Last week, police in Washington State made an arrest
in the 30-year-old killing of a Canadian couple.
She had been sexually assaulted
and shot in the back of the head.
He had been beaten and strangled.
There was plenty of DNA evidence,
but nobody really to point a finger at.
For 31 years there was basically no resolution
but then the power of using genetics
and genealogy was able to get the name of a suspect
within a day.
Because of this sort of analysis we can now do,
you can discover things about the relatives of people
who have uploaded their genetic information to the internet
and I think that's what's both the power of this method
and also the thing that raises a lot
of these disquieting questions about privacy
and consent, that we're going through right now.
We're evolving
how DNA shows who you're connected to.
Genetics is this thing that we think of
as cutting edge science, you know?
It's happening in some of the most advanced labs
in the world.
And genealogy is something that, you know,
maybe makes you think of your grandparents.
You know, looking up records, maybe going to churches
and looking at gravestones to kind of try
and trace your family tree back.
So genetic genealogy is what happens
when you combine those two sciences.
A family tree represents
so much more than history.
So in the mid-2000s, this new industry started to grow
based on the rise of an of a consumer DNA testing industry.
And that was something that came out of the sequencing
of the human genome,
basically companies trying to figure out
how to make this a consumer product.
I decided to have my DNA tested through Ancestry DNA.
The big surprise was we're not German at all.
Family Tree DNA was the first company on the scene.
They were really targeting hardcore genealogists,
and then you have companies that are more targeted
at a broader commercial audience,
start coming into the scene.
Now, GEDmatch really was an important breakthrough
in genetic genealogy
because what it did was it created an open source site
where if you had done Ancestry's DNA test,
you could also compare your results to people
who had done other DNA tests.
But, you know, my DNA isn't just my DNA,
it's my cousin's DNA, it's my mom's DNA,
and so when I make a decision to share my DNA
I'm also making a decision to share their DNA.
So, at this point,
at least 30 million people have taken
these consumer DNA tests.
Some large portion of those people
have also uploaded the results to these public databases
that are searchable by anyone who's curious.
30 million might not seem like a big number to you,
of course, you know there's billions of people in the world,
but the reason that number is significant is that
you don't necessarily have to have shared
your genetic information in order for your information
to be exposed.
So, there was one study that found
that just 2% of people in the world would need to share
their genetic information
for us to potentially be able to identify everybody.
I'm joined right now with genetic genealogist,
that's a mouthful right there, CeCe Moore.
Hi, how are you? Great to meet you.
I'm happy to be here.
So CeCe Moore is probably one
of the most interesting people that I have ever interviewed.
She started off her career as a model, actress.
At one point, she made a living playing Barbie.
And at one point she decided
that she wanted to make a family tree
as a gift for her niece who was getting married.
This sort of became
this pretty all-consuming pastime for her.
And she didn't have, you know, formal scientific training,
it's just that she was doing a lot of this.
And through sort of trial and error,
she realized the way that you could merge
these traditional genealogical methods
with the genetic information
and also
social media.
She came up with this idea of triangulating your relatives
to discover the hidden identity of someone.
And then she became the genetic genealogist
on this TV show called "Finding Your Roots."
So take a look at this family tree.
This is Christian Kummel and Theresa Stockhausen.
We traced another of their descendants
and found one of their great-grandsons
who was willing to test for us.
So as CeCe Moore is helping all these adoptees
find their birth parents,
people begin asking the question of
what else can we use this technique for?
And there's one really obvious answer
to what else you can use that for
and that is figuring out who committed a crime.
June 18th, 1976 marked the first known rape
by the East Area Rapist.
The Golden State Killer
was this serial murder-rapist
who terrorized California in the '70s.
There was plenty of DNA evidence,
but nobody really to point a finger at
so it became a cold case.
And then in the spring of 2018,
there was this announcement of the solving
of this decades-old case that had used these methods
to basically identify the suspect.
CeCe Moore sees this as a green light.
She gets in contact with this company called Parabon,
which can take really degraded DNA samples
and extract information out of them
and make the same sort of genetic profile,
the same kind of file that you would get from a 23andMe
or an Ancestry.
She had already been in contact
with a few police departments
and detectives across the country,
including detectives in Snohomish County, Washington
where there had been a very brutal murder.
21-year-old Jay Cook
and 18-year-old Tanya Van Cuylenborg were murdered
while visiting Seattle from Victoria, British Columbia.
There were a few clues.
There was this blue blanket
that the one of the bodies had been wrapped in.
And there was DNA and 1987 happens to be the very dawn
of the DNA analysis-era in law enforcement.
But there are really severe limitations to that.
It's really more of a confirmation tool
than like a true detective tool.
And even as these databases grew,
there weren't any matches.
This should tell us which ones
we can be more confident about.
CeCe gets to work doing her part,
which is trying to figure out
what kinds of records and stuff you can use
to build out this family tree.
Not every crime scene DNA sample will have a relative
that has uploaded their genetic information.
So you kind of have to win the lottery and CeCe won big.
She didn't just get one match, she got two.
So basically, whoever gave that sample,
the suspect has two relatives in the GEDmatch database.
And they're pretty good matches
in the context of genetic genealogy,
they're second cousins.
And when she built out the family tree,
there was only one male
that was the right amount of relatedness
to the genetic hits on GEDmatch.
And they knew from other evidence
that they were looking for a male,
so it was a very strong indication, very quickly,
of who their suspect might be.
The suspect happened to be a truck driver,
so they followed him around in his truck for a few days
and at one point, a coffee cup falls out of the truck
when he's pulling away from a traffic light
and they are able to test the saliva
on the lip of the coffee cup and it matches.
Yesterday, we took into custody
a 55-year-old SeaTac man who is suspected
of the 1987 murders of Jay Cook and Tanya Van Cuylenborg.
We, the jury, find the defendant,
William Earl Talbott II, guilty of the crime
of first degree murder as charged in the count.
It's an incredible testament to the power of these tools,
given the right kind of data,
someone with CeCe's abilities is able
to sift through an enormously large data set
and come back with a single name.
So to go from entertainment
and then end up in a science career in my 40s
is definitely not something I would've ever imagined.
Without genetic genealogy,
this case never would have been solved.
CeCe Moore did in two hours
what 20 or 30 cops couldn't do in 30 years.
I think most people don't realize the power
of these types of tests.
When this happened, there was sort of this agreement,
okay, we can use this very powerful technology
to solve cold cases.
But very quickly, people started to use the technology
for other things, for murders that were not long unsolved.
And I think when that happened,
that started to raise the level of discomfort people had.
The particularly sticky thing here
is that you're not just sharing your information,
you're sharing your family's information.
And that's a tough thing, especially when we know things
like the criminal justice system
disproportionately targets minorities, right?
Or when we know that sometimes DNA evidence is wrong.
And I think another part of the cautionary aspect of this
is that
this is an application of genetic analysis
that nobody dreamed of
when we set out
to sequence the human genome.
And it's only through this combination
of these obsessive people
with their weird interests discovering this tool
that we have ended up here.
And so I think there's bound to be
other totally unforeseen uses for this
that we can't even imagine right now
Somebody might find out, you know,
about your family health history, for example.
A life insurer,
if they knew that you were prone to heart attacks,
they would be able to use that information
to deny you a policy.
So it's not just, you know,
crime suspects that face exposure with this information.
All of us could be exposed in one way or another
once this information is out there.
It's an enormously rich data trove
that a lot of people have decided to make public.
And perhaps the people who uploaded it
haven't fully thought through the implications.