Lindsey Baum

Case background and investigation

Lindsey Baum was a 10-year-old girl growing up in McCleary, a small logging town of a few thousand people in Grays Harbor County, Washington. On the warm evening of June 26, 2009, Lindsey was playing at a friend's house and set out to walk the short distance home, a route of only about four blocks. She was last seen between 5th and 6th Streets at roughly 9:15 p.m. She never made it home, and her sudden disappearance from the quiet, close-knit community set off one of the largest and most heartbreaking searches in the state's history.

In the days and weeks after Lindsey vanished, hundreds of volunteers, law enforcement officers, and search teams combed McCleary and the surrounding woods. Investigators reviewed surveillance footage that showed a white truck and a man entering a nearby convenience store, and they pursued numerous leads and persons of interest. In 2011, search warrants were executed at a person of interest's home, business, and storage unit, and detectives explored possible connections to other suspects, including a group of elderly brothers arrested in Seattle on child-exploitation charges. Despite the intense effort, no arrests were made and Lindsey's fate remained unknown for years.

The mystery took a devastating turn in September 2017, when hunters in a remote area of eastern Washington, roughly 20 miles west of Ellensburg and far across the state from McCleary, discovered human remains. Because the bones were not initially tied to a specific criminal case, they were not analyzed right away, but they were eventually sent to the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia. In May 2018, DNA testing confirmed that the remains were those of Lindsey Baum. Grays Harbor County Sheriff Rick Scott announced the identification, telling a shocked community, 'We've brought Lindsey home,' while acknowledging that the family had prayed to find her alive.

The discovery transformed the long-running missing-persons case into a kidnapping and homicide investigation. The remote location of the remains, on the opposite side of the state from Lindsey's home and far from any town, strongly suggested that someone had abducted and killed her before deliberately transporting her body across Washington to a place where it might never be found. Sheriff Rick Scott framed the grim new reality plainly, saying investigators now needed to find a homicide suspect. Detectives returned to the eastern Washington site to conduct forensic searches for evidence that might point to a killer.

Despite the renewed effort, no one has ever been arrested or charged in Lindsey's death. Investigators have revisited earlier persons of interest, including possible suspects examined during the original 2009 and 2011 phases of the case, and have continued to describe the investigation as very active in the years since, appealing repeatedly for tips from the public. For Lindsey's family and the tight-knit town of McCleary, the 2018 identification brought a painful measure of closure after nearly a decade of uncertainty, but the central question of who abducted and killed the 10-year-old on her short walk home remains unanswered.