Edward Humes's "The Forever Witness"

Edward Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author whose many books include Garbology, Mississippi Mud, and the PEN Award-winning No Matter How Loud I Shout. He splits his time between Seattle and Southern California.

Humes applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Forever Witness: How DNA and Genealogy Solved a Cold Case Double Murder, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Forever Witness takes readers to the story of “Baby Alpha Beta,” a newborn abandoned in 1987 not far from Disneyland, at a supermarket that was part of the now-defunct Alpha Beta chain. A janitor found the baby girl behind the store, wrapped in a yellow blanket in a milk crate next to the trash bins. Her birth mother was never found. A local nurse who read about the baby in the local newspaper—which dubbed her “Baby Alpha Beta”—was entranced, and ending up fostering, then adopting the little girl.

If page 99 is all you read, you would have absolutely no idea that The Forever Witness is a true crime story about families devastated by murder, a seemingly unsolvable crime, a revolution in forensic science, and battles over genetic privacy. But if you read a little bit further, you would learn that Baby Alpha Beta was the key to almost everything in the book—a vital and even eerie backstory to the cold case revolution that unfolds in The Forever Witness.

The use of genetic genealogy to solve cold cases was pioneered by CeCe Moore, and the techniques she invented were in essence beta-tested when she was asked by Baby Alpha Beta—now known as Kayla Tovo—to identify the mother who abandoned her. Moore did so, along with the rest of her biological family, and in the process she unintentionally solved a crime with genetic genealogy for the first time: child endangerment. Years later, she would later use the same techniques to solve the murders of Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook, the case at the heart of The Forever Witness.

The eerie part: Baby Alpha Beta was born the same day in November 1987 on which Tanya most likely died. The child who was key to solving the case came into the world at the same time Tanya left it.

Learn more about the book and author at Edward Humes's website.

The Page 99 Test: Force of Nature.

The Page 99 Test: Garbology.

My Book, The Movie: Burned.

The Page 99 Test: Burned.

--Marshal Zeringue