Hey, everyone is Zaki. Today we're re airing one of my favorite episodes from last year. It's about a woman called c. C. Moore who's helping the police self homicide cases using these databases of consumer DNA test results. A lot has happened since then, so keep listening till the end, when reporter Christen Brown will update us on the recent developments and warning that the story includes some graphic descriptions
of a crime scene. Okay, here's the episode. In the fall of seven, Tanya van Kileenberg and j 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's been raped with her hands bound behind her, and there was a bullet your head. Two days later, hunters found j 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 ago. Good morning, and thank you all for being here. Yesterday we took into custody of fifty five year old sea technic who was suspected of the murders of jacob In Tanya and
Kylie Burke. William Earld Tabot the second has been booked into Snowman 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 Cecy 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, c s hunt serial killers. Hi,
I'm Pia Gadkari and I'm Kristin Brown. And this week on Decrypted, we're exploring the unintended consequences of consumer DNA tests. These services are booming, with millions of people sending their
spit into companies like Ancestry and three met. They promised to unite people with long lost family members, detect risk of disease, and even suggests personalized dieting regimens, but critics fear that our DNA could come to be used in ways that would compromise our privacy and even potentially land someone we're 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 trunk? Yeah? 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 Snahomas 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, Cecy Moore 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 barbeam. She had come to our copy date joining 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 used things like Mary Dge records and obituaries to piece together how people are related, and these days some of them, like Ceci, also used DNA. Cecy 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 nineteen 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 de'angelo is facing new charges this morning, four counts of murder in Santa Barbara, twelve murder charges now in all.
Cecie was gearing up for attack at the genetic testing company twenty three and me 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 rested, 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 repository 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, Cecy 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 Parabond 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 CC 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 Snowhomish County in Washington State. It was the case of j Cook and Tanya van Kuilemberg 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. Cecie 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, Cecie 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, ceci knew that somewhere there had to be a marriage between the two families. 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, cc 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 certainly 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 CCI 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 staff, with CC heading up that team. But when people ship their DNA after me or ancestry to find out whether they're Italian or what their g 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 boil. When you send your saliva off to a DNA testing company, you're handing over 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 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 cousin? 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 prestinct and give that list of those things, so your sheariff 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 bit 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 yours, 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
private day. 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 excuse 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 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 powers. 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 if 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 criminal being looked at. Okay, so, PA, 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 in neither services or not, because the model was 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 the stabilitating diseases or MS. Right, you know, don't you think you're not going to get that protection? So there is
one law. It's called the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. It was passed in two tho eight, 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 a 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 septance 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 getting 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. Hey, Kersten's going good. So we're now in the present day. It's October, almost exactly a year after we first published
your story. A lot's happened since then. Give us the lowdown. Yeah, so a lot has happened. I think the biggest thing for me is that it's become very clear that forensic genetic genealogy it's a tool, a technology that is not going away anytime soon. This has now been used to solve dozens and dozens and dozens of cold cases and now also a lot of active cases. The Department of Justice actually issued this really interesting preliminary policy report on
it as an investigative tool. But it was interesting because there was also a cautionary note in that policy report. They said this tool should be used as a last resort because it is invasive, and they recognize that. Interesting. What else is new? Yeah, so, I think one of the most interesting things that has happened is we've started to see this technology used for different kinds of cases. There was one really controversial case just this year in which jed match allowed police in Utah to use it
for a violent assault. Previously, it had mainly been used for murders. I think there had been a few rapes even but for some reason, this really upset users. They felt like this was a violation of their privacy. They had not consented to their information being used for this kind of criminal investigation. That it was just too far down the slippery slope. You know what's next using it
to prosecute shoplifters. And because of that backlash, jed match actually had to make their site opt in instead of opt out, which means that overnight it went from every jed match user being automatically available to the police to search unless they said they didn't want to do that, to the opposite. And so their database went from having more than a million people whose profiles the police could access in order to do these investigations to having last
Night checked in with them. A few weeks ago, they had just a hundred and thirty thousand people in their database, which makes it almost useless to investigators. So what are investigators using now? So there's one of their site, family tree DNA, that has opened itself up to these kinds of investigations. I think that jud match has been adding users. They told me seven or eight hundred every week, so
they're hoping they get those numbers back up. But yeah, it's definitely this technology took a hit when that happened. And it's still the case that the major DNA testing companies like twenty three and me don't cooperate with law enforcement, right right, and ME and S three have made very clear that unless they are subpoenat, unless they are legally compelled, if they are not going to let law enforcement look
at their records. Now that you know, we've known about this use of DNA testing for I guess a little over a year, do you get the sense that people are more accepting of this technology. I think people are actually less accepting of it. You know, people are really conscious now of the ways their data is used, you know, not just by DNA testing companies, but by Facebook, by Instagram. Right. So we see this increasing sensitivity to violations of people's privacy,
including in this space. But I think that that might change as we see different use cases of this technology. There was one recent instance that really started to change my mind about this. Maybe. There was this rape case, Angie Dodd rape case. For a long time, the wrong
person was in prison for her rape and murder. This guy named Christopher Tap and the victim's mother pushed to use genealogy to try and figure out who actually did this, and they found another potential suspect, and Christopher Tap was exonerated after being wrongfully imprisoned for more than two decades. So I think that showed me that there's all different kinds of powers this technology has, and it makes me wonder what other ways this technology will be used that
we haven't thought about yet. Maybe. And what's our protagonist cc More up to these days? Oh my gosh, cecy More. She's so busy. Usually I have to email her like seven times before she emails you back. Now, CC has solved more of these cases than anybody else. She now has this whole team that works with her solving these crimes. She's definitely solved more than fifty of these cases. At this point. She's just you know, working away, sitting on
our couch doing her DNA sleeping. Well, thanks for this update today, You're welcome. This episode was originally produced by p I get Cary and Liz Smith. The update was produced by me Aki Ito and Ethan Brooks with help from Toe for Foreheads. Our story editors are Anne vander May. And Emily Busso. Francesca Levi is ahead of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.