It would be an understatement to say that things were going great in Tacoma back in the mid-1980s. But after the tragic deaths of two young girls in a short time, everything changed. Michella Welch and Jennifer Bastian were both killed five months apart in what can only be called the worst ways possible. This was shown on “Dateline: Evil Was Watching.” So now, if you want to learn more about the same, including how they were killed, how long the investigation took, and who killed them, we’ve got you covered.
Death Cause: Michelle Welch and Jennifer Bastian
At 10 a.m. on March 26, 1986, Michella Welch took her two younger sisters to Puget Park. She didn’t know that it would end in heartbreak. The petite 12-year-old had gone home at 11 to get lunch for the three of them. When she came back, she put the food on a table and chained her bike next to her sisters’ before going to find them. She was never seen or heard from again. Her siblings later asked a babysitter for help. The babysitter called their parents and the police right away, but it was only Michella’s body that was found at 11:30 that night.
She was found in a ditch near an old fire pit about a quarter-mile from the play area. She had been raped, but her death was caused by blunt force trauma to the head and a deep cut to the neck. This isn’t the only time that happened. In August 1986, 13-year-old Jennifer Bastian also went missing while riding her bicycle at Point Defiance Park, which was only a few miles away. She was last seen alive at 6 p.m., but three weeks later, her body was found in a wooded area off of Five Mile Drive. She had been sexually assaulted before she was strangled to death.
Michella Welch and Jennifer Bastian were killed. Who did it?
In this case, authorities came to the (reasonable) conclusion that a single person killed two people who were both horrific and very clear-cut. They did have a teen witness in Michella’s case who saw a strange man under Proctor Bridge looking at the young girls on that dark day, but he couldn’t be named at the time. Everything from her crime scene or body had DNA. But because of the technology available back then, not much could be found. When Jennifer’s clothes were tested decades later, they showed the same thing.
As a result, the investigators moved on as soon as DNA testing disproved their theory that there was a connection between the two young girls in 2013. They wanted to get the two young girls justice more than anything else. When they ran the samples against each other and through the national database, they didn’t find a match at all. There were two different people who were responsible for the crime, and neither of them had any previous criminal history. This led officials to use more advanced technology to solve the case.
They used everything from forensic genealogy to in-depth DNA analysis to family genetic techniques until they came up with Gary Hartman and Robert Dwane Washburn as the two suspects. When the FBI came to him about Jennifer’s death in March 2017, he agreed to give them a DNA sample, which turned out to be a match in May 2018. The detectives, on the other hand, took Gary’s DNA sample from a brown paper napkin after watching him and his brother very closely. In June 2018, that also turned out to be a match.
Robert Dwane Washburn is the name of a man who worked for the government.
After more than 30 years, the first and last arrests in the case of Michella Welch and Jennifer Bastian were made. Gary was found guilty of Michella’s first-degree murder by a judge in early 2022 after a bench trial. Robert pleaded guilty to Jennifer’s murder in January 2019. During their court hearings, both of them said they were sorry for what they did. The sad truth is that nothing they say or do now will change the past or improve things.