Timothy Burkhart

Because of this, he applied to have DNA evidence from the two cases be entered into CODIS in the hope they would be a potential match to Burkhart. To his relief, the results positively connected Burkhart's and the killer's DNA, meaning that he was likely the perpetrator in both killings. Since his identification, investigators have suggested that he might be responsible for additional unsolved cases both in and outside of Pierce County, but as of October 2022, none have been linked back to Burkhart. The Welch and Bastian murders were later solved and proved to be committed by separate offenders.

In April 2009, Gene Miller, a detective who worked at the Tacoma Police Department, started organizing the county's cold cases and eventually came across the unsolved murders of Sallee and Payne. Initially believing they might be related to the murders of two other teenage girls (Michella Welch and Jennifer Bastian), he delved deeper into the cases and took note of a name that kept coming up in the original reports, but with different spellings. He then ran the name through a software program that identified similar sounding names, which eventually gave him the name Timothy Ray Burkhart. Miller then started digging into Burkhart's past, uncovering that he had been suspected in an attempted kidnapping in Parkland in 1984, but was never charged, and that he was responsible for the murders of two women in 2001.

Timothy Ray Burkhart (1966 – July 2, 2001) was an American serial killer who killed at least two teenage girls and two women in Pierce County, Washington from 1986 to 2001. He committed suicide shortly after being identified as the prime suspect in the latter murders, and was linked via DNA to the first two murders eight years after his death.

On June 13, 2001, 72-year-old housewife Kathryn Coates was bludgeoned to death in the backyard of her home in Summit, in what appeared to be a botched burglary attempt. Her body was found by her husband, who had gone out to do an errand at the time of the crime. Aside from witness testimony claiming that a stranger had been wandering the area, police had no leads and released a composite sketch of the mysterious stranger.

Two weeks later, a friend went to the Tacoma apartment of 48-year-old Rebecca Nash, an employee of a water delivery company based in Kent. To her shock, she found Nash dead on the floor, with her apartment burglarized and her car, a 1990 Chevrolet Cavalier, apparently stolen. The car was found on the following day parked about a mile away at the Park Village Apartments, but there was no sign of the perpetrator.

On January 24, 1986, 17-year-old Denise 'Denny' Sallee, a high school dropout who worked at a fast food restaurant in Spanaway, went to the Paradise Village Bowl bowling alley in Parkland with a friend. The pair played until the friend eventually left, leaving Sallee behind. However, she failed to call her mother and was reported missing the following day, with authorities initially treating her case as that of a runaway.