Military-trained dad accused of killing daughters believed to be alive, evading capture: police
Travis Decker has managed to avoid capture for three weeks and is wanted for allegedly killing his three daughters – Paityn, 9; Evelyn, 8; and Olivia, 5 – after their bodies were found near a Washington campsite earlier this month.
"We'll eventually get to find him," Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison told KING 5. "It may be in a week, it may be in a couple of years, but we're not going to go away."
The revelation comes after officials announced earlier this week they are combing through the Teanaway Valley and Blewett Pass areas, according to the Kittitas County Sheriff's Office.
"If you have trail cameras or doorbell cameras, please check them for suspicious activity," the department said in a statement. "If you have residences in these areas, check them for anything missing – no matter how small or seemingly insignificant."
The Kittitas County Sheriff's Office did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Authorities began searching for Decker on the evening of May 30 after his ex-wife notified police that he had not returned the couple's three children from a court-mandated visitation, according to court documents. Three days later, the girls were discovered near Decker's abandoned vehicle with plastic bags over their heads and their hands bound, police said.
The update comes one week after the Chelan County Sheriff's Office (CCSO) announced a group of hikers reported seeing a lone individual who appeared unprepared for the wilderness near Colchuck Lake.
When authorities responded to the tip, they "spotted a lone, off-trail hiker from a helicopter," adding the individual "ran from sight as the helicopter passed," CCSO previously said in a press release.
The lake is located approximately 40 miles from Blewett Pass and 60 miles from Teanaway Valley by car.
A new flyer depicting renderings of ways Decker may have changed his physical appearance was released by authorities on Tuesday. The updated poster includes photos of Decker with and without facial hair and wearing a baseball hat.
Officials also quashed a TikTok video reportedly showing CCSO Sheriff Mike Morrison announcing Decker's arrest after a long standoff.
"To be clear, Mr. Decker is not in custody and CCSO had no part in making the video," the department wrote in a Facebook post.
The U.S. Marshals Service has taken on the role of lead agency in the hunt for Decker, who is a former member of the military with extensive experience in wilderness survival. The Washington National Guard is also assisting local law enforcement with aerial search efforts and surveillance.
Officials warn that Decker is considered armed and dangerous but do not have reason to believe he is a threat to public safety.
The U.S. Marshals Service is offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to Decker's arrest. He is charged with three counts of aggravated first-degree murder and kidnapping.
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More from Rolling Stone The No Kings Playbook to Confront Trump's 'Authoritarian Breakthrough' Trump Celebrates Fourth of July by Deporting Veterans and Their Families Trump's Military Birthday Parade 'Illegally' Used Hit Song: Cease-and-Desist Letter Freddie Wayne Huff, a North Carolina lawman born in 1980, never served in the military. All the same, his story of early promise, high achievement, subsequent disillusionment, loss of faith, turning against his former employer, and descent into addiction, drug trafficking, and violent crime closely paralleled the downward trajectories of Billy Lavigne and Timothy Dumas. Although the bare bones of his criminal exploits were reported in a few North Carolina publications, authorities kept his connection to events at Fort Bragg under wraps. Freddie Huff joined the Lexington police force not long after high school. A self-described 'obsessive perfectionist' who worked tirelessly to improve himself during the mania phases of his bipolar disorder, he quickly distinguished himself as a highly motivated young K9 officer with a preternatural ability to find drug money at traffic stops. Many a cartel courier, passing through North Carolina, lost a five- or six-figure sum to Officer Huff, a tall, solidly built, pink-skinned white man with hooded eyes and a high-and-tight haircut. In 2009, Huff was deputized as a DEA task force officer and assigned to the El Paso Intelligence Center, or EPIC, the agency's main source of intelligence on Mexican drug cartels. There, he became friends with a terminally ill DEA analyst, a bespectacled Black man named Karl Culberson, whose long and varied career working for the federal government included a self-reported stint with the CIA. Nearing death from pancreatic cancer, Culberson confessed something that changed the course of Huff's life. 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All of the stops took place on the stretch of Interstate 85 between Charlotte and Greensboro, and every one of the suspects was a nonwhite man whom Huff pulled over for failing to signal, following too closely, going slightly over the speed limit, having obstructed state tags or a broken taillight, or some other minor offense. On June 17, 2010, for instance, Huff stopped 33-year-old Felipe Fabela for tailgating. Lo and behold, Fabela turned out to have $449,360 concealed in a hidden compartment of his 1998 Mazda minivan. Three months earlier, Huff had pulled over 44-year-old Herman Alonso Rojas driving the same inconspicuous model of Mazda, which also had a concealed hiding place, and relieved him of $93,920. Rojas had been doing 75 in a 70. 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Through intuition and a little research, Huff ascertained that the import-export shop, housed in a pair of portable trailers on a dirt lot in one of the poorest neighborhoods of hot and sunny Laredo, was owned by relatives of Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales, who as Huff knew from his time at EPIC was one of the most notorious drug lords in the world. Until 2013, Treviño Morales had been the ruthless leader of the Nuevo Laredo–based paramilitary cartel known as Los Zetas. Of all the drug cartels in Mexico, Los Zetas was by far the most feared. They were not just narcos. They were real soldiers, elite ones, trained in the United States. The cartel traced its origins to a joint project between the United States and Mexico to create a Mexican commando unit modeled on the Green Berets, called the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales, or Airborne Special Forces Group. The original members of the GAFE, as the unit was known by its initials in Spanish, were schooled in irregular warfare at none other than Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as well as Fort Benning, Georgia, and also received instruction from Israeli trainers. Around the year 2000, the majority of the unit defected from the Mexican state and went to work directly for the Matamoros-based Gulf Cartel, a powerful smuggling mafia that controlled the underside of the Texas border, serving as its armed wing and enforcer corps. Not long after, the rogue commandos again betrayed their employers, struck out on their own, and formed a rival cartel. 'Los Zetas' was a reference to the alphanumeric call sign used by the group's first boss, a Mexican special forces officer named Arturo Guzmán Decena. The advent of Los Zetas inaugurated the darkest era in all of Mexican history. Trained in marksmanship, rapid deployment, ambushes, surveillance, and psychological operations, Los Zetas used overt military force to consolidate control over most of the Texas border and the Gulf Coast port of Veracruz. Augmented by the state and local police forces that they co-opted, as well as an endless supply of short-lived hit men recruited from the lumpen class of the northern borderlands, Los Zetas wore paramilitary uniforms, drove around in homemade armored vehicles called monstruos, and, to sow terror, filmed themselves committing sickening atrocities. Countless thousands died in their raids, assaults, and sprees of arson. Countless thousands more were abducted and disappeared. 'You're the Most Badass White Boy I Ever Met' When the proprietor of Aguilar Appliance Repair came up to North Carolina in 2016 to pick up a load of washers and dryers, Huff invited her over to his house to meet his wife and kids. Though he looked, on first glance, like a big dumb gringo, Huff was cunning, charismatic, and street smart. Concealing the fact that he had been a state trooper and DEA task force agent, Huff gained the woman's trust, gathered that she really was plugged into the Mexican drug world, and gradually let it be known that he was interested in buying wholesale narcotics. After a months-long courtship in which each side felt the other out, Ruben Treviño Morales, one of Miguel Ángel and Óscar Omar's 15-odd siblings, agreed to meet Huff in person. The improbable rendezvous took place in the parking lot of a Tex-Mex restaurant in McAllen, Texas. 'He screamed cartel,' Huff recalled of his first look at the lesser-known Treviño Morales brother. 'He wore super expensive designer clothes. He had a long pinkie nail,' for taking bumps of cocaine up his nose. 'He looked like a Mexican Kenny Rogers.' That an Anglo who spoke only broken Spanish and lacked any familial ties to Mexico could simply approach an exceedingly dangerous transnational crime syndicate like Los Zetas and arrange to become one of their distributors in the United States would seem like an implausible plot point in an unrealistic movie, yet that is exactly what Freddie Wayne Huff did, court records show. From 2016 to 2021, he was Los Zetas' main man in the Carolinas, with an operation extending into Georgia and Virginia. He went on running his appliance business, which was profitable in its own right, and used it as a cover for trafficking cocaine. He rented a warehouse in High Point, a muggy, traffic-ridden suburb of Greensboro and Winston-Salem, bought moving trucks and tractor trailers, and hired employees. At the peak of his criminal career, Huff was moving 50 to 100 kilos of cocaine every seven to 10 days, putting him in the top tier of all traffickers in the United States. 'You're the most badass white boy I ever met,' Huff proudly recalled Treviño Morales telling him. Drawing on his past work as a K9 officer, Huff helped Los Zetas' border smugglers understand how to pack and conceal shipments to thwart drug-sniffing dogs by wrapping the kilos in shop towels soaked in ammonia, vacuum sealing them in plastic, and then repeating the process, enveloping the bricks in multiple fail-safe layers of a sharply pungent chemical that dogs will do anything to avoid. To defeat X-ray machines, he procured a tractor trailer whose rear differential axle had been hollowed out and lined with lead, a custom job that cost $50,000. 'It took 13 bolts to take apart, but it looked much more complicated,' said Huff, who understood how to exploit the ordinary human laziness of customs agents, among other weaknesses in the narcotics-interdiction apparatus. He also advised the cartel's couriers on how to hide money in cars. 'It was like I was teaching a fucking school,' he said. 'Huff used the very information that he had gained as a law enforcement officer to then thwart law enforcement in order to improve his drug-dealing activity,' said the federal prosecutor Randall Galyon, an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina. 'He Told Me About a Drug-Trafficking Organization Within the Military' For a personal hideout and base of operations, Huff rented a large redbrick house on Peppermill Drive in Lexington that had a four-car garage and basement, which he converted into a combination game room and home gym, replete with hidden compartments operated by means of electric motors activated by magnetic switches, in which stacks of money and kilos of cocaine were stored. There he received gangsters from across the state, as well as southern Virginia and northern Georgia, including Atlanta, as well as hustlers and mobsters from New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois. During his first two years in business, before he developed a sales pipeline to Fort Bragg, Huff mainly sold to street gangs in Raleigh, Charlotte, and the Piedmont Triad, a sprawling agglomeration of suburbs, strip malls, and office parks, home to some 1.6 million people, with High Point near its center. Shot callers from the Bloods, Crips, and Gangster Disciples would come to his McMansion of trap house to buy kilos at the wholesale price of forty grand, product that they broke up and distributed on the street. For personal protection, Huff carried two identical subcompact handguns that were easy to conceal. 'I had two Glocks, .380,' he told me. 'They were really small. They only held six rounds but were very accurate. That's why I always carried one on my ankle. If I ran out of bullets on top, I could go down on one knee and grab the one off my ankle, and that gave me 12 rounds maximum.' Additional security came from a coterie of trained wingmen, almost all of whom were or had been police officers, sheriff's deputies, marines from Camp Lejeune, or soldiers from Fort Bragg. Huff was effectively Los Zetas' franchisee in North Carolina, and like Los Zetas his little cartel was made up almost entirely of cops and soldiers. 'They were former law enforcement, former military,' said Randall Galyon, the federal prosecutor, of Huff's accomplices. 'Mr. Huff knew that they provided a set of skills that would be useful to him.' One day in 2018, a pair of FBI agents showed up at Huff's warehouse in High Point, an unexpected visit that shot a bolt of fear through his heart because he had $700,000 in drug money stashed in a washing machine in plain view. But it turned out that the agents only wanted to talk to him about one of his warehouse employees, Robert Seward, a bearded Black man from Fayetteville who had converted to Islam. A few years earlier, Seward had traveled to Syria and joined the Islamic State, only to become disillusioned with the austere path of jihad, escape from a training camp, and return to America. 'You can't make this shit up,' said Huff. The FBI agents seemed to be keeping tabs on Seward, not looking to make an arrest. Huff gave them minimal information and kept Seward on as an employee, because he was well aware of what was packed inside of the washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, and stoves that it was his job to unload. 'Robert knew what was going on,' said Huff. 'He lived in one of the warehouses, and he turned a blind eye to shit. And one day he comes to me and he says, 'I got this friend of mine who used to move a lot of cocaine. Would it be OK if I introduced you to him?'' Huff said yes. Not long after, a quad-cab Dodge Ram, black with Alabama license plates, pulled up to the warehouse towing a flatbed trailer. In the driver's seat was Chief Warrant Officer Timothy Dumas. 'He gets out,' said Huff, 'and he's got on a Thin Blue Line bracelet, and he's a very fit, muscular kind of guy.' Dumas, a baldheaded, broad-chested Black man who woke up every morning around five o'clock to run and lift weights, and often wore a three-piece suit, fit the profile of the kind of man with whom Huff liked to work. 'I preferred to deal with older, more mature people,' Huff said, 'not thugs with their pants hanging around their ass.' Once they got to know each other, Huff and Dumas became not only business partners but best friends. 'He was an amazing man,' said Huff. 'Probably the most amazing guy I've ever met. No homo,' he hastened to add. It's one thing to traffic drugs internationally and smuggle them across the country undetected. It's another, often more fraught thing to convert stacks of bulk cocaine into cash. What made Dumas such a valuable partner to Huff was that he could liquidate wholesale product at an incredible rate. The secret to his mercantile alacrity was Fort Bragg. 'Tim told me about basically a gang,' said Huff, 'a drug-trafficking organization within the military,' made up of 'an unspoken group of soldiers that policed themselves.' The bricks of coke that he passed off to Dumas were in turn distributed among the group, a confederation of semi-independent dealers in and around Fayetteville. The core members of the underground military mafia, in Dumas' telling, were Special Forces soldiers who had gone over to the dark side during deployments to Afghanistan. The main players were 'guys that are trained killers, that have already killed people,' Huff said. As such, they played by cartel rules. In order to settle debts and resolve disputes, they 'would resort to anything,' Huff said, 'including murder.' 'It Was Seriously Incriminating Shit' Besides dealing drugs on base and off, 'they were taking grenades,' Huff said, 'taking automatic arms,' stealing them from Fort Bragg armories, and reselling them on the black market. Dumas' role in the gun-trafficking portion of the conspiracy, before he was kicked out of the Army, was to falsify entries in the property book accounting system to keep anyone from noticing the disappearing items. 'That was his job,' said Huff. 'Maintaining records.' During the second decade of the Global War on Terrorism, criminal organizations in the United States sourced much of their weaponry from corrupt members of all four branches of the armed forces. The Florencia 13 street gang bought assault rifles from marines stationed at Twentynine Palms, California; a Navy SEAL sold machine guns to the Mongols outlaw motorcycle club; and the Gangster Disciples obtained the pistols used in Chicago shootings from soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to name a few cases. American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines participate significantly in that clandestine 'river of iron' that keeps Mexico's paramilitary cartels, especially Los Zetas and their progeny, better supplied than the Mexican government with military-grade machine guns, grenades, antitank bazookas, helicopter-mounted rotary cannons called miniguns, and plastic explosives, as well as advanced laser optics and night-vision goggles. In 2018, a pair of Fort Bragg soldiers attempted to sell dozens of stolen assault rifles and blocks of C‑4 to men whom they believed to be representatives of Los Zetas in El Paso. In June 2021, Associated Press published a multipart series, the product of a decade-long investigation, on the Army's massive unacknowledged losses of weapons, and detailed the case of a single pistol stolen from Fort Bragg that was used in four shootings in New York. The soldier who diverted it to the black market was never identified. Dumas introduced Huff to two of his closest cronies, both of whom had served at Fort Bragg. One was a Puerto Rican man named David Garcia, whom Dumas presented as his oldest Army buddy. 'This is my brother,' he told Huff. 'I'd do anything for him. I'd kill for him. I'd die for him.' Dumas also introduced Huff to Orlando Fitzhugh, another 40-year-old Black man and former soldier. Fitzhugh, a veteran of the 82nd Airborne's 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, had been investigated for dealing drugs on Fort Bragg in the 1990s and served time in the disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth before being separated in 2000. He would go on to be convicted federally of trafficking cocaine in 2023. Huff asked Garcia and Fitzhugh about the 'military groups that trap narcotics,' but neither man was willing to discuss the subject. Huff was left with the impression that they were afraid of the repercussions of naming names. 'Which was weird,' said Huff, 'because these are people who are not scared of anything.' One day in late 2019, Dumas came to the basement, handed Huff a thumb drive, and told him to keep it in a safe place. On the memory stick was a blackmail letter that Dumas had previously shown to two other people: his teenage son, Timothy Dumas, Jr., and a Waffle House waitress whom he used to hook up with named Brianna Woods. The younger Dumas and Woods both told me that the document contained allegations of drug crime in the Special Forces and that Dumas had written it with the intention of exerting leverage on the Army to reinstate his forfeited pension. So far, Dumas had not carried out his threat to reveal the contents of the letter. Now, he told Huff, he wanted to use it as a kind of dead man's switch. If anything happened to him, he wanted it made public. 'It was like his insurance policy,' said Huff. Huff stashed the thumb drive in the drawer of a minibar in the basement of his house in Lexington. But before doing so, he plugged it into his computer and opened the word processing document. 'I read the whole thing in depth,' he said. 'It was seriously incriminating shit.' Although four sources independently attested to the existence of Dumas' 'insurance policy,' and described its contents in broadly similar terms, Huff alone claimed to have actually read the text. According to him, the lengthy letter was addressed to a high-ranking general and alleged that 'soldiers were involved in bringing opiates from Afghanistan and distributing it on Fort Bragg.' The letter specifically identified the service members who were supposedly transporting commercial quantities of occupied Afghanistan's marquee national product into the United States. 'It names each one of them dudes,' Huff said. Several years had gone by and Huff was unable to recall any of their identities from memory except one. Subsequent events ensured that he would not forget one particular dealer with whom Dumas worked: a white guy in the Army known to Huff, as well as Dumas, as Will Lavigne. 'He was dispersing methamphetamine and cocaine,' Huff said of Lavigne, on Fort Bragg itself and 'to military personnel in and around Fayetteville.' He added, 'Fort Bragg has a lot of secrets. A lot of underground narcotics secrets. It's its own little cartel.' Excerpted from the book THE FORT BRAGG CARTEL by Seth Harp ©2025 by Seth Harp, to be published by Viking on Aug. 12, 2025. Best of Rolling Stone Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best The United States of Weed Gaming Levels Up Solve the daily Crossword
