Genetic Genealogy: Identifying Both the Guilty and Innocent

23-06 Genetic Genealogy: Identifying Both the Guilty and Innocent

[00:00:00] Reed Pence: In 1987, Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook boarded a ferry to Seattle, Washington. What was supposed to be an overnight trip began to concern their families after the couple failed to return back home. Soon after, Tanya and Jay were found brutally murdered. But with no witnesses or promising leads, the case sat untouched for decades. That is until 2018 when law enforcement was able to finally catch the killer by using genetic genealogy.

[00:00:36] Edward Humes: It's the DNA that actually determines what color eyes we have, what color hair we have, whether we're gonna be tall or short. And you can also figure out the part of the world where a person's ancestors is from, from their DNA. That's the, there's sort of genetic heritage, and that's different than a DNA fingerprint.

[00:00:53] Reed Pence: That's Edward Humes, an author and journalist. He details the 1987 cold case and the future of crime solving in his new book, The Forever Witness: How DNA and Genealogy Solved a Cold Case Double Murder. Companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA have popularized at-home DNA testing that anyone can use to trace their lineage throughout history. Very quickly, people realize that these databases could be used for much more than finding a long lost relative.

[00:01:26] Edward Humes: With this DNA tool, this genetic genealogy became not exactly child's play, but it opened up all those doors also for abandoned babies who didn't know where they came from, for amnesiacs who couldn't recall who they were, these people were being helped through the power of this crowdsourced DNA.

[00:01:45] Reed Pence: Hume says it wasn't long before people realized we could use this technology to help solve crimes. It may not get matched with the killer, but finding a relative can be a crucial step to solving the case.

[00:01:58] Edward Humes: That's the power of it. You don't need to have the guilty party's DNA, just some of their distant relatives. And that combined with a search through records, the old genealogy, you know, old school methods, the two together could find almost anyone, including killers that seemed they were beyond reach.

[00:02:16] Reed Pence: This revolutionary technology's first law enforcement debut was just five years ago when it caught the Golden State Killer. Humes says that the first attempt took multiple months and millions of dollars.

[00:02:30] Edward Humes: So what I thought then was what everybody thought: oh, well this is cool and they solved this big crime, but it's not like this is gonna be useful in more than a handful of cases. It's too expensive, it's too much manpower. And then immediately another case broke, and it's where I happened to be living at the time in Seattle, in that area. And it was this double murder that became the heart of my book because that wasn't a moonshot level. It happened really fast. And the genealogist who did the work, CeCe Moore, two hours after she got the go ahead to do the case, she had solved it. A 31 year old mystery that had baffled generations of detectives. She did it in two hours for free. It didn't cost the police anything, and that was when I realized this isn't just a, you know, a one off. This is the future of criminal investigation.

[00:03:21] Reed Pence: CeCe Moore is the chief genetic genealogist at Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology firm. Before dipping her toe into crime solving, Moore used genetic genealogy to help orphans learn about their biological ancestry.

[00:03:36] CeCe Moore: I was involved in a lot of media, both news type shows as well as print media that described some of the cases that I was involved in. And those would be read or seen by these law enforcement professionals and they would think: hey, could I use these techniques, these adoption type techniques, to identify the violent criminal in my case? Or in some cases, coroners reached out to me and asked if I would be able to help identify their Jane or John doe’s.

[00:04:10] Reed Pence: And though Moore realized how her techniques could greatly benefit law enforcement, she didn't immediately offer her services. Instead, she contemplated the decision for years before finally making her choice.

[00:04:23] CeCe Moore: I wanted to make sure I was doing it in an ethical and responsible way and I also wanted to make sure that the people whose DNA was used for that purpose was aware of that. And had the choice as to whether to participate in that application or not.

[00:04:40] Reed Pence: That's when Moore decided to team up with Parabon, which was leading the way in SNP genotyping, a different test than what law enforcement had been using.

[00:04:49] CeCe Moore: Up until that time in 2018, crime scene DNA was only being processed in the STR type profile. In order for it to be compatible with genetic genealogy, it needed to be in the SNP profiles. Well, Parabon had pioneered processing crime scene DNA and unidentified human remains using SNP genotyping, this type of health genetic testing. But it wasn't for health purposes. They were doing it because they were predicting someone's phenotype, meaning what did they look like based on their DNA; their hair color, eye color, skin color, shape face. And it just so happens that was the exact same process that I needed to be able to move forward with genetic genealogy on those cases.

[00:05:36] Reed Pence: Parabon had already SNP genotyped about 100 files from crime scenes and unidentified remains when Moore joined the team. With all this data, they reached out to the agencies involved in those investigations and asked if they could perform genetic genealogy on those cases. The very first case Moore took on was the same double homicide Humes writes about in his book.

[00:05:59] CeCe Moore: For law enforcement purposes, we are limited to the smallest databases. And in that case, I was just using GEDMatch, which is about 1 million people at the time that I utilized it. And so you just never really know what you're gonna get till you get that DNA uploaded into whatever database you're allowed to use for that particular type of case. And sometimes it can take minutes, sometimes it can take days or months. And in some cases, rarely, it can take years.

[00:06:29] Reed Pence: The process of genotyping involves looking at hundreds of thousands of genetic markers across a genome. It's the same method that's used when you send your DNA into a site like 23andMe. Moore needed to have this specific type of file because all the people she could be comparing the DNA to would also have to have used this method. After the file was created and uploaded to an online DNA database called GEDMatch, the investigation turned into a waiting game.

[00:06:59] CeCe Moore: You have to wait anywhere between about eight hours and 48 hours for that unknown killer's DNA to be compared against the files that are in the GEDMatch database. And so I kept checking late one night. No matches, no matches. And I finally gave up and went to sleep. Woke up in the morning, immediately opened my laptop, checked that profile and we had a list of matches.

[00:07:24] Reed Pence: The list consisted of people that shared what more considers a significant amount of DNA with the unknown subject. In this case, the term significant even applies to matches that shared less than 1% of DNA, which is completely opposite of law enforcement database matches.

[00:07:42] CeCe Moore: They're looking for an exact match, someone who shares a hundred percent of their DNA. And I'm just looking for people who share 1% or 2%.

[00:07:50] Reed Pence: Moore is able to use such a large scope because it allows them to find distant relatives who may share just one segment of DNA with that match. She can find a common ancestor somewhere in their family tree. When looking into the murders of Tanya and Jay, Moore says she got super lucky with two matches of second cousins.

[00:08:12] CeCe Moore: And so very quickly, William Earl Talbott II's name came to my attention. It was in probably less than two hours. This was the first case I worked for law enforcement though, so this was a very heavy burden to know this name, to know the potential identity of these killers after 30 years and I wanted to make really sure that I was passing good information over to Detective Scharf. So I spent the rest of the weekend vetting that hypothesis. Playing devil's advocate, trying to see if there was any other explanation or I could be wrong. But by the end of the weekend, I was fully convinced that William Earl Talbott II was the DNA contributor to that crime scene, and thus Jay and Tanya's killer.

[00:08:56] Reed Pence: Moore says this first case solidified her future working with law enforcement. Since 2018, she's worked on hundreds of cases using genetic genealogy to find the guilty. However, these achievements aren't possible without people in the public deciding to put their DNA information into online databases. And though this technology received a lot of praise, critics voiced concerns about privacy issues. Fortunately, Moore says much of the worry stems from false information.

[00:09:27] CeCe Moore: There's a lot of fear mongering. There's a lot of misinformation. I don't believe in using anyone's DNA that has not allowed us to do so. Everyone has the right of how their own DNA should be used, other than a violent criminal who leaves it behind at a crime scene. And so I want people to make an informed decision. But I want them to really understand the process, what we do and what we don't do with this DNA. So that they can come to a decision based on education versus misinformation.

[00:09:58] Reed Pence: If you send your DNA to a company like 23andMe, your data is not shared with police. In fact, it's more difficult than you may think for your information to be used by law enforcement.

[00:10:10] Edward Humes: There's two very specific places that the police can look at your copa tree DNA and GEDMatch. As a user, you have to take your test off of a place like Ancestry or 23andMe and put them yourself into those databases and give permission for the police to use the data that you've put up there to help them solve crimes. So nothing's happening -- well, it shouldn't be happening behind anyone's back when you do that. And you're further protected because the only thing the police see when they get a list of individuals who might be distantly related to their crime suspect is a name and an email.

[00:10:50] Reed Pence: Meaning they don't get any genetic data like hair color or health information. In fact, Moore says that most of her investigative work is actually done after the genetic genealogy test.

[00:11:01] CeCe Moore: My time is mostly spent in public records doing research. And so it's, I think, much less concerning as far as genetic privacy than most people realize. I often tell people that the genetic part of it is very small. If they're worried about privacy, they should be thinking more about what they're putting out there in the world about themselves and their families. It's very common for me to use social media to piece these families back together and learn who's related to whom. And that is where I get a lot of more personal, private type information.

[00:11:36] Reed Pence: And even though genetic genealogy gained publicity through solving cold cases, Moore says it's now evolved into a helpful tool to catching the bad guys in real time. The Forever Witness is available now wherever books are sold. You can find more information about Edward Humes, CeCe Moore, and all of our guests on our website, radiohealthjournal.org.