On August 4, 1986, 13-year-old Jennifer Bastian pulled on her swimsuit, climbed onto her new green Schwinn bike, and rode to Point Defiance Park in Tacoma, Washington. She was training for a long-distance cycling trip with her father, a goal the two had planned together for later that summer. Before leaving, she promised to be home for dinner.
She never came back.
Jennifer, known to everyone as Jenny, was a lively teenager who loved swimming and cycling. The park was her favorite place, a massive sanctuary of old-growth forests, saltwater beaches, and winding trails. She knew every curve of the Five Mile Drive, the scenic loop where she trained.
On that warm August morning, she left a note for her family and pedaled the 30 blocks to the park, ready to take on the familiar hills.
When she didn’t return by evening, her parents felt the dread every parent fears. Her father drove the loop over and over, scanning the roadside and calling her name into the woods. There was no sign of her, and her new bike was gone too.
The family called the police, and a missing-person search quickly grew into a massive operation. Dozens of volunteers combed the dense underbrush and trails, but the park stayed silent.
Days turned into weeks, and hope faded into grim reality. Then, on August 28, nearly three weeks after she disappeared, a construction crew reported a strong odor coming from a remote, heavily wooded area off the main road. Investigators followed the scent down a steep embankment and found Jennifer’s body, carefully hidden under layered brush.
Her Schwinn bike was concealed nearby.
The autopsy confirmed the worst: she had been sexually assaulted and strangled. The way the brush had been arranged suggested a calculated, predatory killer who had taken time to conceal his crime. The news struck Tacoma like a physical blow.
A child had been taken from a public park in broad daylight, and the community’s sense of safety was shattered.
Among the evidence collected at the scene was the swimsuit Jennifer had been wearing. At the time, it seemed like just a heartbreaking piece of clothing. No one could have known that this single item held an invisible trace of the killer, a microscopic biological signature that would sit in an evidence locker for decades, waiting for science to catch up with justice.
The investigation was complicated by a tragic coincidence. Five months earlier, in March 1986, 12-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 a serial killer was at work. This theory dominated the investigation for years, but it was wrong. The focus on a single predator for both crimes skewed how evidence was interpreted and stalled progress in both cases.
For nearly 30 years, the investigation went nowhere. Police had a few persons of interest, but without hard evidence, they were just names on a list. One of those names was Robert Dwayne Washburn.
He had lived in Tacoma in 1986 and had called police with a tip about the Michella Welch case. He also told officers he was a frequent jogger on the trails near where Jennifer’s body was found. It was circumstantial, but it put him on their radar.
The first real breakthrough came not from a witness but from a lab. By the 2000s, DNA technology had advanced dramatically. Detectives, including investigator Lindsey Wade, decided to re-examine the evidence from 1986.
In November 2013, the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab analyzed the swimsuit, the item closest to Jennifer in her final moments. They successfully extracted a full male DNA profile.
After 27 years, they had the killer’s biological fingerprint. They rushed to run the profile through CODIS, the national DNA database of convicted felons, hoping for a match. The search came back empty.
The killer had either never been convicted of a serious crime or his DNA simply wasn’t in the system. Around the same time, DNA from the Michella Welch case was tested, bringing another shock: the DNA from her killer did not match the DNA on Jennifer’s swimsuit. The serial killer theory was officially dead.
Two separate monsters had preyed on young girls in Tacoma that year.
The case went cold again, but this time it felt different. The killer’s DNA was right there in a file. The question was no longer if he could be identified, but how.
The answer came in 2016. The cold case team reached out to Parabon NanoLabs, a Virginia company pioneering forensic genetic genealogy. This technique, which would later help catch the Golden State Killer, offered a new way to find suspects.
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 to build family trees. If a distant relative of the killer has used one of these sites, a partial match appears.
Genealogists then work backward, using public records to build a massive family tree and pinpoint one person who fits the age, location, and timeline of the crime.
The genealogist on Jennifer’s case got to work. The DNA from the swimsuit was uploaded, and distant relatives of the killer began appearing. By tracing family 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 case files, and there he was: Robert Dwayne Washburn. The same man who had called in a tip in 1986.
The man who said he jogged the park trails all the time. He had been on their list for 30 years. The tip he had called in all those years ago suddenly took on a darker meaning.
Was it a genuine attempt to help, or the act of a man inserting himself into the investigation to see what police knew? Either way, his name was now written in ink.
Now they had their prime suspect, but they needed his DNA for a direct comparison. In 2017, as part of a push to re-interview everyone connected to the case, detectives asked for voluntary DNA samples to eliminate people. In what can only be described as pure arrogance, Robert Washburn agreed to give a sample in March 2017.
The police lab had a backlog, so samples were tested in batches. Washburn’s ended up in one of the last rounds. Finally, on May 7, 2018, they got 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 1 in 57 trillion. After 32 years, the ghost finally had a face.
Three days later, police arrested the now 60-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 described as kind and helpful, the guy who shoveled the sidewalk for the elderly couple next door, the guy 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 the evil he did that day.
He was sentenced to just over 26 years in prison, based on sentencing guidelines from 1986. Jennifer’s mother, Patty Bastian, later reflected on the sentence, saying she thought about his daughter and how he had cared for her for so long, then realized what he had done to her own daughter. She couldn’t put those two things together in her head.
Today, Washburn is incarcerated at the Airway Heights Correction Center in Washington, where he will likely spend the rest of his life.
Using the same genetic genealogy technology, police also caught Michella Welch’s killer. Parabon identified two brothers as suspects. Police trailed one of them, a nurse named Gary Hartman, and obtained his DNA from a napkin he threw away at a restaurant.
It was a match. The two cases that had haunted Tacoma for a generation were finally solved.
The resolution of Jennifer Bastian’s murder is a story about the persistence of a mother who never gave up, the dedication of detectives who wouldn’t let a case go cold, and the incredible power of science. 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 to require samples from anyone convicted of a felony and certain misdemeanors, often precursor crimes.
It closed loopholes and gave police a better chance of solving cases and even stopping violent crimes before they happen.
In the end, this is about more than just a swimsuit. It’s about memory, and how a family, a community, and a team of detectives refused to let a 13-year-old girl be forgotten. For 32 years, her killer walked free, thinking his secret was buried.
But he left behind one microscopic thread, and in the end, that was all it took to unravel his world and finally bring Jennifer Bastian justice. No secret is ever truly safe, no matter how much time passes, because science keeps moving forward, and there are people who refuse to let the truth stay buried.