Travis Decker 'case closed:' Here's what Chelan County sheriff said about DNA match

CHELAN COUNTY, Wash. - Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison announced Thursday that DNA analysis from the Washington State Patrol crime lab confirmed the human remains found last week belong to Travis Decker, the suspect in the murders of his three daughters. The announcement brings a conclusion to a four-month-long search.

"We are glad to say that those remains do come back as a positive match for Travis Decker," Morrison said during a news conference. "It's a big day for the Chelan County Sheriff's Office, all of our federal partners, that we can finally bring a close to this dark chapter of Chelan County."

The remains were found on Grindstone Mountain, not far from the Rock Island Campground where the bodies of his daughters, 9-year-old Paityn, 8-year-old Evelyn, and 5-year-old Olivia, were discovered in June.

"Certainly pay respects to the deaths of Peyton, Evelyn, and Olivia, we wanted to show honor to them, let them know that we never forgot about them. We haven't forgot about their family," Morrison said. "To Whitney, we apologize that it's taken this long to get the closeness and the closure that we are looking for in this case, but I hope that you can rest easier at night knowing that Travis is accounted for. He is deceased."

Full transcript of the news conference

Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison: "Again, I want to thank everyone for coming here. We're coming full circle. We're looking at about four months ago, we were just sitting here breaking the news about this tragic situation of the deaths of Peyton, Evelyn, and Olivia. And today I stand before you again with news that we have received our DNA results back from the Washington State Patrol's crime lab from the items that were recovered last week. That'd be the clothing and also the human remains. We are glad to say that those remains do come back as a positive match for Travis Decker. It's a big day for Chelan County Sheriff's Office, all of our federal partners, that we can finally bring a close to this dark chapter of Chelan county. Certainly pay respects to the deaths of Peyton, Evelyn, and Olivia. We wanted to show honor to them, let them know that we never forgot about them. We haven't forgot about their family. To Whitney, we apologize that it's taken this long to get the closeness and the closure that we are looking for in this case, but I hope that you can rest easier at night knowing that Travis is accounted for. He is deceased. Our DNA results confirm that. And this will bring a close to our case. I want to thank our detectives, our investigative unit for the amount of time, effort, and just overall sacrifice that they put in. They never relented on this case. They remained focused, and they made sure that number one, justice was served. And most importantly, the law prevailed in this situation. We appreciate all of our federal partners, the FBI, the U.S. Force Service, the U S Marshal Service will come up and talk after me. And then we'll take questions after that. We also had. Our partners at the Criminal Investigation Division, Border Patrol with their Borat team and also their Borstar team. We couldn't have done this by ourselves. We're a medium-sized agency, as I've said throughout this process. We appreciate our federal partners standing up alongside of us, assisting us. We appreciate the Washington State Patrol. Specifically, I'd like to give thanks to operational psychologist, Stacey Gutchett and her work and her forensics analysis of Mr. Decker that assisted us in our fourth search. Pointed us in the direction of Grindstone Mountain in an area of interest that we wanted to search. And her insights and guidance led us to an important area to search where we did eventually locate Mr. Decker. Again, we couldn't have done this by ourselves. I want to thank the King County Sheriff's Office, the Snohomish County Sheriff's office, the Spokane County Sheriff's Office for also coming alongside of us, allocating their air assets to us. We could not have done it by ourselves if we had not had the repelling capabilities that we had from the helicopters. Again, we would have struggled. They would have taken months longer, and we're thankful for that. But most importantly to our community, thank you. Thank you for supporting us, being patient. We wanted this wrapped up within the first couple of days. We knew it took months. We knew that you sat on edge as we were also stressed out about this situation. But again, you never wavered your support from us. We're grateful for that, we haven't forgot it. And we hope that you can also rest easy at night knowing that Mr. Decker is accounted for. Unfortunately, he's deceased to his family. My condolences to you. I understand this could be your brother, your son, your family member. We never wanted any harm to come to him, but unfortunately the circumstances are what they are. He succumbed to whatever injuries those were. We're gonna hear back from our coroner's office, the medical examiner, if they're able to get a cause of death or a time of death. But we appreciate them also working with us, working closely with us and also being respectful of those remains as we found them. We will hand them back over to his family when the time's appropriate. But we just thank everyone that has come alongside the Chelan County Sheriff's Office, the media who has also been here assisting us as we've kept Mr. Decker's face out there in public. I know at times a lot of the citizens, not only here in Washington state, but nationally, were wondering when are we gonna get closure to this case? Again, we needed the media to do this. We needed them to keep their face out there so we could have Travis, if he was out beyond our borders, at least under some pressure. But again, fate had what it was. We were able to locate him. And again, we appreciate it. I'm gonna let the U.S. Marshals Service also present. They've been alongside us from day one. We appreciate that partnership, the resources, the finances they put into this. We couldn't have done it without them. Same with the FBI, but the Marshals' Service really took on a heavy burden for us overseeing the search efforts while our detective investigative units went and focused primarily on the investigation, knowing that we were getting ready for a criminal trial. This was a triple homicide. We never lost sight of that. This was also a kidnapping. We never lost sight of it. Before I conclude, though, I also want to make sure that I pay thanks specifically to the Wenatchee Police Department, Detective Hewitt. If it had not been for his tireless effort, the days coming up to Monday, when we jumped into this investigation, we would have had 2,900 square miles that we've had to search without any real guidance. His efforts, the Wenatchee Police Department, their investigative unit, certainly gave us a leg up to be able to track them down, get to the site quickly. We thank Deputy Mike McCloud for his quick work in finding that campsite. Not only nationally with our federal partners, state partners, but regionally, we had help with the Douglas County Sheriff's Office, East Wenatchee Police Department, Wenatchee Police Department. But specifically, I wanted to make sure Detective Hewitt was recognized for his efforts, his work. He certainly gave us everything we needed to jump into this investigation and get there quickly. And they continue to stay besides us, talking with Whitney and the family, making sure that they were talking with them as we were focusing on the investigation. So I just want to make sure I said thank you to them as well. I'll let the Marshal's office speak, and then after that, we'll take any questions you have. Thank you."

Jerome Brown, US Marshals Service: "Thank you, Sheriff. Jerome Brown with the Marshal's Service, based out of Spokane, Washington. I'm the supervisor for the task force. The first time I spoke before this podium, I promised you that we would not stop until we found the fugitive. My job and my team's job is to find the fugitives using the rapid advancing manhunt program, which we did, along with the help from the partners that was mentioned from the sheriff already. There's numerous to mention. I'm not going to go over the list again, but without the community. Which is what this truly is about. Law enforcement community, family community, community members that are out here present. Without all of you, we could not have done this. This is a truly team, family endeavor. That's why this was successful. So remember that. When you go home, that we were supported with food, roofs, things when we needed them to accomplish our mission as a law enforcement community. You helped us and supported us in that endeavor. That's way we are successful. Again, thank you to everybody. And I'll go into questions and let the sheriff have something else. No, we'll open it up to questions."

Reporter: "Are you able to talk a little bit at all? I know it's very early. How he died or when he died."

Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison: "We're going to leave it up to the coroner's office. Coroner Harris has already confirmed that they're doing the best they can with their medical partners. Determine if they can determine a cause of death and also how long he had been deceased when he was out there. Again, we understand that process takes time. We did not get full remains. We've gotten the majority of the remains back. But again, that's a process and we're hoping that they are able to determine that because we know that some of the community wanted to know as of now we don't have those answers."

Reporter: "Sheriff, were there any clues to try to figure out whether he had been on the run all this time or if he went straight to the rescue route?"

Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison: "Based off the information we have, it appears that the potential of him going directly up Grindstone Mountain shortly after the event or within that day would be pretty consistent. But again, we'll look at the timeframe once we are back in the coroner's office and, hopefully we can get a clearer picture on what was the cause of death. Again, if there was anything outside of what would be an explainable cause of dead and it wasn't at Mr. Decker's own decision by his own hand, we would investigate that as a separate homicide. Again, we will pay respects to him. We'll honor his family as well. But we will wait to hear what the coroner's office and the medical examiner has to say."

Reporter: "Sheriff, how were you able to circle in on this one specific tiny area that you find?"

Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison: "So this was our fourth search. It was a planned search. We appreciate the U.S. Marshals overseeing that, taking it on. The FBI had done our third one after that. This was the area that we had been speaking with the Washington State Patrol and their operational psychologist, who I mentioned before. That would be Stacy Chuckett. Really appreciate her insight. So we did get forensics analysis when it came back from the U S Marshal Service, the FBI with their forensic psychologist and, of course, the Washington state patrol. And she had highlighted an area of interest that was on Grindstone Mountain. She even guesstimated about what elevation we were looking at. We really appreciate her insight. She brought certainly a different perspective than we had received from the FBI or the Marshal Service. But again, we were taking information as we could throughout this investigation. It was rapidly evolving. I think we utilized our resources best as possible. And the last iteration, Washington State Patrol coming in with this contracted operational psychologist certainly gave us a different area to look at. But it was always something that we were going to check next as our search area continued to expand out."

Reporter: "What was kind of the clues that led to that area being, as you mentioned, an area of interest?"

Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison:"It was outside of the three search areas that we'd already checked. It was certainly within sight of our original crime scene. And we knew also with the information that had been obtained with the psychologist there from Washington State Patrol, that they feel that would be an area that they might've singled out when Mr. Decker might've viewed out as an area that he would've headed."

Reporter: "Sheriff, I saw that there was a tip line. How many people finished that tip line? And did rumors and any other leads kind of prolong like a lead or was that difficult?"

Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison: "So certainly we were running our tip line. We really appreciate the FBI coming in and overseeing that over the first couple of days of the operation. You're going to thousands of tips coming in and then of course it slowly dwindled down. But you're hearing leads that everyone was telling us you've missed it. He's already in Canada, he's in Mexico. Clearly we have the Marshal Service. They have relationships as well with international partners. We did have international partners in Mexico and Canada following up on leads along with nationally here. We had viewings in Montana, Idaho, Texas. So again, we appreciate our national resources that we had. Also we had local resources in different states that were willing to step up, assist us, track down leads. Again, we couldn't have done this by ourselves but certainly we weren't overlooking any tip that came in, any bit of advice that we have. But it's certainly strained our resources that we did have, but we primarily kept our focus here with our investigators and eventually we got the results we were looking for. So I have been in touch with Whitney. We've certainly tried to respect her privacy throughout this process. We know that she's grieving, the family's grieving. We've told her that we will share information that she feels appropriate. We had a general idea. I'd like to thank Captain Chance with Wenashee Police Department. He really was the point of contact primarily with the family. But when we did have press releases that came out that I felt would be more shocking to the conscience, we did try to communicate that with her so she wasn't taken back by it. But we understand no matter what, this is not gonna bring Peyton, Evelyn, and Olivia back. If anything, we just hoped that maybe she would sleep better at night. She wouldn't be looking over her shoulder. But we understand nothing we can do is going to reverse this travesty and bring her daughters back, which we feel for that. But we certainly have done everything we can to be supportive of her and respect her privacy and keep her informed when she needed to be."

Reporter: "Can you talk a little bit? Can you tell us just how it feels for you personally and for your department to finally have this day done?"

Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison: "My focus is more back on my agency. I understand that a lot of our deputies have taken a huge toll when they're sitting there on the crime scene for hours on end. Our detectives are having to read through these reports, define details of the case that no officer in his law enforcement career should really have to read though. So I certainly am focusing on them, making sure that they have the support they need with psychologists, critical incident stress management, peer supporters. We've done everything we can to make sure we're supporting them on that front. I would say personally that I certainly view it as a win for our community that we can close this. This has been a very dark chapter. You're looking at one of the largest manhunts in Chelan County history. One of the most horrific crimes that we've seen in Chelon County. And we're glad to put it behind us. Personally, I certainly just feel for the family. I couldn't imagine that as a father to lose any of my kids, especially all three. And I hope that we never see anything like this in Chelin County again. But personally, I'm just glad to see it's closing out and then we're putting it behind it. And number one. Above all that we found Mr. Decker he's accounted for and that we can say that threat to our community is confirmed no longer a threat."

Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison: "This case officially closed in Chelan County now."

Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison: "We will go through the final processes of closing out the case. We know that our detectives still have some things to wrap up. We still consider this to be a criminal case. We're making sure that we've documented all of our evidence, that we completed all of reports and that we done what we need to do to process the evidence we have. We do not believe there are any other suspects. Anything else we'd need to follow up on but we wanna make sure it's closed properly."

Reporter: "If you think you've gotten any closer or you ever get close to a reason why Mr. Decker might have done it."

Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison: "I don't think we'll ever have a true reason. I don't think it really matters what his reasoning was. In our view and based off the evidence we have he committed murder. It's inexcusable, it's inexplainable. And we would have liked to of course hurt his thought process of what he was thinking at the time but I don't think anything he said would have justified it. The bottom line is our community is now down three young girls that would have been our bright future. They're not here. I know several members of our agencies had their kids interacting with them. On sporting events and other personal events. So it's a loss for us personally too. We recognize that those girls are gone for their family. They're not gonna be able to enjoy birthdays, other memories, first dances, first sporting events, even first jobs. So I certainly feel for them. I understand that is a huge loss and I certainly will be sending my prayers towards them hoping that they can find some kind of closure on this."

Reporter: "Can you speak to the state of the remains you took on this little event last week but did the crime lab give any indication about why it may have been particularly difficult to test any of the samples of the state-of-the-remains or?"

Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison: "No, I would say the biggest challenge to the results was me personally. I requested more than they're used to. I appreciate Chief Batiste and his team being flexible and willing to adjust. I did not wanna take any chance of just coming back with samples from the clothing. I wanted samples from the remains that were also located there. I know this was an unusual request for the state patrol. I appreciate them humoring me on this but we also wanna make sure we shut down conspiracy theories. Mr. Decker did not bring anyone else up there and leave the remains behind. This is Mr. Decker's remains, the clothing matches, the remains match. That is the end of the conversation. This is why we ask them to take their time, test more samples. And again, I have to follow the lead that our detectives did. They've been thorough by the book and have not rushed any process through this. So when we're making this request to the Washington State Patrol, I understand that it took more time but I certainly have to follow our investigators leads and say, go the extra mile, don't rush this investigation and make sure it's closed out properly. I think we did that. Though it was frustrating to our community, I understand that. And to others, the sheriff's office did exactly what it was supposed to do."

Reporter: "Is there any specific estimate of how many personnel across all the agencies worked together throughout this entire process?"

Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison: "I would say hundreds in the search alone that the FBI coordinated. We were over a hundred personnel that were on the ground searching in addition to the amount of money that each agency has contributed. Had the Chelan County Sheriff's Office and the Chelant County government itself had to absorb the cost of this, it would have bankrupted our county. So thank you to the FBI. Thank you to U.S. Forest Service. Thank you border patrol. Thank you the marshals. Thank you every single municipality and county agency that came out, contributed funds again. We couldn't have done this by ourselves and I've heard you spent a lot of money. I guarantee if it was your kids, you would ask me to spend the same amount of money so if I had to do it over again, we'd do it exactly the same way to ensure that justice was served and again, that the law prevailed. I'm not sure of the nation. I certainly have our subject matter expert here but for Chelan County, this certainly takes the largest manhunt that I think we've ever seen, that we've never heard of and we did talk to former members of our agency but I don't think we ever seen anything like this before."

Reporter: "I'm curious if there's a timeline for the border officers when they have support to bring the results in a positive manner."

Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison: "They said it could take months. I'm not the subject matter expert in here, but I know that Coroner Harris was open to have any questions on that front to be redirected back over towards him. Certainly someone I would trust his opinion. He's done an excellent job for not only the industry but our county for several years. We're gonna miss him but I we've got a good candidate coming up behind him with Deputy Earl Crow that's gonna be taking that position potentially so we've good people in there. I know they'll get the results when they get them. Anything else from anybody?"

Reporter: "Thank you for your hard work sir."

Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison: "It was definitely a group effort. Sheriff's office didn't do this by ourselves. I know I get to stand up here and take some credit but we didn't this by ourself. It certainly was a group efforts. The marshal service was key. Again, they took on the workload that was this manhunt. The FBI was certainly pulling every string they could behind the scenes getting additional resources if we hadn't got the additional funding for that third search. I get that we didn't get the results we wanted to but we certainly did everything and we're showing that we weren't willing to give up, and we were gonna continue to do what we need to do. We're just appreciative for all of our partners that came alongside us. And most importantly, and I wanna say this too, like our deputies stepped up every single day while we were out here taking on fires as we're seeing here. The 365 day 24-7 coverage that we provided was still being taken care of. You've seen our deputes at work handling other cases and I appreciate them too. They've done a lot of personal sacrifice and we continue to be here and support them. Just appreciative of their efforts. I appreciate it. Thank you. Appreciate you coming. And thank you for being supportive of us during this time. We're looking forward to closing this case out and to Whitney. Certainly hope you know that we never gave up and Peyton, Evelyn, Olivia, their memories will live on forever."

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