Lindsey Baum
Nearly a year before a child-sized skull was recovered in a crab pot two miles off the coast of Westport, Lewis County deputies sent information to the Grays Harbor County Sheriff’s Office about a tip they received from an informant indicating that missing McCleary girl Lindsey Baum’s body had been put inside a crab pot and dumped into the ocean.
A skull was recovered on Feb. 21 after a local fisherman pulled up his crab pot about 2.3 miles off the coast of Westport, according to Grays Harbor County Undersheriff Dave Pimentel.
The fisherman had placed the crab pot about a week prior. It’s possible the skull drifted into the pot sometime in the days leading up to the fisherman’s retrieval of it, law enforcement officials have said.
Despite rumors speculating the skull may belong to Baum, the undersheriff said that a number of people have died while crabbing or fishing in that area.
“We’re not ruling anything out and not speculating,” he said.
Baum went missing at age 10 on June 26, 2009 in McCleary after leaving a friend’s house.
The tip about Baum’s body being dumped in the ocean came from Erwin Bartlett, 50, of Hoquiam, who also testified in the six-week trial against Rick Riffe for the 1985 murders of Ed and Minnie Maurin.
Bartlett, who at the time of his October testimony had a pending felony drug charge, told the jury that he was previously housed in the medical unit of the Lewis County Jail with Riffe and that the now-convicted murderer had confessed to him that he killed the Maurins.
While Bartlett was on the stand, he testified that he told deputies about Riffe’s alleged confession after jail staff had caught him attempting to smuggle his medication into the jail.
Bartlett, who suffers from serious medical issues, had been allowed to leave the jail on temporary furlough for a doctor’s appointment.
When he was caught smuggling the medication by jail staff on Feb. 28 2013, he offered the arresting deputy, Jeremy Almond, information about Riffe, as well as Baum’s disappearance, on his own accord.
Bartlett said during Riffe’s trial that investigators did not promise him anything for the information, but that he was hoping for leniency in his own drug case in exchange for his testimony.
The Hoquiam man has his own lengthy criminal record: He spent 13 years in prison during the ‘80s and ‘90s for two counts of attempted murder after he found his then-wife with two other men. He attacked the men with an ax. While serving his prison sentence, he managed to escape for six months before he was caught and given additional prison time.
While Bartlett mentioned Baum’s name during his testimony at the Riffe trial, he did not go into details about what he supposedly knew of her disappearance.
The deputy’s initial report about Bartlett’s tips about the case, obtained by The Chronicle through a public records request, goes into further detail.
According to the police report:
In the fall of 2012, Bartlett was in Hoquiam near a boat launch talking to a friend when his friend admitted to killing a young girl, Bartlett said. Several years prior, Bartlett’s friend told him he had accidentally run over a girl with his car while she was walking down the street.
He said his friend had just left a casino near Shelton. Bartlett told the deputy that his friend had confessed that when he ran over the girl, he was “loaded” and driving while drunk and high on meth.
Bartlett’s friend then allegedly told him that he was in a panic, so he shoved her body inside his vehicle, drove to a boat on the coast, put her body inside a crab pot and threw her into the ocean.
At the time of the alleged confession, Bartlett said his friend was crying.
Bartlett also told police that same friend had confessed the story to other people.
Chief Deputy Stacy Brown, spokeswoman from the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office, confirmed that reports about Bartlett’s admission were forwarded onto the Grays Harbor County Sheriff’s Office on March 6, 2013.
While the Grays Harbor County undersheriff said he was not in a position to comment on specific information regarding Baum’s disappearance, he said throughout the years the sheriff’s office has received a number of possible tips about it.
“We’ve had dozens of alleged informants from many different sources,” he said.
Based off the partial skull recovered last week, Pimentel said there is no way to determine at this point how the individual died, or if it was an accidental or homicidal death.
The fisherman is not suspected of any crime, he said.
An anthropologist in King County told investigators that the skull was “unequivocally human” and likely belonged to a younger person, Pimentel said. Age, gender and information pointing to how long the skull had been underwater is currently unavailable. The skull has since been sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s headquarters in Quantico, Virginia.
The FBI has assured the Grays Harbor County Sheriff’s Office that the skull is a “top priority,” Pimentel said, and that the federal agency will use all its technology to analyze it.
He said he hopes to get DNA results back in a few weeks.
He said it is possible a deep-water dive team will search the area where the skull was recovered in an attempt to find additional bones.
