More than three decades after a 12-year-old girl was found raped and murdered near a park in Washington state, investigators say they have finally solved the case after submitting DNA evidence collected at the scene to a public database.

In the third cold case to be cracked in recent months using a genealogy website, 66-year-old Gary Hartman was charged Friday with first-degree rape and murder for the 1986 killing of sixth-grader Michella Welch.

Hartman was recently identified after investigators recovered a discarded restaurant napkin containing his DNA and matched it to a genetic profile from crime scene evidence, Tacoma Police Chief Don Ramsdell said at a news conference Friday. Hartman was never previously suspected of the crime.



According to investigators, Welch was babysitting her two younger sisters at Puget Park in Tacoma, Washington, on March 26, 1986, when she rode her bike home to make sandwiches. The two younger girls left the park briefly to use a restroom at a nearby business and made a call home to check on their sister, but no one picked up.

Welch's bike and the sandwiches were later found at the park, leading investigators to believe she had returned to the park and gone looking for her sisters, while they were using the restroom. Her body was recovered later that night.

“A search dog found Michella’s body just before 11 p.m. that night in an isolated area in the gulch, more than a quarter-mile away from the play area,” Ramsdell said. “Michella had been sexually assaulted and murdered.”

Less than six months later, 13-year-old Jennifer Bastian was sexually assaulted and strangled after riding her bike on a nearby trail in Tacoma. Her body was found in a wooded area.

The similarities between the murders made investigators believe that they were committed by the same person, Ramsdell said, but in 2013 a new piece of DNA evidence collected at the scene where Bastian's body was found revealed that there were two different killers.

Investigators worked up a list of possible suspects for the cases and asked them to submit DNA to an FBI database, leading to the arrest of 60-year-old Robert Washburn, who had been living for many years in Illinois.

After Welch's death in 1986, Washburn had called police and told officers he saw a man resembling a composite sketch of the killer out jogging. After Bastian's death, Washburn was interviewed again, but it did not lead to an arrest, according to the Tacoma News Tribune. After his arrest in May on suspicion of killing Bastian, he pleaded not guilty to murder charges.