Officials find remains they believe are Travis Decker, wanted in killings of his 3 young daughters

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LEAVENWORTH, Wash. (AP) — Authorities say they have found remains they believe are Travis Decker, an ex-soldier wanted in the deaths of his three daughters, in the mountains of Washington state.

The Chelan County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Thursday that it was processing the site with the help of the Washington State Patrol crime scene response team. They will follow up with DNA analysis, it said.

“While positive identification has not yet been confirmed, preliminary findings suggest the remains belong to Travis Decker,” the statement said.

Decker, 32, has been wanted since June 2, when a sheriff’s deputy found his truck and the bodies of his three daughters — 9-year-old Paityn Decker, 8-year-old Evelyn Decker and 5-year-old Olivia Decker — at a campground outside Leavenworth.

Three days earlier he failed to return the girls to their mother’s home in Wenatchee, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of Seattle, following a scheduled visit.

Decker was an infantryman in the Army from March 2013 to July 2021 and deployed to Afghanistan for four months in 2014. He had training in navigation, survival and other skills, authorities said, and once spent more than two months living in the backwoods off the grid.

More than 100 officials with an array of state and federal agencies searched hundreds of square miles, much of it mountainous and remote, by land, water and air during the on and off search. The U.S. Marshals Service offered a reward of up to $20,000 for information leading to his capture.

Last September, Decker’s 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. He was often living out of his truck, and she sought to restrict him from having overnight visits with their daughters until he found housing.

An autopsy determined the girls' cause of death to be suffocation, the sheriff’s office said. They had been bound with zip ties and had plastic bags placed over their heads.