Dad Kills 3 Daughters: Travis Decker’s Manhunt and Cause of Death

The Travis Decker case refers to the May 2025 killings of three young sisters — Paityn, Evelyn, and Olivia Decker — by their father during a court-approved custody visit in the Wenatchee Valley of Washington state, followed by a nearly four-month manhunt that ended when Decker’s own remains were found on a Cascade mountainside less than a mile from where the girls died. Travis Decker, a 32-year-old Army veteran, suffocated his daughters, ages 9, 8, and 5, and fled into rugged backcountry. He was never captured alive.

The Custody Visit That Never Ended

Under a modified parenting plan issued in September 2024, Travis Decker had daytime-only visitation with his three daughters and was barred from taking them outside the Wenatchee Valley. On Friday, May 30, 2025, he picked the girls up from their mother, Whitney Decker, and was expected to return them by 8:00 p.m.¹ He did not. When Whitney’s calls went straight to voicemail, she contacted the Wenatchee Police Department, telling officers Decker had been struggling with mental health issues but had “never done this before.”²

Whitney asked for an Amber Alert that night. The Washington State Patrol declined, concluding the case did not meet the federal threshold requiring a reasonable belief of abduction and imminent danger of serious bodily injury or death. Because Decker had custodial privileges and no documented history of failing to return the girls, the situation was classified as a missed return.³ An Endangered Missing Person Alert went out the next day, May 31, after Decker and the children failed to appear at a scheduled running event.²

What Was Found at Rock Island Campground

On June 2, 2025, law enforcement located Decker’s white pickup truck near the Rock Island Campground along Icicle Creek in Chelan County, roughly 130 miles east of Seattle. Two bloody handprints marked the tailgate.² The bodies of all three girls were found about 75 yards away, down a small embankment.

Each child had plastic bags over her head and her wrists bound with zip ties. Two of the girls had two bags over their heads; the third had three.⁴ An autopsy completed June 6 confirmed the cause of death for all three was suffocation, and the manner of death was ruled homicide.⁵ The Washington State Crime Lab later matched DNA on the plastic bags and cable ties to Travis Decker. No other profiles besides those of the victims appeared on the evidence.

Decker was not at the scene. On June 3, Chelan County prosecutors charged him with three counts of first-degree murder and one count of first-degree kidnapping. Federal prosecutors added a charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.⁶

Who Paityn, Evelyn, and Olivia Were

Whitney Decker described her daughters as active children who played soccer, danced, and performed in theater productions.⁷ A former music teacher called them “a true light in this world,” saying “it is a darker place without them.”⁸ At a June 20 memorial at Rocky Reach Park in Wenatchee, hundreds gathered wearing the girls’ favorite colors of pink, purple, and green. “I truly hope the legacy of the girls’ lives in everyone’s heart forever,” Whitney told the crowd. “They were incredible.”⁹

Warning Signs in the Custody File

Travis and Whitney Decker divorced in 2022, and Whitney was awarded full custody.¹ By September 2024, she had petitioned Chelan County Superior Court to modify the parenting agreement, citing “unsafe and unstable conditions” during visitation. Her attorney, Arianna Cozart, told the court Decker was homeless, sleeping in his truck, motels, or with friends, and owed thousands in back child support. Cozart said the children had been forced to sleep at a National Guard armory alongside dozens of other men, and that Decker had at times left them unattended.¹⁰

Judge Robert Jourdan granted the modification on September 27, 2024. The revised plan stripped Decker of overnight privileges, limited visitation to specific daytime hours on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, and ordered him to complete a domestic violence evaluation within 30 days.¹¹ Decker never completed the evaluation. The court continued to allow unsupervised visitation anyway.¹²

According to Cozart, the restricted arrangement had been “working really well” until the day the girls vanished. She said there had been “no red flags” immediately beforehand and that Decker “loved those girls very much.” Whitney, she added, believed the “system really let Travis down” by failing to connect him with adequate mental health resources: “if somebody would have provided Travis with the help that he needed, those girls would be alive.”¹

Military Service and Mental Health

Decker served as an Army infantryman from March 2013 to July 2021, leaving active duty at the rank of staff sergeant. He was assigned to the 2nd Ranger Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord from 2014 to 2016 as an automatic rifleman, and deployed to Afghanistan for four months during that period.¹³

He transferred to the Washington National Guard in 2021, serving full-time before switching to part-time status in 2023 or 2024. He stopped attending mandatory monthly drills roughly a year before the murders, and the Guard had begun a disciplinary discharge process that was not finalized when he killed his daughters.² Investigators considered his infantry training in navigation and survival a significant factor in how long he was able to evade capture in the backcountry.¹⁴ A retired U.S. Army Special Forces officer noted, however, that Decker had never attended SERE school or any special operations survival course and had not earned a Ranger tab.¹⁵

According to Whitney, Decker suffered severe sleep disturbances and had been diagnosed with both PTSD and Borderline Personality Disorder.⁷

The Manhunt Across the Cascades

With Decker’s truck at the campground and Decker himself gone, one of the largest manhunts in recent Washington state history began. The Chelan County Sheriff’s Office led the investigation, joined by the FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, U.S. Border Patrol, U.S. Forest Service, Department of Homeland Security, Washington State Patrol, and multiple local agencies.¹⁶ The Marshals offered up to $20,000 for information leading to his arrest.¹⁷

FBI supervisory agent Peter Orth described the search area as featuring “steep hillsides, dense brush, minimal cell service, and unpredictable conditions,” noting a person could be 10 meters off a trail and remain invisible.¹⁴ In early June, the U.S. Forest Service imposed an emergency closure across a large portion of the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, including the Enchantments wilderness area and eight campgrounds.¹⁸

Reported sightings in Idaho’s Sawtooth National Forest in July and near Snoqualmie Pass in August drew large tactical deployments but produced no arrest.¹ In late August, the FBI ran a two-day grid search of roughly one million square meters around the campground with nearly 100 personnel. Bones were recovered but were not human.¹⁹

How Decker Was Found

On September 15, U.S. Marshals and the Chelan County Sheriff’s Office expanded the search based on a psychological profile that pointed to a gap in the previously covered ground. Teams focused on the south face of Grindstone Mountain, north of the original crime scene.²⁰ Three days later, a Border Patrol drone flying over the mountainside detected a green object across a ravine. A closer look revealed a neon green T-shirt matching what Decker had been wearing in surveillance footage before his disappearance.²¹

The site sat on steep, trail-less terrain above 4,000 feet, less than a mile from where the girls’ bodies had been found at roughly 2,800 feet. Detectives were rappelled onto the mountainside by a Spokane County Sheriff’s Office helicopter, then hiked out for an hour after the recovery.²²

The remains were partial and badly decomposed after months of summer weather and animal activity. Searchers recovered skeletal fragments including ribs, feet, a femur, a finger, and portions of the spinal column, scattered across five locations separated by several hundred yards. The torso and cranium were never found.²³ Alongside the bones, investigators found Decker’s green T-shirt, a pair of U.S. Rangers shorts, a bracelet, and chewing tobacco. Divers recovered a key fob consistent with Decker’s truck from Icicle Creek.²⁰

On September 25, 2025, Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison announced that DNA testing by the Washington State Crime Lab had positively identified the remains as Travis Decker’s. Morrison said he had requested an increased number of DNA samples specifically to “shut down conspiracy theories.”²⁴ “Mr. Decker is accounted for,” the sheriff said.¹

Why His Cause of Death Is Unknown

Chelan County Coroner Wayne E. Harris said an autopsy could not be performed because so little of the body remained. A state anthropologist examined the recovered bones and found no fractures indicating a fall. Without the cranium, investigators could not check for a gunshot wound. Without soft tissue, toxicology was impossible.²⁵ Harris said how and when Decker died “will likely never be known.”²⁶

Legal Closure and Calls for Reform

On September 24, 2025, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Washington filed a motion to dismiss the federal case against Decker and quash the arrest warrant, citing advisement from the U.S. Marshals Service that he was deceased.⁶ With Decker dead, the criminal case was effectively closed. Sheriff Morrison confirmed there were no other suspects.⁷

A December 2025 Department of Justice report concluded that the Washington State Patrol had followed proper protocols in declining to issue an Amber Alert, but recommended improvements to training, documentation, and decision-making tools. WSP spokesperson Chris Loftis acknowledged that had investigators known about Decker’s mental health history at the time of the initial report, the decision would have been different.²⁷ A structural gap contributed: the Wenatchee Police Department did not have access to the civil court records documenting Decker’s court-ordered evaluations until the courts opened the following Monday, by which time the girls were already dead.

On June 13, 2025, child safety advocates and Washington lawmakers held a news conference demanding reforms including mandatory training for judges on domestic violence, stronger risk assessments, and expanded access to supervised visitation centers. Rep. Amy Walen of Kirkland said lawmakers had a “solemn responsibility” to evaluate how judicial and law enforcement systems had failed to protect children in cases like this one. Advocates pointed to Kayden’s Law, a 2022 federal law that incentivizes states to implement domestic violence training for family court judges, noting that Washington had not yet adopted those changes.²⁸

1
ABC News. Travis Decker Timeline
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CNN. Travis Decker Daughters Washington Manhunt
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KOMO News. Washington State Patrol Amber Alert Wenatchee Sisters
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KOMO News. Details Released on Decker Sisters Crime Scene
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ABC News. Washington Girls Father Wanted for Murder Cause of Death
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KOMO News. US Marshals Declare Travis Decker Deceased
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People. Travis Decker Manhunt Case Timeline
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NBC News. Grim Details Revealed Deaths Three Washington Girls
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Fox 13 Seattle. Decker Girls Memorial
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MyNorthwest. Custody Issues Travis Decker
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Wenatchee World. Decker Contested New Parenting Plan Months Before Homicide
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USA Today. Travis Decker Manhunt Sisters Washington Domestic Violence
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The News Tribune. Travis Decker Military Service
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CBS News. Travis Decker Manhunt FBI Search Washington Murders
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Fox 13 Seattle. Special Forces Vet Travis Decker
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U.S. Marshals Service. US Marshals Adopt Arrest Warrant Wenatchee Father Suspected Murder
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FBI. Statement on the Search for Travis Decker
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Your Source One. Forest Service Closes Icicle River Recreation Area
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ABC News. Travis Decker Search FBI Recovers Items Crime Scene
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USA Today. Travis Decker Search Shirt Remains
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People. Drone Spotted T-Shirt Travis Decker Remains Less Than Mile From Daughters
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CNN. Travis Decker Remains Believed Found
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ABC 6. Travis Decker Manhunt Autopsy Cannot Be Performed
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USA Today. Travis Decker DNA Match Human Remains Washington State
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MyNorthwest. Travis Decker Remains Coroner Findings
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People. Why Travis Decker’s Cause of Death May Never Be Known
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Wenatchee World. DOJ Report WSP Met Protocol on Decker Amber Alert
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The Spokesman-Review. Travis Decker Search WA Lawmakers Advocates Demand