Shadows In The Pines

For decades, the murders of Jennifer Bastian and Michella Welch haunted Tacoma, Washington. Two young girls. Two bicycle rides. Two families left searching for answers. And for more than thirty years, investigators believed they were looking at a single mystery.

In Part One of Bound by Assumption, Dan and Bekah examine the disappearances that terrified an entire community, the massive search efforts that followed, the heartbreakin...

CrimeCon 2026 was an experience we’ll never forget.

This week, Dan and Rebekah take a break from the case files and pull back the curtain on their trip to Las Vegas for CrimeCon 2026. From Nancy Grace’s opening remarks and discussions about the Gabby Petito investigation, to meeting victims’ families still searching for answers, this episode explores the people, stories, and moments that left a lasting impact.

W...

The Loneliest Road to the Stars — Nevada’s Extraterrestrial Highway

What if the most famous alien highway in America has been hiding its biggest secret in plain sight?

This week on Mini Pines, we travel Nevada’s mysterious Extraterrestrial Highway—a lonely stretch of desert road forever linked to Area 51, Bob Lazar, UFO sightings, and the legendary Black Mailbox that became a pilgrimage site for believers ...

🔎 Part 2 of our Diane Downs series is available now.

As detectives continue pulling apart the story from Old Mohawk Road, the investigation begins shifting in a dramatic direction. What started as the search for a mysterious roadside gunman slowly becomes something much darker as timeline problems, forensic evidence, and survivor statements begin pointing investigators toward an unthinkable possibility.

In Part 2, Dan and Bekah ...

🚨 This week on Shadows in the Pines, we head to Springfield, Oregon for one of the most disturbing and psychologically unsettling cases in true crime history: the case of Diane Downs.

On a dark stretch of Old Mohawk Road in May of 1983, three children were shot inside a family car. Seven-year-old Cheryl Lynn Downs was killed. Eight-year-old Christie and three-year-old Danny barely survived. Their mother claimed a bushy-haired str...

🏔️🪣 This week on Mini Pines, we head deep into the high desert of eastern Oregon for one of the strangest lost-treasure legends in American history — The Blue Bucket Mine. 🌵✨

In 1845, a wagon train following the infamous Meek Cutoff became hopelessly lost in the Oregon wilderness. Families starved. People died. And somewhere during the nightmare journey, children playing in a dry creek bed may have unknowingly filled a bl...

September 24th, 1997. A Spokane patrol officer pulls over a white Corvette near East Sprague. The driver is Robert Lee Yates Jr. He’s ticketed and allowed to go. The officer fills out the field interview report and writes one word in the vehicle make field. Camaro. In Part Three of the Robert Lee Yates Jr. arc, Dan and Becka follow the investigation from the inside — the task force, the databases, the September 1999 int...

Shadows in the Pines — The Killing Years (Robert Lee Yates Jr., Part Two) East Sprague Avenue, Spokane. The late 1990s. A social worker named Lynn Everson parks a Winnebago on the strip once a week and keeps a bad-trick list of over a hundred and forty entries. The man in the white Corvette is never on it. In Part Two of the Robert Lee Yates Jr. arc, Dan and Becka spend time with the thirteen women he killed between 1996 and ...

The Predator Next Door — Robert Lee Yates (Part 1) Shadows in the Pines

Spokane, Washington. A quiet city tucked beneath pine-covered hills and long stretches of highway. The kind of place where routines feel safe… and danger doesn’t look the way you expect it to.

In the late 1990s, women began disappearing—many from the edges of society, their lives overlooked, their absences barely making headlines. Som...