REVIEW: The Forever Witness: How DNA and Genealogy Solved a Cold Case Double Murder by Edward Humes
A relentless detective and an amateur genealogist solve a haunting cold case—and launch a crime-fighting revolution that tests the fragile line between justice and privacy.
In November 1987, a young couple on an overnight trip to Seattle vanished without a trace. A week later, the bodies of Tanya Van Cuylenborg and her boyfriend Jay Cook were found in rural Washington. It was a brutal crime, and it was the perfect crime: With few clues and no witnesses, an international manhunt turned up empty, and the sensational case that shocked the Pacific Northwest gradually slipped from the headlines.
In deep-freeze, long-term storage, biological evidence from the crime sat waiting, as Detective Jim Scharf poured over old case files looking for clues his predecessors missed. Meanwhile, 1,200 miles away in California, CeCe Moore began her lifelong fascination with genetic genealogy, a powerful forensic tool that emerged not from the crime lab, but through the wildly popular home DNA ancestry tests purchased by more than 40 million Americans. When Scharf decided to send the cold case’s decades-old DNA to Parabon NanoLabs, he hoped he would finally bring closure to the Van Cuylenborg and Cook families. He didn’t know that he and Moore would make history.
Genetic genealogy, long the province of family tree hobbyists and adoptees seeking their birth families, has made headlines as a cold case solution machine, capable of exposing the darkest secrets of seemingly upstanding citizens. In the hands of a tenacious detective like Scharf, genetic genealogy has solved one baffling killing after another. But as this crime-fighting technique spreads, its sheer power has sparked a national debate: Can we use DNA to catch the murderers among us, yet still protect our last shred of privacy in the digital age—the right to the very blueprint of who we are?
CW – descriptions and discussions (some in graphic detail) of several violent crimes – including against children.
Review
Thirty five years ago – eerily almost to the day that I’m writing this review, a violent crime was committed against a young Canadian couple. Almost immediately, their families knew something was wrong, in part because of Tanya Van Cuylenborg’s faithful habit of always calling her family when she was going to be late. Their worried parents reported them missing but, stymied by the then police policy of waiting three days before beginning an investigation, Tanya’s father launched his own search for them. He and Tanya’s older brother were the ones to identify her body which was found, rolled down into a ravine, naked from the waist down except for her socks. Jay’s battered and strangled body was found by hunters two days later.
Roughly two decades later, a Washington State cold case detective got involved. The case had received wide publicity and coverage at the time but after years of chasing down leads and having the story on TV unsolved crime shows, they were no closer to cracking it. But by this point, use of DNA in solving crimes was about to enter a third stage. The first stage was collecting it from crime scenes and then using it to compare to suspects who were identified by standard means as at that point, DNA databases were small. In stage two, growing databases gave law enforcement officers something to compare collected samples to. But if a suspect’s DNA had never been entered into a database, LEOs were at a loss.
Then the growing field and hobby of DNA genealogy began. Spit in a cup, send it in and learn all about yourself. Upload your data and learn all about your family. Contact someone who knows more about mining databases and discover information about your adoption, or if your listed father is really your father, and more! When the identity of the Golden State Killer was discovered and announced, DNA use in crimes reached stage three, as people began to learn about how these databases could be reverse engineered to reconstruct a family tree and catch criminals.
How does all this affect individual privacy? Are there rules and laws to govern this sort of use of information that people didn’t realize could be used this way? Is it acceptable if it helps find violent criminals who have evaded justice for decades or a criminal who just recently committed his crime and whom police are afraid will strike again? And was a suspect in the murders of Tanya and Jay identified and brought to trial?
Author Edward Humes lays all this out in an easy to understand and follow book. It’s chilling, it’s fascinating, it’s horrific to read about the crimes, and it’s satisfying – in some ways. As of now over 200 cold case crimes have been solved. US States, LEOs, lawyers, and genealogists are discussing, debating, and passing laws regarding the use of genetic genealogy to solve crimes. As the book says, the genie is out of the bottle and consumers who get incensed at having their computer information and credit cards hacked are the ones happily handing over the key to their entire being to companies that are profit oriented. What will happen next, we don’t know. B+
~Jayne
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Interestingly enough, this morning I read this headline “Abducted child found 51 years later, family says.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/abducted-child-found-51-years-later-family-says/ar-AA14CAeo
After searching for 51 years, the family of a kidnapped child says a DNA match has led them to her.
Melissa Highsmith was 21 months old on Aug. 23, 1971, when she was abducted in Fort Worth, Texas, by someone claiming to be a babysitter.
Since then, the family has been searching for her. They even came to Daniel Island in October after an anonymous tip said Melissa might have been spotted in the Lowcountry.
But now the family says the search is over following a “23 and Me” DNA match that reconnected them with Melissa.
One the one hand it’s great that they can catch such horrible criminals but on the other hand you wonder where it’s going to lead to. What if they use it to catch petty thieves someday? What if you didn’t know your cousin was a petty thief but now your DNA has led to his arrest? What if the evidence is falsified? Etc. I know a couple of Black people who don’t get DNA tested for that reason (falsified evidence). But yes, on the other hand it’s a marvel that would have seemed like science fiction when we were kids.
@Janine: One thing Humes mentioned is that so far, the majority of cases cracked have been committed by white men against white women as the vast majority of those who have done home DNA testing are of white European origin and the types of cases where DNA samples would be left are sex crimes and those are usually perpetrated against women.
He also said that as of the time he finished the book (late 2021/early 2022), Maryland and Montana had passed laws trying to address the privacy issue.
@Jayne: That law sounds like a big step in the right direction.
I know someone who had DNA analysis done and ended up giving her results to another service that sent it to a police database in exchange for giving her some additional information about her DNA. Later I told her that such a database was used to catch the Golden State Killer and she had no idea. I’m not sure how many people are giving away their genetic data without thinking about where it’s going or how it will be used.
Another issue is that health insurance companies could easily get access to DNA data and use it to decide who to cover and who not to. I really would not want to be kicked off health insurance because of an illness I may or may not get in the future (not that I would want to get kicked off health insurance for any reason). But two of my relatives both got DNA analyses, one with Ancestry and one with 23andMe, and between those two double helixes, protecting my DNA data is probably a lost cause. :-/
I’m glad Maryland has been giving this some thoughts and I hope other states get on board.
@Janine, reading your thought about relatives giving DNA reminded me of an article in Slate about Facebook’s “people you may know” feature. I’ve never used Facebook although everyone I know has, so according to that article, Facebook knows rather a lot about me. The article was in late 2018. I looked up the date, but have not forgotten the article. It unsettled me. Still does, even more than DNA, because DNA is science and Facebook is not.
@LML: I’ve never had a (evil) FB account. Or twitter. Or Instagram. Or any other social media. For a reason. I just searched for and found the article you mentioned. Those rat b&^%$#ds.
@LML: Yes, Facebook does unethical data gathering and so do many other tech companies. If you want to be horrified further, read the articles at last six links on this list of sources for the “Adam Ruins the Internet” episode of Adam Ruins Everything.
https://www.trutv.com/shows/adam-ruins-everything/articles/adam-ruins-the-internet
@LML: And oh, yes, DNA data theft is far more terrifying. Virtual reality data theft is also scary–tech companies can mine so much information about your emotions and reactions from VR. And a lot of people don’t know these things or it doesn’t occur to them.
@Jayne: I’ve said it many a time–social media should be called antisocial media. And big data should be called big surveillance.
@LML: Oops, sorry, I should have said the articles at the six links starting with the ninth from the bottom (“Dragnet Nation”). The others there are interesting (scary or infuriating) also.
@Janine: ::shaking head:: I had no idea about this either.
@Jayne: Yes, I saw Jaron Lanier, a founder of VR technology, talking about this on TV and he scared me. He was so concerned about data mining that he’d written books on the topic. He talked about how in the future (and this was several years ago) VR data mining could be exponentially more dangerous than the already-awful data mining we are familiar with on the internet and how effectively it could be used for behavioral modification. Unfortunately PBS appears to have removed the interview from its website (it was on The Tavis Smiley Show). But I did find this, also by Lanier (not on the topic of VR but on the topic of social media, so still apropos of this discussion):
https://mindful.technology/jaron-lanier-delete-social-media/
Several years ago I wrote a work for hire book for teens on Big Data And Privacy Rights. It’s all quite complicated, because we benefit as well as suffer. For example, Fitbit watches don’t only encourage people to get their steps in, they can collect and aggregate data for studies that provide a greater understanding of health and advance medicine. That information can literally save lives, but only if people share it. On the flip side, you get identity theft and all the other scary stuff.
This was the first case I thought of while reading the comments.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rape-kit-dna-san-francisco-woman-arrest-lawsuit/
I read about the woman’s arrest also. I’m not convinced that it is wrong to use previously accumulated evidence to charge a current crime victim with a previous bad act. Worrisome, in discouraging victims -especially women- to come forward. But how different is it from “I’m sorry you are a victim. By the way, we have a warrant for your arrest on a different matter.”
I agree, LML, It will be interesting to see how the case proceeds.
@Kris Bock: There are a lot of marvelous things that can be done with any technology, as well as a lot of harmful things, and it all depends on who wields it and what their agenda is. So I think it boils down to how much you trust corporations to use their power for the common good rather than to serve their self-interest. For me the answer is very little.
@LML and @jenreads: I haven’t really thought out my opinion on this, but it seems to me that there is a difference, which is that the woman entrusted her DNA to the police in the belief that they would use it differently than they did. If she (a rape victim) hadn’t been a criminal herself but they had used it to identify a family member as one, would you still feel as you do?
And then there’s using DNA this way. https://www.aol.com/news/holocaust-survivors-offered-dna-tests-063315395.html
@Janine, that is an interesting question and I … I’ll think on it.
@LML: Yeah, I haven’t worked out all my thoughts on it either. I think part of the complexity is that a number of different issues intersect here—how much reach should the police have to use DNA for a purpose other than the one it was voluntarily given for, as well as the value of arresting a criminal vs. showing sensitivity to rape victims, and also, how important is it refrain from discouraging women from coming forward when they are raped. The second and third issues are easy to react to emotionally but I think the first question is just as important because a precedent can have a long-term impact in all kinds of ways that we may not anticipate (both good and bad).
@LML: I was just rereading the thread and this time I understood that you said that Facebook data mining is more worrying to you than DNA data mining. I can understand your reasoning but I don’t agree. Perhaps at the moment, it’s more harmful, but the day will come (if it hasn’t already) that all kinds of personal health information made available through genetic data mining will be sold to companies. So for example a potential employer might pass over you because you have the gene for a mental illness.
Even worse, having your DNA will someday allow scientists to create a person with your genetic code, either part or all of it, and it won’t be impossible for them to do it without your consent. I know its seems like science fiction now but genetic technologies are advancing fast. We could end up having children out in the world that we are not aware of, being used for who knows what purpose.
And a tangent re gene editing more generally— once something is in the gene pool there may not be any getting it out, ever. All kinds of illnesses could be introduced this way. Of course, there is also great potential for good like gene therapy and cures for terrible genetic illnesses like Tay-Sachs. The crispr gene editing tool is already here and it scares the crap out of me though.
Maybe I am a luddite. I benefit greatly from technological advances but I’m also wary of them. As befits the daughter of a scientist, perhaps.
@Janine:
It’s interesting that in this situation, I feel compassion for the victims in both cases. The many ways DNA can be used for and against you. I started the new Michael Connelly mystery today and one of the cold cases featured in it has the “family tree” DNA matching you mentioned.