Timothy Burkhart

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.

Murders Denise Sallee 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.

On March 26, a man cleaning a vacant lot found some clothes stuffed under a log, followed by another discovery three days later, when a 7-year-old boy looking for bottles found a nude, decomposing corpse in the woods near his parents' backyard. The victim had been evidently strangled and partially buried. After news spread about this finding, the man who found the clothes handed them over to the police, which were later identified as belonging to Sallee by her mother. After providing a detailed description of the man, a facial composite was released to the media and lead to numerous tips – at least three of which named Burkhart, but all had spelled his name incorrectly. Authorities then briefly considered that she might have fallen victim to then-unidentified Green River Killer, but this was quickly ruled out and the case eventually went cold. 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.

Identification and suicide While investigating the two homicides, the local Crime Stoppers received a tip from a relative of Burkhart who claimed that he resembled the composite sketches and allegedly was near the two crime scenes on the dates when they were committed. While authorities failed to locate Burkhart himself, they identified several locations he was known to frequent and decided to inspect them. In one of these locations, they checked a storage locker and found blood-stained clothes, a television set and a VCR, the latter of which had been stolen from Nash's apartment. He had died of an apparent drug overdose, and a suicide note was found next to his body, but the contents of said note have never been publicly released. Testing on the body identified traces of blood belonging to Coates, leading investigators to conclude that he had been responsible for both murders. The cases were officially closed, and Burkhart's body was cremated shortly afterwards.

Link to Sallee and Payne 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.