Two Girls. Two Parks. One City Changed Forever.

In 1986, Tacoma, Washington, was shaken by two devastating crimes.

Twelve-year-old Michella Welch went to the park to meet friends.Thirteen-year-old Jennifer Bastian went for a bike ride.

Neither came home.

Months apart, their murders left a community searching for answers—and fearing something even worse: that a single predator was responsible. For more than thirty years, both cases remained unsolved. But they were never forgotten. In this episode of Same Crime, Different Time, I tell their stories side by side.

Sources

In May of 1935, nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser walked home for lunch from school in Tacoma, Washington.

He never made it.

Within hours, kidnappers demanded $200,000 for the return of the heir to one of America’s largest timber fortunes. What followed was a terrifying eight-day ordeal involving underground pits, coded newspaper messages, and one of the largest manhunts in the history of the Pacific Northwest.

In this episode of Same Crime, Different Time, we explore how the crime happened, how the kidnappers were caught, and what this case reveals about desperation, wealth, and justice in 1930s America.

The day after Thanksgiving in 1989, eighteen-year-old Mandy Stavik went for a run along a quiet road in rural Washington.

Her dog came home.

She didn’t.

For nearly thirty years, the small community of Acme lived with an unanswered question: who killed Mandy Stavik? In this episode of Same Crime, Different Time, we explore the heartbreaking case that haunted investigators for decades, and the unlikely break that finally solved it. Sometimes the truth waits.

Amusement parks are meant to deliver joy, laughter, thrills, and escape from the ordinary. But where there’s wonder, sometimes there’s tragedy.Today, we’re exploring accidents that turned places built for magic into scenes of heartbreak, with a focus on the West Coast, where early parks like Disneyland and seaside attractions helped define the American amusement experience. Stay with me for a twist on nostalgia you won’t forget.

A small memorial marks the spot in the tiny unincorporated town of Bly, Oregon where the only fatalities from enemy action in WWII occurred in the continental United States.

May 5 was a sunny day in 1945 when Archie Mitchell, a pastor from Bly, his wife, Elsie Mitchell, 26, and five kids who went to Elsie’s Sunday School class decided to go for a picnic on nearby Leonard Creek. They saw a curious thing in the bushes nearby.

What happened next was the tragic result of one of the most ingenious and curious war inventions known up to that point: a paper balloon bomb.

On October 15, 1973, Deborah Lee Tomlinson disappeared from Creswell, Oregon on the evening of her sixteenth birthday. A small town in Lane County, Creswell had few mysteries then and still has few answers now. According to public records and missing-person databases, Deborah left with a teenage female friend and was never seen again.

For decades, law enforcement officially classified her disappearance as that of an endangered runaway, which was a status supported by limited information in the public record and sparse news coverage at the time. In this week’s episode of Same Crime, Different Time, we cover what we know about her disappearance, the cultural context, and hope for a future solve.

In January 2006, actor Joe Pichler left his apartment in Bremerton, Washington. He was never seen again. Joe had grown up in the public eye, appearing in popular films as a child. But by the time he disappeared at just 18 years old, his life looked very different than the one audiences remembered.

This episode talks about the potential act of suicide. Help is available. Call 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in English and Spanish 24/7.

In boxcars and rail yards, places a lot of us pass without a second glance, men were being murdered. Many were unhoused. Many were transient. Many were dismissed.

This week’s episode of Same Crime, Different Time examines the case of Robert Joseph Silveria Jr., known as the Boxcar Killer, whose crimes began in Oregon and spread across multiple states. It’s a story about violence, but also about visibility and the cost of indifference.