Remains believed to be those of Travis Decker, an ex-soldier wanted in the deaths of his three daughters, have been found in the mountains of Washington state.
This undated photo provided by the Wenatchee Police Department shows Travis Caleb Decker. (Wenatchee Police Department via AP)
The Chelan County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Thursday, Sept. 18, that the discovery was made during a search coordinated by the U.S. Marshals Service.
“While positive identification has not yet been confirmed, preliminary findings suggest the remains belong to Travis Decker,” the statement said.
Decker, 32, has been the target of a large manhunt since June 2, when a sheriff’s deputy in Washington found his truck and the bodies of his three daughters — Paitlyn, 9; Evelyn, 8; and Olivia, 5 — near Rock Island Campground, west of Leavenworth.
Decker had failed to return the girls to their mother’s home in Wenatchee following a scheduled visit. Their cause of death was determined to be suffocation.
Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison told Seattle TV station KIRO that the remains were on Grindstone Mountain, a few miles from where the girls’ bodies were found.
The search had been concentrated in the mountainous area near Leavenworth, though a mistaken report of a sighting briefly turned attention to Idaho in July.
A week after the discovery of the girls’ bodies, hikers reported seeing a man matching Decker’s description in a Cascade Range backpacking area called the Enchantments. Dog teams tracked a trail to Highway 97 south of Leavenworth.
The map above shows key points in the search:
1/ Rock Island Campground, on Upper Icicle Creek, where the bodies were found.
2/ Colchuck Lake, where the suspicious person was spotted on June 9.
3/ Ingalls Creek Trailhead, where the trail tracked by dog teams ended.
4/ Bear Creek, Sawtooth National Forest, Idaho; reported sighting July 5. The Marshals Service said on July 9 that its agents determined that the man was not Travis Decker.
5/ Grindstone Mountain, where the remains were found.
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Decker was an infantryman in the Army from March 2013 to July 2021, including a deployment in Afghanistan. He had training in navigation and survival, authorities said, and once spent more than two months living in the backwoods off the grid.
Last September, Decker’s ex-wife, Whitney Decker, wrote in a petition to modify their parenting plan that his mental health 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.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.