Michella Welch

Case background and investigation

Michella Welch was a 12-year-old girl living in Tacoma, Washington. On the morning of March 26, 1986, she took her two younger sisters to Puget Park, a wooded park and gulch in the north end of the city. At some point Michella rode her bicycle home to get lunch for the girls and returned to the park. When her sisters went to find food elsewhere and came back, Michella was gone. Her bicycle was left behind, and a frantic search began. Hours later, her body was discovered in the wooded ravine near the park. She had been sexually assaulted and killed.

The medical examiner determined Michella had died from blunt-force trauma to the head, and her body also bore a deep neck wound. Investigators had no eyewitnesses to the abduction and, despite an extensive effort, could not identify a suspect. The killing was one of two strikingly similar murders of young Tacoma girls in the 1980s, and it haunted local detectives for decades. Biological evidence was preserved, and in 2006 investigators were able to develop a male DNA profile from the crime scene, but searches of state and national DNA databases produced no match, and the case remained cold.

The turning point came with investigative genetic genealogy. Beginning around 2017 and 2018, Tacoma police detectives, working with genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter and the firm Parabon NanoLabs, uploaded the crime-scene DNA profile to a genealogy database and used family-tree research to narrow the field. The analysis pointed to two brothers, and investigators focused on Gary Charles Hartman. Detectives surveilled Hartman and recovered a discarded napkin, and the DNA on it matched the profile from Michella's murder. Hartman, who had gone on to become a nurse and lived near the park at the time of the killing, was arrested on June 22, 2018.

Hartman was charged with first-degree murder and rape. His identification was notable in part because he had lived only about a mile from the park at the time of the killing and had gone on to a long career as a nurse, working at a state psychiatric hospital, without ever drawing the attention of investigators. After legal proceedings that stretched on for years, his case was decided in a bench trial, and in 2022 Judge Stanley Rumbaugh found him guilty of the rape and murder of Michella Welch. At sentencing, an emotional Hartman apologized, saying, 'I'm so sorry.'

The judge sentenced Hartman to roughly 26 and a half years, or 320 months, in prison, a term that, given his age of about 70, effectively meant he would likely spend the rest of his life incarcerated. Michella's mother told the court she wanted him locked up for good. The conviction brought a measure of closure to Michella's family after more than three decades of waiting and stands as another example of investigative genetic genealogy resolving a long-cold child murder that conventional DNA database searches could not crack. The technology that ultimately identified her killer has since helped solve numerous other cases that had stalled for years.