Once the genealogist CeCe More was given permission to use private DNA databases to pursue violent offenders, she began working through a list of cold cases. As she gained momentum, so did a debate about the ethics surrounding this kind of work.
In April, 2018, Scharf permitted Parabon to pass the killer’s DNA profile to one of the world’s leading genetic genealogists, CeCe Moore. The company’s C.E.O. told him that she would likely identify the killer within a week. Scharf was skeptical, but three days later Parabon reported that Moore had a name: William Earl Talbott II, a truck driver who lived not far from High Bridge. It had taken her two hours on a Saturday to figure this out.
Moore has a warm but intense manner. On a black cord around her neck, she wears a pendant of the Finnish flag—she is a quarter Finnish—and a tiny square of metal engraved with the word. It means something like “grit” or “daring”—adrenaline-fuelled doggedness. Holding the bit of metal, Moore told me, “Although she is in her fifties, Moore pulls all-nighters with the frequency of a college freshman.
Neither of Moore’s sisters had gone to college, and she assumed that she wouldn’t, either. “I started having teachers say to me, ‘You’re joking, right?’ ” she told me. So she bought a Pee-Chee folder and wrote “$30,000” at the top—the scholarship money that she would need to attend the University of Southern California.
For an actress, Moore was introverted—more comfortable reading a book than jumping on a table and launching into soliloquies. But she was relentlessly focussed, and memorizing lines came easily. She spent hours at the gym, training her body. She was likewise disciplined about organizing the jumble of gigs that aspiring actors must negotiate; once, she lined up fifty days of work in a row. She landed roles in the theatre and small parts on TV and in movies.
The human cell is a masterpiece of data compression. Its nucleus, just a few microns wide, contains six feet of DNA: helical molecules that string together some three billion pairs of nucleotides, each represented by an initial—A, C, G, and T—the programming language of our genetic code. These strands are divided into coiled chromosomes. Two of them—labelled either X or Y—determine our biological sex.
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