Robert Washburn charged with murder in 1986 death of Tacoma's Jennifer Bastian



TACOMA, Wash. - Prosecutors charged a 60-year-old Illinois man Friday in the 1986 killing of 13-year-old Jennifer Bastian.

Robert Dwane Washburn was charged with first-degree murder. A background search shows that he lived in North Tacoma near Bastian and where her body was found at the time of the killing.

According to charging documents, Washburn had long been a suspect based on a tip he gave to police related to the murder of 12-year-old Michella Welch in Tacoma that same year. At one point, detectives suspected the killings were tied together, but they later said they didn't think they were after all.

Washburn called police in May of 1986 to say he'd seen a man fitting the suspect description in Welch's case while jogging on Five Mile Drive in Pt. Defiance Park, where Bastian's body was found. Detectives didn't interview him until December. He told them he jogged in the park as often as twice a day, and said something about smelling a foul odor and also something about being in the park when it was cordoned off for the investigation into Bastian's death.

Fast forward to 2013, when the Washington State Patrol crime lab re-examined Bastian's clothing and found DNA evidence. They couldn't match it to any state or national databases, but did create a list of suspects to attempt DNA matching with.

Washburn was on the list, and last March, the FBI contacted him and he agreed to a DNA swab. The report came back last week pointing to Washburn, with the DNA test having a 1 in 57 trillion probability that it could match an unrelated person in the U.S. population.