On August 4, 1986, thirteen-year-old Jennifer Bastian put on her swimsuit, climbed onto her new green Schwinn bike, and rode the thirty blocks from her Tacoma home to Point Defiance Park. She was training for a long-distance cycling trip with her father through the San Juan Islands later that summer, and she was determined to prove she could handle the hills. Before leaving, she promised her family she would be home for dinner. She never came back.
Jenny, as everyone called her, knew the park better than almost anyone. Point Defiance was her sanctuary, a sprawling landscape of old-growth forest, saltwater beaches, and winding trails that locals treated as their own backyard. Her favorite training route was Five Mile Drive, a scenic loop cutting through dense woods. That morning, she left a note for her family saying she was heading out for a ride.
For an active teenager on summer vacation, nothing could have seemed more ordinary. When the sun began to set and Jenny had not returned, her parents felt the dread every parent fears. Her father rushed to the park, driving the Five Mile Drive loop again and again, stopping at every pullout and trailhead, calling her name into the darkening woods. There was no sign of her.
Her new green bike was gone too. The family called the police, and the search for the missing girl quickly grew into a massive operation. Tacoma officers and dozens of volunteers swarmed the park, combing through thick underbrush and searching every trail as night fell. But the park stayed silent.
Days turned into weeks, and hope faded into grim reality. A cloud of fear settled over the entire city. On August 28, nearly three weeks after she vanished, a construction crew reported a strong, foul odor coming from a remote, heavily wooded area just off the main road. Investigators followed the scent down a steep embankment, and there, carefully hidden under layered brush, they found Jennifer Bastian.
Her beloved Schwinn bike was concealed nearby. The autopsy confirmed the worst: she had been sexually assaulted and strangled. The way her body had been arranged under the brush suggested a calculated, predatory killer who had spent time trying to hide what he had done. The news hit Tacoma like a physical blow.
A child had been taken from a public park in broad daylight and murdered. Investigators processed the scene meticulously, collecting every piece of evidence they could find. Among the items recovered was the swimsuit Jennifer had been wearing. At the time, it was just a heartbreaking piece of clothing.
No one could have known that it held a tiny, invisible trace of her killer, a biological signature that would sit in an evidence locker for decades, waiting for science to catch up with justice. The investigation was immediately complicated by a tragic coincidence. Five months earlier, in March 1986, twelve-year-old Michella Welch had been murdered in a different Tacoma park. The similarities were glaring: two young girls, both killed in public parks.
Police and the public naturally assumed they were hunting a serial killer. This theory dominated the investigation for years. But it was wrong. Jennifer’s killer was not responsible for both deaths.
He was a separate monster who had blended back into society, and the false assumption would steer the case into a dead end. For nearly thirty years, the investigation went nowhere. Police had a few persons of interest, but without hard evidence, they were just names on a long list. One of those names was Robert Dwayne Washburn.
He had lived in Tacoma in 1986 and had actually called the police with a tip about the Michella Welch case. He also told officers he was a frequent jogger on the trails right near where Jennifer’s body was found. It was circumstantial, but it put him on their radar. For Jenny’s mother, Patty Bastian, time did not heal anything.
It sharpened the injustice. Every year on Jennifer’s birthday and on the anniversary of her disappearance, Patty called the detective bureau, not to demand answers, but simply to ask if there was anything new. She became a fixture in the cold case unit, a voice on the other end of the line reminding everyone why the boxes could not be allowed to gather dust. The first real crack in the case came not from a witness but from a lab.
By the 2000s, DNA technology had become a game-changer. Detectives, including a dedicated investigator named Lindsey Wade, decided to re-examine the 1986 evidence. In November 2013, the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab analyzed the item that had been closest to Jennifer in her final moments, her swimsuit. They successfully extracted a full male DNA profile.
After twenty-seven years, they finally had the killer’s biological fingerprint. They rushed the profile through CODIS, the national DNA database of convicted felons, hoping for a match that would give them a name. The search came back empty. It meant he had never been convicted of a serious crime, or his DNA simply was not in the system.
Around the same time, DNA from the Michella Welch case was tested and brought another shock: the two killers’ DNA did not match. The serial killer theory was officially dead. There had been two separate predators preying on young girls in Tacoma that year. The case went cold again, but this time it felt different.
The killer’s DNA was in a file. The question was no longer whether he could be identified, but how. The big shift came in 2016. The cold case team reached out to Parabon NanoLabs, a Virginia company pioneering forensic genetic genealogy, the same technique that would eventually catch the Golden State Killer.
Instead of looking for a direct match in a criminal database, genetic genealogy uses crime scene DNA to find a suspect’s relatives. Investigators upload the unknown profile to public genealogy websites like GEDmatch, where people voluntarily share their DNA results to build family trees. If the killer’s second or third cousin has used one of these sites, a partial match appears. From there, genealogists work backward through public records, building a massive family tree to pinpoint one person who fits the age, location, and timeline of the crime.
The genealogist on Jennifer’s case got to work. Distant relatives of the killer began appearing. By tracing those connections, the genealogist identified three main surnames in the killer’s family tree: Smith, Holbrook, and Washburn. That name set off alarm bells.
Investigators checked their old files, and there he was: Robert Dwayne Washburn, the same man who had called in a tip back in 1986, the man who said he jogged the park trails all the time. The tip he had offered all those years ago suddenly took on a darker color. Was it a genuine attempt to help, or the act of a man inserting himself into the investigation to see what the police knew? Either way, his name was now written in ink.
The detectives needed his DNA for a direct comparison. Around 2017, as part of a massive push, they began re-interviewing everyone connected to the case, asking for voluntary DNA samples to eliminate them. In what could only be described as pure arrogance, Robert Washburn agreed to give a sample in March 2017. The police lab had a backlog and tested the samples in batches.
Washburn’s ended up in one of the last rounds. On May 7, 2018, they got the confirmation. The DNA profile from Jennifer Bastian’s swimsuit was a perfect match to Robert Dwayne Washburn. The odds of it being anyone else were one in fifty-seven trillion.
After thirty-two years, the ghost finally had a face. Three days later, police arrested the now sixty-year-old Washburn at his home in Eureka, Illinois. His neighbors were stunned. They knew him as a quiet man, a single father devoted to caring for his disabled daughter.
He had no real criminal record. He was the kind of neighbor who shoveled the sidewalk for the elderly couple next door, who never missed a PTA meeting. The disconnect between the man they knew and the man being led away in handcuffs was almost impossible to process. He had hidden his secret by being totally, terrifyingly ordinary.
Faced with the DNA evidence, Washburn knew he was done. He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in January 2019. In a short, written confession, he admitted to grabbing Jennifer as she rode her bike, dragging her into the woods, and killing her. He offered an apology but gave no reason for what he had done.
He was sentenced to just over twenty-six years in prison based on sentencing guidelines from 1986. Today, he is incarcerated at the Airway Heights Correction Center in Washington, where he will likely spend the rest of his life. The same technology that caught Washburn also solved Michella Welch’s murder. Parabon identified two brothers as suspects; police trailed one, a nurse named Gary Hartman, and obtained his DNA from a napkin he discarded at a restaurant.
It was a match. The two cases that had haunted Tacoma for a generation were finally closed. Jennifer’s legacy went further. Her mother, Patty Bastian, turned her grief into action, becoming a fierce advocate for changing DNA collection laws in Washington state.
Her efforts helped pass Jennifer and Michella’s Law, which expanded the state’s DNA database, requiring samples from anyone convicted of a felony and certain misdemeanors that are often precursor crimes. It closed loopholes and gave police a better chance of solving cases and stopping violent crimes before they happen. For thirty-two years, Robert Washburn walked free, certain his secret was buried. But he left behind one microscopic thread.
In the end, that was all it took to unravel his world and bring Jennifer Bastian justice.