
3 sisters who vanished while visiting homeless dad found dead in a campground
The three young sisters who vanished while visiting their troubled and homeless father have been found dead, police confirmed Tuesday.
The bodies of the Decker sisters — Paityn, 9, Evelyn, 8, and Olivia, 5 — were found late Monday close to their father's truck near a campground in Wenatchee, where SWAT teams had swamped the area, KIRO 7 reported.
Officials had canceled the endangered missing person alerts for them Monday, without initially confirming the tragic discovery.
Advertisement
The girls were last seen alive on Friday when their father, Travis Decker, collected them from their mother's house for a planned visitation, police said earlier.
4 Police are searching for Paitlyn Decker, 9, who vanished with her younger sisters after an arranged visitation with their homeless father on May 30, 2025.
Wenatchee Police Department
He was earlier charged with three counts of first-degree custodial interference for allegedly failing to return his children, but was not found in the search for his kids, local media said.
Advertisement
The bodies were found after a SWAT team swooped in on Rock Island Campground, about 18 miles west of the town of Leavenworth, at around 5 p.m. on Monday.
Decker, who is homeless and divorced from his children's mother, is known to stay at campgrounds and hotels in the local area with his dog, according to police.
4 Evelyn Decker, 8, vanished with her two sisters on Friday.
Wenatchee Police Department
4 Olivia Decker, 5, has been missing with her two older sisters since May 30, 2025.
Wenatchee Police Department
Advertisement
A warrant was issued for his arrest at around 5 p.m. on Monday by Superior Court Judge Robert Jourdan.
The offense is a Class C felony in Washington and carries a maximum sentence of five years.
4 Police are looking for Travis Decker, 32, who vanished May 30 during a planned visit with his missing young daughters.
Wenatchee Police Department
Decker picked his three daughters up at around 5 p.m. on Friday but did not tell their mother where he planned to take the girls, who were last seen traveling in his truck, a white 2017 GMC Sierra.
Advertisement
The vehicle was spotted on the Wenatchee River Bridge heading north some 40 minutes later, according to a filed police affidavit seen by NCWLIFE.
Later that weekend, the truck was spotted in the west end of Leavenworth, triggering a police search in the wooded areas around the town, NCWLIFE reported.
Federal agencies, including Homeland Security and the Forest Service, were enlisted in the search for the missing girls.
The girl's mother had issued a heartbreaking appeal for their safe return Monday, hours before the bodies were found.
'I just want the girls back home safe and sound — that is the most important thing to me,' she said in the emailed statement sent to NCWLIFE.
'I am concerned about the safety and wellbeing of my girls and their dad. This is an unimaginable situation.' I am pleading for everyone to look out for them,' she said in the emailed statement sent to NCWLIFE.'

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
A Trump Tariff Case Study: Can the U.S. Again Be the Power Tool King?
My DeWalt 20-volt cordless drill/driver combo set is a beaut—powerful, smooth, comfortable in the hand, and not too expensive; I got it on sale for about a hundred bucks. It's also a tribute to the wonders of the transnational supply chain, its components traversing the earth before they came together and found their way to my door. The drill and driver were made in Mexico, but their batteries were made in China, as were the battery charger and the handy tote bag that came with it. DeWalt, a brand familiar to every woodworker and DIY enthusiast, is a division of Stanley Black & Decker, a global conglomerate headquartered in Connecticut that owns brands including Craftsman, Porter-Cable, Bostitch, and many others. In 2024, it sold $15.4 billion worth of tools. While the company does some domestic manufacturing, its power tools—drills, saws, routers, and the like—are all made abroad. The same is true of most of the power tool brands you'll find at your local Home Depot or Lowe's; many started as American companies but are now part of multinational corporations that do little manufacturing in the United States. Your Milwaukee reciprocating saw and Ryobi sander may sound like they come from the U.S. and Japan, but both companies are owned by Techtronic Industries, which is headquartered in Hong Kong. Your dad called his circular saw a 'skilsaw,' but Skil is now owned by Chervon, a Chinese company. This is just the kind of industrial production President Trump would love to bring back to the U.S., and that, he assures us, tariffs will produce. It's part of a vision for what the American economy should be, where we make stuff again, a world-leading industrial machine humming with capability and power. That goal is shared across the political spectrum; you'd be hard-pressed to find a politician of either party who would say we shouldn't make more things in America. Unfortunately, there are serious impediments to achieving reindustrialization on a large scale, and Trump's policies are just about the worst way to go about it. The woodworking tool industry—what it is today and how it has changed in recent decades—offers a revealing window into the obstacles this effort will face. As a hobbyist woodworker for the last 20 years, I've accumulated a lot of tools. If you asked how many I have, I'd echo the quip gun owners often say: more than I need, but not as many as I want. A tour through my shop goes around the world—a couple of Japanese handsaws, a chisel set from the Czech Republic, a sander made by a German company but built in Malaysia, a table saw blade from Italy. The big machines—the table saw, jointer, and planer (the latter two are used for flattening and truing boards)—have American brand names but were built in Taiwan, which for years has been the place toolmakers go to find the skilled but relatively inexpensive labor that allows them to produce tools at lower cost than they can domestically. And lots of knickknacks from China. When I started woodworking 25 years ago, Chinese tools were mostly junk. That's no longer true; as in so many industries, the quality of Chinese manufacturing has rapidly improved, to the point where some of what is produced there is on par in quality with what is made in Europe or the U.S.—if those products are made in the U.S. at all. So what woodworking tools are still made here? The big companies may make some accessories here, but for the most part, the industry is confined to small manufacturers of relatively high-priced, niche products that don't even try to compete on price. For instance, I own a nice hand plane made by WoodRiver, the house brand of the retail chain Woodcraft; right now it sells for around $175. It was made in China, but it's solid quality, unlike some Chinese planes you can get on Amazon for 50 bucks. If you want to buy a similar American plane, you can get one from Lie-Nielsen, which does its manufacturing in Maine. It will cost you $385. I like my plane, but I'm told that using a Lie-Nielsen plane is almost a religious experience. When I told Deneb Puchalski of Lie-Nielsen about my plane, he scoffed. 'You know what that WoodRiver is? That is a direct copy of a Lie-Nielsen plane,' but made in China with cheaper labor and less exacting standards. There are other manufacturers that have carved out a similar space in the market. Woodpeckers, which manufactures in Ohio, makes measuring and marking tools, along with a variety of jigs and fixtures. It is considered the gold standard of quality; if you need a combination square that's accurate to 0.001 inches and has a host of innovative features, that's the brand you'd choose. It will also cost you $179.99. The last combination square I bought was made by Irwin Tools, which has been bought and sold many times since it was founded in 1885. Today, Irwin is another subsidiary of Stanley Black & Decker. My basic Irwin square, which was made in China, cost me $15. It may not spark joy, but it works the major spending bills Joe Biden signed—the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law—his administration fashioned an industrial policy built on manufacturing, centered on both critical technologies such as semiconductors and 'place-based' interventions targeting struggling areas to create high-tech centers that could spur an area-wide revival. It may be some time before we know just how successful that strategy was (and it may depend on how much of it Trump decides to dismantle). But it was focused and limited. If we decided that we wanted to reshore production of a wider variety of goods—including something like power tools—could we do it? The answer is a qualified yes: We could, but it would have to be done methodically, and it would take a long time—years or even decades. The Chinese manufacturing system that today seems so powerful developed over an extended period, through a combination of determination, substantial government support, and an almost limitless supply of inexpensive labor. A retired manufacturing engineer told me that when his company began moving production to China two decades ago, they encountered a mirror image of their domestic challenges: When they needed to make an alteration to their domestic U.S. production, the key question was whether more labor would be involved; material costs were trivial in comparison. Their Chinese partners were only concerned about material costs and dismissed any concerns about labor; they could always hire plenty of workers for very little. Over time, China developed integrated manufacturing hubs that enable quick production of things like power tools: a company that makes motors, another company that makes injection molds, another that makes springs and screws, all working together and ready to contract with large corporations to produce their products. We still have that kind of integrated system in some sectors like autos, but much of it has departed. As for woodworking equipment, 'very little of it is made in the United States anymore, because the companies that made that stuff took their manufacturing overseas so they didn't have to pay American wages,' says Puchalski. We could rebuild those manufacturing ecosystems in the U.S., but we can't just wish it into existence. 'It took time to send all this stuff over to China, and it's going to take time to retrieve it all,' says economist Susan Helper of Case Western University, who served in senior roles in the Obama and Biden administrations, including managing industrial strategy. Tariffs can play a role in that process, but they would have to be carefully designed and predictable enough to allow businesses to do long-term planning. They would have to remain in place to give the domestic industry time to develop, and account for the fact that even American manufacturers often need to import materials from overseas. Lie-Nielsen, for instance, gets iron ore from Canada. 'Sourcing material is always an issue, particularly with the political environment today. That could become crippling' if tariffs go too high, Puchalski says. 'Companies like ours that are relatively small are going to be hit the hardest.' Since foreign labor will be cheaper than American labor for the foreseeable future, any domestic manufacturer that wants to be competitive on price will have to get more out of each worker, which means automation. And that means creating fewer jobs than we might like. The Trump administration has circled around that problem. 'President Trump is interested in the jobs of the future, not the jobs of the past,' said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently. 'We don't need to necessarily have a booming textile industry like where I grew up again, but we do want to have precision manufacturing and bring that back.' Precision manufacturing can offer good jobs, but not as many. In fact, this entire debate seems animated by a vision of a bygone time. 'Manufacturing jobs in the past have been good jobs,' says Susan Helper. 'I think that's less to do with something inherent in the nature of manufacturing and more to do with the time period in which the U.S. became a manufacturing power, which was also one in which unions were able to organize.' That ensured good wages and benefits. But the 'manufacturing wage premium'—the degree to which factory workers make higher wages than similar workers in other kinds of jobs—'has eroded quite significantly.' Not only that, she adds, 'it was never true that all manufacturing jobs were good jobs. Some of them were pretty terrible.' Just ask the women of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Without unions, working in a factory isn't necessarily better than working in a Walmart or a Starbucks. And if we aren't talking about vital national security interests (relevant in the case of, say, semiconductors), there may be a limit to how much we want to invest in bringing production of goods like power tools back to the U.S., especially if it means drastically higher prices in the short run. Businesses will respond rationally to the incentives they have. Executives at Stanley Black & Decker said on their latest earnings call that they are migrating some of their manufacturing—the products destined for the U.S.—away from China to mitigate the risks associated with ongoing trade tensions. They didn't say where they were migrating it to, but Mexico—where my drills were made—is a good bet. At the end of our conversation, I told Puchalski that I've always wanted a Lie-Nielsen plane, but the purchase has been stuck in the 'someday' category. 'Someday could be tomorrow,' he said, assuring me that once I got one of their gorgeous American-made tools, I'd never go back. I'm sure he's right, but I haven't been able to bring myself to spend the money just yet.


New York Post
5 hours ago
- New York Post
Wanted Washington dad Travis Decker seen in doorbell footage before allegedly murdering his 3 daughters
The Washington dad wanted for the murders of his three daughters was spotted on security cameras in the days leading up to the brutal killings as police ramp up their search for the military-trained suspect. Doorbell footage captured Travis Decker walking up to an unidentified home's door, knocking on it before strangely sliding his hand up and down the surface, according to video released by the Chelan County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday evening. Authorities noted the video was from before the alleged killings, but released the footage as they are the most recent images of Decker. 6 Travis Decker was spotted on a Ring doorbell camera days before his three daughters' bodies were discovered on June 2, 2025. Chelan County Sheriff's Office Decker, 32, is wanted on three counts of murder and kidnapping after the bodies of his three daughters –Paityn, 9, Evelyn, 8, and Olivia, 5 – were discovered in a remote campground near his abandoned truck. Police also shared two other images of the 32-year-old military veteran that showcased his bushy mustache and chin beard. Decker, who is homeless and has been living out of his truck, also has multiple arm tattoos and was sporting a ponytail in one of the pictures. He was described as 5-foot-8 inches, 190 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes. 'It is unknown if he is armed at this time but he should be considered dangerous and should not be contacted or approached,' the sheriff's department noted. 6 The bodies of his three daughters -Paityn, 9, Evelyn, 8, and Olivia, 5 – were discovered in a remote Washington campground. Facebook/Whitney Decker 6 Police also shared two other images of the 32-year-old military veteran that showcased his bushy mustache and chin beard. Chelan County Sheriff's Office 6 Decker, who is homeless and has been living out of his truck, also has multiple arm tattoos and was sporting a mullet in one of the pictures. Chelan County Sheriff's Office Decker had picked up his daughters from his ex-wife Whitney Decker's house for a scheduled custody visit on May 30 and brought them to a campground in the rural Washington State city of Wenatchee. The girls' mother reported the trio missing at 9:45 p.m. Friday after her ex-husband failed to return them home. An endangered missing persons alert was issued Saturday before it was canceled Monday after police discovered the girls. Their bodies were found in an embankment at Rock Island Campground, about 18 miles west of the town of Leavenworth, at around 5 p.m. Their bodies were found close to their father's white 2017 GMC Sierra truck, which allegedly had two bloody handprints smeared on the back. They were found with plastic bags over their heads and their wrists zip-tied. Preliminary investigations indicate the girls likely died from asphyxiation. Officials believe Decker, who was a member of the Washington National Guard since 2021 after transferring from the Active Component, can survive for months off-grid in the wilderness. 'We understand that at times, he would do cashing, so we understand that's a possibility that he could have scoped out this area before, put some supplies out there, and has the ability and knowledge to survive for long periods of time,' Sheriff Morrison said at a press conference Wednesday night, KIRO7 reported. 6 The girls' mother reported the trio missing at 9:45 p.m. Friday after her ex-husband failed to return them home. Facebook/Katie Vogel 6 Officials believe Decker, who was a member of the Washington National Guard since 2021 after transferring from the Active Component, can survive for months off-grid in the wilderness. Chelan County Sheriff's Office 'Thanks to our Marshall's Office tracking down some good leads that we feel are giving us more of an insight into Travis' mindset – where he may have gone to,' Morrison added. A $20,000 reward is available for information leading to Decker's arrest.

Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Sheriff remains 'optimistic' about tracking down Wenatchee father wanted for killings of his daughters
Jun. 4—The Chelan County Sheriff's Office is "optimistic" it will locate a man accused of killing his three young daughters at a campsite and fleeing the scene, sheriff Mike Morrison said at a news conference Wednesday evening. "My message is still the same," Morrison said. "Turn yourself in ... We will not relinquish our efforts. Do us right for your kids." Travis Caleb Decker, 32, is charged with the murder and kidnapping in connection to the deaths of his children, Olivia Decker, 5; Evelyn Decker, 8; and Paitlyn Decker, 9, from Wenatchee. The girls were found bound and asphyxiated in an embankment at the Rock Island Campground near Leavenworth, according to previous reporting from The Spokesman-Review. Their father has not been seen since last week when he failed to return the children to their mother after a planned visit. Decker, who is homeless and only allowed day visits unless an exception is made, is said to have borderline personality disorder for which he did not take medication, according to court records. He has never failed to return his kids to their mother before, and the children generally enjoyed being with him, court records say. Investigators later found his white truck and miscellaneous supplies at the campground, along with plastic bags and zip ties. The discovery led to a near-statewide manhunt. Morrison said during the news conference they are "optimistic" they can track his location, even though Decker is a military veteran with elite wilderness survival skills. He went through survival school as a kid and had more training in the military, Morrison said, and his family told investigators they believe he is able to live "off the grid" for more than two days. The Chelan County Sheriff's Office wrote in a news release they don't believe Decker is armed, but consider him dangerous. Aerial units from the Spokane County Sheriff's Office are assisting Chelan County in the search across the Okanagan Wenatchee National Forest, along with federal law enforcement. The FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit were also called in and have rendered "good leads" about Decker's mindset and thought process at the time of the killings, Morrison said. Multiple tips have come in, including sightings from McCall, Idaho, but were determined not to be Decker, the sheriff said at the news conference. Agencies have swept fast-moving creeks, steep terrain, cellphone data and financial documents for clues. The sheriff's office also has limited resources, Morrison added, but the assistance Chelan County, most of which is not accessible by road, has received from statewide agencies statewide gives him confidence. "We are up for the challenge," he said. "We are aware of our terrain ... And we are not doing it alone." As of Wednesday afternoon, the Decker family's GoFundMe has raised more than half a million dollars. "Their light touched so many, and the pain of this loss is immeasurable," the post says about the Decker girls. The girls and their family are the "motivating force" behind the rigorous search, Morrison said Wednesday. The agency has set up a tip line for people with knowledge or sightings of Decker to submit information. The Chelan County Sheriff's Office has posted a $20,000 reward leading to his arrest. Decker was last seen wearing a light-colored shirt with dark shorts, has black hair and brown eyes, is 5-foot-8 and weighs about 190 pounds. He may pose a risk if he is approached, police said in a release. If found, call 911 immediately.