Crime and Your DNA

Humes, Edward.  The Forever Witness: How Genetic Genealogy Solved a Cold Case Double 

           Murder.  NY: Dutton, 2022.  ISBN: 9781524746278

 Do you crave a chance to solve a mystery?  Do you follow true crime stories and read everything you can get on killers?  Or do you live in northwestern United States?  Finally, are you engaged in the ancestry DNA craze?  If your answer to any of these question are yes, you might want to pick up and read The Forever Witness.

 

On November 18, 1987, Jay Cook and his girlfriend Tanya Van Cuylenborg left Vancouver Island (British Columbia, Canada) to drive five hours to Seattle, Washington, to pick up a furnace for his dad.  They never arrived.  Someplace along the way they encountered someone who murdered them both, left their bodies in rural Washington and the copper-colored van was left in the town of Bellingham.  A massive search went out, but the case went cold.  

 

In 2005, Jim Scharf was appointed to work the 65 cold cases of Snohomish County (WA) where he had worked off and on since 1h3 1970s.  The only double-homicide was that of Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook.  In 2008, Sharf invested in decks of tip cards -  playing cards that had the story of a case and photo of the victim.  Since DNA in semen was found on Tanya's body, DNA matching could be used to rule out various suspects that tips brought forward.   CODIS, a database of DNA collected from known criminals was tried a few times without any hits.   Then came the genetic genealogy phenomenon where folks started sending in their DNA to trace back their ancestors and find living relatives via 23andMe and other DNA testing companies.  Scharf used Parabon which had gone private after creating a terrorist DNA database for the Defense Department. He got a profile with a description.  This is where CeCe Moore comes into the story.  She is a genetic genealogist who  has made a business out of her obsession with tracking down genealogical answers.  She saw that her toolkit for helping people find answers could possibly be a way to help solve police cold cases.  She and Parabon gotten together to work on cases using the GEDmatch platform to solve cold cases and the first case was Jim Sharf's.  It took CeCe Moore nine hours to identify the possible killer.  Then came the need to obtain direct DNA evidence that was positively linked to the suspected person which was accomplished on May 18, 2018.  Then all the evidence collected over the years needed to be put in order, a case presented to a court, and a verdict rendered which happened on December 6, 2021.

Edward Humes provides a very readable account of how the case of Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook's murders were solved and the vindication of genetic genealogy as a tool in law enforcement's handbook.  He also provides a warning about the need for limits on these tools.   Pick up a copy and dive into the details of a fascinating cold case solved!