Edward Humes - The Forever Witness: How DNA and Genealogy Solved a Cold Case Double Murder

Burned

Mississippi Mud

No Matter How Loud I Shout

Mean Justice

Murderer with a Badge

Buried Secrets

Garbology

Door to Door

Eco Barons

Force of Nature

Monkey Girl

Baby ER

School of Dreams

A Man and His Mountain

Over Here

Prologue

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, sheriffs 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 toone 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 Arbys 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. Ill 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 Scharfs desk in the Snohomish County Sheriffs 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 Talbotts 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 mans reclusiveness also made it hard for the surveillance officers to accomplish Scharfs other directive: grab something with Talbotts 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 wasnt 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 thats when it happened: a used paper coffee cup tumbled out of the cab and fell to the street below. Talbott didnt 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.