Suspect arrested in 1994 Seattle killing of 14-year-old Tanya Frazier

Fourteen-year-old Tanya Frazier disappeared on a Monday afternoon in July 1994.

She had attended a summer school class at Meany Middle School on Capitol Hill and was last seen alive at a nearby bus stop. After her mother learned Tanya hadn’t shown up for her job at the Chicken Soup Brigade’s Jackson Street thrift shop, she called Seattle police and reported her daughter missing.

The initial police report labeled Tanya a runaway but her family insisted the shy, responsible girl would never just take off, according to news reports at the time.

Five days later, on a Saturday, her partially clothed body was found down a ravine in the 2200 block of East Highland Drive, discovered by a Korean War veteran who was walking his dog and recognized the smell of death. The King County medical examiner’s office determined she died from sharp force injuries to her head and neck the previous Wednesday, July 20, 1994.

More than 31 years later, Seattle police announced Wednesday that DNA recovered during Tanya’s autopsy was matched to a 57-year-old man, who spent 25 years behind bars before his release in 2021 and was a noncompliant Level 3 sex offender at the time of his arrest Tuesday, according to police and other records.

“For more than 30 years, Tanya’s family wanted nothing more than answers, closure and justice,” Seattle police Chief Shon Barnes said at a Wednesday news conference at police headquarters downtown. “As a father of three kids, I can’t imagine the pain Tanya’s family has had to endure. Today, I am grateful to announce that we have finally found the man responsible for taking her life.”

Detective Rolf Norton, who has worked homicide cases for more than 20 years, credited the work done by the original case detectives, Greg Mixsell and Tom Pike, for setting “the investigative foundation that allowed future generations of detectives to get where we are today.”

The Seattle Police Department didn’t have a crime scene investigation team when Tanya disappeared, so the case detectives did double duty processing the scene, Norton said.

“The fact that we’re here 31 years later, talking about how physical evidence got us to the finish line, is really remarkable and a testament to their skills,” he said. He also acknowledged the work down by forensic scientists at the State Patrol crime lab who tested and retested evidence.

Norton declined to go into specifics about the DNA evidence or describe the circumstances of the 57-year-old man’s arrest, saying he would leave that to the King County prosecuting attorney’s office, which is expected to file criminal charges Friday.

A couple hours after the police news conference, a King County District Court judge found probable cause to hold the man, who waived his presence, for investigation of first-degree murder. Citing the man’s criminal history and propensity for violence, Senior Deputy Prosecutor Mary Barbosa requested that he be held without bail. The judge agreed.

Cloyd Steiger, a retired Seattle police homicide detective, said in a phone interview that Tanya’s killing was the first homicide case he worked on and is one he’s thought and talked about often over the years. He recalled that Tanya was found lying on her right side and there was a bloody handprint on her body. Her clothes were discovered at a West Seattle golf course a couple weeks after her body was found, Steiger said.

“She was an innocent girl. You pull the stops out for a child homicide — there’s clearly a predator out there, and he’s a danger to everybody else if he’s not caught,” Steiger, who retired in 2016, said Wednesday. “It was never a case that just sat on a shelf — never. Somebody was working on it actively the entire 31 years.”

For a while, detectives suspected a school janitor but then focused on another suspect, who volunteered his DNA and was ultimately cleared, he said.

“We were just throwing darts back then. … He probably was not on our radar,” Steiger said of the man who was arrested. “He may have just been someone who randomly saw her and picked her up.”

“Forensics caught up with this guy,” he said. “Forensic science has advanced so much more in the last five years than the previous 30.”