LEAVENWORTH, Wash. (AP) — Officials have discovered remains in the mountains of Washington that they suspect belong to Travis Decker, a former soldier sought in connection with the deaths of his three daughters.
According to a statement released Thursday by the Chelan County Sheriff’s Office, they are collaborating with the Washington State Patrol crime scene team to examine the site. DNA testing will be conducted to confirm the identity of the remains.
“While positive identification has not yet been confirmed, preliminary findings suggest the remains belong to Travis Decker,” the statement said.
Decker, aged 32, has been on the run since June 2, when a sheriff’s deputy discovered his vehicle along with the bodies of his daughters—Paityn, age 9, Evelyn, age 8, and Olivia, age 5—at a campground near Leavenworth.
He did not return the children to their mother’s residence in Wenatchee, approximately 100 miles east of Seattle, following a scheduled visitation three days earlier.
Having served as an Army infantryman from March 2013 to July 2021, Decker was deployed to Afghanistan for four months in 2014. He was skilled in navigation and survival techniques, and had lived off the grid in the wilderness for over two months on a previous occasion, authorities noted.
An extensive search was conducted across hundreds of square miles, much of it difficult mountainous terrain, with more than 100 personnel from state and federal agencies searching by ground, water, and air. The U.S. Marshals Service had offered a reward of up to $20,000 for any information that would lead to his arrest.
Last September, Decker’s ex-wife, Whitney Decker, wrote in a petition to modify their parenting plan that his mental health issues had worsened and that he had become increasingly unstable. He was often living out of his truck, and she sought to restrict him from having overnight visits with their daughters until he found housing.
An autopsy determined the girls’ cause of death to be suffocation, the sheriff’s office said. They had been bound with zip ties and had plastic bags placed over their heads.
