Category Archives: Cold Cases

BUTLER COUNTY, OH (FOX19) -For three years, Butler County officials have been working to identify a woman who was found dead in West Chester in 2015. Now, with the help of a non-profit focused on DNA, they could be getting closer than ever.
Three young boys found the unidentified woman’s bones in a wooded area near the intersection of Tylersville Road and Cincinnati-Dayton Road in March 2015.

The daughter of a notorious US serial killer has offered her DNA to gardai in a bid to help solve cold case murders that took place during a period when her father visited Ireland.
Jenn Carson, whose father was Michael ‘Bear’ Carson, also known as the ‘San Francisco Witch Killer’ spoke to Dave Fanning on RTE Radio 1’s Ryan Tubridy Show today.

The attacks came before DNA testing, before the internet. Ronald Reagan was president. News reports at the time said one of the women was in her shower getting ready for work when she was attacked by a stranger with a knife. Another was at her own door when the man jumped her.

For the past 30 years, evidence found at the scenes of the killings of Jay Cook and Tanya Van Cuylenborg was mostly confined to a blue blanket wrapped around Cook’s body, an abandoned bronze 1977 Ford Club Wagon and, crucially, the killer’s DNA.
The couple was from Saanich, British Columbia, and on the evening of Nov. 18, 1987, they were traveling in the Cook family van to Gensco Heating in Seattle to pick up a part for Cook’s father. They were last seen purchasing a ticket around 10 p.m. in Bremerton, Wash., to board a ferry to Seattle, but they never made it there. Several days later, 18-year-old Van Cuylenborg’s body was found partly clothed, dumped in a ditch in a wooded area in Skagit County, Wash. She had been raped, police said. Cook’s body was found near the Snoqualmie River.
Since 1987, police had received more than 300 names from tipsters who thought they had information about the couple’s alleged killer. William Earl Talbott II was not on that list.
But then investigators ran the DNA from the scene through a genealogy website. They turned up two second cousins of Talbott, which led them to him.

A 55-year-old man has been arrested in a 31-year-old cold case involving a young couple murdered in Washington state.
Detectives from the Snohomish County and Skagit County Sheriff’s Offices arrested William Talbott for the November 1987 murders of 20-year-old Jay Cook and 18-year-old Tanya Van Cuylenborg, the Skagit County Sheriff’s Office said Thursday.

DUNN COUNTY (WBAY) – A 56-year-old cab driver charged with sexual assault in western Wisconsin is linked by DNA to a sexual assault in Green Bay, police say.
On Tuesday, Edward Woodbery was charged with second-degree sexual assault of an intoxicated victim in Dunn County. The victim told police she called for a cab after drinking in a bar on a night in Oct. 2017 and was picked up by Woodberry. She said he raped her inside the cab and then at his apartment.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police say someone found a human foot inside a hiking boot along the shores of British Columbia, the 14th such discovery since 2007.
Canadian authorities say a man was walking the beach on Gabriola Island, on the west coast of the country, when he found a “disarticulated” human foot inside a boot wedged between logs last week

More than 40 years after the so-called “Golden State Killer” began terrorizing California, raping dozens of women and killing at least 12 people, authorities announced Wednesday that they had arrested 72-year-old Joseph James DeAngelo, charging him with capital murder, after a recent DNA match.

When the DNA results came back, even Lukis Anderson thought he might have committed the murder.
“I drink a lot,” he remembers telling public defender Kelley Kulick as they sat in a plain interview room at the Santa Clara County, California, jail. Sometimes he blacked out, so it was possible he did something he didn’t remember. “Maybe I did do it.”
Kulick shushed him. If she was going to keep her new client off death row, he couldn’t go around saying things like that. But she agreed. It looked bad.

GREEN BAY, Wis. (WBAY) — Green Bay Police have helped solve three cold cases in the past month, all thanks to DNA evidence.
The cases are sexual assaults in which a stranger attacked a woman.
“They’re difficult ones, the scary ones to try to solve, because it’s hard to find the suspect,” said Commander Jim Runge with the Green Bay Police Dept.
Two of the cases date back to 2011. One case is from 2014.
In all three cases, police had no good leads. That’s until DNA from the attacker was collected and entered into the national DNA database.