Blood found on a truck abandoned near the spot in Washington State where three sisters were found dead belongs to their father, Travis Decker, who’s also the lone suspect in their slayings, authorities confirmed.
The sisters — Paityn 9, Evelyn, 8, and Olivia, 5 — were last seen alive on May 30, at their mother’s home in Wenatchee Valley before a “planned visitation” with Decker. When he failed to return the girls the following day, authorities launched a massive search effort, which culminated in the discovery of their remains just days later, near a campground in Leavenworth.
Police said the girls’ hands were zip-tied and that they each had plastic bags placed over their heads. Their cause of death was later determined to be asphyxiation.
“Detectives originally recovered some individual, personal items from the scene they believed belong to Mr. Decker,” the Chelan County Sheriff’s Office wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “The lab took DNA samples from those items and found they matched the DNA in the blood samples recovered at the scene.”
The sheriff’s office added that “all of the DNA samples recovered belong to the same male subject, who we believe is Mr. Decker.”
Decker, a combat veteran trained in survival skills, has been on the run for nearly five weeks now. Police said he’s believed to be “homeless” and that he’d been “living in his vehicle or at various hotels/motels or at campgrounds in the area” at the time of his daughters’ murders.
The search for Decker remains ongoing.
