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EERIE details have been revealed about the last time a dad accused of killing his three daughters picked them up for a visit.
Travis Decker, aged 32, appeared thin and seemed preoccupied when he arrived to pick up his children at his former partner’s residence on May 30, according to a neighbor who has known the family for a long time.
Three hours afterwards, when the scheduled visitation was supposed to conclude, Decker failed to bring the girls back to their Wenatchee, Washington home, which led their mother to alert the authorities.
Paityn, 9, Evelyn, 8, and Olivia Decker, 5, were found at a campground three days later. They had been suffocated to death.
Police immediately launched a manhunt for Decker, a military veteran who is charged with kidnapping and murdering his daughters.
As the search stretches into its fourth week, Binh Nguyen, the Deckers’ next-door neighbor for several years, has shared insights with People regarding the discussion he had with the father on the day of his disappearance.
Decker had moved out of the home in 2022 during his divorce from Whitney Decker after seven years, but would often return to retrieve their daughters for custody visits according to their parenting plan.
Nguyen said he was surprised by how Decker, a previously clean-cut military member, looked when he arrived that day, while the neighbor was watering his lawn.
“He was skinny. He had long hair and a beard,” Nguyen told the outlet.
“I said, ‘Is that you, Travis?’”
Previous pictures of Decker show him with multiple different hairstyles, and cops confirmed he had his hair in a ponytail on the day he was last seen, according to recent video footage.
The two men spoke for about 10 minutes while he waited to pick up his daughters.
However, Nguyen noticed that Decker seemed distracted and wasn’t paying full attention to their exchange.
Decker asked him how he’d been three separate times during the chat.
“What was strange was that he kept asking me the same question at different points in our conversation,” Nguyen told the Daily Mail.
“Like he wasn’t remembering he already asked.”
Timeline of the missing Decker girls
Paityn, 9; Evelyn, 8; and Olivia Decker, 5, were found dead at a campground after they were last seen on a custody visit to their dad.
Below is a timeline of events:
May 29: Cell phone activity shows that the girls’ dad, Travis Decker, drove to the Rock Island Campground and left.
May 30: 5 pm – Travis Decker picks the three girls up from their mom, Whitney Decker.
8 pm – Travis Decker is supposed to return the girls but doesn’t. Whitney Decker calls him and it goes to voicemail.
9:45 pm – Whitney Decker calls the Wenatchee Police Department to report her daughters missing.
Travis Decker’s truck is seen driving westbound on Highway 2.
Washington State Patrol is contacted for an Amber Alert but said the situation didn’t match their criteria.
May 31 : WPD issues an Endangered Missing Persons Alert.
June 2: 3:45 pm – Travis Decker’s truck is found empty at Rock Island Campground with two bloody handprints and items inside.
5 pm – Cops search the area and find the bodies of the three girls.
June 3: 9:30 am – Cops notify the public that they are still searching for Decker.
2 pm – WPD tells the public that the three girls were found dead and that Travis Decker is still on the loose.
June 8: Federal authorities take over search efforts.
June 9: Autopsy results confirm three girls were murdered by suffocation.
June 13: An affidavit revealed Whitney described Travis as having “recent mental health concerns.”
“She provided the examples of randomly leaving or waking her up by screaming at her in the middle of the night,” it read.
“She also said near the end of the marriage he was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder that she believes he currently does not take medications for.”
June 17: New audio of Travis in court fighting for custody of his daughters is released.
“I understand that my current position when I’m by myself isn’t ideal, but my daughters aren’t a part of that,” he saidin September 2024.
“I only get to see them over the weekends and camping is something that the four of us have done since the three of them were in diapers.”
June 20: Memorial is held where mom Whitney speak publicly about girls for first time.
He told People that the interaction struck him as “kind of weird.”
“He had a sad face,” Nguyen added.
Whitney Decker previously said nothing was out of the ordinary about the pickup that day until he didn’t return the girls or answer her calls.
“He said, ‘Hey, I will see you at 8’ and he left, and he never came back,” Arianna Cozart, Whitney’s attorney who she allowed to speak on her behalf, told ABC News earlier this month.
Whitney said there had never been any issues with visitation before the tragedy.
“Something came out of this man and he broke, that’s it,” Cozart said.
“When that man picked up those girls, his babies, he did not have a plan to kill them; there’s nothing that indicates that he did.”
HORRIFYING CRIME SCENE
The girls were found at the campground with plastic bags tied around their heads and zip-ties around their wrists.
Decker’s truck, with items of interest inside, was found abandoned nearby with two adult-sized bloody handprints on the tailgate.
The blood samples collected from the scene were revealed to belong to a man and an animal after Decker’s dog was also found at the camp.
Decker has extensive military training and experience surviving in the wilderness alone for months, making the search harder for police.
A recent potential sighting led police to believe Decker was alone and hiking off-trail in the sprawling mountains of Washington state.
However, cops made a U-turn this week and started to shift toward a recovery mission, as there’s no clear sign whether he’s alive or dead.
As the search continues in the rough terrain, Whitney is left mourning her three daughters as the community begins to heal.
The mom spoke publicly for the first time last week at a memorial service for Paityn, Evelyn, and Olivia, which over 800 people attended.
A GoFundMe for Whitney has now raised over $1.2 million.
