Tragic mom Whitney Decker missed a golden opportunity to restrict her ex-husband from seeing the three daughters he is now accused of murdering, DailyMail.com can reveal.
A judge in Washington State gave Travis Decker 30 days to seek mental health and anger management counseling last September, warning that if he didn’t Whitney could stop him having contact with the girls.
‘The mother will have the right to further limit visitation,’ the judge ruled.
The deadline came and went without Travis following through on the counseling.
But Whitney didn’t inform authorities until it was too late, court papers reviewed by Dailymail.com show.
Travis is currently on the run wanted in connection with the murder of the three girls, Paityn, 9, Evelyn, 8, and Olivia, 5, who were found with plastic bags over their heads and with their hands zip-tied on June 6.
Early court filings in their custody case, viewed by DailyMail.com, described the 32-year-old as having a ‘loving and stable relationship’ with his daughters.
Whitney did not raise any concerns about Travis’s parenting or behavior for the first three years after their split.
When she finally unloaded on him last September, detailing psychological problems and a transient lifestyle that left the children anxious and crying, a court temporarily stripped Travis’s right to overnight visits.
It was then that Whitney finally pleaded with the court to intervene, detailing Travis’s severe psychological problems and ‘unstable’ lifestyle that she claimed had begun to take a toll on their daughters.
Washington mom-of-three Whitney Decker hadn’t raised any serious concerns about ex-husband Travis since their divorce and custody proceedings began in 2022
Travis Decker, 32, who is currently on the run and wanted for allegedly murdering his daughters, was ordered to seek mental health treatment and anger management counseling as part of a parenting plan, but never followed through, according to court records
But when he ultimately failed to follow through with the court order, Whitney never informed the authorities, nor did she pursue her parental rights.
Instead the unsupervised visits continued and eight months later the girls were found dead at a campsite in Leavenworth, a 38 mile drive from their home in Wenatchee, Washington.
And today, DailyMail.com can reveal that while Whitney had told authorities that Travis had verbally agreed to follow through with the court-issued parenting plan, records show he never even signed the September 27 court order.
In fact, court filings show he had objected to her proposed parenting plan and ‘proclaimed that he liked to take the children camping on his weekends’.
And though Whitney had claimed in the wake of the tragedy that she had no reason to suspect Travis had any ill intentions when he picked them up on May 30, unearthed court filings now appear to paint a picture of a deeply unstable man and missed red flags.
The bereaved mom admitted in court filings that Travis, an Afghanistan war veteran, suffers from ‘complex PTSD’ and ‘other mental health issues’, which apparently worsened when he left the military.
In the more recent court documents, she expressed concern about his declining mental health and its impact on the girls, yet indicated a desire to maintain his relationship with their daughters.
And even now, with Travis on the run and wanted for their murders, DailyMail.com can reveal that Whitney still feels ‘almost purely empathy’ for her ex-husband, who she believes was failed by a broken system.
The couple’s daughters, Paityn, 9, Evelyn, 8, and Olivia, 5, were found dead at a campsite in Leavenworth, 20 miles from their Washington State home
The girls’ wrists had been bound with zip ties and each had been suffocated with a plastic bag
‘She knows that the monster that came and out and killed her babies is not Travis,’ her attorney Arianna Cozart, who has spoken with the grieving mom extensively since the kids’ bodies were found last week, told DailyMail.com.
‘She has a lot of empathy still for Travis,’ Cozart said as she recalled Whitney telling her to ‘think about what he must have fought and struggled with all these years’.
‘For this to come out of this man who was a loving father, he’s broken, a broken man. It’s not him,’ said Cozart.
‘She just wants him to come back to humanity here because obviously he suffered some sort of break.’
Papers from their Family Court cases provided no indication of any red flags when Whitney, 35, filed for divorce in 2022 and showed they worked out custody arrangements for the children.
‘He has them every other weekend and meets all parenting expectations during the time he is with them,’ she informed the court on November 14, 2022, while declaring he has a ‘loving and stable relationship with the children.’
In her signed parenting plan at the time, Whitney cited no mental health issues, abuse, or any ‘other serious problems.’
Lawyer Cozart similarly told DailyMail.com that there were never any allegations of violence and that she doesn’t believe he ever hit her or the children, though she acknowledged he could be ‘abrasive.’
The couple remained close friends even after the divorce, she said.
However, in an interview with DailyMail.com last week, Binh Nguyen, a next-door neighbor, claimed Whitney told him in the past that Travis had beaten her and gone ‘crazy,’ leading to their divorce.
‘She said she can’t work it out, that he’s crazy and, ‘he beat me’,’ Nguyen said.
Documents from the divorce and custody cases seen by DailyMail.com include no allegations of domestic violence, but a disturbing picture emerged in September when Whitney accused him of neglect and cited a ‘long-term emotional or physical problem that gets in the way’ of his ‘ability to parent’.
‘Since our separation, it has become increasingly clear that Travis has been struggling to maintain stability in his life,’ she stated in court papers, citing his transience and unreliability.
‘This lack of stability has unfortunately had a negative impact on our children,’ she added.
‘They are deeply affected by the uncertainty surrounding their time with their dad, which has led to heightened emotional stress.’
Authorities released photos of Decker from before he went missing, showing him with sunglasses that obscured his eyes and tattoos all down his arm
In one image, Travis was captured carrying pizza boxes while wearing a tan shirt with the number 59 on the sleeve, dark shorts, flip flops with his hair tied back
She cited the girls’ ‘screaming/crying bouts at drop-off or when they get off a phone call’, and how they were in therapy to help them cope.
‘Travis also has some emotional/mental health issues that were the primary catalyst to the end of our marriage and have also affected the girls greatly,’ she wrote.
She also cited his Army experience and how his ‘borderline personality disorder and narcissism became rampant’ after his stint. He later joined the National Guard.
Whitney also pointed out that after moving out of their house in October 2022, her ex ‘bounced around’ two armory sites for a while, briefly got an apartment, then bought an RV that later got repossessed.
He’d work out of town for the Carpenter’s Union out of Spokane and come back for weekends to stay with the kids at the armory.
She noted: ‘I didn’t feel comfortable with the girls staying in the armory with a bunch of strange men and he told me he was staying in the RV but then I found out he really was staying at the armory again.’
She also revealed that ‘he has had some outbursts where he has burst into my home against my objections and yelled for the girls.’
She documented a series of incidents back in 2022, when he took the girls to Montana without notifying her.
She also described times he picked up the girls from school without telling her, had dropped them off early, or not showed up.
She recalled a time Olivia FaceTimed her ‘screaming, crying Travis was nowhere in sight,’ and describing how her sister Paityn was left ‘unattended in the armory with Olivia’ who was playing with a machine and had ‘smashed Olivia’s fingers’.
Another time, daughter Evelyn came back from the weekend ‘with welts between her legs that looked like what happens when you sit in an accident for too long’.
Among the incidents from 2024, she described a time he hitchhiked to her house, arriving three hours late, asking to stay in the basement and saying he could have a stranger go pick up the girls from a play.
The following month, Travis showed up two hours late to drop off, after staying in a hotel where the girls said they’d been kicked out and had to sleep in a tent.
‘You can see from the above that Travis just keeps getting more and more unstable,’ she wrote in the court papers.
‘He has made huge sacrifices to serve our country and loves his girls very much, but he has got to get better for our girls.’
The sisters’ lifeless bodies were discovered at a campsite in Leavenworth – about 20 miles from their home. Their wrists had been bound with zip ties and each of them had been suffocated with a plastic bag
The girls’ bodies were found approximately 38 miles from their mother’s home. Decker is still on the run, as authorities warn locals that he could be dangerous due to his military training
‘I do not want to keep Travis from the girls at all,’ she stated.
‘To the contrary I have bent over backwards to facilitate that relationship. But I cannot have our girls staying in what is essentially a homeless shelter, at times unsupervised, with dozens of strange men, or staying in a tent or living in his truck with him both in extreme temperatures and unknown areas for their safety.’
She pleaded with the court that, ‘Given the current situation, I believe it is in their best interest to temporarily remove the option of overnight visits to be revisited when Travis is no longer experiencing homelessness and can provide consistency.
‘This will ensure that they can remain in a safe and stable environment overnight until he is able to secure a consistent residence,’ she wrote.
But the unsupervised visits continued.
On June 3, a day after the girls’ bodies were discovered near the remote Rock Island campground an hour from their home, Whitney shared some additional details in a petition for protection on the grounds of ‘domestic violence.’
Referencing the parenting plan from September, she stated: ‘Travis has never gotten that counseling or that evaluation.’
The document notes that Travis had been working on a construction project for a performing arts center in downtown Wenatchee.
A GoFundMe was launched for Whitney as she grapples with the tragic deaths of her daughters
Pictured above is the home where Whitney and her three daughters lived in Wenatchee, Washington, and where Travis had picked them up for the fatal camping trip
‘He had seemed better, then it seemed like things just started happening one after another,’ Whitney wrote, revealing that he was ‘getting bullied at work and that he was really lonely.’
The protection order also described how he’d been showing up to the girls’ activities but not participating, coming to soccer games but not watching.
He’d also been speaking in recent months with his old pastor in Georgia for hours nightly before recently going silent him.
And days before the deadly visit, he tried to get back together with Whitney.
‘He tried to reconcile our marriage and had even made comments to the girls about him moving back in, and I rejected his advancements,’ she stated.
Decker remains on the run, as law enforcement has fanned out across the vast wilderness of the Wenatchee Valley and near the border with Canada.
Cozart clarified that the grieving mother has no doubts her ex-husband is responsible for her children’s horrific deaths but also knows that he was a good father who would never hurt them if not for the lack of mental health services provided for veterans.
She now wants Decker found not so he can be punished, but so he can finally receive treatment for borderline personality disorder and possibly post-traumatic stress disorder, left untreated by a broken VA system.
