Jennifer Bastian's Murder Was Solved By A Detective Whose Career Was Inspired By The Crime

NBC News reports that Wade eventually worked herself up to Tacoma's cold case unit. As she delved into Bastian and Welch's murders, Oxygen writes that she decided to look into DNA evidence from both crime scenes. While there was DNA on Welch's body, there was none on Bastian's. Moreover, the DNA found on Welch had zero hits. That's when Wade decided to test Bastian's swimsuit. 

She told NBC News that this hadn't occurred to her before. Wade explained, "I think the assumption prior to that was that her swimsuit must have been removed prior to any sexual assault occurring because it was found down around her ankle at the time that she was recovered."

NBC News notes that Wade assumed that if DNA was found in the bathing suit, it would match the DNA from Welch. To her complete surprise, A&E states that the DNA belonged to a different man. In other words, there were two different killers. Despite this revelation, the DNA also didn't match anyone from the national CODIS database (via Oxygen). Undeterred, Wade continued her investigation. When the FBI and a genealogy expert got involved, they were able to provide Wade with a list of possible suspects with data from public genealogy sites. 

When that also failed, Wade went back into the cold case file, which had 2,300 possible suspects (via Oxygen). In 2018, the FBI was able to find 160 of these individuals to collect their DNA. Kiro7 explains that this included Robert Washburn, from Eureka, Illinois.

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