A woman is found dead in a sleeping bag
In the late summer of 1995, the quiet community of Olalla, Washington, was disturbed by a grim discovery. On August 25th, the body of 61-year-old Patricia Lorraine Barnes, a resident of Seattle, was found in a ditch alongside a rural road. An investigation revealed that the female victim had been shot in the head twice. Her body was found unclothed and partially covered by a sleeping bag. Patricia had been last seen alive in Seattle three days earlier, on August 22, 1995. She had no known connections to Kitsap County, where her body was discovered, making her murder all the more mysterious.
For years, the case grew cold, leaving Patricia's family with no answers and her killer at large. Investigators collected over 130 pieces of evidence from the scene, and though they had a composite sketch of a potential suspect based on an eyewitness account, they were unable to identify the person responsible. At one point, investigators considered the possibility that she could have been a victim of the notorious serial killer Robert Lee Yates, but he was later ruled out as a suspect. The initial investigation, despite its thoroughness, hit a dead end, and the case remained one of Kitsap County's lingering unsolved homicides.
Decades later, a renewed effort to solve cold cases brought Patricia's story back into focus. In 2018, Kitsap County Sheriff's detectives reopened the investigation, re-examining evidence with the help of modern forensic technology. DNA evidence collected from the scene, including a crucial cigarette butt, was sent to specialized labs for advanced testing. Through forensic genealogy, a revolutionary technique that uses DNA to trace family trees, investigators were finally able to identify a suspect: Douglas Keith Krohne. Krohne, who would have been 33 at the time of the murder, had a significant criminal history, including convictions for robbery and an arrest for kidnapping.
The identification of Krohne, however, did not lead to an arrest. He had died in an accidental electrocution in Arizona in 2016. Investigators obtained a DNA sample from his autopsy, and in February 2022, the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab confirmed it was a match to the DNA found at the scene of Patricia's murder. While justice in a courtroom was no longer possible, the scientific breakthrough provided a definitive answer to the question of who had taken Patricia Barnes's life. After 26 long years, her family finally had a resolution, a name to the individual responsible for their loss.
