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Showing posts from July, 2014

Genetic Genealogy

The unlikely crime-fighter cracking decades-old murders? A genealogist.  The Washington Post   By  Justin Jouvenal   July 16, 2018 The young couple set out on a trip in 1987, speeding toward Seattle in a gold van, when they crossed paths with a killer. The man raped Tanya Van Cuylenborg and shot her in the head. Jay Cook was beaten and strangled. The killer left a pair of plastic gloves inside their vehicle, a gesture one detective interpreted as a taunt: You’ll never catch me. That was true for more than three decades. Investigators spent thousands of hours sifting leads and probing suspects with little to show. But in late April, a former musical theater actor with no background in law enforcement took over the case. CeCe Moore and her team cracked it in three days. Moore put the killer’s DNA profile into a public genealogy website to find relatives and then built a family tree that led to a suspect, William Earl Talbott II. The truck driver was charged in Washin