The Key to Cracking Cold Cases Might Be Genealogy Sites

In the fall of 1987, a young Canadian couple set off from their hometown of Saanich, British Columbia to run a few errands in Seattle. They never made it there; police found their bodies a few days later near Bellingham, Washington. Jay Cook had been beaten and strangled. His girlfriend, Tanya Van Cuylenborg, had been raped and shot in the head. For more than 30 years their families held out hope that police would one day find the killer.

That day was Friday, May 18, when the Snohomish County sheriff’s office announced it had finally arrested a suspect: 55-year-old William Earl Talbott II. Investigators found him the same way California police identified a suspect in the Golden State Killer case just a few weeks ago—by uploading DNA data from decades-old crime scene evidence to the public genealogy site GEDmatch. The difference this time was that GEDmatch knew about the investigation.

Earlier this month, the open-source database—which houses nearly a million voluntarily contributed genetic profiles—changed its terms of service to explicitly allow law enforcement to use it, either to identify the remains of a deceased individual or identify a perpetrator of a violent crime. It’s the first such site to formally open its data riches to the police, lending this new genetic sleuthing practice a growing sense of legitimacy. And investigators are wasting no time in taking advantage, which means these two arrests are probably just the beginning.

GEDmatch has long been a theoretical source of leads for the police, says CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist who worked on the Snohomish case. Up until a few weeks ago, she had mostly helped adopted people find their biological parents and celebrities track down their ancestors on the PBS television series Finding Your Roots. She often relied on GEDmatch to reverse engineer someone’s family tree, and with her particular knack for finding people, she got regular requests from police departments to help them crack a case. But she never felt comfortable working with law enforcement while GEDmatch's users were unaware their data might be used that way.

Then came the Golden State Killer case. Unbeknownst to the small roster of volunteers who run GEDmatch, California investigators used the site to generate a list of people that eventually led them to Joseph James DeAngelo, who they arrested April 24. After that, things moved very quickly.

“I knew right away, when I read that first news story that the unnamed site was GEDmatch,” says Moore. She scanned the headlines and social media, expecting there to be a lot of blowback about privacy concerns. But soon, a more altruistic consensus began to emerge. “The feeling was that GEDmatch should be considered public data, like the phonebook, or Facebook,” she says. “There’s no genetic exceptionalism; any data people put in there can be used as a tool for the public good.”

So a few days later, Moore accepted an offer to work with Parabon NanoLabs, a forensic DNA technology firm in Virginia. The company is paying her to helm the its brand new genetic genealogy unit, which the company announced May 8. Her first case? The Washington double murder.

Parabon specializes in DNA phenotyping—predicting the physical appearance of people from unidentified DNA evidence. For the past year, the company had been working with detectives from Snohomish and Skagit Counties to produce facial composite images of the 1987 double murder suspect. It was a last-ditch effort to produce a meaningful lead, after DNA evidence collected during the investigation had failed to match any profiles in the genetic databases available to law enforcement. But no one had come forward with any possible suspects.

With Moore on board, Parabon offered to run the genetic profile it already had on file through GEDmatch for free. The Snohomish and Skagit detectives, having seen the Golden State Killer news, promptly agreed. From a genetic sleuthing standpoint, their case turned out to be much more straightforward.

On a Friday evening in early May, Moore got the DNA report back from GEDmatch. Right away, she saw two people in the database—a man and a woman—who appeared to be second cousins of the person who had left DNA at the crime scene. Moore compared the shared regions of the two cousins’ genomes and assessed that they weren’t from the same branch of the family tree. There had to be a marriage connecting them. Working through the weekend with obituaries, census records, newspaper archives, and social media she found her way to two descendants of the great-grandparents of the original matches who had married. That couple had only one child, a son. And he carried the correct mix of DNA to fit the suspect’s raw DNA data file. By Monday, Moore sent the detectives a name: William Earl Talbott II.

From there the cops ran down the lead. Talbott’s parents had lived seven miles from where one of the bodies had been found. The investigators found Talbott in SeaTac, Washington, working as a truck driver. After surveilling him for a few days, they collected DNA from a cup he discarded, and arrested him after a lab confirmed a match. A case unsolved for 31 years had turned around in a matter of weeks.

Of course, it’s not always that fast. Sometimes genetic matching yields only a list of surnames, or a geographical region where a family has historically lived; it just depends on who’s in the database. But the odds get better as police embrace the technique—and since the Snohomish case, Parabon says it has uploaded 100 files to GEDmatch.

Of those files, from law enforcement clients Parabon had already contracted with for phenotyping services, about 20 look highly promising. An additional 30 could be workable, depending what Moore can dig up (her services cost extra). That means genealogy is a dead end for the other 50—for now. The company monitors the profiles every few weeks, looking for new matches as more and more users upload new data.

Curtis Rogers, who runs GEDmatch, says a number of users did remove their profiles or make them private following the Golden State Killer news. But in the weeks since, the site has experienced a serious uptick in uploads, with emails flooding in about how people want to donate their DNA to help catch dangerous criminals. Today the database is back to around a million users, according to Rogers.

And that’s despite some other new changes to the site in response to GDPR—the new European data privacy law—which went into effect May 25. GEDmatch didn’t allow users to log in until they had read the site's updated policy and accepted the new terms.¹ If they chose to decline, all their data on the site was automatically deleted. And now, when users upload a new genetic profile, they have to tick a box verifying the origin of the DNA data file. Options include “your DNA,” “DNA of a person for whom you are a legal guardian,” and “DNA obtained and authorized by law enforcement.” Ellen Greytak, Parabon’s director of bioinformatics, says the company gets written consent from the jurisdictional police department and selects the appropriate box before it uploads any samples.

“We had been thinking about offering this kind of service for a while,” says Greytak. “When we saw the mostly positive reactions the to the Golden State Killer case, and that the databases were seeing an increasing number of people joining and accepting the new terms, we went ahead with it.” According to Greytak and Moore, GEDmatch is the only site Parabon is currently using.

There aren’t that many other places to go. Private outfits like 23andMe and Ancestry require a court order to turn over genetic information to police. Neither company has yet complied with the few requests they’ve received from law enforcement, according to their annual reports. And other third party sites that offered public tools are shuttering them in light of the Golden State Killer case and the new GDPR requirements. Last week, genealogy company Family Tree DNA removed all access to its free and public genetic tools ysearch.org and mitosearch.org, which help genealogists track individuals through their paternal and maternal lines, respectively.

Bennett Greenspan, Family Tree DNA’s president, says it was a difficult decision, but that it was time for them to go. “They had been up for longer than any company in the field has been around,” he says. With more powerful tools becoming available elsewhere, it wasn’t worth the fuss of dealing with law enforcement concerns and new GDPR standards to keep them around.

When asked if GEDmatch considered shutting down, Rogers said it occurred to him, in the immediate shock of the Golden State Killer news. But after talking to users it became clear that people didn’t want to lose an opportunity to contribute to a greater societal good. “Look, we are who we are and we’re damn good at it,” he says. “So then it became a matter of educating people and being transparent about this particular use of their data.”

Rogers expects it won’t take long for this kind of police work to become routine, and for people to not think twice about their own part in it. When he first started GEDmatch in 2010, the site didn’t require users to enter an email, because people protested it as an invasion of privacy. A few years later users began complaining they couldn’t contact potential relatives they found. So email became a required profile criteria, this time without the uproar. It won’t be long before these genealogists just expect their DNA to be working overtime without them, out solving crimes.

06/02/18 1:50pm EST Correction: This story has been updated to clarify how GEDmatch users were informed of its policy changes. They did not receive an email, as the article previously stated.

The Key to Cracking Cold Cases Might Be Genealogy Sites

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