The Forever Witness Read online

  Also by Edward Humes

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  No Matter How Loud I Shout

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  Over Here

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  Copyright © 2022 by Edward Humes

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  Images on this page, this page, this page, and this page are courtesy of the Snohomish County Sheriff

  Image on this page is courtesy of the Snohomish County Superior Court

  Images on this page, this page, and this page are courtesy of Parabon NanoLabs

  Image on this page is courtesy of John Van Cuylenborg

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Humes, Edward, author.

  Title: The forever witness : how DNA and genealogy solved a cold case double murder / Edward Humes.

  Description: [New York] : Dutton, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021058094 (print) | LCCN 2021058095 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524746278 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524746292 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Criminal investigation—Case studies. | Genetic Genealogy—Case studies. | Cold cases (Criminal investigation)—Case studies.

  Classification: LCC HV8073 .H877 2022 (print) | LCC HV8073 (ebook) | DDC 363.25—dc23/eng/20220131

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021058094

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021058095

  Cover design by Nyesha Viechweg

  Cover photo by Chris Clarke/Getty Images

  book design by tiffany estreicher, adapted for ebook by estelle malmed

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  pid_prh_6.0_141940004_c0_r0

  To the family and friends of

  Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook,

  and to the others still awaiting answers

  Contents

  Prologue: Litterbug

  Part I: We’ll Be Back Tomorrow Night

  1. If Only . . .

  2. Squirrelly

  3. Wrong Turn

  4. Patrol Deputy Scharf

  5. Searching

  6. Fertile Ground for the Bogeyman

  7. The Jane Doe of Parson Creek Road

  8. It’s Always the Boyfriend

  9. He’s Taunting Us

  10. Nowhere Man

  11. Baby Alpha Beta and the Finder of Lost Souls

  12. She Parts Her Wings and Then She’s Gone

  Part II: Finders of Lost Souls

  13. Cold Case Man

  14. The DNA Blues

  15. The Tool of Inclusion

  16. Precious Jane Doe

  17. Facing a Killer

  18. Cold Fusion

  19. He’s the One That You Want

  Part III: Mystery Man

  20. Watching and Waiting

  21. Can You Come Back Tomorrow?

  22. Oh, That’s Just Bill

  23. Heart of Gold, Van of Copper

  24. The End of the Perfect Crime

  25. The Nietzsche Dilemma

  26. The Detective Versus the Four Pillars

  27. Is That It?

  28. For Me, That Closes the Window

  29. That’s Gonna Stick in My Head

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Prologue

  Litterbug

  May 18, 2018

  Snohomish County, Washington

  The sixtyish man with the plain gray suit and pale blue watchful eyes had just finished lunch when his phone buzzed. Feeling the buy-one-get-one-free roast beef sandwiches leaden in his belly, he sighed, sure this would be yet another false alarm. He dug the vibrating cell from his pocket.

  “Detective Scharf, sheriff’s department.”

  “We got it!” the voice on the other end said.

  Jim Scharf felt a second of incomprehension. Then the detective registered the exultant tone and who it belonged to—one of the ten undercover cops assigned to his stakeout. Finally! More than a week had gone by with nothing to show for the mission but overtime bills and impatient department brass.

  “What did you get?” he asked.

  “His coffee cup.”

  Scharf paused, letting the words sink in as he sat in his department-issue Ford SUV, stocked with enough bottled water, beef jerky, and Arby’s coupons to wait out nuclear winter, much less a long stakeout. Here he was, trying to solve one of the most baffling crimes in Pacific Northwest history, the disappearance and murder of a young Canadian couple on an overnight trip to Seattle. And now he had a coffee cup. He took a deep breath and started his car.

  “Bring it to the office,” Scharf said. “I’ll meet you there.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The brutality and randomness of the murders of Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook sparked an international manhunt, blanket media coverage, and deep anxiety that the rapist and killer might strike again in this semirural county north of Seattle. But that was thirty-one years ago. Since then there had been no eyewitnesses, no leads in the physical evidence, no arrests. Over time the panic and the headlines faded, and the investigation stalled.

  The case eventually landed on Scharf’s desk in the Snohomish County Sheriff’s cold case unit, where his job was to bring fresh eyes to old files. Many saw this as a departmental backwater, but so far Scharf had cracked eight murders and a sexual assault no one else could solve. And now he had a surprising new lead in the Canadian double murder case.

  His unlikely source was a self-taught genetic genealogist and cast member on the PBS reality series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Every cop ever assigned to the case, plus the FBI, Interpol, and even the Canadian Mounties, had all failed in their search for the killer. So this TV personality had succeeded by not searching for him. Instead, she had constructed his family tree.

  Now it fell to Scharf to determine if she was right, and if a Seattle trucker named William Earl Talbott II really was the killer who eluded capture for three decades.

  * * *

  • • •

  A balding mountain of a man, Bill Talbott had reached his fifty-fifth birthday with no criminal convictions on his record and no known connection to the victims. Scharf assigned the surveillance detail to shadow Talbott’s big rig on his daily deliveries of machine parts around Seattle, then trail him home from work, looking for anything suspicious. But other than bouts of fist shaking and shouting at other drivers, the man was a cipher. He worked, then went home and did little else.

  The man’s reclusiveness also made it hard for the surveillance officers to accomplish Scharf’s other directive: grab something with Talbott’s DNA on it without tipping him off. But there was a problem. The man never left anything behind. He was obsessive about it. And so a week of waiting and frustration went by before the break finally came where they least expected it: on a busy highway in the middle of traffic.

  Talbott stopped his truck at a red light, then abruptly flung open his door and climbed onto the running board. His surprised watchers quickly slumped in their car seats, but he wasn’t looking their way. His broad face florid, brows knit, Talbott leaned his bulk between cab and trailer and wrestled with something, maybe a loose cable that had been rattling and annoying him. When the light turned green, he hastily clambered back behind the wheel, and that’s when it happened: a used paper coffee cup tumbled out of the cab and fell to the street below. Talbott didn’t notice it, or, if he did, he ignored it and left the cup where it lay to be flattened by a hundred passing cars and trucks. He slammed his big rig into gear and roared off.

  The closest undercover cop had seen it all. Leaping from his watch car and dodging traffic, the officer snatched the cup and hoisted his paper trophy high.

  * * *

  • • •

  “I’ll drive it to the crime lab myself,” Scharf told the surveillance officer when they met that afternoon at the cold case office. Ten minutes later, their paperwork signed, he was in his car and headed to the Washington
State Patrol Crime Laboratory Division, the stained white cup in its plastic evidence bag on the seat beside him.

  The crime lab people loved coffee cups, Scharf knew. Saliva was a rich source of DNA, and drinking always left plenty behind. Every day, we all unthinkingly throw away a plethora of objects containing our entire genome, our most private information, the road map to who and what we are. Through accident or design, Scharf didn’t know which, Talbott somehow avoided doing so while under constant surveillance. But finally that cup slipped through.

  “Give me twenty-four hours,” Scharf’s favorite lab tech told him, “and I’ll have an answer for you.”

  The detective returned to his office with its piles of papers and yellowing photos of cold case victims, feeling anxious and steeling himself against hoping too much. He had lost count of the other suspects in this case he had sought out, checked out, and ultimately ruled out because their DNA didn’t match traces left behind by the killer. Maybe this time would be different.

  Tomorrow he would know. He would know the truth about Bill Talbott. He would know if he was on the verge of a big arrest and something quite possibly historic: the first-ever genetic genealogy murder trial. And he’d know if the slaying of a young couple could be solved through a family tree, a paper cup, and the heedless act of a litterbug.

  Scharf flipped through a folder, its graying manila cover worn thin and soft as old leather. His case file held only one picture of Jay Cook and Tanya Van Cuylenborg together. It wasn’t posed, just a hasty snapshot. Jay stood, gazing down in concentration at some small object in his hands, maybe something he was trying to unknot, his dark brown hair falling over his eyes. Tanya was seated and had just glanced up as the shutter clicked, so she appeared to look directly into Scharf’s eyes. Her slightly freckled face looked relaxed, Scharf thought, carefree. He guessed it had been taken just a month or two before they died. Tanya had turned eighteen that spring. Jay was a month shy of twenty-one. They’d be pushing fifty by now, he thought, had they lived.

  After a long moment, Scharf closed the folder, and waited.

  PART I

  WE’LL BE BACK TOMORROW NIGHT

  If ever there was time, I would lie in the sands of Gonzales and wiggle my toes in the sun. So leave me not forever, and keep love in your soul.

  —Tanya Van Cuylenborg, from the last entry in her notebook

  We were only eighteen. We were kids. We felt invincible. But you grow up fast when your best friend is kidnapped and murdered.

  —May Robson

  1

  If Only . . .

  November 17, 1987

  Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada

  “Why don’t you come with us?” Tanya Van Cuylenborg grinned, picturing the look on her best friend’s face.

  “What, me?” May Robson sputtered. “Jump in the car and drive to Seattle tomorrow, just like that?”

  “Nope,” Tanya said. After a beat, she added, “We’re going in Jay’s dad’s van.”

  This last-minute trip to Seattle was actually her boyfriend’s idea, she told May. And, okay, yes, she admitted, she was feeling a little nervous about it, this first extended trip alone with Jay Cook. So Tanya was doing what any eighteen-year-old almost-adult would do in such a situation: she asked her girlfriend to come along.

  But May had gone quiet.

  “C’mon, Mary-Anne,” Tanya implored, emphasizing each syllable of May’s proper first name. “You need a little adventure.”

  “So true,” May muttered grumpily.

  Tanya held her breath. Impulsive last-minute trips abroad were not May’s thing. That was Tanya’s role in this friendship. But once persuaded to jump in, Tanya knew, no one had her back better than May.

  “Please come,” Tanya pressed. “We’re going to be sleeping in his dad’s van and I’ll be uncomfortable alone with Jay. It’ll be so much easier with you there. It’ll be fun.”

  Normally, Tanya could expect May to agree then, no further discussion needed. The two had done everything together, after all, ever since they bonded at a Brownie troop meeting when they were eight. They’d become a constant presence at each other’s homes and tables ever since. May considered Tanya’s dad, Bill, a second, funnier father. The best friends graduated from high school together, ate and drank their way through London and Paris on a school trip that spring together, bluffed their underage selves into bars together. Tanya relished making it her personal mission to coax her more conventional friend into impetuous day trips and expeditions. She couldn’t remember May ever expressing regret at going along for the ride, not even when they got hopelessly lost in France late one evening. Tanya kept a cool head that night for May’s sake, and they finally found their way back to their hotel, arm in arm.

  This time, though, May said she’d have to disappoint her friend: she was sick. The pressure of the hard plastic telephone was making her relentless earache worse, she told Tanya. She had a pounding headache, fever, and chills. She wanted to say yes, but as much as she loved to be spontaneous with her best friend, and as much as she hated to say no when Tanya played the girlfriend-in-need card, May said she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Certainly not the next day.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. I’d be miserable, and I’d make the both of you miserable. I need to stay home in bed.”

  Tanya grumbled a bit, then mastered her disappointment, straining to sound both sincere and sympathetic when she said that, of course, she understood. Everything would be fine in Seattle, she assured May. They both knew Jay was a great guy, that she’d be fine without May playing third wheel. She was just being silly.

  In truth, she said, the impetus for the trip hadn’t been fun and adventure but a request from Jay’s dad, Gordon Cook. He needed a replacement furnace for a customer of his heating service and repair business. His regular supplier in Vancouver on the mainland had fallen through, but a company in Seattle had the right furnace and fittings. He just needed someone to make the five-hour car and ferry trip to pick up the old-style oil burner and haul it back.

  Normally Gordon’s business partner, Spud Talbot, would do it. When a trip to Seattle was needed, Spud would depart on a Friday and bring his wife. They’d make a weekend getaway of it, then return with the parts on the following Monday. But this job couldn’t wait for the weekend—winter had come and the customer needed a working furnace as soon as possible.

  So Jay volunteered to handle it, then asked Tanya to join him. His dad had given him money for a hotel, but Jay wanted to pocket the cash and spend the night in the family van, parked outside the supply warehouse. He and Tanya could pick up the furnace first thing in the morning, then there’d be time and money for some sightseeing and shopping before returning to Vancouver Island. They’d arrive back home that evening, Tanya explained.

  “I’ll talk to you then,” Tanya and May said at the same time. The two friends laughed their good-nights before hanging up.

  * * *

  • • •

  May Robson would replay that phone call in her mind time and again over the days, years, and decades to come. Sometimes she would dream about it. Thirty-plus years later, she still remembers her last conversation with Tanya with the sort of clarity normally reserved for a favorite song or a beloved movie replayed more times than can be counted. The warmth of her friend’s voice still rings in her ears, the laugh she knew better than her own, the easy intimacy with the one person she could and did tell everything. Except, on that last day, she told her friend no. After all this time, May still cannot speak of that without squeezing her eyes shut.

  In her dream version of that conversation, May usually gives a different answer. She sees herself happily packing a bag with her mom’s help, then waiting for Tanya to swing by with Jay at the wheel of his hulking copper-colored family van.

  If only that dream version were true, May often thinks, everything might have been different. Two people headed to Seattle had been an easy target for a predator, she reasons. But had she gone along, had she been in that van during that trip, three might have been a crowd, and the predator might have moved on in search of easier prey. There’s a chance nothing would have happened if she just had gone along for the ride, a chance Tanya would have come home as planned.