She wasn’t wearing any pants. Her hands were bound behind her back. She’d been shot in the back of the head, and she lay in that ditch alone for 6 days before anyone found her. A man collecting bottles on a rural road near Alger, Washington stopped. He had found something in the ditch below the embankment.
He would not forget it for the rest of his life. Between that ditch and the answer to how she got there, 31 years, 200 dead ends, four counties, one detective who refused to close a file, a complete stranger who uploaded her DNA to build a family tree, and a method of identifying killers that had never been used before in criminal history.
Tanya Van Cuylenborg had brought a camera on this trip. She wanted photographs of their first trip together. The killer took it. Three years later, the lens surfaced in a Portland pawn shop. The camera body has never been found. You’re watching Crime Watch Central. This case ended with a killer behind bars and a method that changed criminal investigation forever, built partly by a woman who just wanted to know her own family.
Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from. New here? Hit like and subscribe. Now, let’s go back to November 1987. Tanya Van Cuylenborg was 18 years old, freshly graduated, living in Saanichton, British Columbia, a quiet town on Vancouver Island. She was the kind of person who followed through on things.
She had been campaigning to get a girls basketball team started at her school. She’d been pushing her family to adopt a dog. Her father, William, said she would always call home if plans changed, not sometimes, always. The night she didn’t call was the first night in her life she hadn’t.
People who knew her described something specific about being around Tanya, that she paid attention to you when you spoke, not the polite kind of attention, the kind it made you feel like what you said had landed somewhere and been kept. Her friend, May Robson, who stayed close to the case for decades afterward, spoke about her that way, not just who Tanya was in the abstract, but how she felt to be near.
She brought the Minolta X-700 camera because she noticed moments worth keeping. That was the kind of person she was. She wanted a record of things. Jay Cook was 20 years old, also from Saanich, the only son in the Cook family. His mother, Leona, believed Tanya was something genuinely special to him.
His family remembered him as easy to be around, warm, quietly funny. He had an inexplicable habit of losing his own clothes that had become a running family joke. It was the kind of detail that made people smile when they talked about him, even later, even in the worst context. His father, Gordon, ran a business and needed furnace parts picked up from Jensco Heating in Seattle.
Jay volunteered without hesitation. That was also who Jay was. He helped without being asked. Six months of dating, still in that stage where you turn a supply run into a weekend just to have the extra time together. The plan, drive Gordon’s bronze 1977 Ford Club Wagon to Seattle, collect the parts, sleep one night parked near the King Dome, and drive home to Canada in the morning.
Simple enough that no one thought to worry. One thing to hold on to. Tanya’s older brother, John, was away at college when their father called. Tanya and Jay hadn’t come home. John Van Coolemborg would carry that phone call with him for the next 31 years. On the afternoon of November 18th, 1987, they took the 4:00 p.m.
ferry from Victoria to Port Angeles. They were last seen alive boarding the Bremerton to Seattle ferry at 10:16 that night. The ferry docked just after 11:30. After that, six days of silence. Tanya would always call. By the evening of November 19th, neither family had heard a word. Both the Cooks and the Van Coolemborgs reported them missing.
The search began in Canada, but Jay and Tanya were no longer in Canada. November 24th, six days after the ferry left Victoria, a man collecting bottles on a rural road near Alger in Skagit County, Washington, found Tanya Van Coolemborg’s body in a ditch at the bottom of a steep embankment. She was naked from the waist down.
Her hands were bound behind her back with plastic zip ties. She had been raped. She had been shot in the back of the head at close range. She was the girl who’d pushed for a girls basketball team, who wanted a family dog, who brought a camera to capture something worth remembering. And she had been lying in that ditch for six days.
That same day, her wallet, the van keys, ammunition matching the bullet that killed her, a surgical glove, and more zip ties were found beneath the porch of a tavern near the Greyhound station in Bellingham, 16 miles to the north. The van was found locked in a nearby parking lot a few blocks away. Inside, plastic gloves, more zip ties, receipts, the Bremerton-Seattle ferry ticket, and Tanya’s black pants, the ones she had been wearing the night she was murdered.
Here is what the evidence said before any name existed. He came prepared. Gloves, zip ties, a firearm, ammunition. Investigators later called it a kill kit assembled before the encounter, not improvised during it. This was not a decision made in the moment. The moment had been anticipated. Jay Cook was still missing.
The Cook family held on to whatever hope remained that maybe somehow he was still alive. Two days later, on November 26th, that hope was gone. Jay’s body was found beneath High Bridge in Snohomish County, 70 mi south of where Tanya lay. He had been beaten with rocks and strangled with twine and two red dog collars.
A pack of cigarettes had been stuffed down his throat. Zip ties of the same type lay near his body. His black ski jacket with red piping on the sleeves was gone. Two victims, 70 mi apart, two completely different methods of killing, the same zip ties, the same killer, the same cold deliberateness.
King County, where they were taken, Skagit County, where Tanya’s body was found, Whatcom County, where the van was abandoned, Snohomish County, where Jay lay beneath the bridge. Four counties, one killer, and all he left behind was an unidentified palm print on the van and semen on Tanya’s black pants. In 1987, DNA had been used in a criminal investigation just the year before.
Forensic scientists extracted a profile from the semen on Tanya’s pants. It did not match Jay Cook. It didn’t match anyone. They designated it individual A, a code name for a killer who had no name, no photograph, and no record in any database anywhere. Over the following years, more than 200 names crossed investigators’ desks.
The two most prominent, Robert Yates and Charles Sinclair, both serial killers active in the Seattle area in 1987, both capable of being in the right place at the right time, both eliminated completely by DNA. Each time, individual A stayed unknown, and the list of dead ends grew by one more line. One month after the murders, the families began receiving threatening letters from someone claiming to be the killer, postmarked from Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, arriving over years.
In 2010, through a tip to the television program Washington’s Most Wanted, the author was identified, a 78-year-old Canadian transient with severe mental illness who had heard about the case on the news and had no connection to the murders. 23 years of investigative resources directed at a distraction. In 2003, 16 years after the murders, Sharps uploaded individual A’s profile to CODIS, the national criminal DNA database containing millions of profiles from people arrested across the United States.
He had been waiting for this moment for years, watching the database grow, believing that at some point the odds would turn. The result came back quickly, no match. The killer had left almost nothing in any system, a single misdemeanor assault charge in 1984, no DNA on file from it, no trail.
The notification wasn’t dramatic, it was just an absence, a screen that said nothing, meaning the same thing it had meant since 1987. Individual A was still no one, and if he stayed out of that database, he always would be. In 1995, Snohomish County Detective Jim Scharf helped establish a cold case investigation team.
The Cook and Van Cuylenborg case was among the first files the team took on. Scharf looked at it and said, “This is probably the most horrendous unsolved case we have.” He had no personal connection to the victims, no obligation beyond his badge, but this case lodged in him. He re-interviewed witnesses. He tracked every development in DNA technology through the ’90s and into the 2000s.
He understood one thing with a certainty that never left him. The killer had deposited biological evidence at the scene, and biological evidence doesn’t fade, doesn’t lie, and doesn’t forget. The only missing ingredient was technology powerful enough to exploit it. The families, meanwhile, had built their lives around a question with no answer.
Leona Cook, Jay’s mother, was still alive, still waiting. John Van Cuylenborg had graduated college, built a career, grown older, and carried an unresolved case through every ordinary year of it. The hardest detail belongs to Tanya’s father. William Van Cuylenborg had trusted Jay completely, had said he had no apprehensions about them going together.
He spent the rest of his life with that trust unrewarded by any answer. He died in May 1997 at 61 without ever knowing who had killed his daughter. Scharf kept going. He just needed the technology to catch up. In 2017, 30 years after the murders, Scharf reached out to Parabon NanoLabs, a forensic company in Virginia, using individual A’s DNA, Parabon built a phenotype report, a computer-generated image of the suspect constructed entirely from his genetic material, estimated skin tone, eye color, facial bone structure, age progressions at 25,
45, and 65. For the first time in three decades, there was a face where there had only ever been a code. More important was who Parabon introduced Sharf to, CeCe Moore, America’s foremost genetic genealogist, who had just been appointed to lead Parabon’s genealogy division. Moore had followed this case for years.
She was the same age as Tanya Van Cuylenborg. When Tanya was murdered, Moore was graduating high school, the same stage of life, the same moment, and the case had never fully left her. She later said she felt it personally in a way she couldn’t set aside. Three years earlier, in 2015, a woman named Chelsea Rustad in Tumwater, Washington, bought a consumer DNA test kit and uploaded her results to GEDmatch, a public database where people voluntarily share their genetic data to find relatives they didn’t know they had. She was curious about her own
roots. She knew nothing about Jay Cook, nothing about Tanya Van Cuylenborg, nothing about individual A. What she also didn’t know was that genetic genealogy works precisely because of people like her. Unlike CODIS, which only returns a hit if the suspect’s own DNA is already on file, this method doesn’t look for the killer.
It looks for his relatives, people who share long segments of identical DNA and have uploaded voluntarily for entirely innocent reasons. Chelsea Rustad uploaded to find family. She found some distant relatives. One of them connected through a chain she could not see to the man who had murdered Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook. On Friday, April 27th, 2018, Individual A’s DNA was uploaded to GEDmatch.
Moore stayed up late that night checking for matches. Nothing. Saturday morning, two distant relatives of Individual A appeared, both sharing enough DNA to be placed in the same family branch. Moore built the tree backward from both of them, found their common ancestors, then traced every descendant line forward, narrowing by sex, by age, by geography, until the maternal and paternal lines converged in a single family in Woodinville, Washington, the Talbots.
One son. He went by Bill. Two hours. That was all C.C. Moore needed to do what 31 years of conventional investigation could not. The name, William Earl Talbott II. We’re at the moment this case cracked open. 31 years of silence about to end with a name and a coffee cup. If this story is landing, hit like and subscribe right now.
It’s what keeps Crime Watch Central in cases like this one. Now, who was William Earl Talbott II? 55 years old in 2018, a truck driver out of SeaTac, Washington. In November 1987, he was 24, working delivery routes through the Seattle area, the same roads Jay and Tanya were traveling that night. He had been fired a few months before the murders.
No schedule, no fixed route, nothing tying him anywhere. He lived 7 miles from High Bridge in Snohomish County, the bridge beneath which Jay Cook’s body was found. Investigators noted that detail too specific to be coincidence. His former roommate, located and questioned after the arrest, told police he remembered a bronze van parked outside Talbot’s home on a misty fall day in 1987.
A blue blanket in Talbot’s house and truck, similar to the one found draped over Jay Cook’s body. Talbot’s volatility, a broken relationship with family members, a dramatically different personality when drinking, and one detail that landed like a weight. He had once taken him to the same general area where Jay Cook’s body was later found.
He had been there before. Genetic genealogy is a lead, not a conviction. Scharf needed Talbot’s DNA obtained legally without alerting him, without grounds to compel his cooperation. The solution was surveillance. The team followed Talbot for several days, then stopped at a red light his coffee cup fell from his truck.
They collected it, rushed it to the Washington State Patrol Lab that same day. Forensic scientist Lisa Collins ran the comparison against individual A. Jim Scharf got tears in his eyes when he heard the result. One in 180 quadrillion. That is 180 million trillion. There was no other person on Earth who fit. Individual A had a name, William Earl Talbott II.
May 17th, 2018, Talbott was arrested. Scharf’s first call was to John Van Culenborg. He told him individual A was in handcuffs. John said it sent a chill down his spine, 31 years later. At the press conference, Jay’s sister Laura Bonstra spoke first. It’s hard to put into words this feeling of relief, of joy, of great sorrow that this arrest brings.
Leona Cook said something that was at once a victory and a wound that would never fully close. On one hand, we are close to closure. On the other, we’re still at a loss. I don’t have my only son, Jay. Talbot pleaded not guilty. The trial was set for June 2019. The trial opened in Everett, Washington, and it was never only about a 1987 double murder.
This was the first trial in American history where a suspect had been identified through investigative genetic genealogy and brought before a jury. Cici Moore, who had spent two hours doing what three decades could not, understood precisely how much was resting on the outcome. If [snorts] the evidence was thrown out, the precedent would follow.
Defense attorneys Rachel Ford and co-counsel John Scott argued on two grounds. First, Talbot’s DNA on Tanya’s clothing and body was best explained by consensual sex before her death. Someone else, someone the defense could not name and produced no evidence of, had committed the murders. Second, the evidence, taken as a whole, was insufficient to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Prosecutor Matthew Baldock dismantled the consensual sex argument directly. Tanya Van Cuylenborg was in a foreign country with her boyfriend of six months on a specific errand, on her menstrual period. Nothing about the circumstances of that night supported the claim she voluntarily had sex with a stranger.
More decisively, both Tanya and Jay were bound with identical zip ties, and both were murdered. One kill kit, one night, one killer. The defense’s theory required an unnamed, evidenceless second perpetrator who happened to appear on the same night, in the same area, and used the same restraints. Baldock put it plainly.
Is it possible? Sure. Is it reasonable? No. On June 26th, 2019, the jury of 12 left the courtroom to deliberate. John Van Kaylenberg had been waiting for a verdict since the night his father called him at college in 1987. Now, he was waiting again outside a courtroom in Everett, Washington with the Cook family beside him, Leona, Gordon, Laura, Kelly, and with CeCe Moore watching from elsewhere, and Chelsea Rustad, who had uploaded her DNA to find family and had ended up here.
Three days, 72 hours in which 31 years compressed into something that still had no answer. On the third day, the jury returned. June 28th, 2019. Guilty. Two counts of aggravated first-degree murder, one for Tanya Van Kaylenborg, one for Jay Cook. State of Washington versus William Earl Talbott the Second, verdict form one.
We, the jury, find the defendant, William Earl Talbott the Second, guilty of the crime of first-degree murder as charged in count one. I didn’t do it. “I didn’t do it,” whispers the accused, who appears stunned at the guilty verdict. In July 2019, the judge sentenced William Earl Talbott the Second to two consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.
He was 56 years old. He had been 24 the night he crossed paths with Jay and Tanya on the streets of Seattle. John Van Kaylenborg said what he had waited his entire adult life to say. “It’s wonderful to have answers. We know from the trial that not all questions were answered, but we have more than we had in 31 years. That’s huge progress.
December 2021, the families of Jay Cook and Tanya Van Coelenborg had believed it was done. They had been in the courtroom. They had heard the word. They had gone home with it. And then, the Washington Court of Appeals Division One issued a ruling that overturned the conviction. Not because the DNA was rejected, not because genetic genealogy was challenged, but because a juror identified as juror 40 had told both prosecution and defense during jury selection that she was not certain she could remain impartial if violence had
been committed against a young woman. She had been seated anyway. The court ruled Talbot could not be guaranteed a constitutionally impartial jury. The verdict could not stand. For the families, the news arrived the way only people who had already waited 31 years could receive it. Not with shock.
They had lived too long with uncertainty to be shocked by it. With exhaustion. With the particular grief of people who had finally set something down and were now being asked to pick it back up with no certainty of when they would be allowed to put it down again. December 23rd, 2022, the Washington Supreme Court, in a unanimous 9-0 decision, reinstated the conviction in full.
The defense had possessed the legal right to strike juror 40 before trial and had declined to use it. They could not appeal an outcome they had the tools to prevent. The two life sentences stood unchanged, reinstated, and final. John Van Coelenborg, asked for his reaction, “It never really brings closure or justice, but at least there’s procedural justice.
It feels better than if it had gone the other way.” Chelsea Rustad attended Talbot’s sentencing with the blessing of both families. She sat between John Van Coolenborg and Gordon Cook, Tanya’s brother and Jay’s father, two people she was meeting for the first time. She was the only member of Talbot’s family present in that courtroom.
Asked if she felt any conflict, her cousin, her DNA, her family tree used to convict him, she said, “Absolutely not in light of the horrific nature of the crime.” A woman who only wanted to know her own roots sitting between a murdered girl’s brother and a murdered boy’s father at the sentencing of her own cousin. That image is what this case looks like when you hold all of it together at once.
This was the first case in American history to result in a conviction through investigative genetic genealogy. After Talbot, CeCe Moore’s method spread across the United States and beyond, including the Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo, arrested in 2018 using the same GED match technique weeks before Talbot.
Scharf said afterward, “If it hadn’t been for genetic genealogy, we wouldn’t be standing here today.” That statement belongs to every family that came after. William Talbot has never spoken about that night. No confession, no motive on record. Jay’s black ski jacket with the red piping has never been recovered.
Tanya’s olive drab daypack has never been found. The camera body has never been found. These are the questions this case cannot close, and they deserve to be named. Jim Scharf said the same thing every time he returned to that file from 1995 to the day the verdict arrived. “This is probably the most horrendous unsolved case we have.
” Only the ending of that sentence changed. On the afternoon of November 18th, 1987, Jay Cook borrowed his father’s Gordon’s bronze 1977 Ford van. Tanya put the Minolta X-700 on her shoulder, the camera she brought because she wanted to remember this. The plan was ordinary enough that no one thought to worry.
Pick up furnace parts from Jensco Heating, sleep in the van, drive home to Canada in the morning. They never made it to Jensco Heating. They never drove home. The photographs of their first trip together were never taken. What was left behind instead? A detective who could not close a file for 23 years, a complete stranger who built a family tree and accidentally broke a case that had defeated a generation of investigation, a method that changed how the world finds killers, and two families on Vancouver Island who waited 30 decades through the courts of a
country not their own for a word that finally came in a courtroom in Everett, Washington. The camera lens turned up in a Portland pawn shop in 1990. The camera body, the one Tanya carried onto that last ferry, the one she brought to capture something worth remembering, has never been found. In November 1987, Jay Cook and Tanya Van Cuylenborg boarded their last ferry and never returned.
31 years later, in a courtroom in Everett, Washington, they were finally heard. If this case stayed with you, hit like, subscribe, and tell us in the comments which moment hit hardest. Crime Watch Central reads every single one. We’ll see you in the next story.
