LEVENWORTH, Wash. (AP) – Authorities say they have discovered they are still there. His three daughters’ deathsin the mountains of Washington.
The Chelan County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Thursday that it was handling the site with the help of the Washington State Patrol Crime Scene Response Team. They said they would follow up with DNA analysis.
“While no positive identification has been confirmed yet, the preliminary findings suggest that the body belongs to Travis Decker,” the statement said.
Decker, 32, was wanted since June 2 when the sheriff’s aide found his truck and the bodies of his three daughters, 9-year-old Paten Decker, Evelyn Decker, 8, and 5-year-old Olivia Decker, at a campsite outside Leavenworth.
Three days ago, he was unable to return the girl to her mother’s home in Wenatchee, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of Seattle after a scheduled visit.
Decker was an army infantry soldier from March 2013 to July 2021, and was deployed in Afghanistan for four months in 2014. He was trained in navigation, survival and other skills, and authorities lived in the backwoods of the grid for more than two months.
More than 100 officials with an array of state and federal agencies searched hundreds of square miles. The former US S-service provided a reward of up to $20,000 for information that led to his capture.
Last September, Decker’s ex-wife, Whitney Decker, wrote in a petition to amend his parenting plan that his mental health issues had worsened and he had become increasingly unstable. He often lives by truck and she tried to limit him to visiting with his daughters overnight until he found a home.
The sheriff’s office said an autopsy determined that the girl’s cause of death was suffocation. They were tied up with zip ties and had plastic bags on their heads.
