A Seattle-area man will no longer 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.
Last month, the Washington State Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional. The ruling commuted the sentences of eight men on state’s death row to life in prison.
“So there is no death penalty in the state right now,” Snohomish County’s chief criminal deputy prosecutor Craig Matheson said Wednesday. “So we’re not going to seek something we can’t get.”
Before the ruling, when an individual was charged with aggravated murder, the elected prosecutor had 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.
“We hadn’t even gone through the process that we do on any death qualified cases,” Matheson said. “It’s a very deliberate process and we rarely seek it, although we have on occasion. But it’s a pretty involved process. Obviously, the stakes are pretty high. But given what our State Supreme Court has just done, that hasn’t happened and it won’t happen with Mr. Talbott.”
The trial date has been set for late March or early April, Matheson said.
“Whether that is accurate or not I don’t know. There is voluminous discovery on this thing, as you might imagine,” he said. “The attorney trying the case is preparing for it and he’s got several months of pretty intense work to make sure we are ready to go.”
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.
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.
