Washington 1986 Cold Case — A Napkin Solved This 31 Years Cold Case 

Two sandwiches on a picnic table. That is the image that has never left the people who were there that afternoon. Not the search dogs, not the investigators working the ravine in the dark. Not the 32 years of a case that refused to close. Two sandwiches on a picnic table in Puget Park, North Tacoma, Washington.

Michella had made them at home, packed them carefully, ridden her bicycle back to the park, and left them on the table for her sisters. She was 12 years old. She had ridden home to make lunch because her sisters were hungry. That is the kind of girl she was. Her sisters came back to the park and found the sandwiches.

They found Michella’s bicycle chained exactly where she had left it. They called her name the way sisters do, “Yoo-hoo. Yoo-hoo.” The sound echoing back across an empty park. They searched. They called the babysitter. The babysitter called their mother. Their mother called the police. That night a tracking dog found what the search teams could not.

 Michella Yvonne Welch was in a ravine a quarter mile from the picnic table. She had been sexually assaulted. She had been beaten, and her throat had been cut. She had gone to make lunch for her sisters, and she was dead before the sandwiches went cold. For 32 years the man who did this went about his life. He stayed in the Tacoma area.

 He became a registered nurse. He worked at Western State Hospital, a psychiatric facility that housed the criminally insane. He had a family. He went to restaurants. He left DNA everywhere he went, on every surface he touched, the way every human being does without thinking about it. He did not know for 32 years that the DNA he left in that ravine in 1986 was waiting for him.

 That it had been entered into a national database. That it had been sent to a genealogy company in Virginia. That a genealogist was building a family tree from the outside in, narrowing the branches, closing the distance between the unknown profile and a name. He found out on June the 20th, 2018, when police stopped his car in Lakewood, Washington, and told him he was under arrest. He was 66 years old.

He used a walker in the courtroom. And when the judge delivered the guilty verdict at his bench trial in March 2022, he placed his head in his hands and wept. “I am so sorry.” He said. “God knows I am so sorry.” 32 years after two sandwiches sat on a picnic table going cold, he finally said it out loud.

 This is the case of Michella Yvonne Welch. Stay with it. What you are about to hear stunned an entire city, produced two separate cold case investigations running simultaneously for over three decades, and ultimately changed DNA law in the state of Washington. It began on a sunny spring morning in 1986. And it did not end until a man wept in a courtroom 32 years later and could not explain why he had done what he had done to a 12-year-old girl who had gone to make lunch for her sisters.

Michella Yvonne Welch was born on June the 7th, 1973 in Georgia. She was the oldest of three daughters born to Barbara Leonard who raised the girls largely on her own after their father left. Barbara was the kind of mother who found a way through hard circumstances without making her children feel the weight of them.

By March 1986, she had bought a house in northern Tacoma, Washington, found a new job, and signed her three daughters up for piano lessons. Life, for the first time in a while, was turning towards something better. Michella was 12. Her sisters, Angela and Nicole, were younger, still in the age range where an older sister is not just a sibling, but a whole world.

 Michella had taken that role seriously. She was responsible in the way that oldest daughters of single mothers often are, not because she was forced to be, but because she understood instinctively that looking after her sisters was something she could do. And so, she did it. Her family remembered her as a second mother to Angela and Nicole, mature beyond her years, the kind of child who made adult decisions without being asked.

 She was also a child. She loved riding her bicycle through the Tacoma streets she had learned since her family had settled there. She was a talented artist. She played the piano and the violin, two instruments, working at both. Nicole would say decades later that Michella was a super talented, beautiful artist, that she was an amazing girl.

She had glasses and long blonde hair and a brightness that her family could not find the right words to fully describe 32 years later in a courtroom. So, they said the simplest true thing, she was a happy child. On the morning of March the 26th, 1986, a Thursday, spring break, a sunny Washington morning, Michella decided to take her sisters to Puget Park.

The park sat at 3100 North Proctor Street in North Tacoma, a neighborhood park with a playground, a gulch that ran beneath the Proctor Bridge and enough open space for three sisters to spend a morning. They rode their bicycles. They arrived around 10:00 in the morning. They played. Around 11:00, Michella realized they had not brought lunch.

 She told her sister she was going home to get something to eat. She would be right back. She unchained her bicycle, rode the short distance back to the house on North Oaks, made sandwiches, packed them up, and rode back to the park. She returned. She left the sandwiches on the picnic table.

 She chained her bicycle next to her sister’s bike, exactly as she had left it, and then she went looking for Angela and Nicole, who had wandered away from the playground to find a restroom at a nearby business. A 13-year-old classmate, who had been in the park that morning, told investigators later that he had noticed a man near the park standing under the Proctor Bridge, watching the girls.

 The man had looked at them repeatedly. “He was white,” the classmate said, “in his mid-20s, wearing a blue jean jacket with holes in it and dirty white tennis shoes.” The classmate had not known what to do with what he had seen. He had done nothing. He was 13 years old. A witness near the park saw Michella at around 1:30 in the afternoon talking to a man.

The man was pointing toward a trail that led down into the ravine, the gulch that ran beneath the bridge, overgrown and dark even on a sunny March afternoon. Michella appeared to be following where he pointed. That was the last time anyone saw Michella Yvonne Welch alive. When Angela and Nicole returned to the park, they found the picnic table exactly as Michella had left it.

 The sandwiches were there. Michella’s bicycle was there, chained to Nicole’s. The babysitter’s call to the park had gone unanswered. They called for her. Yoohoo, Yoohoo. The park gave nothing back. They were frightened now. They found the babysitter. The babysitter found Barbara Leonard. Barbara found the police.

 The search began that afternoon and stretched into the evening. Officers, volunteers. Search dogs moving through the gulch in the dark. At 11:30 that night, a tracking dog found the location. Michella’s body was in the ravine, a quarter mile from the picnic table near a makeshift fire pit in the overgrown underbrush beneath the bridge.

 She had been sexually assaulted. She had been beaten. She had died from a cut to the throat and blunt force trauma to the head. She had been there for hours while her sisters called her name and the sandwiches sat on the picnic table going uneaten. Barbara Leonard learned what had been found that night. She told investigators years later that she did not know whether to laugh or cry when she finally got the call.

 Not about Michella, not yet, but about the arrest 18 years later that gave the case its first face. That was the shape of 32 years of waiting. A woman who had held so much grief for so long that the arrival of an answer could not settle into a single recognizable feeling. Tacoma in the spring of 1986 was a city that was about to discover something about itself that no community ever wants to know. Not once, but twice.

Five months after Michella was found in the ravine at Puget Park, a 13-year-old girl named Jennifer Bastian went missing from Point Defiance Park 3 miles away. Jennifer had been riding her bicycle. Her body was found 3 weeks later hidden in the underbrush along 5-Mile Drive with her bicycle nearby. She had been sexually assaulted and murdered.

 Two girls, two parks, 3 miles apart, 5 months apart, both riding bicycles, both 12 and 13 years old, both attacked in broad daylight in public parks in the same city. The assumption was immediate and logical. One killer. It had to be one killer. The circumstances were too similar, the geography too close, the victims too alike in age and circumstance.

A six-person task force was formed specifically to investigate both cases together. More than 10,000 investigative hours went into the combined investigation in 1986 alone. Thousands of tips were processed. A composite sketch of the man seen watching the girls in Puget Park circulated across the city. 2,300 names eventually accumulated across the combined files, every man connected to either case by any means, however distant. None of them matched.

 The DNA evidence that investigators had was strong enough to profile. They had biological material recovered from Michella’s body at the crime scene. That profile was entered into CODIS, the FBI’s national database of convicted offender DNA, in May 2006. It returned no match. The man who had killed Michella had never been convicted of an offense that required a DNA sample in any database.

Here is the detail that would take years to understand fully. The assumption that one killer had murdered both girls, the assumption that had driven the entire investigation, was wrong. In 2013, a piece of evidence from Jennifer Bastian’s case was finally tested. A swimsuit that investigators had assumed contained no recoverable DNA was examined under improved conditions and yielded a profile.

 The profile did not match the profile from Michella’s case, not even close. Two separate men, two separate crimes, two separate DNA profiles, both sitting in a national database for years, both returning nothing. 2,300 names, 10,000 investigative hours, 32 years of a task force believing they were looking for one person. And the answer had always been two separate strangers, two separate mornings, two girls who had the terrible luck to cross paths with two different men in the same city within 5 months of each other.

When the detectives working the cases finally understood they were looking for two killers, the investigation had to split. Both tracks started over. The DNA profiles were the only reliable leads either track had. And neither profile matched anyone in CODIS. The investigation needed a new approach. It needed technology that did not yet exist in 2013.

It would arrive in 2015. And it would change everything. Detective Lindsey Wade joined the Tacoma Cold Case Unit in 2013. She was handed the Michella Welch and Jennifer Bastian files together. Decades of paper, hundreds of binders, 2,300 names in a combined list that represented every person who had ever touched either investigation in any capacity. Wade was methodical.

 She went through every name. She prioritized. She eliminated. She built a working theory that the killer had to be someone who had committed a sex crime and slipped through the cracks. Someone in the system somewhere, just not in the right database. She began collecting DNA samples from the names at the top of her list.

 In 5 years, she collected 160 samples. She tested everyone against the profile from Michella’s crime scene. None of them matched. In 2015, Wade sent Michella’s DNA profile to Parabon NanoLabs in Virginia, the same forensic company that would later work the Golden State Killer case and the April Tinsley case and dozens of others.

Parabon used a technique called DNA Phenotyping to predict the physical appearance of the unknown male from the genetic material alone. The resulting composite showed a white male, medium build, with specific predicted features. In May 2016, Tacoma police released the composite publicly. Tips came in. Several people called about a man who resembled the image.

 Investigators pursued every lead. Every lead dissolved. The composite had not identified the killer, but it had proved something important. The DNA in Michella’s case was strong enough to yield a usable profile, which meant it was strong enough for the next step, a step that became possible in 2018 when a genealogy company in California used the same technology to identify the Golden State Killer after 40 years.

Two weeks after that arrest made international news, the Tacoma Cold Case Unit made a decision. They uploaded Michella’s DNA profile to GEDmatch. GEDmatch is a public ancestry database where ordinary people voluntarily submit their DNA to trace family history. When an unknown crime scene profile is uploaded, the system searches for genetic overlap, not an exact match, but the partial overlap of relatives.

 A second cousin, a third cousin, once removed. Enough shared DNA to establish a family connection to the unknown contributor, Parabon’s genealogist began building outward from the matches. A family tree constructed from partial overlaps, census records, birth certificates, marriage records, and public ancestry databases.

 Branch by branch, generation by generation, the tree narrowed. Extended family, immediate family, two brothers who had both lived in North Tacoma in March 1986, both within miles of Puget Park. Both within the age range of the man seen watching the girls near the bridge that morning. Two brothers. One of them had killed Michella Welch. The DNA said so.

The genealogy had pointed the way. Now investigators needed a fresh sample from each man to confirm which one. Every case on this channel takes weeks of research because these stories deserve more than a summary. If Michella’s story is staying with you the way it has stayed with us, if the image of those sandwiches on the picnic table is sitting somewhere you cannot quite put down, hit subscribe and tell us in the comments a man worked as a psychiatric nurse at a facility housing the criminally insane for years after doing what he did in

that ravine. What does it tell you about how well we know the people around us? More solved cold cases are in the description. Now, let’s get back to it because what Detective Steve Rayappel did in a restaurant in June of 2018 is one of the most precise moments in cold case history. Detective Steve Rio Pel of the Tacoma Police Department Cold Case Unit was assigned to conduct surveillance on the two brothers the genealogy had identified.

 His job was simple in concept and demanding in execution. Follow them. Wait for them to discard something that contained their DNA, collect it before anyone else touched it, and get it to the lab. On June the 4th, 2018, Ria Pell followed the older brother to his job at Western State Hospital in Lakewood, Washington. Western State Hospital is a state psychiatric facility.

It houses patients on a secure ward for the criminally insane. The man who had killed a 12-year-old girl in a park in 1986 had spent years working there as a registered nurse, treating some of the most dangerous patients in the Washington State mental health system. He had a clean criminal record, no convictions.

No arrests beyond a lewd conduct citation that predated mandatory DNA collection. The hospital had no reason to know what he had done in that ravine in March of 1986. His colleagues had no reason to know. His patients had no reason to know. He was simply a nurse. A man who went to work, helped the vulnerable, went home, and had done so for years while Michella’s case sat open, and Barbara Leonard gave interviews about not knowing who had taken her daughter.

After his shift on June the 5th, the man went to a nearby restaurant to have breakfast with a coworker. Ria Pell followed. He positioned himself to watch. The man sat down, ordered, used a brown paper napkin multiple times during the meal, crumpled it up, placed it in a bag, crumpled the bag, and left it on the table as he walked out.

Ria Pell said afterward that he observed him using the napkin multiple times. He crumpled it up, put it into a bag, crumpled that bag up, and voluntarily abandoned that bag as he left the restaurant. Ria Pell moved in after the man left. He collected the napkin from a restaurant employee.

 It went directly to the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory. While the lab processed the sample, investigators followed the younger brother to a restaurant on a different day. They collected a straw he had discarded. That went to the lab, too. The lab returned results within days. The younger brother’s straw returned no match to the crime scene DNA from 1986.

The older brother’s napkin was a different story. The DNA extracted from the crumpled brown paper napkin matched the DNA profile recovered from Michella Welch’s body 32 years earlier. The probability of a coincidental match was infinitesimal. This was not a near match. This was not an inconclusive result. This was confirmation.

 The man who had sat in that restaurant eating breakfast with a co-worker, the man who had crumpled his napkin and walked out without a second thought was the same man who had taken Michella Welch into a ravine on a spring afternoon in 1986 and left her there. His name was Gary Charles Hartman. He was 66 years old. He had never appeared on any list connected to Michella’s case.

 He had never been interviewed. He had never been investigated. He had lived 2 miles from Puget Park at the time of the murder and had remained in the greater Tacoma area for the 32 years that followed, working, living, going to restaurants, leaving his DNA on napkins and straws and every other surface he touched as every human being does without thinking, never knowing that one of those surfaces would eventually matter.

On June the 20th, 2018, Tacoma police conducted a traffic stop in Lakewood. Gary Charles Hartman was taken into custody and charged with first degree murder and first degree rape in the death of Michella Evon Welch. Bail was set at $5 million. dollars. Barbara Leonard was in Tennessee when she received the call from Tacoma Police Chief Don Ramsdell.

 He asked if she was sitting down. She said yes, there happened to be a chair right there. He told her they had arrested the person they believed was responsible for Michella’s murder. She told reporters afterward that she did not know whether to laugh or cry. She flew to Tacoma. At Hartman’s arraignment, she stood outside the courthouse and said the words she had been carrying for 32 years.

For 32 years, he has gotten away with it. I am here because I believe in justice. At the hearing inside, Hartman pleaded not guilty. His attorney, Brian Hirschman, told reporters that his client was a family man who held a very important job at Western State Hospital and that the public should accord him the presumption of innocence.

Hartman was held on the $5 million bail and the case moved toward trial. The road from arrest to conviction took 4 years. The trial was delayed by the pandemic and by defense motions. When it finally proceeded, Hartman chose a bench trial, his case heard by a judge rather than a jury. Judge Stanley Rumbaugh of Pierce County Superior Court presided.

Prosecutors built their case entirely around the DNA. The biological material recovered from Michella’s body in 1986, the profile developed from that material over the following decades. The genealogy work that had identified Hartman and his brother. The surveillance. The napkin. The Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory’s confirmation that the napkin matched the crime scene.

The statistical probability of a coincidental match so small it barely existed as a number. The defense challenged the DNA at every point it could. Hartman maintained his innocence throughout the proceedings. His attorney argued that the case rested entirely on DNA evidence in a system that had been decades old before anyone truly knew how to handle it.

 It was not enough. On March the 22nd, 2022, 32 years, 11 months, and 24 days after Michella’s body was found in that ravine, Judge Stanley Rumbaugh found Gary Charles Hartman guilty of first-degree murder and first-degree rape. The verdict came quickly. Less than 2 hours of deliberation by the judge. The evidence was that clear.

Before sentencing, Michella’s family had the chance to speak. Barbara Leonard told the judge, “Lock him up and throw away the key.” She said Hartman owed not only her family, but the community and everyone a huge apology, and that even apologizing could not bring her daughter back. “It is hard to know what justice is,” she said, “because it is never going to bring her back.

” Angela Velasquez addressed Hartman directly. She told him that she asked him to rely on God because he is the only one who can forgive and give you rest. Nicole Abby said something that required a different kind of courage than rage. She said, “I am thankful to say that I choose to forgive Gary Hartman through God’s strength, because when I do not, it brings death to my life in one way or another.

” Standing in a room where her sister’s killer sat in front of her for the first time, Nicole Abby chose to forgive him, not for his sake, for her own. Because she had been 12 years old in 1986, yoo-hooing across a park that would not answer, and she had carried that afternoon for 32 years. And she had decided that she was not going to carry it the way it had been given to her. Then Hartman spoke.

He stood with his walker, 70 years old, the registered nurse who had worked in a hospital for the criminally insane for years, after doing what he had done, and he placed his head in his hands, and he wept. “I am so sorry,” he said. “God knows I am so sorry. That does not help. I am just sorry.

” Judge Rumba sentenced him to 26 years and 6 months in prison, the maximum available. He noted from the bench that given Hartman’s age, the sentence meant he would almost certainly die in prison. He was right. Gary Charles Hartman will die in prison. The case of Michella Yvonne Welch and the case of Jennifer Marie Bastian, two girls, two parks, two killers, one city, one spring, led to something else after the convictions.

Washington state passed a law called Jennifer and Michella’s Law, signed by Governor Jay Inslee in 2019. The law expanded the state’s DNA database to include deceased sex offenders, and required those convicted of indecent exposure, the precise offense that Gary Hartman had been cited for in an earlier decade, to submit DNA samples to state and national databases.

The law means that what happened in the Michella Welch and Jennifer Bastian cases, a killer with a prior offense who was never entered into a database, cannot happen the same way again. Two girls murdered in parks, a law written in their names, the closest thing to permanence that the justice system can offer.

Her name was Michella Yvonne Welch. She was 12 years old. She was responsible and mature and loving and she played the piano and the violin and she was a talented artist and she was the oldest sister and she took that seriously. She rode home from a park to make sandwiches for Angela and Nicole because they were hungry.

 She made the sandwiches, rode back, left them on the table and went to find her sisters. The sandwiches were still there when Nicole and Angela came back. Michella was not. Yoohoo, Yoohoo, the park did not answer. Gary Charles Hartman lived 2 miles from that park in March 1986. He had no criminal record that placed him on any list.

 He was never interviewed. He was never investigated. He stayed in the Tacoma area for 32 years, worked as a nurse, went to restaurants, left his DNA on napkins and walked away. And believed if he thought about it at all, that what he had done in that ravine had already been forgotten by the system that was supposed to find him.

A crumpled paper napkin in a restaurant bag proved otherwise. Before you go, three questions. Gary Hartman worked as a registered nurse at Western State Hospital, a facility that housed the criminally insane for years after killing Michella in that ravine. He treated vulnerable patients. He held a position of trust and care.

 Do you think the people around him, colleagues, patients, supervisors, ever sensed something wrong? Or is that the most frightening thing about this case, that there was nothing to sense? Nicole Eby stood in that courtroom and told Hartman she forgave him, not for his sake, but because carrying it without forgiveness was bringing death to her own life.

After 32 years of not knowing and then knowing, do you think forgiveness is something you could find? Or does a verdict change what forgiveness means? The sandwiches were still on the table. That is the image this case leaves behind. A 12-year-old girl who made lunch for her sisters came back to the park and was gone before anyone realized it.

What does it mean that something so ordinary, a sandwich, a bicycle, a sunny spring morning can become the last thing someone does? Her name was Michella Yvonne Welch. She was 12 years old. She made lunch for her sisters. She mattered.