Washington 1986 Cold Case Solved — A Swimsuit Named Her Killer 32 Years Later

There’s a kind of place every family trusts without thinking twice about it. A park where the trails are familiar, where the trees have watched three generations of kids grow up. In Tacoma, Washington, that place was Point Defiance, thousands of acres of old growth forest, quiet saltwater beaches, and a 5mm loop road that joggers, cyclists, and families claimed as their own.

 In the summer of 1986, that park belonged for a little while to a 13-year-old girl and her bright green bicycle. On the morning of August 4th, she rode out through those trees for what should have been an ordinary training loop. She never rode back. What followed wasn’t just a search. It was the beginning of a mystery that would sit unsolved for more than three decades, built around one impossible question.

 How does a predator vanish completely for 32 years without ever being seen? The answer was hiding in plain sight the entire time, stitched into a piece of fabric nobody thought twice about. A single swimsuit sealed away in an evidence locker holding a secret that science hadn’t yet learned how to read. Her name was Jennifer Bastion.

 Everyone who knew her called her Jenny, a strong swimmer, a determined cyclist, the kind of kid who set a goal and refused to let it go. That summer, her goal was a multi-day bike trip through the San Juan Islands with her father, and she was training for it every chance she got, pushing herself up the hills of Point Defiance’s 5m loop until she could keep pace with him.

 On August 4th, she left a note, hopped on her new green Schwin, and pedled the 30 blocks from home to the park she knew better than anyone. It was nothing unusual, just another ride on a route she’d done a dozen times before. But as the afternoon stretched into evening, the ride that should have taken an hour hadn’t ended.

 Her parents felt the kind of dread only a parent can understand. Her father drove the loop road again and again, calling her name into the trees, checking every pull out, every trail head, searching for a flash of green paint in the fading light. There was nothing, no bike, no daughter. By nightfall, Tacoma police and dozens of volunteers had swarmed the park, tearing through the underbrush as darkness closed in.

 The search stretched on for days, then weeks, and the park gave up nothing. Then on August 28th, almost 3 weeks after Jenny disappeared, a construction crew working near the main road noticed something wrong in the air. Investigators followed the smell down a steep embankment, and there, deliberately hidden beneath brush, they found her.

 Her bicycle was hidden nearby. The autopsy confirmed the worst. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. And there was something else, something that chilled the investigators to the bone. The way the scene had been staged, the brush hadn’t just fallen over her. It had been arranged, layered. Someone had taken his time.

 This wasn’t chaos. This was control. Investigators processed every inch of that scene, and among the items they recovered was the swimsuit Jenny had been wearing. At the time, it was just evidence, a heartbreaking piece of fabric, nothing more. No one in that room understood they were holding the one thing that would eventually end this case.

 The investigation was complicated almost immediately by a haunting coincidence. Just 5 months earlier, in March of 1986, another Tacoma girl, 12-year-old Michella Welch, had been murdered in a different park across the city. Two girls, two parks, the same summer. It seemed obvious. detectives and the public became convinced they were hunting a single serial predator and that assumption would define the investigation for years.

 It felt logical. It was also completely wrong and it would cost the case nearly three decades. For Jenny’s mother, Patty Bastion, the years that followed were a private kind of torture. Time didn’t heal anything. She would later say it just made the injustice feel sharper. Every year on Jenny’s birthday and on the anniversary of her disappearance, Patty called the cold case unit, not to demand, just to ask if there was anything new.

 She became a fixture in that department, a voice nobody could forget. For almost 30 years, the case barely moved. Detectives had persons of interest, but nothing solid, just names on a list. One of them belonging to a local man who had once called police with a tip about the Welch case. a man who mentioned almost in passing that he liked to jog the very trails where Jenny’s body was found.

 Then in 2013, technology finally caught up with the evidence. Scientists at the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab went back to that swimsuit, the one piece of clothing that had been closest to Jenny in her final moments and pulled a full male DNA profile from it. After 27 years, they had the killer’s biological signature.

They ran it through the national felon database, certain this was the moment, and then nothing, no match. The DNA sat there, precise and complete and utterly anonymous. Around the same time, investigators tested the DNA from Michella Welch’s case, too, expecting confirmation of the serial killer theory that had shaped this investigation for a generation.

Instead, they got a second shock. The two profiles didn’t match. There wasn’t one monster responsible for both girls. There were two separate predators in the same city in the same terrible year. The case went cold again, but this time it was different because the killer’s genetic fingerprint already existed in a file.

 The question was no longer whether he could be identified. It was how. In 2016, the Cold Case team refused to let that file sit untouched. They turned to a company in Virginia named Parabon Nanolabs, pioneers of a method that would soon become famous for catching the Golden State Killer, forensic genetic genealogy. Instead of searching for a direct match in a criminal database, this technique traces distant relatives, people who had simply uploaded their own DNA to public genealogy sites out of curiosity about their family history.

Investigators uploaded the unknown profile from Jenny’s swimsuit. Slowly, distant cousins began appearing in the results. Genealogologists worked backward through generations of public records, narrowing an entire family tree down to the handful of people who fit the age, the location, and the timeline of the crime.

 Three surnames rose to the surface, and one of them detonated like a bomb in the investigation room. It matched a name that had been sitting quietly in their files for 30 years. The same man who had once called police with a tip. The same man who had mentioned almost casually that he jogged those exact trails.

 His name was now written in permanent ink. But a family tree match wasn’t proof. To close this case, they needed his DNA taken directly, and they needed him to hand it over without knowing what he was really confirming. By the time investigators had his name, the man had spent three decades building an entirely ordinary life.

 He held a steady job. He raised a daughter with a disability, caring for her alone. Neighbors would later describe him as quiet, dependable, the kind of man who shoveled the sidewalk for the elderly couple next door and never missed a school meeting. He had almost no criminal record, nothing that would have flagged him as dangerous.

 He had simply learned better than most how to disappear inside normal life. Around 2017, as part of a wider push to eliminate old persons of interest, detectives began quietly requesting voluntary DNA samples from everyone still connected to the case. In an act of pure arrogance, or pure confidence that he’d never be caught, he agreed to give one. The lab was backlogged.

 His sample sat waiting, processed in batches with dozens of others, no urgency attached to it. He had no idea he had just handed over the one thing that would end everything. For 32 years, this was the pattern. A predator who understood exactly how to blend in, how to insert himself into an investigation without raising suspicion, how to let time and a flawed serial killer theory work in his favor.

 The system hadn’t failed for lack of effort. It had failed because he was patient enough and ordinary enough to outlast it. But patience only works until science catches up. On May 7th, 2018, the results came back. The DNA from Jennifer Bastion’s swimsuit was a perfect match. The odds of it belonging to anyone else on Earth, 1 in 57 trillion.

 His name was Robert Dwayne Washburn. 3 days later, police arrested the now 60-year-old Washburn at his home in Eureka, Illinois. His neighbors were stunned into silence. The man they knew, the devoted single father, the helpful neighbor, could not be reconciled with the man being led away in handcuffs. He had hidden his secret by being terrifyingly, perfectly ordinary.

Faced with the DNA evidence, Washburn pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in January 2019. In a brief written confession, he admitted to grabbing Jennifer as she rode her bike, dragging her into the woods, and killing her. He offered an apology. He offered no explanation for why. Asked in court whether he would have wanted the death penalty applied to himself, his answer was simple.

 Nothing was going to bring Jennifer back, and he didn’t want to be responsible for anyone else’s life either. Bound by the sentencing guidelines that existed back in 1986, the court handed him just over 26 years. Today, he serves that sentence at the Airway Heights Correction Center in Washington. Using the same genetic genealogy method, investigators soon closed the second case, too.

 Tracking down Michella Welch’s killer, a nurse named Gary Hartman, through DNA lifted from a napkin he discarded at a restaurant. Two murders that had haunted an entire city for a generation were finally both solved. But Jennifer’s story didn’t end in a courtroom. Her mother, Patty Bastion, channeled three decades of grief into action, becoming a driving force behind new legislation that expanded Washington State’s DNA database, now known as Jennifer and Michella’s Law.

 It closes gaps that once let dangerous men slip through, and it gives investigators a fighting chance to stop the next one before he ever gets the chance to hide. For 32 years, a killer believed his secret was buried in the woods of a park he thought he knew better than anyone. He was wrong.

 All it took to unravel his entire world was one microscopic thread. And a mother who never for a single year let her daughter be forgotten.