At Last

On August 4, 1986, a young girl took a bike ride through Point Defiance Park near Tacoma, Washington. She never returned home. Investigators conducted a desperate search but came up empty handed. The case went dormant for decades and eventually ended up on the desk of cold-case detective Lindsey Wade. Through the application of emerging DNA testing and hard work, Wade and her fellow detectives were finally able to piece together what happened that day and bring closure to the family.

Guest detective: Lindsey Wade

Lindsey served as a Tacoma Police Officer for twenty-one years. During her fourteen years as a detective, she investigated sexual assaults, child abuse, missing persons, and homicides. In 2010, Lindsey discovered that serial killer Ted Bundy’s DNA was not in CODIS. She worked with authorities in Florida to track down a sample of Bundy’s DNA and finally entered it into the national database in 2011. In 2012, Lindsey’s work on collecting DNA from convicted sexual predators in Washington state who’d slipped through the cracks led to an arrest in the 1980 homicide of a teenage girl. Lindsey retired in 2018 as the Tacoma Police Department’s cold case detective and joined the Washington State Attorney General’s Office as a senior investigator assigned for the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. She is a former member of the FBI ViCAP National Advisory Board and teaches child abduction response and cold case investigations for the National Criminal Justice Training Center at Fox Valley Technical College. Lindsey has been a speaker at numerous law enforcement conferences around the country, lecturing on cold cases, sex crimes, DNA, and child abduction response. She recently published a true crime memoir titled, “In My DNA:  My Career Investigating Your Worst Nightmares''.

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