WASHINGTON 1989 Cold Case Solved — A Coworker Caught the Killer

On the Friday after Thanksgiving 1989, [music] an 18-year-old college freshman named Mandy Stavic laced up her running shoes, called her German Shepherd to her side, and headed out for a jog along the back roads of Acme, Washington. Population [music] barely 300. 2 hours later, the dog came home alone, cowering, tail tucked between her legs, [music] river mud caked across her hind quarters. Mandy never came back.

 For 28 years, [music] detectives collected DNA from every man in town. One neighbor refused to give his. And the woman who finally caught him wasn’t a detective, wasn’t a forensic scientist, [music] wasn’t anyone with a badge. She was his coworker at a bakery. She pulled a plastic cup from a breakroom trash can, sealed it in a bag, and handed it to the one detective who had never [music] stopped looking.

 The DNA matched one in 11 quadrillion. This is the story of how Mandy Stavic was taken from a town that loved her, how her case sat cold for nearly three decades, and how the most ordinary act of courage imaginable brought her killer to justice. This is Cold Case Redemption. If cases like this are what keep you watching, hit [music] subscribe.

 We cover the cold cases that everyone thought would stay buried. Amanda Terresa Stavic was born on April 16th, 1971 in Anchorage, Alaska. Her mother, Mary, raised Mandy and her siblings Molly and Lee after divorcing their father Glenn in 1974. By all accounts, Mandy was the kind of kid who made you pay [music] attention the second she walked into a room.

 She played basketball and was good at it. She ran cross country. She cheered on the sidelines. She played saxophone in the school band. And her band director, Doug Sutton, would remember her years later as a big presence in the band room. Not in a loud way, in the way that certain people just pull everyone’s attention without trying to.

 She ran track, played softball, and still managed to keep her grades at the top of her class. Honor student every year. And she wasn’t just smart. She [music] was curious in a way that most 18-year-olds aren’t. She could speak Japanese. She knew sign language. She wanted to be an airline pilot, which in 1989 was still an uncommon ambition for a young woman from a rural town of 300 people.

 Mandy didn’t seem to notice or care about what was common. She wanted what she wanted. Her mother, Mary, later tried to describe her to a reporter and struggled to find the words. She said Mandy was very everything and that she didn’t know if there were words to describe her. Mary said her daughter wanted to do everything.

 Wanted to be the best at everything she did and usually was. Her basketball coach at Mount Baker High School, a man named Jim Freeman, became a father figure to Mandy after her parents split. Freeman took a personal interest in Mandy’s life, the way coaches sometimes [music] do when they see a kid who needs a steady adult in her corner.

 He would later deliver the eulogy at her memorial, standing in front of a gymnasium full of people who couldn’t believe she was gone. The family had already been shattered once before Mandy was even old enough to understand what grief meant. In 1975, Mandy’s older brother, Brent, was shot and killed while bow hunting on Army land near Anchorage.

 He was 17 years old. Brent’s murder was never solved. No arrest, no suspect, no answers. The family carried that silence with them and it changed the shape of their lives in ways that are hard to quantify. Mary had already learned what it felt like to lose a child to violence and receive nothing in return. No explanation, no justice, no closure, just [music] a funeral and a question that would never be answered.

 After the divorce and after Brent’s death, Mary moved the younger children across state lines to Watcom County, Washington. Settling in the tiny rural community of Acme, tucked into the foothills of Mount Baker along the banks of the Noosack River. The town sits at the end of a narrow valley where the river bends through farmland and forests of old growth cedar.

 It is quiet in the way that only places with no traffic lights can be quiet. In the 1980s, Acme had a general store, a post office, and not much else. People waved from their pickups. Nobody locked their front doors. Kids walked to school along logging roads and came home when it got dark. It was safe. It was home.

 And Mandy thrived there in a way that made the town feel like it belonged to her as much as she belonged to it. [music] She graduated from Mount Baker High School in the spring of 1989. And that fall she enrolled at Central Washington University in Ellensburg about 4 hours east of Acme. She was a freshman just getting started full of the kind of energy that comes from being 18 and believing the world is about to open up.

When Thanksgiving break came around in late November, she caught a ride home with her ex-boyfriend Rick Zender and her college roommate Yoko. She walked back into her mother’s house on Wednesday afternoon, November 22nd, ready for a quiet holiday weekend with her family. She had no way of knowing she would never leave Acme again.

 If you believe victims like Mandy deserve to be remembered for who they were, not just how they died, drop a like on this video. It helps more people find these stories. Thanksgiving Day itself was quiet. The family spent it at home. Leftovers, conversation. The kind of uneventful holiday that feels unremarkable until you realize it was the last normal day.

 On Friday, November 24th, Mandy ate Thanksgiving leftovers, took a walk with her roommate, Yoko, and made plans for that evening. She was going to go out with her high school friend Brad Gorum and a local guy named Tom Bass. Tom was a friend of Mandy’s from the area. His older brother Timothy lived just a few houses down from the Stavic family on Strand Road.

 That detail would become important later. But on that Friday afternoon, it was just another name in a small town social circle. Sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon, Mandy called Kyra, the family’s German Shepherd, and headed out for her regular 5mile jog along Strand Road. This was her route. She’d run it dozens of times.

The road wound through farmland and forest along the south fork of the Noosack River. In a town like Acme, jogging alone was not unusual. It was just what you did. Her brother Lee saw her running east along the road, heading back toward home sometime around 3:00. A neighbor named David Kraker saw her, too, moving at her usual pace, minutes from the house. She never made it.

Around 5 in the afternoon, Kira came home without Mandy. The dog was trembling, tail pressed between her legs, cowering in a way the family had never seen before. There was river silt caked across her hind quarters, the kind of dark, wet mud that comes from the banks of the Nooks [music] Sack. Investigators would later conclude that whoever took Mandy had struck or kicked the dog into a ditch to keep Kira from protecting her.

 By 5:30, Mary Stavoc called the Watcom County Sheriff’s Office. Search and rescue was mobilized that evening. A tracker named Alan Pratt examined the area along Strand Road near the Stavic home and found a disturbed patch of ground with what appeared to be multiple sets of footfalls. He found river silt in a nearby ditch that matched the mud on Kira’s body.

Something violent had happened right there within minutes of Mandy’s house. But Mandy herself was nowhere. Saturday and Sunday passed with no sign of her. Volunteers combed the fields, the logging roads, the riverbanks. Searchers [music] on foot, searchers on horseback, searchers and boats.

 The Nooksack River ran cold and fast that time of year, swollen with late autumn rain. The forest on either side was thick with blackberry bramble and underbrush, the kind of terrain where a person could vanish in 50 ft. On Monday morning, November 27th, Detective Ron Peterson took a Zodiac inflatable boat up river along the South Fork of the Nooks Sack.

He was scanning the banks and the shallow side channels, looking for anything. And then he saw something, a flash of color in a shallow channel, partially submerged, caught against the rocks and brush. It was Mandy. She was found wearing only her running shoes and socks. Everything else had been removed. Peterson, who had recently completed specialized training with the FBI at Quantico on the recovery and preservation of DNA evidence, lifted Mandy from the water with extraordinary care. He understood that the biological

evidence on her body might be the only thing that could identify her killer, and he treated that responsibility with the gravity it deserved. Years later, in an interview, he recalled the moment he reached her and said quietly, “I got you.” The autopsy was performed the following day by Watcom County Medical Examiner Dr. Gary Goldfog.

 The cause of death was freshwater drowning. Mandy had suffered blunt force trauma to the right side of her forehead, a concussion level blow. There were scratches across her body consistent with running through blackberry bushes while she was still alive. There was evidence of sexual assault.

 Her stomach contents placed the time of death between roughly 3:30 and 4:30 on Friday afternoon, which meant she died within an hour or so of when her brother last saw her running along Strand Road. The FBI and the Washington State Patrol crime lab developed a male DNA profile from the biological evidence recovered from Mandy’s body.

 They ran it against every database available. No match. Whoever did this was not in the system. And in 1989, DNA technology was still in its infancy. The profile would be preserved, but without a suspect to compare it against. It was a key without a lock. The investigation began in earnest.

 A community of 300 people had just lost one of its brightest, [music] and the killer was still out there, possibly still among them. The first suspects came quickly, the way they always do in small communities where everyone knows everyone and grief makes people suspicious. Mandy’s ex-boyfriend, Rick Zender, who had driven her home from college just 2 days before, was interviewed extensively.

 In cases like this, the boyfriend is always the first person investigators look at. Zender cooperated fully. He sat through hours of questioning, provided a DNA sample without hesitation, and was described by investigators as extremely forthcoming. He was cleared. A composite sketch was drawn up based on tips from the community depicting a heavy set man with a round, pudgy face.

 It was circulated across Watcom County and beyond. [music] No solid match emerged. A local drifter named [music] David Sushi drew attention. Investigators obtained a warrant, collected [music] his DNA, and sent it to the crime lab. It didn’t match. Then came John Wisnooki, a drug dealer from the area who had loose connections to people in Mandy’s social circle.

 Wisnooki became a person of interest who would haunt the investigation for years. He was evasive, hard to pin down, and eventually moved overseas. In 2010, a detective would fly all the way to Cambodia just to sit across [music] from Wisnooki, interview him, and collect a DNA sample. That sample didn’t match either. Another dead end.

 This one 13,000 m from Acme, Washington. In the early years of the investigation, 30 men from the Acme area voluntarily provided saliva samples for DNA comparison. [music] Every single one was eliminated. The case was cross-referenced against the Green River Killer Task Force, [music] which was actively hunting a serial murderer operating in Washington State.

During the same period, no connection to the Stavic case was found. A reward fund was established by the community and eventually grew to $25,000. Tips came in from across the county and beyond. Each one was investigated, followed up, documented, and filed away. None of them went [music] anywhere. In the weeks after Mandy’s death, approximately 900 people attended her memorial service.

 Think about that number for a second. Acme had a population of roughly 300. 900 people meant the entire town plus the surrounding community showed up to mourn a girl who had graduated from Mount Baker High just 6 months earlier. The gymnasium was standing room only. Her coach, Jim Freeman, delivered the eulogy.

 A song called Mandy’s Song was recorded in her honor, and the proceeds went toward establishing the Mandy Stavic Scholarship at Mount Baker High School, an endowed award given to students [music] who participate in the school’s music program. That scholarship has been awarded [music] every year since 1990. The community mourned. The investigation continued and slowly with the particular cruelty of a case that refuses [music] to break, the years began to pass. 1990 became 1995.

1995 became 2000. 2000 became 2005. Lead detectives rotated on and off the case, each one inheriting a file that had grown thicker with every passing year. They reviewed the same evidence, reinterviewed the same people, and hit the same walls that their predecessors [music] had hit. The DNA profile recovered from Mandy’s body sat in the crime lab, perfectly [music] preserved, waiting for a name to attach itself to.

The key existed. The lock was nowhere to be found. Mary Stavic waited, too. She had already lost one child to an unsolved murder when Brent was killed in 1975. Now she carried two. One son shot dead in Alaska, his case never solved. One daughter killed in Washington, her case going cold. Two children taken by violence, and no answers for either one.

Mary kept living because that was the only choice available to her. She later said something that stayed with the people who heard it. She said that the living have to go on to honor the goodness in what they have lost for 20 years. That was the story. A mother waiting. A town remembering a case file gathering dust in a sheriff’s office and a killer who walked free.

Living his life 19 miles away in Everson, driving a delivery truck for a bakery, raising a family of his own. In 2009, a detective named Kevin Boh was assigned the Stavic cold case. He was the third lead investigator to take it on. And he brought something the others hadn’t, [music] a personal connection. Bohe had attended the same high school as Mandy.

 Mount Baker High, the same hallways, the same gymnasium where she played basketball and cheered. He was a young deputy in the Watcom County Sheriff’s Office in 1989 when she was killed. Her case wasn’t abstract to him. It wasn’t a name in a file. It was something that had happened to a girl from his school in his community during his first years wearing a badge.

 And it had been sitting unsolved for two decades while the world moved on. Boh wasn’t moving on. He took the case file home and read it cover to cover. He studied the evidence, the interviews, the dead ends, the suspects who had been cleared. And then he started thinking about how to approach the problem differently.

 He had read Joseph Womba’s true crime book, The Blooding, which told the story of the first murder ever solved through a DNA drag net. It happened in a small English village in the 1980s. The local police, unable to identify a killer through traditional detective work, went to every man in the area and asked for a voluntary blood sample.

 One by one, they eliminated the innocent until the guilty man was revealed. The concept was simple and brutal in its patience. You ask everyone, you test everyone, and eventually you find the one who matches. [music] Bohe decided to do the same thing in Acme. He started by reconstructing a list of every male who had lived in or near the town in November of 1989.

That alone was a massive undertaking. Acme was small, but the surrounding area included farms, logging operations, seasonal [music] workers, and people who had since moved away. Boh tracked them down one at a time. He drove to their current addresses, knocked on their doors, explained who he was, explained the case, and asked them to provide a voluntary cheek swab.

 Most of them agreed. They remembered Mandy. They wanted the case solved. The swab would go to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. The results would come back weeks later, and every time the answer was the same. No match. Cross another name off the list. move on to the next one.

 There was nothing glamorous about this work. There were no dramatic interrogations, no forensic breakthroughs, no moments where the pieces suddenly fell into place. It was the investigative equivalent of digging a ditch one shovel full at a time. Drive, knock, explain, swab, wait, negative, repeat. Over the full course of the investigation, Boh and his team collected more than 80 DNA samples from men connected to the Acme area.

 Every single one came back negative. In 2010, Boh flew to Cambodia to track down John Wiznooki, the drug dealer who had moved overseas and remained a lingering person of interest after all those years. Bohay traveled 13,000 m to sit across from Wisnooki, interview him about a crime that had happened 21 years earlier and collect a DNA sample.

 He sent it to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, waited for the results, and received the same answer he had received 80 times before. No match. Even after that dead end, Boh didn’t quit. He said something that captured his mindset perfectly. He said it was just a matter of time. They just had to keep asking the right person or keep finding the right sample.

 They had to keep plugging away. Year after year, the list got shorter. The innocent were crossed off. The file remained open. And somewhere in the stack of names Boh had compiled, one man kept coming back into focus. A man who lived on Strand Road. A man who said he didn’t remember the girl who was murdered a few houses from his front door.

 A man who refused to open his mouth for a cheek swab. We’re about to get to the break in this case. If you want to see how it all unravels, stay with us. And if you haven’t already, hit subscribe so you don’t miss our next deep dive. Timothy Forest Bass was about 3 or 4 years older than Mandy. He had grown up on Strand Road, the same road where Mandy went jogging.

 His house sat just a few doors down from the Stavic family home, directly on the route she ran every time she went out. He had attended Mount Baker High School. According to charging documents filed years later, Bass used to watch Mandy’s basketball games even though he was several years ahead of her in school. His younger brother, Tom Bass, was actually a friend of Mandy’s.

 Tom was one of the people Mandy had plans to go out with on the Friday night she disappeared. The Bass family was wellliked in the community. They were considered good people, the kind of family no one would think to question, which is partly why during the original investigation in 1989 and the years that followed, the Bass household was never asked to provide DNA.

 As the years passed, details about Timothy Bass’s character emerged in fragments. People who knew him described a loner who was socially awkward and increasingly hostile toward women. There was a teenage incident in which Bass had fired a pistol during a phone call with a girlfriend who was breaking up with him.

 His relationships after that followed a pattern of control and intimidation. Roughly 6 weeks after Mandy’s murder, in January of 1990, Bass married a woman named Gina Malone. He moved about 19 mi north to the town of Everson and took a job as a delivery driver for France Bakery. He and Gina had three children together before eventually divorcing in March of 2019.

Gina would later describe Bass as controlling and emotionally abusive throughout their marriage. She recalled him making off-hand comments over the years about how killers who get caught are foolish because they don’t cover their tracks. This decision to leave Acme so soon after the murder, the quickness of the marriage, and the move to Everson would all look very different in retrospect.

In 2013, Detective Bohay approached Bass and asked for a voluntary DNA sample. Bass’s response was strange from the start. He pretended not to remember Mandy Stavic. [music] He said something to the effect of, “Oh, that was the girl that was found in the river.” He claimed he didn’t even know where she had lived, despite the fact that her house was just doors away from his on the same road.

[music] Then he refused to give his DNA. He told the detective he’d watched those crime shows on television and he’d seen what happened to people who cooperated. He wasn’t going to make that mistake. That refusal launched Timothy Bass to the top of the suspect list. In a case where more than 80 men had voluntarily opened their mouths for a cheek swab because they wanted Mandy’s killer found, one man said no.

 One man invoked television crime dramas as his reason for not cooperating. One man pretended he didn’t remember the murdered girl who had lived a few houses away from him on the same street. Bohi now had a suspect he believed in. He also had a problem. Without a warrant, he couldn’t force Bass [music] to give a DNA sample.

 And to get a warrant, he needed probable cause, which required more than a refusal and a hunch. The DNA refusal was suspicious. The proximity to the crime scene [music] was suspicious. The claim of not remembering Mandy was laughable given that Bass’s own brother was her friend. But suspicion, proximity, [music] and an implausible claim of amnesia do not add up to probable cause in a court of law.

 Making things worse, Bass seemed to understand exactly what the investigators needed from him and was determined [music] not to give it. He behaved like a man who had thought carefully about how DNA is collected [music] and had structured his daily life around avoiding it. He wore gloves at work. He took his trash home instead of using the bins at the bakery.

 He never left behind a cup, a napkin, a straw, a can, or anything else that might carry his saliva, his skin cells, or any other biological trace. As Bohay later described it, Bass basically took his trash home and didn’t leave any chance that somebody would find something with his DNA on it. The man was vigilant to the point of obsession.

 For 4 years from 2013 to 2017, [music] Timothy Bass was the primary suspect in the murder of Mandy Stavic. And for 4 years, investigators could not get a usable DNA sample from him. They watched him. They followed his delivery route. They looked for discarded items in every dumpster and trash can he passed. Nothing. Every day, Bass went to work, [music] did his job, and came home without leaving a trace. It was maddening.

 Bohi had a killer’s DNA sitting in a crime lab. He had a suspect who refused to give his. And the gap between those two facts was the difference between justice and another decade of waiting. The first crack didn’t come from a detective’s interview room or a forensic database. It came from a conversation between two mothers at a water park while their kids went down water slides and splashed in the pool.

 In June of 2013, the same year Boh approached Bass and was refused. Two women named Heather Backrom and Merrily Anderson found themselves standing near the pool at Birch Bay water slides. It was a summer day. their children were playing. The kind of afternoon where conversations drift from topic to topic without any particular direction.

 Both women were graduates of Mount Baker High School. Both had grown up in the same community as Mandy Stavic. Both had lived through the aftermath of her murder and the long slow silence that followed. Somehow the conversation turned to the case. And without coordinating beforehand, without any prior discussion between them about suspects or theories, [music] both women named the same man, Tim Bass.

Each of them independently had long suspected [music] him. Each had carried that suspicion quietly for years, and each of them had personal encounters with Bass over the course of those years that [music] had left them deeply unsettled. The specific nature of those encounters reinforced what they already felt in their bones.

 The man who killed Mandy Stavic was not some drifter who passed through town and disappeared. He was a neighbor. He was someone they had seen around. He was someone who had been there the entire time, living his life in plain sight while Mandy’s mother sat at home with an empty place at the table.

 Anderson contacted Detective Ken Gates with the information. It wasn’t a smoking gun. It wasn’t physical evidence. It was two women saying what they believed to be true based on what they had seen and experienced. And it helped solidify the investigative focus on Bass in a way that complemented the suspicion Bohe already had. The refusal to give DNA was one thing.

Community members independently naming the same man was another. Together, they formed a picture that was becoming harder to ignore. Backstrom later reflected on the case after it was finally resolved and she said something that has stayed with everyone who [music] heard it. She said that in the end it was three women’s word and experiences that brought Bass down.

Three women, not a forensic lab, not a database hit, not a detective’s interrogation. Three women who paid attention, who remembered and who refused to keep quiet about what they knew. And she loved that. Two moms at a water park had just set the first domino in motion. The second domino was about to fall at a bakery about 20 m down the road.

Kim Wagner was the manager of the Fron Bakery outlet store in Watcom County. She was not a detective. She was not trained in criminal investigation. [music] She was a bakery manager who oversaw operations at a small town bread outlet. And Timothy Bass was one of the delivery drivers who passed through her store on a regular basis.

 Their paths crossed the way co-workers paths cross in any workplace. Wagner knew Bass. She saw him most days. And at some point, without anyone asking her to, she began to pay attention. The connection between Wagner and the Stavic investigation started in 2013 when Detective Bohay first visited the bakery. He wasn’t there for Wagner specifically.

 He wanted to swab the delivery trucks for what forensic investigators call touch DNA. Trace amounts of biological material that a person leaves behind on surfaces they handle regularly, like steering wheels, door handles, and gear shifts. If Bass had left enough skin cells or sweat on his truck, Bohi might be able to build a DNA profile without needing Bass’s direct cooperation.

Wagner heard the detective’s request and directed him to the corporate office to get authorization. Corporate refused to let anyone swab the trucks without a subpoena or a warrant. Bohi didn’t have either. That could have been the end of Kim Wagner’s involvement in the Stavic case. And for anyone else, it probably would have been.

 A detective came, asked a question, got turned down by corporate, and left. Move on with your day. Wagner didn’t move on. Sometime later, at a local bar, she put the pieces together on her own. The employee the police had been asking about at the bakery was Bass. And Bass, she now realized, had lived on Strand Road, the same street where Mandy Stavic grew up.

 The same road where she went jogging the day she disappeared. The math was not complicated. A girl vanishes from a road. A man who lived on that road refuses to give his DNA. The police show up at his workplace asking to swab his truck. You don’t need a detective’s [music] badge to draw a line between those dots. Four years passed. In May of 2017, Bohi returned to the bakery.

 This time, he had a more specific request. He wanted Bass’s delivery route so he could follow it and look for opportunities to collect discarded items, anything Bass might throw away that would carry his DNA. Wagner didn’t beat around the bush. She asked the [music] detective point blank whether he was investigating the Stavic murder and whether Timothy Bass was the suspect.

Bohi confirmed both. From that point on, Bohi began surveilling Bass’s delivery route. He trailed him from stop to stop, watching, waiting for the moment Bass would toss a coffee cup out the window, drop a napkin in a gas station trash can, leave a water bottle behind at a loading dock, anything. It never happened. Bass discarded nothing.

 He was pathologically careful. He wore gloves. He took his trash home. He ate and drank at work, but never left a cup, a can, a wrapper, or a straw behind. It was as if he knew on some level that someone was watching. Or perhaps he had simply lived with this paranoia for so long that it had [music] become second nature.

 Either way, the surveillance produced nothing. This is where Kim Wagner made the decision that changed everything. She volunteered to watch bass at work. She told Bohei she would keep an eye on the break room and let him know if Bass ever slipped up. She wasn’t doing this because anyone ordered her to. No one directed her, coached her, or gave her instructions.

 She did it because she could not stop thinking about Mary Stavic. The thought of Mandy’s mother living out the rest of her life without ever knowing who killed her daughter was something Wagner could not accept. She later said it plainly. She said if she could help bring that peace, she wanted to do it. Weeks passed. Wagner watched.

Bass was careful. And then one day in August of 2017, he wasn’t. Wagner was in the breakroom at the bakery when she saw Bass walk over to the water cooler, fill a plastic cup, drink from it, and toss it in the waste basket. Then he walked out of the room. Wagner waited until she was sure he was gone.

 Then she walked to the trash can, reached in, pulled the cup out, put it in a plastic bag, and locked it inside her desk drawer. 2 days later, Bass discarded a soda can in the same waste basket. Wagner did the same thing. Retrieved it, bagged it, locked it away. On August 10th, 2017, Kim Wagner walked out to the bakery parking lot and handed both items to Detective Kevin Boh.

 a plastic cup and a soda can. Two pieces of trash from a breakroom waste basket handled with the care of someone who understood exactly what they might mean. Bohe packaged the items and sent them to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. What Wagner did was not complicated. She didn’t infiltrate a criminal organization or crack a code or run a sting operation.

She pulled two pieces of garbage out of a trash can. She did it because she believed it mattered. because she believed Mandy Stavic mattered and because she had spent four years watching a man she suspected of murder walk through her workplace every day while a mother sat at home without answers. She was done waiting for someone else to act.

The results came back from the crime lab and they were not ambiguous. They were not inconclusive. They were not a partial match that would require further testing. The DNA recovered from the plastic cup and the soda can that Kim Wagner had pulled from the breakroom trash was a dead match to the male DNA profile that had been developed from biological evidence on Mandy Stavic’s body in 1989.

The Washington State Patrol Crime Lab ran the numbers and put the statistical probability of that match at 1 in1 quadrillion. To put that number in context, it was more than a million times the entire population of Earth. It was, for all practical purposes, a certainty. The DNA on that cup belonged to the same man who had left biological evidence on an 18-year-old girl’s body in the Noosack River 28 years earlier.

28 years of searching, of knocking on doors, of flying to Cambodia, of collecting more than 80 DNA samples from men who cooperated, men who wanted to help, men who opened their mouths for a cheek swab because they wanted Mandy’s killer found. And the one man who refused, the one man who wore gloves at work and took his trash home and said he’d seen what happened to people who cooperated with police, was the one man whose DNA matched.

 The answer had been living 19 miles away this entire time, driving a bakery truck, raising a family, and the evidence that caught him had been sitting in a breakroom waste basket, waiting for someone brave enough to reach in and pull it out. When investigators confronted Bass with the DNA evidence, his story shifted instantly.

 He had spent years claiming he barely remembered Mandy Stavic, that he didn’t know where she lived, that she was just the girl that was found in the river. Now faced with an undeniable biological link between himself and a murdered teenager, he stopped pretending he didn’t know her. Instead, his first question was how investigators had obtained his DNA.

 Not a denial, not an explanation, not an alibi, just a question about how he got caught. On December 12th, 2017, detectives arrested 50-year-old Timothy Forest Bass in the parking lot of Fron’s Bakery, the same workplace where Kim Wagner had collected the cup and can just months earlier, the same parking lot where she had handed them to Bohe.

 He was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Amanda Stavic. The date of the arrest fell on December 12th. It happened to be Mary Stavic’s 81st birthday. When Mandy’s sister Molly called to tell her mother the news, she called it a birthday present. Mary Stavic, who had been waiting 28 years for a phone call that she had probably stopped believing would ever come, learned on her birthday that the man who killed her daughter was finally in handcuffs.

 WTOC County Sheriff Bill Elo held a press conference and described the moment as monumental. He said something that stayed with the reporters in the room. He said that he sometimes felt Mandy was speaking to them, that the case needed to be solved. After nearly three decades of silence, it finally had a name.

 Timothy Forest Bass, the neighbor on Strand Road who had lived just houses from the Stavic family. The man whose younger brother was Mandy’s friend. The man who sat in the bleachers at her basketball games. the man who watched her jog past his upstairs window on the route she ran every time she left the house. He had been right there the entire time.

 The trial of Timothy Forest Bass began in May of 2019 in Watcom County Superior Court and lasted roughly 3 weeks. By the time it started, Bass had spent nearly a year and a half in custody since his arrest in December 2017. The community that had waited 30 years for answers was about to hear the full story of what happened to Mandy Stavic laid out piece by piece in a courtroom.

The prosecution was led by a 73-year-old special prosecutor named Dave McEn who came out of retirement specifically for this case. McKean had been a prosecutor in Watcom County for decades before stepping away. And when the call came about the Stavic case, he came back. He insisted on not being paid for his work. Not a dollar.

He took the case because it mattered to him, because it mattered to the community he had served for most of his career, and because he believed Mandy Stavic deserved someone who would fight for her with everything they had. Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecutor Eric Sigmar worked alongside him. The prosecution’s theory was built on the evidence and on Bass’s own behavior.

Bass knew Mandy’s running routine. He and his then girlfriend Gina had watched Mandy jog past their upstairs window on Strand Road. He knew when she ran. He knew the route she took. And on November 24th, 1989, he acted on it. The prosecution argued that Bass abducted Mandy, likely at gunpoint, drove her to an isolated field near the river known as the Homestead [music] and assaulted her.

 Mandy, trying to escape, ran through Blackberry bushes toward the Noosack River, where she drowned. Bass’s defense took an unusual approach. His attorneys conceded that he had sexual contact with Mandy, but claimed it was a consensual encounter, part of a secret relationship that nobody knew about. They pointed to certain medical findings and argued that the contact had occurred well before her death, not during an assault.

 The prosecution tore [music] this claim apart. There was no evidence whatsoever of any relationship between Mandy and Bass. No letters, no phone [music] records, no witnesses, no diary entries, nothing. Mandy’s sister Molly addressed the claim directly and said bluntly that Mandy would never have been involved with Timothy Bass.

 [music] She was, as Molly put it, way out of his league. And then the web of lies Bass had built over the years began to unravel in the courtroom. He had told his own brother Tom that he had slept with Mandy and asked Tom to tell police the same thing to create the impression that Mandy was promiscuous and that multiple men could have been responsible.

 Tom initially [music] cooperated with this lie before eventually coming forward with the truth. Bass asked his mother, Sandra, to tell investigators that his deceased [music] father had been responsible for Mandy’s death. He wanted his own mother to blame a dead man for a crime he committed. He had also attempted to arrange a false alibi through family members, trying to establish that he was somewhere else.

 On the afternoon of November 24th, [music] his ex-wife, Gina Malone, had initially provided Bass with a false alibi. She had told investigators that Bass was home with her that afternoon, but during the trial, Gina recanted. She took the stand and testified against her ex-husband, withdrawing the alibi she had given him, and sharing details about his behavior, his controlling nature, and his comments about killers who get caught being foolish.

The defense also attempted to introduce pages from Mandy’s personal diary, referencing entries from months before her death in which she expressed feelings of sadness. They wanted to suggest that Mandy’s death might have been self-inflicted. The judge rejected this attempt, finding the entries too remote and speculative to be relevant.

 On May 24th, 2019, the jury deliberated for just over a day. They returned a verdict of guilty on the charge of first-degree felony murder. The special verdict confirmed all four predicate offenses. When it came time for sentencing, Judge Robert Olsen gave Bass the maximum sentence that [music] prosecutors had requested, 320 months, nearly 27 years in prison.

 Prosecutors had not charged premeditated murder, which meant a life sentence was not available. 320 months was the ceiling, and Olsen hid it. Standing in the courtroom, Bass declared that he was 100% innocent of the crime. Judge Olsen’s response was measured [music] and devastating. He told Bass that for 30 years he had [music] lived free from the responsibility for his actions, but that life had [music] been a lie.

 And tragically, it had caught his family in its web. Mandy’s brother-in-law, Mike Brighton, delivered the family’s victim impact statement. He said that the loss could never be imagined or replaced, that his family would never be healed. never be normal and that Timothy Forest Bass must never be allowed to walk the earth as a free person.

Bass appealed his conviction. His primary argument was that Kim Wagner had acted as a government agent when she collected the cup and soda can from the breakroom trash, which would make the DNA evidence the product of an unlawful warrantless search. If the court agreed the DNA match, the single most devastating piece of evidence in the entire case could potentially be thrown out.

 It was the one legal argument that had real teeth. If Wagner had been acting under the direction of law enforcement, then what she did in that breakroom might constitute a search that required a warrant. The distinction mattered enormously. In 2021, the Washington Court of Appeals rejected the argument. The court examined the facts carefully and concluded that Vagner had acted entirely on her own initiative.

 She conceived the idea herself. She decided on her own to watch for discarded items. Detective Bohay did not direct her, did not instruct her, did not coach her, and did not encourage her to collect the cup and can. Wagner was a private citizen who made a voluntary choice based on her own conscience and the evidence she gathered was legally obtained.

 Under Washington law, there is no privacy interest in items voluntarily abandoned in a trash can and a private citizen retrieving those items does not trigger the constitutional protections that apply to government searches. The appeals court did identify one technical error in the trial proceedings.

 The trial court had applied a 1990 version of the felony murder statute to a crime committed in 1989. And the two versions contained slightly different legal language regarding whether the death needed to occur in the course of and in furtherance of the underlying felony or in the course of or in furtherance of it. The appellet court acknowledged the error, but ruled it harmless beyond a reasonable doubt because the evidence overwhelmingly proved that Mandy died during the ongoing crime of kidnapping, regardless of which version applied. Bas petitioned

the Washington Supreme Court for further review. In January of 2022, the state’s highest court denied his petition without comment. The conviction stood. A later motion by Bass seeking a new trial based on what he called alternate suspect evidence was also denied by Judge Olsen, who found that the evidence Bass wanted to present had been available before the original trial and could have been raised at that time.

 Timothy Bass is serving his 320month sentence. He continues to maintain his innocence. Mary Stavic, who had waited 28 years for an answer, finally had one. She had already carried the weight of Brent’s unsolved murder since 1975. 14 years of that grief had passed before Mandy was taken from her. And then another 28 years of silence followed.

Mary lived through decades of not knowing, and she survived it with a quiet, stubborn refusal to stop hoping. After the conviction, Mary reflected on what it all meant. She said that Mandy was special, that she really was, and that she had learned over the years that the living have to go on to honor the goodness in what they have lost.

 Mandy’s sister, Molly, named her own daughter after Mandy. Mandy’s nephew, Elijah, later wrote about growing up in the wake of grief that her murder left behind, saying that his earliest memories were of her absence at holidays and family gatherings. a person he never met whose presence he felt in every room through the weight of what was missing.

 The Mandy Stavic Scholarship at Mount Baker High School has been awarded every year since 1990 to students who participate in the school’s music program. As of the most recent count, it had been given 29 times. 29 students who carried a piece of Mandy’s name forward, even if they never knew the girl who played saxophone in that same band room decades earlier.

Kim Wagner, the bakery manager who pulled a cup and a soda can from a trash can and changed the course of a 28-year-old murder investigation, summed up what happened in the simplest terms possible. She said, “It took a village. It took a whole community. The sheriff’s office never gave up on Mandy, and neither did the women who finally made sure justice found her.

 Strand Road is still there. The Noosack River still runs alongside it, cold and fast, fed by snow melt from Mount Baker. The Blackberry Brambles still grow thick along the banks where the water bends through the valley. Acme is still a town of a few hundred people where everyone knows everyone. The kind of place where you wave at your neighbor from the porch and your dog runs loose in the yard.

 It looks the same as it did in 1989. The mountains haven’t moved. The river hasn’t changed course. The road still winds past the same houses, the same fields, the same quiet stretches of forest. But the town remembers. They will always remember. In 1989, an 18-year-old girl ran along that road with her German Shepherd.

On a Friday afternoon, she never came home. The man who took her from that road lived just houses away. He watched her run past his window. He knew her name. He knew her brother. He had sat in the bleachers at her basketball games. And for 28 years, he lived free. while her mother waited for an answer that the criminal justice system could not deliver.

 Timothy Bass married a woman 6 weeks after the murder. He raised [music] three children. He drove a delivery truck for a bakery. He lived a life that from the outside looked perfectly ordinary. And every single day of that life was built on a lie. A lie that held up for 28 years until a woman he worked with reached into a trash can and pulled out a plastic cup.

 The case of Mandy Stavic was not solved by a genealogy database. It was not solved by a deathbed confession, a jail house informant, or a forensic breakthrough that arrived in the mail. It was solved by ordinary people who refused to let it stay buried. Two mothers talking at a water park who both independently named the same man.

 a detective who knocked on doors for a decade, flew to Cambodia, collected more than 80 DNA samples, and got 80 negative results without ever considering the possibility of 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 doesn’t arrive with fanfare. It arrives 30 years late. carried by people who had no obligation to keep looking, no professional requirement to keep pushing, and no guarantee that their efforts would ever produce a result. [music] They did it anyway. Mandy Stavic was 18 years old.

 She played [music] the saxophone in the Mount Baker High School band. She spoke Japanese. She knew sign language. She dreamed of becoming an airline pilot. She ran cross country and played basketball and cheered on the sidelines and kept her grades at the top of her class. She was the kind of person her mother described as very everything because there were not enough words to capture what she was.

 She went for a run on a Friday afternoon and deserved every year she didn’t get. And she got justice 30 years late because the people around her refused to let her become a forgotten name in a cold case file. Her name was Amanda Theresa Stavic [music] and this was her story. If this story stayed with you, share it with someone who cares about justice.

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