Nearly thirty years after the murder of Mandy Stavik, the man accused of killing her was on the verge of trial. The pandemic of silence that had hung over the small town of Acme, Washington, since 1989 was about to break. On the day after Thanksgiving in that year, eighteen-year-old Mandy, home from her first semester at Central Washington University, went for a run. She took her German Shepherd, Kyra, along Strand Road toward the Nooksack River.
Two hours later, the dog returned home alone, agitated. Three days after that, on November 27th, Detective Ron Peterson found Mandy’s body in the South Fork of the Nooksack, six miles from her house. She was wearing only her running shoes. The autopsy confirmed she had been sexually assaulted and that she had drowned, likely still alive when she entered the water.
In a town of about 250 people, the horror of the crime settled into everyone. Roughly thirty local men provided DNA samples, but with the technology of 1989, the evidence from her body could prove the assault but not identify the perpetrator. Every lead was chased and every thread pulled, and slowly, the case went cold. For thirty years, the people of Acme lived with the knowledge that whoever had killed Mandy Stavik was likely still among them.
He was closer than anyone could have imagined. A man named Tim Bass lived on the same road Mandy had run that day. He had never been questioned in the original investigation, his family was well-liked, and his name never reached a suspect list. Decades later, investigators admitted he had never once been on their radar.
He remained invisible until a conversation that had nothing to do with police work. In June 2013, at a water park, two mothers sat on the grass watching their children. Heather Backstrom and Merilee Anderson barely knew each other, but both had gone to Mount Baker High. When one of them mentioned Mandy Stavik’s name, they both said the same name back without planning it.
Tim Bass. Each of them had carried that suspicion alone for years. Merilee explained why she had never said it out loud. In a small town, accusing someone of something you are not sure of is a little scary.
Heather had never told a single person, not friends, not family. Her reason went back to the summer of 1989, months before the murder, when she was fifteen and Bass was in his twenties. During a group outing, he sat next to her, told her she had beautiful eyes, and ran a pen along her bare knee. She was terrified.
Merilee’s encounter happened in July 1991, when Bass showed up at her door asking to use her phone, walked into her bedroom, and told her he had always driven past her house and wanted her. She threatened to call the police, and he left. Two women, two separate nights, years apart, one name that had lived quietly inside both of them because nobody had ever felt safe enough to offer it. That afternoon, they finally called a high school classmate who had become a detective.
For the first time in twenty-four years, the case had a direction. Investigators learned that Tim Bass had lived close enough to Mandy’s running route to see her pass by from his own window day after day. By the time they looked at him seriously, decades had passed. He was a delivery driver for Franz Bakery, married for nearly thirty years to a woman named Gina, with three children and no criminal record.
But the people closest to him had seen things. His brother Tom described an incident from their teenage years when, after a breakup, Tim sat in his room with a pistol and fired it. Gina described a controlling contempt that never let up, a marriage that felt like being in a prison. She said she stayed because she was afraid of what would happen to her children if she tried to leave.
Investigators noted that Tim Bass married Gina six weeks after Mandy Stavik was murdered. When they approached him directly in 2013, he refused to give a voluntary DNA sample, saying he would need a warrant. Police tried another angle, going to his employer to swab his delivery truck. The store manager, Kim Wagner, pointed them to corporate, and corporate also required a warrant the police did not yet have.
The investigation stalled. As investigators kept circling back to Bass, Kim Wagner eventually pieced together what the case was really about and decided, quietly, that she was going to help. For three months, she watched Tim Bass every day at the bakery, watching what he drank from and what he threw away. Nothing landed right until finally a plastic cup and then a Coke can went into the trash.
When the moment was right, she reached in and took them, her heart pounding while people moved around her. She put them in her desk drawer and handed them to police. The Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory compared the DNA against the semen recovered from Mandy’s body in 1989. The match was a statistic of one in eleven quadrillion, meaning every person alive could be tested and no other match would be found.
It was him. On December 12th, 2017, twenty-eight years after Mandy’s body was pulled from the river, detectives drove to Franz Bakery and arrested Tim Bass in the parking lot. When they told him he was under arrest for the murder of Mandy Stavik, he said, We’ve got him. When the detectives asked who, he had no answer.
Bass pleaded not guilty, but by the time the case reached trial, his own defense made a significant concession. They did not dispute that his semen was inside her. Instead, they argued about timing. A defense expert testified that in her opinion, intercourse had likely happened twenty-four to forty-eight hours before Mandy died, not during the attack itself.
The theory was that the sexual contact and the murder could be treated as separate, unconnected things. This was the same man who, when first questioned in 2013, could barely place who Mandy was, reportedly saying she was the girl they found on the river. Now his entire defense rested on admitting he had been intimate with her. The prosecution’s medical examiner, Dr.
Gary Goldfogel, who had performed the original 1989 autopsy, disagreed. He testified that the physical evidence fit a much tighter timeline, that she was raped, killed, and placed in the river in close succession. Outside the courtroom, Bass had tried other things. According to testimony, he asked his brother Tom to falsely claim he had also slept with Mandy, and Tom refused.
He asked his mother to say they had been out Christmas shopping together when Mandy disappeared, and she put her hands over her face and refused. Tom eventually took the stand against his own brother, and Gina, who had filed for divorce after the arrest, testified against him as well. She said she had been afraid of him for years and never once looked at him while she spoke. The trial ran nine days.
The jury deliberated for just over one. On May 24th, 2019, Timothy Forrest Bass was found guilty on all counts, first-degree murder, kidnapping, and aggravated sexual assault. Mandy’s sister Molly was too overwhelmed to speak, and her husband stood in her place, saying Bass must never be allowed to walk free again. When Bass spoke, he said he was one hundred percent innocent and added that the better man in him said he should give the day to the Stavik family.
The judge sentenced him to the maximum available under the charges, roughly twenty-six to twenty-seven years. Before handing down the sentence, the judge looked directly at him and said that for thirty years he had lived free from the responsibility for his acts, but that life had been a lie, and tragically, it had caught his family in its web. Bass still maintains his innocence and will not be eligible for release until he is well into his seventies. What made the case possible to solve after so long was not just the DNA that had been preserved since 1989, but the quiet determination of ordinary people.
Two women at a water park who finally said the name they had both carried. A bakery manager who would not let it go. A cup and a Coke can in a trash can. That is what it took to close thirty years.
At Mandy’s memorial, her basketball coach stood before nearly a thousand people and remembered the way she looked at you, with eyes that said she loved life. She was eighteen. She went out for a run on a road she had run a hundred times before, in a town where she had never had reason to be afraid. Kyra came home alone on November 24th, 1989.
The search that began that afternoon did not really end until a plastic cup and a Coke can closed it three decades later.