On November 24, 1989, the Friday after Thanksgiving, Mandy Stavic laced up her running shoes, called her German Shepherd to her side, and stepped out for a jog along the back roads of Acme, Washington. The town of barely three hundred people sat quietly in the foothills of Mount Baker, a place where nobody locked their doors and kids walked to school along logging roads. Mandy was an eighteen-year-old freshman at Central Washington University, home for the holiday. She ran the same five-mile route along Strand Road dozens of times before.
That afternoon, she never came back. Around five o’clock, her dog returned alone, cowering, with river mud caked across her hindquarters. The animal had been struck or kicked into a ditch when whoever took Mandy needed the dog out of the way. Mandy Stavic was born in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1971.
Her mother, Mary, raised Mandy and her siblings after a divorce, and the family had already suffered one unsolved tragedy. In 1975, Mandy’s older brother Brent was shot and killed while bow hunting on Army land near Anchorage. He was seventeen. No arrest was ever made.
After that loss, Mary moved the younger children across state lines to Whatcom County, Washington, settling in Acme along the South Fork of the Nooksack River. Mandy thrived there. She played basketball and ran cross country, played saxophone in the school band, kept top grades, spoke Japanese, knew sign language, and dreamed of becoming an airline pilot. Her high school basketball coach, Jim Freeman, had become a father figure after her parents split.
He would later deliver the eulogy at her memorial before a gymnasium of people who could not believe she was gone. On the day she vanished, Mandy was seen running east along Strand Road around three in the afternoon. A neighbor spotted her minutes from home. She never arrived.
Her body was found on Monday, November 27, by Detective Ron Peterson, who took an inflatable boat up the South Fork of the Nooksack and spotted a flash of color in a shallow channel. She was wearing only her running shoes and socks. The autopsy determined she had drowned in freshwater after suffering blunt force trauma to the right side of her forehead, a concussion-level blow. Scratches across her body indicated she had run through blackberry bushes while still alive.
There was evidence of sexual assault. Her stomach contents placed the time of death between roughly three-thirty and four-thirty that Friday afternoon, within an hour or so of when her brother last saw her jogging along the road. From biological evidence on her body, investigators developed a male DNA profile. They ran it against every available database.
There was no match. In 1989, DNA technology was still in its infancy. The profile was preserved, but with no suspect to compare it against. The investigation began with the usual suspects.
Mandy’s ex-boyfriend, who had driven her home from college two days earlier, was interviewed extensively, provided a DNA sample, and was cleared. A local drifter was checked against the profile and ruled out. So was a drug dealer named John Wisnooki, a person of interest who would haunt the case for years. In 2010, a detective would fly to Cambodia just to interview him and collect a sample.
It didn’t match. Over the years, thirty men from the Acme area voluntarily provided saliva samples. Every one was eliminated. The case was cross-referenced against the Green River Killer Task Force, which found no connection.
A reward fund grew to $25,000. Tips came in and went nowhere. Approximately nine hundred people attended Mandy’s memorial, three times the population of the town itself. A scholarship was established in her name at Mount Baker High School, awarded every year since 1990 to students in the music program.
The years passed. 1990 became 1995, then 2000, then 2005. Lead detectives rotated on and off the case, each inheriting a file that had grown thicker, each hitting the same walls. Mary Stavic waited.
She had already lost one child to an unsolved murder. Now she carried two. She said that the living have to go on to honor the goodness in what they have lost. In 2009, a detective named Kevin Bohay was assigned the cold case.
He had attended the same high school as Mandy and had been a young deputy in the sheriff’s office when she was killed. The case was personal to him. Bohay read the file cover to cover, then decided to approach it differently. He had read Joseph Wambaugh’s true crime book The Blooding, about the first murder solved through a DNA dragnet in a small English village, where police asked every man in the area for a blood sample until the one who matched was revealed.
Bohay decided to do the same thing in Acme. He reconstructed a list of every male who had lived near the town in November 1989. He tracked them down one at a time, knocked on doors, explained the case, and asked for voluntary cheek swabs. Most agreed.
Every result came back negative. Over the full course of the investigation, more than eighty men provided DNA. All were eliminated. Bohay flew to Cambodia to see Wisnooki and collected another sample.
No match. He kept going. As he put it, it was just a matter of time. They just had to keep asking the right person or keep finding the right sample.
One man on the list kept coming back into focus. Timothy Forest Bass had grown up on Strand Road, the same road where Mandy jogged. His house sat just a few doors down from the Stavic family home. He had attended Mount Baker High School and, according to charging documents filed years later, used to watch Mandy’s basketball games even though he was several years ahead of her.
His younger brother Tom was actually Mandy’s friend and one of the people she had plans to go out with the night she disappeared. The Bass family was well-liked in the community, considered good people. During the original investigation and the years that followed, the Bass household was never asked to provide DNA. In 2013, Bohay approached Bass and asked for a voluntary sample.
Bass pretended not to remember Mandy Stavic, claiming he didn’t even know where she had lived, despite the fact that her house was just doors away. Then he refused. He told the detective he had watched crime shows on television and had seen what happened to people who cooperated. He wasn’t going to make that mistake.
That refusal made Timothy Bass the primary suspect. But Bohay had a problem. Without a warrant, he couldn’t force Bass to give a sample, and to get a warrant he needed probable cause. Suspicion and an implausible claim of amnesia weren’t enough.
Making things worse, Bass seemed to understand exactly what investigators needed and structured his daily life around avoiding it. He wore gloves at work. He took his trash home instead of using bins at the bakery. He never left behind a cup, a napkin, a straw, or anything that might carry his biological trace.
For four years, from 2013 to 2017, investigators watched him, followed his delivery route, searched the dumpsters and trash cans he passed. Nothing. Bass was the suspect, and they could not get a usable sample from him. The first crack came not from a detective’s interview room but from a conversation between two mothers at a water park.
In June 2013, two women named Heather Backstrom and Merrily Anderson, both graduates of Mount Baker High School, were standing near the pool at Birch Bay water slides while their children played. The conversation drifted to the Stavic case. Without coordinating beforehand, both women named the same man: Tim Bass. Each had long suspected him independently.
Each had personal encounters with Bass over the years that had left her deeply unsettled. Anderson contacted Detective Ken Gates with the information. It wasn’t physical evidence, but community members independently naming the same man reinforced the investigative focus on Bass. Backstrom would later say that in the end, it was three women’s word and experiences that brought Bass down.
Two mothers had set the first domino in motion. The second domino fell at a bakery. Kim Wagner was the manager of the Franz Bakery outlet store in Whatcom County. Timothy Bass was one of the delivery drivers who passed through her store regularly.
In 2013, when Bohay first visited the bakery, he wanted to swab Bass’s delivery truck for trace DNA, the kind of biological material a person leaves on surfaces he handles regularly. Wagner directed him to the corporate office, which refused authorization without a subpoena or warrant. That could have ended her involvement. Instead, Wagner put the pieces together on her own.
The employee the police had been asking about was Bass, and Bass had lived on the same street where Mandy Stavic grew up. The math was not complicated. In May 2017, Bohay returned with a more specific request: he wanted Bass’s delivery route so he could follow it. Wagner asked directly whether he was investigating the Stavic murder and whether Timothy Bass was the suspect.
Bohay confirmed both. He began surveilling Bass’s route, watching for any discarded object that might carry DNA. Bass discarded nothing. The surveillance produced nothing.
Wagner then volunteered to watch Bass at work. She told Bohay she would keep an eye on the break room and let him know if Bass ever slipped up. She did it because she could not stop thinking about Mary Stavic. She later said that if she could help bring that peace, she wanted to do it.
In August 2017, Bass walked over to the water cooler in the break room, filled a plastic cup, drank from it, and tossed it in the wastebasket. Wagner waited until he was gone, reached into the trash can, pulled out the cup, put it in a plastic bag, and locked it in her desk drawer. Two days later, Bass discarded a soda can in the same basket. Wagner did the same thing.
On August 10, 2017, she walked out to the bakery parking lot and handed both items to Detective Kevin Bohay. The Washington State Patrol Crime Lab ran the results. The DNA recovered from the cup and the can was a dead match to the male profile developed from the biological evidence on Mandy Stavic’s body in 1989. The statistical probability of that match was one in eleven quadrillion.
It was, for all practical purposes, a certainty. Timothy Bass, the man who refused to give a sample, who wore gloves at work, who said he had seen what happened to people who cooperated, was the match. The answer had been living nineteen miles away the entire time. When confronted with the DNA evidence, Bass’s story shifted instantly.
He stopped pretending he didn’t know Mandy. His first question was how investigators had obtained his DNA. Not a denial, not an alibi, just a question about how he got caught. On December 12, 2017, detectives arrested fifty-year-old Timothy Forest Bass in the parking lot of Franz Bakery.
The date happened to be Mary Stavic’s eighty-first birthday. Mandy’s sister called to tell her mother the news and called it a birthday present. Bass was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Amanda Stavic. Sheriff Bill Elfo described the arrest as monumental, saying he sometimes felt Mandy was speaking to them, that the case needed to be solved.
The trial began in May 2019 and lasted roughly three weeks. The prosecution was led by seventy-three-year-old special prosecutor David McEachran, who came out of retirement specifically for the case and insisted on not being paid. The prosecution argued that Bass knew Mandy’s running routine, that he and his then-girlfriend had watched her jog past their upstairs window, and that on November 24, 1989, he acted on it. They argued that he abducted her, likely at gunpoint, drove her to an isolated field near the river known as the Homestead, and assaulted her.
Mandy, trying to escape, ran through blackberry bushes toward the Nooksack, where she drowned. Bass’s defense conceded that he had sexual contact with Mandy but claimed it was consensual, part of a secret relationship nobody knew about. The prosecution tore this apart. There was no evidence of any relationship, no letters, no phone records, no witnesses.
Mandy’s sister said bluntly that Mandy would never have been involved with him. The defense also attempted to introduce pages from Mandy’s diary to suggest her death might have been self-inflicted. The judge rejected the attempt as too remote and speculative. The web of lies Bass had built began to unravel in the courtroom.
He had asked his own brother to tell police that he had slept with Mandy, to create the impression she was promiscuous. He had asked his mother to tell investigators that his deceased father had been responsible for her death. He had tried to arrange a false alibi. His ex-wife, Gina, who had initially provided that alibi, recanted on the stand and testified against him.
On May 24, 2019, the jury deliberated for just over a day and returned a verdict of guilty on first-degree felony murder. Judge Robert Olsen sentenced Bass to the maximum of 320 months, nearly twenty-seven years in prison, since premeditated murder had not been charged. Bass declared he was one hundred percent innocent. The judge told him that for thirty years he had lived free from the responsibility for his actions, but that life had been a lie, and tragically, it had caught his family in its web.
Bass appealed. His primary argument was that Kim Wagner had acted as a government agent when she collected the cup and can, making the DNA evidence the product of an unlawful warrantless search. In 2021, the Washington Court of Appeals rejected the argument. The court concluded that Wagner had acted entirely on her own initiative.
Bohay had not directed, instructed, coached, or encouraged her. Under Washington law, there is no privacy interest in items voluntarily abandoned in a trash can, and a private citizen retrieving them does not trigger constitutional protections that apply to government searches. The court identified one technical error in the trial, an application of a 1990 version of the felony murder statute to a crime committed in 1989, but ruled it harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. Bass petitioned the Washington Supreme Court.
In January 2022, the state’s highest court denied the petition without comment. Timothy Bass is serving his 320-month sentence and continues to maintain his innocence. Mary Stavic, who had waited twenty-eight years for an answer, finally had one. She had already carried the weight of her son’s unsolved murder since 1975, and then another twenty-eight years of silence after Mandy was taken.
After the conviction, she said that Mandy was special, that she really was, and that the living have to go on to honor the goodness in what they have lost. Mandy’s sister named her own daughter after Mandy. The scholarship at Mount Baker High School has been awarded every year since 1990, twenty-nine times as of the most recent count. Kim Wagner, the bakery manager who reached into a trash can and changed the course of a twenty-eight-year-old murder investigation, summed up what happened in the simplest terms possible.
She said it took a village, a whole community. The case of Mandy Stavic was not solved by a genealogy database or a forensic breakthrough. It was solved by ordinary people who refused to let it stay buried. Two mothers talking at a water park.
A detective who knocked on doors for a decade without giving up. And a bakery manager who pulled a discarded cup from a trash can because she could not stop thinking about a mother who deserved to know what happened to her daughter. That is what justice looks like in a cold case. It arrives thirty years late, carried by people who had no obligation to keep looking and no guarantee their efforts would ever produce a result.
They did it anyway.