Feds take over manhunt for Washington father accused of killing 3 young daughters

After law enforcement officers spent days scouring a remote section of Washington State for a father accused of killing his three young daughters, the local sheriff leading the manhunt turned over the search to federal authorities, officials said Monday.

Since last week, the search for Travis Decker, 32, has covered hundreds of square miles by air, land and water, the Chelan County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release, and the department reached the point “where we need to rest our local resources.”

“Our command staff continues to be engaged with the search command while we give our teams time off to rest and recuperate and be ready to rejoin the search for, and capture of, the suspect,” the sheriff’s office said.

The sheriff’s office remains the lead agency on the criminal investigation into the deaths of Decker’s three daughters, Evelyn, 8, Paityn, 9, and Olivia Decker, 5, the department said.

The girls were found dead June 2 near a campground east of Seattle after Decker failed to return them from a visitation three days before. An arrest warrant accuses him of first-degree murder and kidnapping.

An autopsy completed Friday attributed the girls’ cause of death to suffocation, according to Monday’s release. A detective previously wrote in an affidavit in support of an arrest warrant that they had bags over their heads and had been zip-tied.

Two bloody handprints were found on Decker’s white pickup, which was found near the girls, and one of the blood samples recovered from the scene belonged to a man, the department said. Another blood sample was non-human.

The department said additional DNA and fingerprint analyses are being conducted.

Authorities said they have collected a large amount of evidence from the scene, along with Decker’s dog, which was turned over to a local animal rescue.

Authorities previously described Decker, a military veteran and active member of the Washington State National Guard, as a longtime outdoorsman known to go “off-grid” for months. The sheriff has warned people with cabins in the area to lock their doors and leave their lights on at night.

The affidavit shows that Decker’s ex-wife, Whitney Decker, described her relationship with her ex-husband as cordial and said he’d never previously failed to return their children. A parenting plan imposed by a court last year required him to seek mental health treatment and domestic violence-anger management counseling but he had not done so and refused to sign the plan, according to the affidavit.

Since the girls were found dead, Whitney Decker has called for reforms to the Amber Alert system, which sends out text messages to all cell phones in the area of missing children but was not used after she told authorities that her ex-husband had violated their parenting plan.

A spokesman for the agency that manages the system, Washington State Patrol, has said that a request for an alert from local authorities did not meet strict criteria required by the federal program.