a single match. it was enough to wear any detective down, even one as passionate as lindsey wade. she had given her best. but now, she d made a tough decision. it was time for me to move on. in the spring of 2018, lindsey wade retired from the tacoma pd. working on cold cases is, typically, more frustrating than rewarding. because you can work and work and work and work, and do a ton of investigation. and come up with zero. and then, walk away? yeah. she had investigated both jenni and michella s cases for years. and saying good-bye wasn t easy. especially, to
ask for ransom. we just didn t know. or maybe, jenni got lost or was badly hurt. there were, literally, hundreds of people looking through the park for her. everybody wanted to find jenni. gene miller helped run down hundreds of suspected sightings. there was a lot of good-faith effort, on the part of citizens, to call in. and say i think i saw her here or i think i saw her there. pattie waited. still, hoping her jenni would walk right in the door. she was at home, when she got a visit from another mother. barbara. michella s mom. there to offer support. just seemed like the thing to do. she was very, very sweet. very nice. i said, thank you. she left. and i said, to a friend who was sitting there, i m not sure why she came. jennifer s not dead. you represented the outcome she kpraetly did not want to have happen.
victim? fear gripped the city. though, for barbara, it felt more like rage. she got a gun permit. kept a gun in her car. i d go pull up at a stoplight, and i remember looking over and there is a man in the car and i was thinking could you have done this? did you do this? because they had no clues, for months, months, and months. and it was fog. you just living in a fog. then, it was summer. five months had passed. august, that year, was fabulous in the pacific northwest. and woke up a little late. jenni woke up a little late. just the two of them. pattie bastian and her 13-year-old, jenni. and we were sitting in the dining room, on the floor. in front of the patio doors, bathing ourselves in the sun. we were talking. all about upcoming camp. all about what she was going to do the rest of
years, in 20 years. her method can link an unknown dna profile to possible relatives and, therefore, possible, last names. detective wade was skeptical, at first. it kind of sounded like smoke and mirrors, to me. but i thought, well, i m going to give it a shot. i mean, i want to solve this case. yeah. she sent dr. fitzpatrick the two dna profiles from michella and jenni s crime scenes. and she did her magic. she entered into her genealogy databases. there were no exact matches, but there were some possible family names. i certainly dug into the names and there wasn t anybody who jumped off the page. the only name that seemed remotely interesting was washburn, because there was a guy, by that name, in the case file. but he wasn t a suspect. he was a witness. he was the jogger who told police he saw someone in point defiance park who resembled the sketch of
mindset of the killer. i mean, there were days when i would get frustrated sitting in my office working on the case. and i would just drive down here, and park my car and sit down here. hoping that something would come to mind. one thing that did come to mind? assembling a list of all the names in those binders. persons of interest. witnesses. any male, who had intersected with the original investigation. so, how many names did you have? about 2,300 names. it s a lot of names. yes. my working theory, at that time, was this guy s got to be somebody who s been convicted of a sex crime or another murder. and somehow, he slipped through the cracks. back, in 1986, investigators had recovered semen from michella s body. but when that semen was tested years later, it didn t match anyone in the fbi s national-dna database, known as codis. they didn t have any dna from jenni s body, though they did still have the