoulders,
very lean, very handsome.
Both Jay and Tanya were quiet,
sweet, loving people.
♪♪
Jay's father owned
a furnace business
and in November,
asked the couple
if they could drive from
Victoria, Canada, to Seattle
to pick up some parts
from a client.
This may have been
the first prolonged trip
that they'd taken overnight
out of the country.
Jay and Tanya were
using Jay's family van.
The trip was just over
but since they had to take
a couple of ferries,
it was going to take some time.
So instead of rushing home,
they planned to stay overnight
once they got to Seattle.
My dad had given them enough
money to stay in a hotel.
As it turned out, they chose
to save that money
and sleep in the van instead.
Jay and Tanya didn't make it
to the next morning's
appointment.
They didn't call the client,
and they didn't call home.
No one knew where they were.
My parents were very
concerned right away,
by that afternoon,
that something was amiss.
Days passed.
Police on both sides
of the border mounted searches.
So did Jay and Tanya's families.
My dad had an acquaintance
who had a small airplane.
They did a flyover
of the Olympic peninsula
and out towards
the cascade mountains,
just sort of looking
for the needle in the haystack.
Unfortunately, it didn't
turn up anything.
Six days after Jay
and Tanya left Canada,
a man collecting cans
in a rural area
about 80 miles from Seattle
found the body of a young woman.
She had been sh*t
execution-style
in the back of the head.
A .380-caliber shell casing
was nearby.
Plastic zip ties, presumably
used to restrain the victim,
were found near the body.
All indications
were she had been r*ped.
Family members
identified the victim
as Tanya Van Cuylenborg.
We were, you know,
just dumbstruck with grief
of the fact that this was
the end result for Tanya.
I mean, we were just bewildered.
For now, the big
question was, where was Jay?
The answer came 48 hours later,
on Thanksgiving Day.
When Jay's body was found,
there was a ligature around his
neck of twine and dog collars.
He had tissue and
a pack of cigarettes
stuffed down his throat,
and he had been beaten
in the head with rocks.
Jay's body was located
about 70 miles away
from where Tanya was found.
He'd been strangled.
The boy who found my brother's
body was 24 at the time.
He's now in his 50s,
and he remembers it
and has carried it
with him this whole time.
The plastic zip ties
found with both victims
indicated this was not
a haphazard,
spur-of-the-moment att*ck.
This was something that appeared
to have been premeditated.
This person came equipped
to commit this crime.
Who would do this?
Jay and Tanya appear
to have been targeted,
but they didn't know
anyone in the area.
Tanya... I mean, I couldn't
even imagine her
coming close to having
enemies of this sort.
We didn't know anybody
that we could even dream
of doing this kind
of damage to someone.
♪♪
When detectives finally located
the van Jay and Tanya
had driven from Canada,
they were hopeful
evidence in the van
would point to the k*ller.
That same day, near a tavern
a short distance from the van,
police found personal items
belonging to Tanya.
Detectives now had four
separate crime scenes...
the spots where Tanya
and Jay's bodies were found,
Jay's van, and the tavern.
There were components
of each crime scene
that were connected
both to Jay and Tanya
but also from scene to scene.
The key items were
amm*nit*on for
a .380-caliber firearm,
which was consistent
with the g*n used to k*ll Tanya,
a partial palm print
lifted from Jay's van
that didn't match either Jay
or Tanya or any of Jay's family,
dozens of plastic zip ties,
presumably used to bind
both victims,
and among the various items
of Tanya's clothing,
one item stood out.
They found Tanya's pants,
which eventually were found
to have semen on the pant leg.
They also took swabs
from Tanya's body
during her autopsy.
And so they kept some of
the vaginal swabs,
and they retained them,
frozen, in the laboratory.
But this was 1987,
and DNA science was
in its infancy.
In fact, the first-ever
conviction using DNA evidence
happened in England just weeks
before Jay and Tanya's murders.
When these murders
happened in 1987,
we weren't using DNA testing.
It hadn't been brought
into the lab yet.
Despite being
relatively unfamiliar
with DNA technology,
analysts realized
they had potential evidence
on their hands,
and the sample on Tanya's pants
looked particularly promising.
The scientist at the time...
she cut that entire stain out,
and she saved that stain and she
preserved it in the crime lab.
It was maintained in a freezer.
At this point,
the physical evidence
wasn't revealing
anything about the k*ller
or K*llers' identity.
The case looked like it might
stall before it really started.
They looked at persons locally
who had committed
those kinds of crimes
in the past.
They looked at registered
sex offenders.
Why pick these two kids?
There was no reason
for anybody to commit
this horrible act against them.
And I think that's the big
question, is why?
There were no answers
to that question
until there was
a bizarre development.
Someone, possibly the k*ller,
reached out to Jay
and Tanya's families.
The families received
handwritten notes and cards
from a person claiming
to have been involved
in the m*rder of Jay and Tanya,
taunting the families,
and these were letters that were
postmarked from various cities,
from New York to L.A.
to Seattle.
One of the letters
reads, "Dear Mr. Cook,
as someone who instinctively
hates all Canadians,
I couldn't pass up
the opportunity
to k*ll Jay and Tanya."
They go on to say,
"I'll do it again
if another opportunity
presents itself."
If this was the k*ller,
detectives were at a loss
as to why he'd risk exposure
just to torment the families,
especially since
it didn't appear the k*ller
even knew the victims.
They were very
disturbing, of course.
They were written in a manner
to be to be unsettling,
which they were because
we were all uncertain,
as were even the police,
whether they were from
the m*rder*r or not.
The letters were handwritten
with no apparent
attempt at concealment.
Detectives hoped this bizarre
cat-and-mouse game
might finally lead them
to who k*lled Jay and Tanya.
There was some hope
by investigators
that maybe this was it.
Maybe this was the break
that they had been waiting for.
♪♪
In the weeks after
a young Canadian couple
were found m*rder*d
outside of Seattle,
their families
received anonymous letters
from someone claiming credit
for the crimes.
The first ones
arrived Christmas of 1987,
and it continued,
you know, seemingly
every couple of months or so.
There'd be either a letter
or, like, a Father's Day card
and a Mother's Day card
to the parents... very cruel.
In a possible break,
they were handwritten...
a potential source of evidence.
As much as they could do
was handwriting analysis,
so they had multiple letters
and multiple exemplars
for handwriting analysis.
The problem was that
without suspects,
there was no one
to compare the handwriting to.
Details of the murders
and excerpts from the letters
were broadcast on television.
Hundreds of tips poured in,
but none panned out.
I think one of the most
frustrating aspects
for investigators was,
despite the number of leads
that they had,
none of them were really viable.
In 2003,
improvements in DNA technology
made it possible
to identify a potential suspect
from the male DNA
taken from the crime scenes,
but who was it?
Since it was an unknown person,
we gave it the designation
of individual "A,"
and that was all we knew.
By this time, CODIS,
the national DNA database,
was in full swing,
but the DNA sample
from individual "A"
didn't match anyone
in the system.
Years and years went by
with no luck,
no matches in the database.
In 2010, DNA analysts
turned to the letters.
Using touch DNA, they were
able to lift a genetic profile,
but it did not match
the DNA of individual "A."
In an attempt to generate
more leads,
copies of the letters
were broadcast and published.
Amazingly, someone recognized
the handwriting.
A potential suspect was finally
identified and confronted.
He readily admitted
that he wrote the letters
and apologized for doing so.
And the letter-writer's DNA
didn't match the DNA
from the crime scenes.
He was mentally ill, homeless,
and was eliminated as a suspect.
He never faced any charges
in connection with the murders.
I've heard of people inserting
themselves into crimes,
you know, especially people
with some sort of mental illness
or something like that,
but this was about as
extreme and strange
a case as you could imagine.
♪♪
Dumbstruck and disappointed,
detectives were
back to square one.
Though tips and leads
kept coming in,
there was a real possibility
that Jay and Tanya's k*ller
would never be found.
It was an open wound
that really couldn't heal.
It's very hard to not have
any answers.
As a family, we still
talked about Jay a lot.
We tried really hard
to not think about the fact
that he had been m*rder*d.
We just tried to think
of him as gone.
This case is one of those cases
that just
really sticks with you.
Nobody wanted to give up
on this case.
Luckily, the lead investigator,
Jim Scharf, was a man who knew
more than most people
about working a cold case.
I've mentioned to people before
that if anything happens to me,
I want him to investigate
what... you know,
try to find the perpetrator.
In 2018,
the alleged Golden State k*ller
was finally behind bars,
thanks, said prosecutors,
to a new forensic tool
called genetic genealogy.
We knew we could
and should solve it
using the most innovative
DNA technology
available at this time.
The question now was
whether that science
could reveal
who k*lled Jay and Tanya.
♪♪
In the spring of 2018,
the suspected
Golden State k*ller
was finally arrested,
accused in a crime spree
that had terrorized California
for almost a generation.
What ultimately brought him
to justice
was a new type
of forensic technology.
The Golden State k*ller suspect
was arrested
thanks to genetic genealogy.
Genetic genealogy is an offshoot
of the consumer genomics boom
that started in 2013,
when people began using
DNA and the web
to explore
their family histories.
The purpose of traditional
genetic genealogy
is to identify
our long-dead ancestors.
And it turns out
it can also be used
to solve crimes.
The DNA databases used by
consumers don't operate
in the same way as
law-enforcement databases
like CODIS.
In CODIS, you're looking
for that exact match,
but in genetic genealogy,
we can go way beyond that
and use those
hundreds of thousands of markers
to predict second, third,
fourth cousins and beyond.
However,
there are serious concerns
about law enforcement having
access to the DNA of people
who have never
committed a crime.
That problem can be resolved
if people are told their DNA
is going to databases
used by police,
which is exactly what a company
called GEDmatch did.
GEDmatch posted a notification
on their site alerting
their users that law enforcement
was using the database,
and that was what I needed
to allow me
to finally make the decision
to help law enforcement.
In 2018, investigators
took the DNA profile
from Jay and Tanya's case
and put it into
the GEDmatch system.
What I'm looking at
is a list of people
who share significant amounts
of DNA with the unknown suspect.
I'm hoping to get people
who share around 3%
of their DNA or higher.
That would be second cousins.
Once these distant relatives
of a possible suspect
were identified,
Cece Moore turned to more
traditional methods...
things like public records
and obituary pages.
So, in this way,
I'm reverse-engineering
the family tree of the suspect
from the people's family trees
that he shares DNA with.
In Jay and Tanya's m*rder case,
high-tech...
genetic genealogy...
and low tech...
searches of public records...
led investigators to
a Seattle-based family
with four children.
Three of those children
were female,
so I knew they couldn't be
the suspect,
and there was only one son,
so there was only one person
who was carrying
the correct mix of DNA.
And so the genealogist said
that the perpetrator has to be
that male child.
That person was William Talbott,
who was 24 years old
at the time of the murders.
This was the first time
that I'd ever heard the name
William Talbott.
He was not in
the case file anywhere.
His family home was just about
from where Jay's body was found.
Talbott,
a never-married truck driver,
had no criminal record,
so his DNA wasn't in CODIS,
the genetic database
used by law enforcement.
Investigators needed
a sample of Talbott's DNA
to either expose
or eliminate him
as a suspect
in Jay and Tanya's m*rder.
They were having
a really hard time
getting a piece
of evidence from him.
But, eventually, Talbott,
who, after all this time,
had no idea detectives
were following him,
discarded a paper coffee cup,
which was seized
and immediately tested for DNA.
Detectives and analysts waited
as their case,
now more than 30 years old,
hung in the balance.
As I'm going along through
the series of markers,
they're matching, and so it's
almost like winning a lottery,
and you're saying,
"Okay, that's a match.
That's a match."
The odds of this
not being William Talbott
was 1 in 180 quadrillion.
You would have to have
with the same
population as Earth
to find William Talbott
with that DNA profile.
Old-fashioned forensics
also sealed Talbott's fate.
His palm print matched
the partial palm print
lifted from Jay's van
way back in 1987.
The evidence tells the story,
or at least part of it.
Police say Talbott was
a r*pist hunting for a victim.
Police think he may have
befriended Jay and Tanya
or may have threatened them
at gunpoint.
They ended up in Jay's van,
and once they were under
the g*n, they were helpless.
He tied them up with
the plastic zip ties
he'd brought along
for just that purpose.
Without knowing it, he left
his DNA on those plastic ties.
He strangled Jay.
Then he r*ped Tanya,
creating even more DNA evidence.
He sh*t Tanya and then
disposed of both bodies
at separate locations.
At some point,
amid all this activity,
Talbott left
a partial palm print
on the back of the van.
He really set out with
a premeditated plan that day
or that evening
to carry out some...
some form of heinous crime,
which, unfortunately, he did
and just somehow crossed paths
with Tanya and Jay.
In June of 2019,
William Talbott was convicted
of aggravated m*rder
and sentenced to
two consecutive life terms
without the possibility
of parole.
His case is a forensic first.
The suspected
Golden State k*ller
was exposed by genetic genealogy
and is awaiting trial.
In Talbott's case,
in a legal precedent,
the genetic genealogy evidence
was presented to a jury
and helped put him behind bars.
This is a game-changer
for investigators,
for forensic scientists,
for prosecutors.
Genetic genealogy is
the best crime-fighting tool
that's come along
since DNA came along.
In Jay and Tanya's case,
genetic genealogy was able
to develop a suspect
who had never even been
considered previously.
William Earl Talbott really
was the first good suspect
they ever had in all these years
of investigating the case.