A warning this episode contains some graphic descriptions of crime scenes which might not be suitable for all listeners. In the fall of seven, Tanya van Kailenberg and Jay Cook took a ferry from their home in British Columbia to Washington State. They were planning to run an errand the next morning for Jay's father. A few days later, Tanya's body was found in a ditch seventy miles north of Seattle. She'd been raped with her hands bound behind her, and
there was a bullet your head. Two days later, hunters found Jay under a bridge one county over. He had been strangled with a dog collar. A pack of cigarettes was stuffed in his mouth. Police had a theory. They suspected the couple had met the killer on the ferry and offered him a ride, but the leads ran out and the case went cold until a few months. H
good morning and thank you all for being here. Yesterday we took into custody of fifty five year old Sea Technique, who was suspected of the murders of j Cooke, An, Tanya and Kylie Burke. William Earld Tabot the second has been booked into Snowoman County Jail on one count of first degree murder on a war. Thirty one years after the murder, police finally arrested a suspect. A woman named c. C. Moore helped crack the case using a new and controversial technology.
At the time, CECI was known for solving the mysteries of people's family histories. Today, CECI hunt serial killers, Hi, I'm Pagat Kari and I'm Kristin Brown. And this week on Decrypted works lauring the unintended consequences of consumer DNA tests. These services are booming, with millions of people sending their
spit into companies like Ancestry and twenty three meets. They promised to unite people with long lost family members, detect risk of disease, and even suggests personalized dieting regiments, but critics fear that our DNA could come to be used in ways that would compromise our privacy and even potentially land someone were related to in jail. Stay with us. Okay, It was a classically cold and gray Pacific Northwest day when I picked cc more up at our hotel about
an hour and a half outside Seattle. Hey, do you want to put that in the track. Yeah, I can put it in there. There were just a few miles from More the murder of Tanya van Kilemberg and Jay Cook took place. So I was just gonna say, I was just realizing this morning that this we're in the county right now where you solved your first case, right are we in Stahomish cool. I saw a sign that
said this way, and I was was going to ask somebody. Yeah, I realized Cecy was here in rural Washington State to do what she has done for years, help people piece together their family histories. She was speaking at the annual Northwest Genealogical Conference. The day before, I had watched her give a very technical talk about how to triangulate DNA relatives to fill stubborn gaps and genealogies. Afterward, about two
dozen people rushed the stage to talk to her. One person, apparently a distant cousin, even asked her to pose for a picture. In this world, Cecymore is a star, but she fell into it by accident because until about twenty years ago, Cecy was an actress. Once she told me she had a gig where she had to pretend to be a bar Beam. She had come to our copy date joing a suitcase with multiple outfit options for the big banquet keynote she was giving later at the local
country club. Because it wasn't acting that made cc famous, it was genealogy. About twenty years ago, my niece was getting married and I was trying to think of a good wedding gift, and I thought, Oh, a family tree would be a cool wedding gift. I think I'll try to put one together for her, and got online and found ancestry dot com and started trying to figure that out and became obsessed with in genealogy. Genealogists are like detectives,
but for the family tree. They use things like marriage records and obituaries to piece together how people are related, and these days some of them, like Ceci, also used DNA. CEC made her mark using DNA to crack tough to solve mysteries like tracking down the birth parents of adopted children. Then Ceci's life took a turn. In April, police arrested a suspect in the long cold case of the Golden State Killer, a notorious serial killer who terrorized California in
the nine seventies. And eighties. Huge break in a cold case terrorizing California for decades. Police say they now have a Golden State Killer in custody. Joseph D'Angelo is facing new charges this morning, four counts of murder in Santa Barbara, twelve murder charges now in all Cecy was gearing up for attack at the genetic testing company three and when
news of the arrest happened. I woke up in a hotel room in Mountain View and saw the headline that the Golden State Killer had been arrested, and I knew immediately that it was through genetic genealogy techniques. It didn't come out immediately, but I knew that in the case of the Golden State Killer, law enforcement had used a genealogy website called jet match to find their suspect. Jet Match is sort of like a big community pository for
DNA data. For example, I could upload my data from say twenty three and me and find out whether I might be related to someone else who uploaded data from a different service like ancestry. What police did in this case is they uploaded data from crime scene DNA and then looked for potential suspects in the family trees of other people who showed up as a genetic match, in other words, people who shared the killer's DNA. We've reunited tens of thousands of people with long lost family members,
and it's exactly the same technique. So if we can do it there for adoptees, there's absolutely no reason we can't do it in these law enforcement cases as well. In the past, c C had been hesitant to go snooping through people's profiles for a purpose they'd never intended, but once the Golden State killer case was splashed across the headlines, she figured it was open season. I didn't want to do this until people knew that it was possible and that it was happening that their DNA could
be used for this purpose. CC's work is possible in part because of a small software company called Parabon Nano Labs. A few years ago, Parabond created a program called Snapshot that can use crime scene DNA to do basically what a sketch artist does. It creates a vague picture of what a suspect might look like. It does this by processing crime scene DNA with the same kind of technology that companies like twenty three and me and ancestry use
in the world of law enforcement. This hadn't really been done before I actually visited Parabon along with Business Week reporter Drake Bennett. Their technique provides a lot more data than crime scene labs usually work with. One standard test, for example, looks at just twenty three markers on the
Y chromosome. Markers are unique places on a person's genome, but Parabon looks at thousands of markers and more data means you can get a lot more detail about what your suspect might be like and compare that data to the consumer DNA tests that millions of people are doing right now. And that's where CEC comes in. The data that Parabond generates to create its DNA sketches is similar to the data people upload to sites like jet match
when they're looking for relatives. Last year, CEC reached out to Parabon to see if they could work together, and eventually the company hired her to head up a new unit devoted to forensic genetic genealogy. One of the first cases to come in was from Snohomish County in Washington State. It was the case of j Cook and Tanya Van Kuilenberg that we heard about at the start, and it was right after the Golden State killer arrest, so there was a lot of enthusiasm from law enforcement around the
country about using this same technique. Cecy got to work and I kept waiting for matches to populate, but they didn't populate. That Friday night, I went to sleep, and I woke up Saturday morning to a list of DNA matches on jed match. She got really lucky. There in the list of matches was the geneological equivalent of winning the lottery. Two cousins who shared a lot of DNA with the suspect, but who didn't seem to be related
to each other. So imagine a cousin on your dad's side of the family and another cousin on your mom's side of the family. Those two cousins aren't related to each other, but they are related to you. So that tells me I should be able to find a triangulation between them, meaning a place where those two family trees come together. From there, Cecy turned to all the traditional tools of genealogy to build a family tree for each
of the people who showed up as a match. That meant searching through Facebook, newspaper archives, and local records to figure out who else these people were related to. Since the two cousins of the suspect weren't related to each other, cecy knew that somewhere there had to be a marriage between the two family. Eventually she found an obituary for a woman from one family who was carrying a last
name from the other. Perhaps this was it. Cecie told me marriage records are pretty good in Washington State, so she was able to confirm that this was indeed the marriage she'd been looking for. And this resulted in four children, three of which were female, and so we only had one male. That one male was the only probable suspect. Within a few hours, ceci found herself staring at a name,
William Earl Talbot. The second police collected a new DNA sample from him and confirmed it matched the DNA found at the crime scene. Then, on May seventeen, police took William Earl Talbot into custody. Of course, he hasn't been found guilty yet, but my work certain points right at him. William L. Talbot has been charged with both murders, but he's pleaded not guilty. If he's convicted, he could face the death penalty. The Snohomish case was just the first
murder case CECI tried to crack. To date, Parabon and CC have solved more than a dozen cases, and they have dozens more in the works. Parabon has added three other full time genealogists to its stuff, with CCI heading up that team. But when people ship their DNA after or Ancestry to find out whether they're Italian or what their genes say about their taste for cilantro, they probably
don't imagine it being used for a criminal investigation. The Golden State killer case bren already bubbling conversation about DNA and privacy. To a boy, all, when you send your saliva off to a DNA testing company, you're handing over x extremely sensitive, extremely personal information not just about yourself, but about other people you're related to consumer genetic testing companies.
So companies like Ancestry and twenty three and me don't in general share data with law enforcement unless they're legally compelled to. But that data gets shared in lots of other ways. For example, DNA testing companies are already using the data for research. Over time, there could be other uses for that data too. For example, what if advertisers one day used it to Taylor adds to you, what if authorities used it not just to hunt down serial killers,
but petty criminals. I got into some of this with Aaron Murphy, she's a law professor, and yu, I mean the police. You were able to use DNA to determine something that probably people in the world do not know, which is who is your six cousins? I mean, I always say, now, I don't think people have fully internalized that they may be the person who's the pivot. Aaron thinks that if we fully grasped the scope of what law enforcement could learn about any of us by using
these new DNA technologies, we'd be truly shocked. Sometimes I say like, okay, we'll go on twenty three and me and look at the list of things that they're going to tell you about, and then tell me if you want to march down to your local precinct and and give that list of those things so your shareff with your name and the answers. To be clear, it is highly unlikely that police would get hold of a whole vial of saliva from a crime scene and send it
into a company like twenty three and me. Most of the time there are just tiny bits of DNA left behind at the scene of a crime. But the technology has already advanced enough that these kinds of searchers are actually possible through a pair bond nano labs and jet match, and your information could be exposed even if you don't
take one of these spit tests yourself. The key thing here is that it doesn't have to be you, you know, if they can find that information out through a relative of you earth because we're looking at you know, enough snips that we could make a prediction about what you look like based on your relative or whether your family has certain dispositions, then the whole families could be cut off because of one person's you know, cavalier approached to
another privacy. There actually is a precedent for what police can and cannot do when it comes to locating criminal suspects through their relatives. Police can upload crime scene data to a government criminal DNA database called CODIS to see if there's a match to anyone else. One major concern, though, with using CODIS in this way, is that the database exkews towards people of color, meaning that searching it for
family matches just continues to disproportionately imprisoned minority populations. But privacy is a concern too, so in California, for example, police can only use codeis after they've exhausted all other search tools. It's called familial search. But some states have strict laws governing when police are allowed to use it, and at least to one state has actually forbid it altogether.
Those rules, though, only govern that federal database. Big open platforms where people can voluntarily upload their data, services like judd Match are private. That means CC's investigations are not subject to those same strict rules that apply to government DNA databases. In fact, she's already solved one case that didn't meet California's rules for familial search. It was a three month old rape case in Utah. But CC is
wary of her palace. She worries, for one, about genealogists who don't know what they're doing leading police to the wrong suspect. That's actually already sort of happened once a
few years back, using a slightly different technology. You know, I don't like the idea of this being the wild West where people that don't have any law enforcement experience, are out there offering services to law enforcement, and there's no quality control, you know, there's no checks and balances, And I want to make sure that genetic genealogy is shown in the best possible way through these cases with law enforcement and that there aren't unnecessary missteps or negative outcomes.
But CC doesn't have the same concerns about people's privacy. She said it would be hard for jed match users at this point to not know that she's creeping around in there, and she thinks her work might prevent some innocent people from being wrongly suspected. Now, yes, some innocent family members are going to get pulled into investigations, but it's going to eliminate dozens or hundreds or sometimes even thousands of innocent people that are completely unrelated to the
crime or the criminals being looked at. Okay, So, P after hearing about all of this, I have to know, have you ever taken a DNA test? You know I haven't, and I guess at some level it's because I was always a little creeped out about it. But actually quite a few of my relatives have done these tests, and so I know I'm exposed I just don't know how much. So there was actually a very interesting study that just
came out that answers that question. So this researcher from Colombia and another DNA testing company called my Heritage found that if you are an American of European descent, there is a sixty percent chance that you have a relative that has done a DNA test that could expose you. So basically, we're approaching all of us being exposed. And that's basically what happened in the case of the Golden
State killer. He didn't actually take one of these DNA tests himself, but obviously someone he's related to did, and not just that, they then took the second step of uploading their results to jet match, this open source community platform, and without that second step, police would never have been able to crack the case. I think when people take these tests, even if they have, you know, maybe thought about these consequences, it still seems unrealistic that anything really
bad would happen because of sharing their data. But actually, you know, Aaron Murphy is one of the most cynical people I've met when it comes to genetic privacy, and she had a lot of thoughts about the kinds of bad things that might happen. The whole purpose of insurers, whether a health insurer or a life insure or a long term disability insure, is to predict whether people are going to need their services or not, because the model
is premised on people not needing the services. And if an insurer could find out through a Google search if they might have to pay out an Alzheimer's claim on you, or they have to pay out at Parkinson's claim on you, or they're going to have to support you through thoseabilitating diseases or MS. Right, you know, I don't e think you're not going to get that protection. So there is one.
It's called the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. It was passed in two thousand and it does offer some limited protection of how your data can be used, but it has a lot of loopholes, like, for example, it does not apply to life insurance, so life ensure could potentially just ask you like, hey, have you taken a DNA test? And if you have, you have to give them that information and maybe they could decide whether or not to
give you life insurance coverage based on it. I also think that because the Golden state killer was such a brutal and violent case, there was a lot of public acceptance behind the idea that finally, this technique had allowed us to identify a suspect. And I think a lot of people think that because they are not violent criminals, using this kind of technique to hunt down very rare, very violent people won't affect them. And the unintended consequences
of this technology are only just beginning to unfold. Denying someone life insurance is just one example of how this technology might be used, and we don't really know at this stage how far it could go, and I think that's the scariest part of this, right. This is a technology that is kind of in its infancy. You know, when cell phones first starting to be a thing, I don't think anybody ever imagined that we would be using
them for everything besides actually making phone calls. And you know, now I carry my iPhone around with me all the time and it tracks my location. And to your point, cell phone data is only one type of personal data that we're entrusting to a third party company. So that repository of data is sitting in one place with your provider like Apple or Google, um, which is separate from the data that a company like twenty three and me would have on you if you complete one of these
DNA tests, right. I think a really important part of this story is you know that it's not just the DNA data that CC is using to solve these crimes. She's going that data and then she's going on Facebook and looking at all the information people have shared there. And we're just sharing all of this data and not thinking about the consequences, And it's really hard to know
where that will leave us in the future. So it makes me think that as a society, we're really just at the very beginning of understanding how much our data is worth and how to take care of it properly. Perhaps in the coming years regulators will have to step in and tell us what they think is a responsible way for companies to use our genetic information. And that's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening. Have you
tried genetic testing? We want to hear your story. You can email us at decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at Kristin V. Brown and I'm at pgat Cary. If you're a fan of the show, please consider leaving us a rating and a review. It really helps new listeners find the oh. This episode was produced by Pa Good, Kari and Liz Smith. Our story editor was Aki Edo. A big shout out to Drake Bennett.
We've got a more in depth look at genetic genealogy and ccmore that will appear in Bloomberg Business Week shortly, so keep an eye out for that. Thanks also to Ann Vandermay, Emily Buso, and Magnus Henrikson. Francesco Levie is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.