New book explores ‘magic’ of genetic genealogy in solving decades-old B.C. cold cases

She has long uncovered the stories that are all around us yet are hidden in plain sight, starting with her first book At Home with History 15 years ago through to 2018’s Murder by Milkshake and her most recent book Vancouver Exposed in 2020.

Now, author, journalist, blogger, and podcaster Eve Lazarus returns to the CityNews Bookshelf with Cold Case BC: The Stories Behind the Province’s Most Intriguing Murder and Missing Person Cases.

It’s a sequel of sorts to her 2015 book, Cold Case Vancouver, but this time, she has cast her net wide to include cases from all over British Columbia.

It is also informed by genetic genealogy: the practice of identifying suspects by entering crime-scene DNA profiles into public databases that people have used for years to fill out their family trees.

This week on the #CityNewsBookshelf, author @evelazarus talks about her latest book, "Cold Case BC: The Stories Behind the Province’s Most Intriguing Murder and Missing Person Cases." @CityNewsVAN @Arsenalpulp @zgstories_ pic.twitter.com/woTfcwHaaV

— John Ackermann ???? (@jackermann) October 23, 2022

Q&A with Eve Lazarus

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

John Ackermann:  One of the things that has made this book possible is the advancements in forensic technology, specifically DNA and DNA databases.  What difference do you think that has made in the cases profiled in this book?

Eve Lazarus:  Quite a bit.  With my earlier book, Cold Case Vancouver, it was just unsolved murders.  And with this one, I really wanted to look outside of Metro Vancouver, at unsolved murders still, particularly historical ones, but also look into missing persons cases and cases that have been solved after a really long time, after decades.

Two things happened that became news:  two young people from Saanich, Jay Cook, and Tanya Van Cuylenborg, were murdered in 1989 in Washington.  That case had gone cold for years and it was through genetic genealogy that they found the killer.  This guy had never done anything before or since and his DNA was nowhere.  And, if not for the magic of genetic genealogy of being able to track down his family, that [case] never would have been solved.

Editor’s Note: The murder conviction was later overturned on appeal.

And then the Babes in the Woods case that I’ve been obsessed about for decades and wrote about in detail in Cold Case Vancouver, the two children were finally identified this past February, again through genetic genealogy, and it’s just become a complete game-changer.  And we’re seeing everyday dozens of cases that have been solved south of the border of missing people and unsolved murders.  It’s really quite amazing.

Read More: Vancouver’s ‘Babes in the Woods’ murder victims identified after 70 years

Ackermann:  Now, the Babes in the Woods, six and seven-year-old brothers David and Derek D’Alton, these are two children who went unidentified for nearly 75 years.  That was a story that you broke yourself earlier this year.  What happened there?

Lazarus:  These were two skeletons that were found in Stanley Park in 1953.  They’d been there for several years and the skeletons, at that point, were deteriorated.  They had been given to the Vancouver Police Museum and put on display there.  And they were also taken, unbelievably, to the PNE and put on display there too, but it also in some way preserved them.

So, when DNA came out in the `90s, they made this incredible discovery that the skeletons were not a girl and boy as had been thought for 50 years.  There were actually two boys.  But the bone fragments were very old and degraded and there weren’t very many of them and the coroner’s office didn’t really have a lot of hope that anything would happen.  And then finally, last year, they were able to get some DNA from the oldest skeleton and they were able to do the genomic sequencing and everything that you need to do to put it in the database, which they did, and they got hits.

I’d heard that they’d been identified but I didn’t know anything else.  And I was waiting along with everybody else to see what was happening and then I got a message from this young lady who said that the police had been to see her and that the Babes in the Woods were her great uncles.

Read More: Vancouver Exposed uncovers city you never knew existed

The story in the family had always been that her grandmother had two younger brothers, but the family was so poor during the war years that they’d been taken by social services. And it was a very sad thing for the family, and they didn’t know what had happened.

So, a couple of things happened.  The grandmother, who was the oldest sister to the Babes in the Woods, was still alive but not very well and they taken a swab from her just to find out their ancestry and then Ally, the granddaughter, had decided she’d really like to find out who these great uncles were. And so, she spat in a tube and sent it off to ancestry.com and all this happened and so it’s a bit of a miracle.

And so, when we were putting together the story, she had sent me a lot of photos and we had a photo of Derek, the older boy, at Henry Hudson Elementary School in Kitsilano.  And it was just a bit of a mystery why he was never found because I know the police, over the decades, have really gone through this thoroughly, gone through school records looking for missing children, and never came up with his name. So, it was really fascinating.

Ackermann:  What do you hope people get out of the book?

Lazarus: I hope it brings attention to these really long-forgotten cases. I’m really hoping that, in a perfect world, it would bring forward some information and maybe something could get solved.

Ackermann: So, you have a Facebook group, a podcast, and now another book, all devoted to cold cases. What is it about them that we find so fascinating?

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Lazarus:  Well, I think it’s a couple of things. First of all, there’s so many.  It was frightening how many I had to pick from.  A lot of them [were] families coming to me with cases that I’d never heard of and I found it fascinating.  Take Brenda Byman.  This was a case in 1961 that divided a town.  [Now], 60 years later and the grandchildren are now in a basic feud.  It was incredible.  Apart from the sadness of her missing was this incredibly interesting story about this whole culture and society and what’s happened to it.

The missing women and murdered women along the Highway of Tears.  It’s just so awful.  I really wanted to bring more attention to that.  There’s been a lot recently, fortunately, and I wanted to go back to [Gloria Moody], the first one in 1969, and talk to her family.  But yeah, there’s a lot out there.

Cold Case BC:  The Stories Behind the Province’s Most Intriguing Murder and Missing Person Cases is available from Arsenal Pulp Press.