SEATTLE (AP) — The hunt has narrowed for Travis Decker, an ex-soldier wanted in the deaths of his three daughters, after hikers near a remote alpine lake in Washington state reported seeing a lone person who appeared to be ill-prepared for the conditions.
The Chelan County sheriff’s office said in a Facebook post Tuesday that tracking teams responded immediately, and a helicopter crew spotted a hiker near Colchuck Lake, in a Cascade Range backpacking area called the Enchantments.
The off-trail hiker ran from sight as the helicopter passed, the sheriff’s office said. Teams later found a trail, and dog teams tracked it to the area of Ingalls Creek Trailhead, along Highway 97 south of Leavenworth.
Authorities did not say when they spotted the subject, but late Monday they issued an alert for residents in the Ingalls Creek area to lock their homes and vehicles and to be on the lookout for Decker.
Decker, 32, has been the target of a large manhunt since June 2, when a sheriff’s deputy found his truck and the bodies of his three daughters — Paitlyn, 9; Evelyn, 8; and Olivia, 5 — near Rock Island Campground, west of Leavenworth.
He had failed to return the girls to their mother’s home in Wenatchee following a scheduled visit three days earlier.
The map 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.
3/ Ingalls Creek Trailhead, where the search is now focused.
Decker was an infantryman in the U.S. Army from March 2013 to July 2021 and deployed to Afghanistan for four months in 2014. He has training in navigation, survival and other skills, authorities said. He once spent more than two months living in the backwoods off the grid.
Officials with an array of state and federal agencies have searched hundreds of square miles, much of it mountainous and remote, by land, water and air. The U.S. Marshals Service was offering a reward of up to $20,000 for information leading to his capture.
In September, his ex-wife, Whitney Decker, wrote in a petition to modify their parenting plan that his mental health issues had worsened and that he had become increasingly unstable, often living out of his truck. She sought to restrict him from having overnight visits with their daughters until he found housing.
An autopsy on Friday determined the cause of the girls’ death to be suffocation, the sheriff’s office said.