WASHINGTON 1989 Cold Case Solved — A Coworker Caught the Killer | The Mandy Stavik Story
On the Friday after Thanksgiving in 1989, eighteen-year-old college freshman Amanda "Mandy" Stavik went jogging with her German Shepherd along the back roads of Acme, Washington. Two hours later, the dog came home alone, covered in river mud. Mandy never returned.
Her body was found three days later in the Nooksack River. Detectives recovered DNA evidence from the scene, but every suspect they tested came back negative. For twenty-eight years, the case sat cold while a mother who had already lost one child to an unsolved murder waited for an answer that never came.
Then, in 2017, a bakery manager named Kim Wagner pulled a discarded cup and soda can from a break room trash can at the workplace she shared with a man named Timothy Bass. Bass had lived just houses away from Mandy on the same road where she disappeared. He had refused to give police his DNA. He wore gloves at work and took his trash home. Wagner handed the items to Detective Kevin Bowhay, who had spent nearly a decade knocking on doors and collecting DNA samples from more than eighty men. The lab results came back as a one-in-eleven-quadrillion match.
Bass was arrested on December 12, 2017, which happened to be Mandy's mother Mary's eighty-first birthday. In May 2019, he was convicted of first-degree felony murder and sentenced to 320 months in prison, nearly twenty-seven years.
This case was not solved by a genealogy database or a forensic breakthrough. It was solved by two mothers who independently named the same suspect at a waterpark, a detective who never stopped knocking on doors, and a coworker who reached into a trash can because she refused to let a mother live without answers.
This is the full story. From Mandy's life to the decades of dead ends to the courtroom where the truth finally came out.
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Cold Case Redemption tells the stories of the forgotten victims who finally received the justice they deserved. Every case here went cold, shelved for years or decades, until a breakthrough changed everything. Subscribe for in-depth documentaries on the cases everyone thought would stay buried.
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REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
CBS News / 48 Hours — "Mandy Stavik: The Case No One Could Forget"
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mandy-stavik-killing-how-a-community-came-together-to-help-solve-acme-washington-teens-1989-murder/
CBS News — "How Two Moms Chatting at a Water Park Helped Crack a Thanksgiving Cold Case Murder"
https://cbsnews.com/news/mandy-stavik-case-how-two-moms-chatting-at-a-water-park-helped-crack-thanksgiving-cold-case-murder
ABC 20/20 — "30 Years Searching" (Two-Hour Special)
https://www.insideedition.com/2020-examines-mandy-stavik-murder-and-how-a-cup-and-coke-can-solved-the-30-year-old-case-56119
Good Morning America — "How Bakery Worker Got DNA to Crack 30-Year-Old Murder Case"
https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/news/story/100-volunteered-bakery-worker-dna-crack-30-year-65537828
Lynden Tribune — "Bass Sentence Almost 27 Years"
https://www.lyndentribune.com/news/bass-sentence-almost-27-years/article_854eb46c-9d1e-11e9-8948-d72cc194f0c4.html
Washington Court of Appeals — State v. Bass, No. 80156-2-I (2021)
https://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/801562.pdf
FOX 13 Seattle — "Timothy Bass Sentenced to 27 Years in 1989 Murder of Mandy Stavik"
https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/timothy-bass-sentenced-to-27-years-in-1989-murder-of-mandy-stavik
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