(somber music)
- It was alternately scary, frightening,
And questioning.
- I was terrified.
I was thinking some wacko is gonna jump out of the bushes
And grab me.
- Who would've done this?
It had to be some completely bizarre pervert.
- This was a case that I grew up with.
This is in the background of my childhood.
- I was questioning whether we would have her back alive.
- And I wanted to know what happened.
This is crazy.
We have two different killers.
(dramatic music)
(gentle music)
I would describe tacoma as kind of a
Blue collar town.
We could go ride our bikes and walk to school
Without our parents fearing that something bad
Was gonna happen to us.
And I think after 1986, that changed.
She was just a couple years older than me.
- [news anchor] a young girl full of love.
- It was on the tv every night and in the paper.
And it just really shaped our childhoods,
And not in a good way.
- It was in the middle of a beautiful spate of weather.
It had been warmer than usual.
Sunny.
The kind of days you wanna just get out and do something,
Either in the yard or at the beach.
You wanna plan a picnic.
You just wanna go and do.
- [narrator] 13 year old, jennifer bastian
And her mother patty
Spend the quiet summer morning together.
- Jennifer was up.
I got up.
I think she got cereal.
I got coffee.
And we just talked about the day.
She was going to go on a ymca bike riding trip.
It was a trip that was a little bit timid for her.
She was a petite gal, riding a 15 speed bike,
And trying to master that before the trip.
And so she was practicing every day.
- And on that particular day,
She asked for permission to ride her bike
To the point defiance park,
Which is something she had done before.
Normally she would take a friend,
But her friend was not available that day.
So, she went by herself and she actually left a,
A note for her dad.
And she took off for the park.
- She wrote a note saying she'd be home by 6:30,
But she wasn't there for dinner.
She wasn't there after she had said she would be.
It gets very scary.
We called a few friends, neighbors
To see if maybe jennifer had stopped off
After her ride to play with their sons or daughters.
And then we called the police.
(gentle music)
- We were very close as a family.
My dad, you know, he had kids late in life.
So, I think he maybe appreciated being a dad
Even more than if he had had them as a younger man.
We had great relationship.
We had great fun.
I'm two years older.
I was definitely big sister material.
I was the more serious one.
I was the one who followed more rules.
- Jennifer was a bundle of energy.
She was ready to go at a moment's notice.
- She was always active, always in motion.
Our dining room was kind of open to the living room.
Jennifer would literally get down from the table,
And go into the living room,
And start doing cartwheels and walkovers
And gymnastics moves.
She was having nothing to do with the sitting still part.
- Jennifer lived life.
(slow piano music)
- My dad picked me up from the movies,
And right when I got in the car he said,
"jennifer hasn't come home from her bike ride yet."
And his voice cracked.
And I could see he had been crying,
And I knew that something was very wrong.
- I can't tell you what I was thinking.
I can tell you I was feeling extremely anxious.
The police had come.
I didn't know what to expect the next would be.
- The police pulled me aside.
They wanted to ask me some questions.
Were there things that maybe jenny kept as a secret
That she wouldn't want her mom and dad to know?
You know, really the answer to all of that was no.
We didn't have any secrets.
- The police asked for a piece of her clothing
Or something from her room.
Ralph and I both went into the bedroom.
We got a t-shirt or school bag.
I don't know what it was,
Gave it to them.
She could have fallen down, had a flat tire.
We go through a whole litany of things that could have been.
- They brought in blood hounds
To track from jennifer's house down to the park.
The dogs picked up her scent
And indicated that she had gone around
The five mile drive, based on her scent.
But the dogs didn't locate her or her bike.
- [narrator] when there is still no sign of jennifer
The following morning,
The search intensifies.
- The five mile drive was closed down
While searchers went on horseback,
On atvs, on foot.
It's kind of hard for people to grasp
How massive and expansive point defiance park is
Until you've seen it.
It's a forest surrounded by the sea.
There are really, really steep cliffs
That go straight down into the water.
So, there was a question of,
Could she have gone off a cliff
And been washed out to sea.
The news covered the story.
There were flyers made up and posted
All over the north end of tacoma.
They had about 300 plus people out looking for jennifer.
And they found nothing.
The thought process after that three day search was,
She's not in the park.
(gentle music)
- I think it was on day two or three
That the doorbell rang,
And I answered it,
And there's a lady there,
And she said, "are you patty?"
And I said, "yes."
And she said,
"I'd like to talk with you,"
And introduced herself as barbara welch.
Michella's mom.
- [narrator] 12 year old, michella welch disappeared
Five months before jennifer.
She was last seen riding her bike near puget park,
Mere miles from where jennifer vanished.
10 hours after michella was reported missing,
Search dogs found her body.
She'd been sexually assaulted and murdered.
The little girl's killing shocks the community.
- I know I felt sorry for her having just lost her daughter.
I felt just terrible.
That's a very, very brave move on her part
To have come by.
- I don't know if it was just what the default was,
But it really seemed the police felt
That someone had kidnapped jennifer
And was going to contact us for ransom
In exchange to get her back.
On my dad's birthday, August 8th,
The press conference we did in the point defiance park
Was actually aimed to the kidnapper.
We were told that whoever took her
Would surely be watching the news and would hear us talking.
It was like our plea to this phantom kidnapper.
- And as a result of all of the media coverage,
A lot of people did call in and reported seeing jennifer
In the park that day.
So, investigators knew she was there.
- [narrator] detectives run down every tip,
But none of them lead to jennifer.
- There was a jogger who was part of a ymca running club.
And he was jogging through the trails at point defiance park
And noticed a really foul odor off of one of the trails.
So, he called the park police
And the park police came
And tried to locate the source of this odor,
But they could not locate it.
So, they called tacoma police.
Tacoma police came out,
They brought a canine out,
And they still could not locate the source of this odor.
- [narrator] on August 28th,
24 days after jennifer vanished,
Her family's worst fears come true.
A search and rescue team finds her remains
Near the five mile drive.
- It was apparent to the investigators at the time
That she had been sexually assaulted,
Just based on the positioning of her body
And the positioning of her clothing when she was found.
(indistinct police radio chatter)
The two cases of michella and jennifer were so similar
That a lot of people thought there must be some
Deranged serial killer on the loose.
People were on edge.
People were questioning,
Do we have a serial killer in tacoma?
Is there gonna be another victim?
(somber music)
- Every single day
A police officer named pat o'malley had been assigned
To come in the morning to inform the family
Of what the police were going to do
To look for jennifer today,
And in the evening,
Come and tell the family what the results of that were.
I never gave up, never gave up hope.
I distinctly remember around noonish
Being on the ladder, painting.
I just heard the latch on the screen door go.
And it was pat walking in,
And he walked up to the ladder,
And he reached up and he took the paint brush
Out of my hand.
And he helped me down the ladder and sat me on a chair.
And he said, "we found her."
And truthfully, I can't remember who said what
Or what was said or how it was said.
But the two detectives that worked on the case
Were there and explained as much as they could,
As gently as they could.
- Her body itself was positioned on its back,
Arms above her head,
Knees somewhat bent and out to the side.
Her bathing suit was pulled down to her right ankle.
Her bicycle was located maybe 60 feet away.
Because of the level of decomposition,
It was very difficult to tell for certain,
But there was a ligature that was around her neck
And based on everything that we saw
And everything that we knew,
We believe that was most likely going to be
The cause of death.
That was subsequently confirmed at autopsy.
- [narrator] the murder of a second young girl
Sparks a wave of fear.
- I went to college in washington state in seattle,
And I remember hearing about both of the murders
And just being horrified.
There's nothing more all american than
Kids out riding their bikes in our parks,
In our beautiful state,
And to have two of them within a few months of each other,
Snatched off their bicycles, raped and murdered
With no sense of who's out there doing this.
Tacoma now believes there's a serial rapist and killer
On the loose.
And everyone's just on the edge wondering
Will they catch this person before he strikes again.
- This is in the background of my childhood.
I was thinking some wacko is gonna jump out of the,
The bushes and grab me.
- After that summer, I never rode a bike again.
- [narrator] as the investigation intensifies,
The people of tacoma come together
To support the bastian family
And say goodbye to jennifer.
- As we were leaving,
I glanced up and saw that that foyer
Was filled with law enforcement,
Not in uniform.
These were moms and dads.
These were family people
Who cared and felt and had journeyed with us.
That was pretty powerful statement.
- [narrator] tacoma police get help
From the green river task force
To investigate the number of incoming tips.
- Based on the similarities between the two cases,
It was believed that the same person
Must be responsible for both cases.
So, detectives were following up on the hundreds of leads
That were coming in.
- Fairly early on, there was a potential suspect identified.
He, to some extent at least, lived out of his van.
The thing that was very compelling about him
Was that he spent a great deal of time
At point defiance park in the parking lot.
And somebody that there had been a number of
Issues with over the years.
Once he was identified as a potential suspect,
It was a matter of locating him.
And it was my partner and I that located him
Down on the waterfront of tacoma.
The van was detained, as was he,
And the search of the van then took place.
During the course of that search,
There was a number of things that were interesting to us.
One of the items was a wooden mallet type thing
That was roughly three inches around.
And it was actually relatively close in size
To the injury that michella had sustained on her head.
Additionally, there was a number of drawings
Within the vehicle that had juvenile females
In rather explicit positions,
But nothing that was specifically able
To be associated with either one of the victims.
And he provided a dna sample voluntarily,
And was able to be excluded because of the dna
That had been found in michella's case.
- [narrator] by the summer of 1987,
New leads coming in vanish like tiny leaves
In the forest wind.
And the case goes cold.
(somber music)
- This case originally had multiple detectives
Assigned to it as part of this task force,
But eventually the leads had pretty much dried up.
- It's a very difficult thing
To be intimately involved in these investigations,
And to not be making progress.
- It was very clear that they had done everything
That was possible.
They were extremely, extremely professional,
And that's gotta be hard when the person you're going to see
Wants an answer, and you don't have it.
- We already had ted bundy
And in 1986, the green river killer was in full force.
So, we had a history in our area
Of really brutal serial killings.
The green river killer became active
And king county police started finding bodies
Of young women on the banks of the green river
And in the green river,
Which was the county north of us.
And everyone knew about that case because it was huge.
There was some evaluation done at that time.
- The victimology was totally different.
The location of occurrence, pierce county,
Rather than in king county.
There was really nothing that suggested
That these were, or could even potentially be,
Linked to the green river killer.
Really, the department took ownership of these cases,
And made me want to be a homicide detective one day.
And then subsequently made me want to start
The cold case unit.
And just that we gotta find a way to solve them.
(somber music)
When I began to develop the cold case unit
For the tacoma police department,
I collected information on all the unsolved homicides
That took place in the city of tacoma.
It was during the course of
Putting all of that information together
That I identified two other juvenile females
That had been the victims of sexual assault homicides
In 1986.
The thing that was very interesting about it
Was one of the victims, denise sally,
Went missing in January, 1986.
Her body was subsequently located just a few days after
Michella had passed.
So, you have four juvenile females,
All within pierce county.
So, I began looking at the overall case files
Of both jenny bastian, michella welch,
And then denise sally,
And kimberly payne on the county side.
And there was a name that continued
To show up on occasion.
It was timothy burkhart.
(gentle music)
I start looking and I'm able to identify
A timothy ray burkhart.
And it was when I dug into that name
That it peaked my curiosity.
Timothy burkhart, at the time that the cases occurred,
Was a 20 year old male.
In looking at his criminal history.
It's rather limited,
But there is one case where he's a suspect
In an attempt abduction about a year and a half
Prior to the denise sally case.
And as I looked further into him,
I actually found that he was listed as a suspect
In two homicides that occurred in 2001.
I looked further and found that he had actually
Committed suicide.
And as a result,
Those cases were never able to be fully adjudicated.
- [narrator] using evidence found at the 2001 crime scenes,
The state crime lab develops a dna profile
Of timothy burkhart.
- What we ended up learning was that
Timothy ray burkhart's dna
Matched the evidence from the kimberly payne homicide.
So, that links him to kimberly payne and denise sally,
But is not consistent with the profile
Developed in the michella welch case.
So, the bad news was jenny and michella's cases
Were still unsolved.
Detective wade and I
Were actually partners when we worked sau cases,
Special assaults, sex crimes.
And so whenever I needed something,
She was kind of my go-to person for help.
- [narrator] while speaking with a forensic expert,
Detectives miller and wade are advised
To submit jennifer's swimsuit to the crime lab.
The hope is to obtain a reference dna
Sample for jennifer,
In case it's needed in the future.
- So, gene submits jennifer's swimsuit to the crime lab.
And a few months later,
He gets a call from the crime lab,
And the forensic scientist says to gene,
"hey, are you interested in the male dna
That we found on jennifer's swimsuit?"
And it was like, "what do you mean male dna?"
The scientist tells gene that there is male dna
In the form of spermatozoa
In the crotch of jennifer's swimsuit.
This is a bombshell
Because not only are we learning for the first time
That we do have dna evidence from an unknown perpetrator,
But we also learn at that same time that this dna profile
Was entered into the state and the national dna database,
And it did not match the dna in the michella welch case.
This is crazy.
We have two different killers,
Like what is going on?
So, the first thing that gene did was
To go back through and look at who had been identified
And eliminated previously,
Either by alibi or, in some cases, by dna,
And then pull those people back up again
And resubmit their samples
So that they could be compared against the dna profile
In jennifer's case.
- [narrator] detectives submit the dna
Found on jennifer's swimsuit to codis,
But there's no match.
With the case still unsolved at the end of 2014,
Detective gene miller makes the difficult decision
To retire,
Leaving the case with detective wade.
- Detective wade is one of those people
That if you're a bad guy,
You do not want her in your rear view mirror
Because she will not quit.
- This was a case that I grew up with,
And I wanted to know what happened.
When I took over the case,
I recognized that the cases were so massive
That I took on the daunting task of creating a database
So that I could take every single male name
That appeared in either one of the cases,
And I entered that name into this database,
Along with whether or not they had dna in codis,
Whether or not we had collected their dna
As a part of the investigation,
Were they dead.
Were they incarcerated?
There were like 2300 plus names in the database.
- [narrator] as detective wade searches for jennifer's killer,
The bastian family mourns another loss.
In 2015, jennifer's father dies.
He goes to the grave without seeing justice done.
- Our faith has seen us through a lot,
And sure, he wanted to know.
You carry the burden you carry.
That's just life, and its natural progression.
When you've got a burden, you carry it.
We all do.
- I met patty and ralph in 2013,
Working on the case,
And I can't explain it,
But for whatever reason, you know,
Patty and I just clicked,
And she was really inspirational to me.
We got to really know each other on a deeper level,
And you know, really gained a mutual respect for each other.
- [narrator] in early 2015, fbi agent terry postma,
Working from one of the fbi's satellite offices,
Helps detective wade with the case
By obtaining dna samples from a wider pool
Of possible suspects.
- One of the primary roles is to collaborate on cases
And investigations.
How we prioritize who we were gonna collect dna from
Was based on the reason they were originally included
In the investigation.
- [narrator] one sample leads them
Outside of tacoma to aberdeen.
- We believe that this individual
Is living there in aberdeen, right?
And so we have a couple of addresses,
And lindsay and I went to the local police department there.
They're like, "oh yeah, this guy,
He lives down here by the river."
They took us to him.
The van is just packed full of stuff.
You can't even see that he's in there.
He had stuff strapped onto the back of the van.
It was pretty, pretty surreal, but you know,
You just never knew, right?
You never knew.
Is this gonna be him?
(somber music)
He was parked in a van under this overpass,
Living in the van right next to the river
That goes through aberdeen there.
Obviously we'd introduce ourselves, right?
I'm detective wade from tacoma police department.
And this is fbi special agent postma.
The reason that we're here today
Is in relation to a cold case homicide from 1986,
And we would like to eliminate you as a suspect.
And he willingly gave us the sample.
- [narrator] analysts run the dna sample,
But it's another letdown.
The dna from the man in aberdeen
Doesn't match the dna found in jennifer's swimsuit.
- Here we have jenny's case
That's actively being investigated,
And we have a profile.
We don't know whose it is.
It's frustrating, right?
It's frustrating.
- [narrator] despite the years of frustration,
And all the dead ends,
Detective wade never gives up.
- This case was so important to me for many reasons.
I never dreamed as a youngster
That I would be in a position one day
To work on the case.
- Lindsay worked so hard on these two cases.
She was 11 years old when this happened to jenny.
There's just something about lindsay
And her total dedication, her total involvement,
Her intelligence.
She gave so much for us as a community.
- [narrator] with leads once again running thin,
Detective wade learns of a murder case in arizona.
- I had heard about a woman named colleen fitzpatrick
Who had helped the phoenix police department
Solve these cold cases from, I think it was 1990 or '91.
And I had talked to the detective on that case.
And when they told me what she had done using genealogy,
I was intrigued, to say the least.
So, with the help of the fbi,
We were able to pay for colleen's assistance
In working on the case.
Our crime lab basically created a profile
From the dna from the swimsuit,
And ystr dna is dna that's passed down from father to son.
And so theoretically, if you follow the paternal line,
The last name should stay the same.
We gave colleen the ystr profile.
She did her research and looked through
Her genealogy databases,
And came up with three potential last names for the suspect
Based on that dna.
The three names were smith, holbrook and washburn.
No one in the case file named holbrook.
So, I went back and I looked at washburn,
And I saw that a guy named robert washburn
Had called in a tip back in like may of 1986
In michella's case.
- So, this was before jennifer was killed.
And he says that he had seen a jogger,
And he often jogs in point defiance park.
And he had seen someone through there
That maybe they should look at,
Someone that might be suspicious.
- The detectives, they didn't find anything
Unusual about him.
And so they just wrote the report up,
And moved on to continue investigating.
He made it into my high priority offender pile
Of people that I wanted to get dna from,
But he certainly wasn't the only one.
- His name is, is there.
So, they have to try to get some answers.
- We would've done the basic record checks
And determined that he was most likely
Living there in illinois,
Had a house address,
Had his driver's license and photo.
I contacted the local fbi resident agency
And provided them with the necessary information and said,
"we're asking people to voluntarily
Provide their dna samples
So they can be eliminated as a suspect.
Can you have somebody go out
And attempt to contact this person?"
- The fbi goes to washburn and says,
"can we have your dna?"
And he says, "sure."
And he gives it to him.
- I called the agent out there.
I asked him,
Was there anything remarkable about your contact with him?
And, and it was just very routine,
Very straightforward.
- I mean, what is going on here?
I don't know if we're ever gonna get to
The bottom of the case.
There were days when I would go into my office,
And I would look at the stacks of case files
And think that this case is unsolvable.
(somber music)
Once we had collected all of these dna samples,
We decided to start submitting them to the crime lab.
But this honestly is kind of like
Searching for a needle in a haystack.
The first batch came back with no matches.
Then I sent the second batch and waited for months.
I sent my last batch of samples to the crime lab
In January of 2018.
And by this point I was not optimistic at all
That anybody in these samples was the suspect.
- [narrator] as she waits for results
From this last batch of samples,
Detective wade is forced to make a difficult choice.
- I had been approached to apply for a job
With the attorney general's office
To work on the sexual assault kit initiative.
And I did a lot of soul searching,
Trying to decide like, do I really wanna leave now?
But that's ultimately what I decided to do.
The hardest part about leaving
Is not having solved jennifer and michella's cases.
Like it was just terrible.
But there was something in the back of my mind
That thought maybe working on the sexual assault kit testing
Will provide an answer.
Maybe one of these untested sexual assault kits
Will provide a match.
My last day was April 13th, 2018,
And I was gone 25 days, and I get a phone call.
It was from the detective who took over for me
And he said, "are you sitting down?"
And he tells me we have a match on jennifer bastian.
I'm speechless at this point.
And I'm also like tearing up.
So, I'm like, "well, who is it?
What's the name?"
And he says, "it's robert washburn."
I got dressed really quick.
And then went back to the station
So that I could help dig through the case
To pull out the information about robert washburn.
- Robert washburn graduated from high school
In the tacoma area.
And he worked for a while as a engineer at boeing.
He moved to illinois and was living a very quiet life,
Caring for his disabled daughter.
Neighbors described him, it's almost a cliche,
As you know, the quiet guy who kind of kept to himself,
But seemed dedicated to his daughter.
- [narrator] at the time of jennifer's murder,
Robert washburn was living just nine blocks
From the bastian family.
- Someone in our office here in tacoma
Called out there and let them know
That tacoma pd would be coming out,
That there was a match to this person,
And they would have a warrant for his arrest.
- They got eyes on robert washburn pretty quickly,
Had the swat team in eureka arrest him.
- [narrator] police arrest washburn,
And began his extradition to washington.
- I think the arrest took place around 7:00 am.
And so immediately one of the assistant chiefs and myself
Drove from the police department to patty's home
And knocked on her door.
I had rehearsed in my head something to say to her,
Of course it all went out the window.
And I couldn't remember what I was gonna say.
- Doorbell rings, open the door,
And she just says, "we got him."
Lindsay and I are hugging one another
And alternately crying and laughing
And crying and laughing.
Just the raw emotion.
Just an awesome, awesome reality that took over.
And my first thought, I gotta call theresa.
- She does the whole,
I've got someone here who wants to say something to you.
And then I hear, "theresa, it's lindsay.
We got him."
And I dropped to my knees.
I just said, tell me everything.
When I heard the name, robert washburn,
It didn't mean anything to me.
I couldn't come up with anything.
I don't know any connection.
- Robert washburn is behind bars.
He's voluntarily given his dna.
It matches to jennifer bastian,
To the evidence left at the crime scene,
But he pleads not guilty.
And we all know anything can happen in a jury room.
Will they trust that that dna was preserved?
It's decades old.
Was it tested properly?
So, there is still a very real fear
That he could get away with murder.
(somber music)
- We had hoped that robert washburn would talk
And answer a lot of the questions that we all have,
But he declined to do that.
- [narrator] two weeks after his arrest,
60 year old robert washburn is arraigned
In a pierce county court
And charged with the first degree murder
Of jennifer bastian.
Washburn pleads not guilty.
- My overwhelming fear was that this case would go to trial.
Because my mom is in tacoma alone,
And I really was quite anxious and fearful
About what that would look like.
- I think the idea of a trial
Was the biggest black cloud since his arrest.
There's a bunch of things that he may have to say
That I don't wanna know.
- As a family, like no one wants to sit through that.
No one wants to sit in the courtroom
And look at graphic photographs of their family member
Who's been sexually assaulted and murdered.
I mean, that's horrifying.
- [narrator] a judge sets a 2019 trial date,
But just three months later,
The bastian family receives a phone call
That changes everything.
- It was the prosecutor saying they felt washburn
Was ready to change his plea.
They were clear.
It wouldn't necessarily be the longest sentence
They would hope for,
But under the situation, it would be no trial.
And given his age,
It kind of made sense to not push the issue.
- [narrator] it took 32 long, painful years,
But finally the bastian family gets a measure of justice.
- Walking into the courtroom that day
Was really intense
Because it's all kind of like overwhelming
To see so many old friends and family
And colleagues of my dad.
But made it really clear how important this case was still
For so many people.
- I mean, lindsay tried to prepare me,
But I knew I was going to see him.
I wanted to see him.
- And then when it was our time to walk into the courtroom
And stand in the same room as him,
It was impactful,
But it also left a lot to be desired
Because he didn't make eye contact.
He just kind of sat there.
- There was no eye to eye.
He never raised his head.
He looked down the whole time.
- I went to the sentencing,
And it was really emotional.
I don't think there was a dry eye in the courtroom
From the judge to one of the cameramen in the courtroom,
To people in the gallery.
I remember patty saying,
"do you know how many birthdays we missed,
And how many christmases we missed?"
I mean, you'd pretty much have to be a psychopath
To sit through that and not tear up.
- [narrator] as the bastian family watches,
Washburn admits he murdered jennifer back in 1986.
- He's strangely stoic in the courtroom.
A written statement is read saying, you know, he's sorry.
He admits that he grabbed jennifer and strangled her.
He never admits to, or talks about the sexual assault.
And there's very little revealed about his motives,
Why he did it, how he did it.
Other than that he strangled this little girl.
- And he basically confessed
In the most bare bones way possible
That he had murdered jennifer, period.
- [narrator] robert washburn is sentenced
To 26 and a half years in prison.
- You know, me as a detective,
I wanna solve the case,
And I'm excited when the case is solved,
But that family is now ripping off a scab,
And all the pain, all the grief, all the trauma, it's back.
That's something that has to really be considered
And addressed from the law enforcement perspective.
When one of these cases is solved is that
It's not just happy feelings.
- That is not the end for patty.
And it's not the end for teresa.
This family is determined to make sure that
This isn't just about one girl's murder,
Or two girls' murders.
This is about keeping young people safer everywhere.
- So, starting in 2015,
We teamed up and we introduced a number of bills
To really move forward on the dna collection.
We had people leaving the court
That had never given their dna,
And all kind of problems.
And then in 2018 we passed house bill 1326,
Is when we really brought it all together
To expand who we collected dna from,
And closing the most loopholes.
It was a bipartisan support,
And it was really a huge team effort
With patty and detective wade.
- [narrator] on may 21st, 2019,
The governor of washington, with patty bastian by his side,
Signs the new legislation,
Now named jennifer and michella's law.
- Thank you for never letting us feel alone
Over the past 32 years.
The fact that the bill itself was named
The jennifer and michella's law is pretty awesome,
Pretty darned awesome.
- [narrator] on March 22nd, 2022,
A pierce county man is found guilty
Of michella welch's murder.
He is sentenced to more than 26 years in prison.
Dna evidence helps link him to the crime.
- This country needs a national law
About what to do with dna,
When to collect it, when to put it in the database.
And it's gotta be before a felon is released from prison.
It's to help the guilty and the innocent.
It's to help parents
And people who have lost someone,
As well as help prevent, period.