In this episode we cover the conclusion of the Michella Welch case.

If you haven’t listened to the Jenni Bastian case, (ep113) please go listen to that one first, as many details about Michella’s case are addressed there.

On March 4th, 1986, the unthinkable happened for the Bastian family of Tacoma, WA.  Their sweet, energetic and athletic little girl Jenni, age 13, didn’t come home from a bike training session in Point Defiance Park.  Police believed Jenni and her bike had been taken from the park by a predator, and the FBI counseled the family to await a ransom call.  But the call never came.  And when Jenni was found murdered and hidden in a cleverly disguised cave among the brush, her case joined another horrific child murder in being attributed to a child serial killer plaguing Tacoma.  Michella Welch had been killed just four months earlier in another Tacoma park, and her case, too, was unsolved.  For the next quarter century, Tacoma investigators pursued the child killer who had taken two of Tacoma’s innocents in such brutal fashion.  But with the advent of modern DNA testing and analysis came answers – and they were not what anyone was expecting.

During the 1990's and 2000's, the remains of several murder victims; mostly female sex workers, were found on Long Island's beaches. To police it seemed clear that they were the victims of a serial killer, or even more frightening, two serial killers who were dumping victims in the same area. The killer or killers, were given the moniker LISK, or Long Island Serial Killer. Many of the victims were identified, but while police hunted for the killer, they also needed to ID the rest of the victims, and they succeeded finally in identifying two of them; Karen Vergata and Valerie Mack.