A Seattle-area man could face the death penalty if convicted of the aggravated first-degree murders of a young Saanich couple.
William Earl Talbott ll was arrested in May and charged with murder in the deaths of 18-year-old Tanya Van Cuylenborg and 20-year-old Jay Cook, who were killed in November 1987. He has pleaded not guilty to the crimes.
Talbott, 55, is expected to appear in Snohomish County court on Thursday.
Snohomish County’s chief criminal deputy prosecutor Craig Matheson expects the hearing will be brief.
“All we are doing is extending notice of the date of death penalty decision until Nov. 30 and continuing the trial date into 2019,” Matheson said. “It’s just the start of a very long process. I think it will be anywhere between a year-and-a-half and two years before we’re actually in a courtroom.”
Under Washington state law, there are two penalties available for aggravated murder: the death penalty and life without the possibility of parole, Matheson said.
Once an individual has been charged with aggravated murder, the elected prosecutor has to make a decision within 30 days and then serve written notice upon the defence on whether he or she plans to seek a special sentencing proceeding, also known as a death-penalty hearing.
“Typically, the defence will request that the 30-day time frame be extended so they can put together a mitigation package,” Matheson said. “We’re agreeable to it because when you’re making a decision of that magnitude, having more information is better than having less.”
The mitigation package, which will be forwarded to elected Snohomish prosecutor Mark Roe, will contain all of the reasons the prosecution should not seek a special sentencing proceeding on Talbott or any other defendant in his position.
A decision will be then made on how prosecutors want to proceed.
In the U.S., murder is when a victim is killed intentionally with malice aforethought. This means the person committing the crime had the intent to kill another person.
Aggravated murder occurs when the accused is alleged to have done one of the following:
• killed someone intentionally with planning;
• intentionally killed a person younger than 13 years of age;
• intentionally killed a person while serving a term in prison or while a prison escapee;
• intentionally killed a law officer on official duty or with planning;
• killed someone or illegally terminated a person’s pregnancy while in the process of committing rape, kidnapping, arson, robbery, burglary, terrorism or trespassing.
There are eight inmates on death row in Washington state. The last execution in the state took place in 2010. Washington utilizes two methods of execution: lethal injection and hanging. Lethal injection is used unless the inmate chooses hanging as the preferred execution method.
Cook and Van Cuylenborg boarded the Coho ferry to Port Angeles on Nov. 18, 1987, in the Cook family van. They planned to return home the next day via the Interstate 5 highway. At 10:16 p.m., they bought tickets at the Bremerton ferry dock to catch the ferry to Seattle. Neither was seen or heard from again.
Van Cuylenborg’s body was found in a ditch in Skagit County in a wooded area of Parsons Creek Road, between Old Highway 99 and Prairie Road. She had a .38-calibre gunshot wound to the back of her head. She had been restrained with zip-tie fasteners and sexually assaulted.
On Nov. 26, Cook’s body was found near High Bridge on Crescent Lake Road, east of Monroe. He was covered by a blue blanket. He had been strangled and restrained with the same type of zip-tie fasteners as Van Cuylenborg.
Police have said they do not know what the motive was for the killings.
DNA led to a breakthrough in the 30-year-old case.
A genealogist, CeCe Moore, worked with experts at Parabon NanoLabs to build a family tree for the suspect based on the genetic evidence recovered from the crime scenes. They used data that had been uploaded by distant cousins to public genealogy websites to pinpoint a suspect.
Police kept Talbott, a trucker living north of Sea-Tac International Airport, under surveillance until a paper cup fell from his truck in Seattle in early May. A swab of DNA from the cup came back as a match to evidence from the crime scenes.
