The Lewis County Coroner’s Office has positively identified the human remains discovered in 2010 in a rural area near Toledo as belonging to a man whom the sheriff’s office had pinned as the suspect in a 2008 attempted rape.
The man, Travis J. Seeber, was 33 at the time when he was last seen on Sep. 6, 2008 — the morning he allegedly attempted to rape the woman who was babysitting his children, according to a police report about the incident obtained by The Chronicle through a public disclosure request.
The night of his disappearance, Seeber was reportedly under the influence of methamphetamine when he returned to his home on the 200 block of McGlaughlin Road near Winlock where he lived with his girlfriend and their three children, according to the report. His girlfriend had gone out for the night to Olympia with a friend, leaving their children in the care of a babysitter.
Seeber, who had left the house at about 8 p.m. Sept. 5 to go to a bar in Chehalis, returned to the house at about 1 a.m. and allegedly tried to pin the babysitter to the ground and rape her at gunpoint, according to the police report.
The woman continued to fight against Seeber until he abruptly stood up and began apologizing for what he did and left the house, according to the report. A few hours later, Seeber’s abandoned Dodge van was located on the 100 block of Cougar Lane, which is a private drive in a rural area outside of Toledo. Deputies and a police dog searched the area at the time his car was discovered; however, they did not locate him.
About a year and a half later, a child playing in that area came across part of a decomposed body about 150 feet from where his van had been found, according to the police report.
The coroner’s office issued a press release Monday morning, three years later, that confirmed that the remains belonged to Seeber, who would have been 38 years old if he had lived.
While detectives had suspected from the beginning that the remains belonged to Seeber, authorities were only able to say conclusively after a positive DNA identification was made this month.
Since the DNA match needed to positively identify Seeber was not part of a criminal case, the DNA samples were sent to the University of North Texas, and employees at a lab there analyzed Seeber’s DNA and compared it to living relatives for free, said Lewis County Coroner Warren McLeod. In criminal cases, DNA analysis is sent to the Washington State Patrol crime lab in Vancouver.
Because that lab is inundated with pending cases, and is so backlogged, they are unable to take non-criminal requests for DNA confirmation like this one, McLeod said.
DNA obtained from the remains was successfully compared to the DNA of Seeber’s father, who is currently living in Montana, McLeod said. The successful confirmation came after two other failed attempts: one from a cousin and another from a different relative. The one from the cousin was ruled inconclusive and the second DNA sample from the other relative was contaminated.
At the time of the discovery of the partial remains, detectives from the sheriff’s office, along with cadaver dogs trained to sniff out dead bodies, saturated the surrounding area searching for the rest of the remains. Because animals had disturbed the body and scattered parts of it throughout the field, authorities were unable to locate the head.
During their search of the area, detectives also located the .9mm handgun he was believed to have had in his possession the night of his disappearance, according to the police report. The gun was located near his body and had a spent shell casing jammed in gun.
The last people to see Seeber the night of his disappearance told police that he was paranoid, “whacked out,” and “out of his mind on drugs.” The night of his disappearance Seeber, who was a convicted felon for a drug-related charge, was also reportedly acting suicidal. He had previously told friends that he would never go back to prison.
The cause and manner of death for Seeber is still undetermined, McLeod said. The partial skeleton is currently at the King County Medical Examiner’s Office.
A forensic anthropologist will examine it to see if a cause and manner can be determined from the skeleton, he said.
“If she can’t make a determination from the bones, it may remain undetermined,” McLeod said.
