Washington 1986 Park Homicide Cold Case SOLVED — Arrest Shocks Community

For more than 30 years, Tacoma police have been trying to solve the murder case of 12-year-old Michella Welch.  Michella’s family said Tacoma police called them with the news yesterday. They tracked the killer down through DNA. We are not identifying him yet because he has not been charged, but we can tell you he’s been part of the community for decades.

 A warning to our viewers. What you are about to watch is a true story. The following program contains content that some viewers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is strongly advised.  On the night of March 26th, 1986, a tracking dog led searchers into a gulch below Puet Park in Tacoma, Washington.

Michella Welch’s body was next to a makeshift fire pit. More than a/4 mile from the picnic table where her bicycle was still chained to the rack. She was 12 years old. She had been sexually assaulted and beaten. A 7-in laceration ran across her throat. The medical examiner ruled the cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head.

 On the table above the gulch sat a brown paper bag. Inside were sandwiches she had made at home and carried back on her bicycle to feed her two younger sisters. She set the bag down, went looking for them, and never came back. Investigators collected biological evidence from the crime scene.

 It sat in a police locker for 20 years. When the technology finally existed to build a DNA profile from it, they ran it through every database in the country. More than 11 million profiles, no match. The man who killed Machella Welch had never been arrested, never been convicted, never given any law enforcement agency a reason to know his name.

 Her name was Michella Evvon Welch. She was a sixth grader in Tacoma’s North End, the oldest of three sisters, and the one who had spent most of her short life being a second set of hands in a single parent household. The morning she was killed was spring break. Her mother was at work. Michella was the one who noticed they had forgotten their lunch.

 She was the one who rode home to make it. She was the one who came back. It took 32 years, a public genealogy database, and a crumpled napkin collected from a restaurant table to put a name to the DNA. Before we go any further, if you’re new here, this channel covers cold cases that took decades to solve. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.

 And if you stay until the end of this one, you’ll find out why a 30-year theory that shaped every lead in this investigation turned out to be completely wrong, and how the answer had been living quietly less than 2 mi from the park the whole time. Now, back to the case. Barbara had raised the three girls on her own after their father left.

 By the spring of 1986, she had bought a house on North Oak Street, found a steady job, and signed the girls up for piano lessons. The pieces were coming together. Machella’s part in holding them together was not the kind anyone asked for. It was the kind the oldest child in a house like that just picks up. Piano lessons were scheduled for that Wednesday afternoon.

 The studio was across the street from Puet Park. Easy distance, known ground. Barbara told the girls they could spend the morning at the park before lessons started. They arrived around 10:00 a.m. At some point, Angela and Nicole left to use a restroom at a nearby business. Machella rode home around 11:00, put the lunches together, and returned alone.

 A 13-year-old classmate of Machella’s was in the park that morning. He later told detectives he had seen a man standing under the Proctor Bridge watching the girls. White male, mid-20s, 5’9″, thin build, torn blue jean jacket, dirty white tennis shoes. He was never identified. Around 1:30 p.m., a witness saw Machella near the edge of the gulch.

She was talking to a man who appeared to be pointing down a trail, possibly Hispanic, 25 to 35, 5’8, black hair, light colored clothing. That was the last time anyone saw Michella Welch alive. Angela and Nicole came back to the picnic area. The lunch was on the table. The bike was where she had left it. They called for her.

 They used the family call, a signal the three sisters had between them, the kind that always got answered. Nothing came back. They contacted their babysitter. The babysitter called Barbara at work. By 3:10 p.m., officers were in the park. Puget Park sits above a wooded gulch that drops steeply below the Proctor Bridge.

 Dense brush, heavy tree cover, the kind of terrain that swallows sound and disappears what’s underneath it. Searchers worked the trails on foot as the afternoon faded. Evening came. Flashlights moved through the brush and lines. At 11:30 that night, more than 8 hours after officers arrived, a tracking dog pulled its handler off the main trail and into a clearing deep in the gulch.

 The site was surrounded by heavy brush, invisible from the path above, invisible from the park. A makeshift fire pit sat nearby. Michella was on her back, her head turned to the left. She had been sexually assaulted and beaten. A 7-in laceration ran across her neck. The medical examiner ruled the cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head.

Whoever brought her there had moved her more than a/4 mile from the picnic table. No one walking the main paths would have found her without the dog. Investigators collected biological evidence from the crime scene and preserved it at the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. In 1986, the technology to do anything useful with it did not exist.

 The evidence went into storage and stayed there for 20 years. Barbara learned that night. The family she had spent years rebuilding the house, the job, the piano lessons, the steady ground she had finally found came apart in one phone call. In the days that followed, Tacoma shifted. Parents drove children to places they had let them walk.

 Kids stopped using the trail shortcuts through the parks. A composite sketch of the man the classmate had seen under the Proctor Bridge was printed and distributed across the city. Nobody recognized him. A second sketch drawn from the witness who had seen Machella talking to a man near the gulch produced nothing either.

 Investigators canvased every block within reach of the park. Tips came in by the hundreds, then the thousands. A task force was assembled. In the first year alone, the department logged more than 10,000 hours on the case. Every lead was run. Every name was checked. None of it produced a suspect. Then, 5 months after Machella was killed, the investigation was pulled in a direction that would hold it for the next 30 years. August 4th, 1986.

5 months after Machella, a 13-year-old girl named Jennifer Bastion, left her home on her bicycle, heading to Point Defiance Park, 3 miles from Puet Park on Tacoma’s North End. She was training for a Yima bike tour. She left a note saying she would be home by 6:30. She never came back.

 3 weeks later, joggers found her body hidden beneath a mound of sticks and leaves in a wooded section of the park. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Jennifer Bastion was blonde. She was 13. She was alone on a bicycle in a north end Tacoma Park. The parallels to Machella were immediate. Investigators consolidated the two cases into a single task force.

The assumption became official. One killer, two victims, 5 months apart. That assumption would shape every decision for the next 30 years. Every suspect pool was built around both cases at once. Every lead had to fit both crimes simultaneously. Anything that held weight in Machella’s case alone could be dismissed because it didn’t match Jennifer’s.

 The theory didn’t just slow the investigation. It bent the shape of it. Barbara carried the weight her own way. She had built a life for three daughters. Now there were two. The house on North Oak Street, the job, the piano lessons. All of it had been put in place so the girls would have steady ground.

 The ground had come apart. She moved forward because Angela and Nicole needed her to. That was not the same thing as recovering. It was the thing that kept her standing while everything behind her stayed broken. Through the late 1980s, tips continued to arrive. A convicted child killer named David Fiser, who had murdered a 13-year-old girl in Tacoma in 1970 and later escaped from prison, was investigated.

 His connection did not hold. Other names surfaced and collapsed. The single killer theory pulled every lead through the same filter and none of them survived it. Nicole was 9 years old the day she stood at the edge of the gulch and used the family call and heard nothing come back. She carried that silence into her 20s, her 30s, her 40s.

 Years later, after she had children of her own, she described the weight of it in plain terms. Seeing my own kids interact makes me remember. You think 32 years later you should be okay, but it’s not. It’s still real all the time. By the early 1990s, the active investigation had run out of ground. Detectives who had worked the original case retired or transferred.

 New officers inherited the binders, read through them, reached the same conclusion. Every actionable lead had been exhausted years earlier. The file sat on shelves in the Tacoma Police Department. The evidence sat in storage at the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. Angela grew up, Nicole grew up, Barbara eventually remarried, took the last name Leonard, and moved to Tennessee.

 The family scattered the way families sometimes do when the thing that fractured them is also the thing they can never fully talk about. Michella’s aunt, Linda Maguire, would write more than three decades later that the murder was the worst and most devastating event in their family, that there was a hole in their lives no one could fill.

 A relative named Scarpino put it another way. 30 years is a long time to agonize over who did this to Machella and why is he still living a free life. 1986 became 1996. 1996 became 2006. The park didn’t change. The gulch still dropped away below the Proctor Bridge the same way it always had. In 2006, the crime lab built a full male DNA profile from the biological evidence.

 It was entered into Cotus. No match came back. The profile was clean and complete. It pointed to one man, but that man had never entered any system that could find him. Then in 2013, two things happened that cracked the case in opposite directions. First, detectives tested the swimsuit Jennifer Bastion had been wearing the day she disappeared. Male DNA was recovered.

They compared it to the profile from Machella’s case. It did not match. Two different men, not one killer, two. 30 years of investigation had been organized around a theory the DNA demolished in a single comparison. They had been looking for the wrong shape of a crime. Second, a detective named Lindseay Wade joined the cold case unit.

WDE had grown up in Tacoma. She was 11 years old in 1986. Old enough to remember what the parks felt like after Machella and Jennifer were killed. Old enough to think twice before riding her bicycle alone through the trees. In high school, she read a book about Ted Bundy, another killer from Tacoma, and decided she wanted to catch people like him.

 She moved through the department, patrol, narcotics, detective, until Gene Miller, who had started the cold case unit in 2009, brought her in. Miller saw something in her. She’s got that grit, he said later. That determination, that ability to fight through whatever challenges there are and just make things happen.

 Wade opened every binder and built a master list of every male name that had ever touched either investigation. witnesses, tipsters, persons of interest, anyone whose name appeared anywhere in three decades of paperwork. The list came to 2,300 names. The killer was one of them. She did not know which one. In 2016, Wade worked with Parabon Nanolabs to generate composite sketches from the DNA of both suspects.

 computerenerated faces built from genetic markers. Skin tone, eye color, hair color, facial structure predicted from the code itself. The Machella suspect was predicted to be fair-skinned, browneyed, brown-haired, predominantly northern European with a small amount of Native American ancestry. The sketches were released to the public. Tips came in.

 None of them held. Wade narrowed the 2,300 down to a few hundred higher probability names and began collecting voluntary DNA samples. 160 men agreed. The samples went to the lab in batches. Batch after batch came back without a match. One name on WDE’s list had been there since 1986. A man named Robert Washburn had called police that year to report a tip.

 said he had been jogging in Point Defiance Park and spotted someone who matched the composite sketch from Machella’s case. He was interviewed, noted, and filed. He stayed on WDE’s list for that reason, and because a forensic genealogologist had flagged his surname as a possible familial connection to the DNA in Jennifer’s case.

 In April 2018, Wade retired from the Tacoma PD. Before she left, she submitted the final 18 DNA samples she had collected. She had no expectation that any of them would produce a match. She had been doing this for years. She had watched 160 names clear, one after another. Days after leaving the department, she got a call. One of those 18 had matched not to Machella’s case, but to Jennifer’s.

 The name was Robert Washburn. The man who had called police in 1986 to report a suspicious jogger in Machella’s case had killed Jennifer Bastion in a different park 5 months later. He had put himself inside the investigation of one murder while carrying the weight of another. Washburn pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 27 years.

 Jennifer Bastion’s case was closed. Machella’s was not, but something else had already been in motion. In February 2017, more than a year before Wade retired, she had begun working with genetic genealogologist Barbara Ray Venttor, the same scientist who would help identify the Golden State Killer. Later that year, a DNA profile was uploaded to GD Match, a public database where ordinary people share their ancestry results.

 The search did not return the killer. It returned his relatives, second cousins, third cousins, people who shared fragments of his DNA without knowing it. From those partial matches, Ray Venttor and genealogologist Nancy Averil built family trees outward, tracing lines backward to common ancestors and following the branches forward.

 The tree narrowed to two brothers who had both lived in Tacoma’s North End in 1986. In May 2018, Parabon Nanolabs independently confirmed the result. Two brothers, both in the area, both under surveillance. Detective Steve Reaple followed one of them for weeks. On June 5th, 2018, the man went to work and then stopped at a restaurant to have breakfast with a co-orker.

 He sat down, ordered, wiped his mouth on a paper napkin and left it on the table. Reple collected the napkin, and sent it to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. The DNA on that napkin matched the DNA recovered from Machella Welch’s body 32 years earlier. In the days before the lab results came back, while detectives were following him through his daily routine, the man whose DNA was on that napkin sensed something.

 He told a c-orker that 30 years ago, he had done something terrible and he thought he had been discovered. He was 66 years old. He had lived in Pierce County his entire life. In 1986, his address was the 4600 block of North Houston Street, less than 2 mi from Puet Park. 3 years after Machella’s murder, he got sober. By 1998, he had earned a registered nursing license, and been hired at Western State Hospital, a state psychiatric facility in Lakewood, 7 mi south of Tacoma.

 His job was helping recently discharged patients reintegrate into society. He held that position for more than 20 years without a single disciplinary mark. He married three times. He lived with his third wife on the shores of Stylum Lake where he collected vintage cars and drove them through the neighborhood on weekends.

Neighbors called him cordial. A nurse named Stephanie Brookens who crossed professional paths with him over the years said she always felt something was off but could never place it. I would have figured cheat on his wife or something minor. She said later, “I don’t understand how you can put that in a little box in your mind and then go into a helping profession.

 His name was Gary Charles Hartman. He had never appeared in the Welch case file. Not as a suspect, not as a person of interest, not in a single tip across 32 years and thousands of pages. He had been living in the same county as the evidence that would end him, working a career built around caring for people, while the family of the girl he killed carried the weight of an answer that never came.

 On June 20th, 2018, Hartman was pulled over during a traffic stop in Lakewood and taken into custody. He was charged with first-degree murder and firstdegree rape. Bail was set at $5 million. He pleaded not guilty. For years, he maintained his innocence. His defense attorney would later tell the court that Hartman’s mental state at the time of the crime had been so fractured that he had buried what he had done completely, that he had convinced himself it never happened.

 Then, at some point in the Pierce County Jail, something gave way. In his attorney’s words, he woke up with the realization that he was the one who committed this atrocious act. The bench trial came on March 22nd, 2022, 36 years after the murder. Hartman had requested it. No jury, just a judge. He was 70 years old and walked into the courtroom with a walker.

 The prosecution and defense had agreed upon so many of the facts that prosecutor Lisa Wagner told the court she believed the defendant had done everything he could to almost plead guilty. The trial lasted less than 2 hours. Judge Stanley Rumba delivered the verdict. Guilty. He sentenced Hartman to 320 months, 26 years, and 6 months, the maximum the law allowed for crimes committed in 1986.

 Then he looked at Hartman and said what the case demanded. Whatever your life has been subsequent to March 26th of 1986, it cannot erase or moderate the horror of the crime. There are no excusing conditions for your behavior. You are guilty of one of the most malignant and depraved crimes this court has seen. Hartmann placed his head in his hands.

His sobs grew louder as each member of Machella’s family spoke. Barbara Leonard had flown in from Tennessee. She had not lived in Tacoma for years, but she had never left the case behind. She stood in front of the man who killed her daughter and said what 36 years had given her the right to say.

 Lock him up and throw away the key. He will pay the price. It will not bring her back, but justice will have been served. Nicole Eie stood next. She had been 9 years old in that park. She was the one who came back with Angela and found the bag on the table and the bike in the rack and the empty space where her sister should have been.

She looked at Hartman and said something no one in that courtroom expected. I’m thankful to say that through God’s strength, I choose to forgive Gary Hartman. Forgiveness is not forgetting, but it is remembering without pain. Gary Hartman is at Airway Heights Corrections Center in Eastern Washington.

 The judge said he will likely die there. After both cases were closed, Hartman for Machella Washburn for Jennifer. The families of both girls worked with Lindseay Wade to change Washington state law. The bill passed in 2019. It is called Jennifer and Machella’s Law. It requires DNA collection from anyone convicted of indecent exposure and allows samples to be taken from deceased sex offenders whose crimes predate the original statute.

 It was written to close the exact gaps that had let both killers exist for decades without a single entry in any genetic database. Two girls who never knew each other killed by two men who never knew each other. Three m apart, 5 months apart. Now there is a law with both their names on it. On the morning of March 26th, 1986, a 12-year-old girl rode her bicycle back to Puet Park carrying a brown paper bag full of sandwiches she had made for her sisters.

 She chained her bike to the rack, set the bag on the table, and went looking for Angela and Nicole. She was the one who always came back. The bag was still there when they found it. If this case stayed with you, let me know your thoughts in the comments and tell me where you’re watching from.