The 49 Year Colorado Cold Case That Took Two States to CRACK

On the morning of December 6th, 1975, a couple riding motorcycles through Westminster, Colorado, pulled over near the corner of 100th Avenue and Lowell Boulevard. They had spotted something in the grass. A 20-year-old woman was lying there, partially clothed, sexually assaulted, and asphyxiated. Two days earlier, she had hitchhiked north from Denver to visit her boyfriend at the Adams County Detention Center.

 When the visit was over, she walked out and tried to thumb a ride home. Somewhere along the highway, a man stopped for her, and she got in. Investigators collected biological evidence at autopsy, but in 1975, there was no science that could read a sample like that. The samples were sealed and put into storage.

 The man who left them was never on the suspect list, never questioned, and never named. It took 49 years to put a name to the killer. In December of 1975, Terri’s boyfriend was being held at the Adams County Detention Center in Brighton, Colorado, about 20 miles northeast of Denver. She visited him when she could. She hitchhiked to the jail.

 Hitchhiking was common in 1975, especially in the west, where the distances between towns were long and public transit barely existed outside the city centers. She had done it before. That day, she caught a series of rides north to Brighton, made it to the detention center, and saw her boyfriend. When the visit was over, she left the facility and walked to the road to find a ride back to Denver.

 Somewhere along that route, she was picked up by a man she did not know. She got into his car. She was never seen alive again. Her body was found two days later in a field on the northern edge of Westminster. The location was semi-rural at the time, open land near a developing stretch of the northern Denver suburbs.

 The couple on motorcycles who found her pulled over because they saw something that did not belong in the grass. They called the police. Westminster homicide detectives responded and processed the scene. The cause of death was asphyxiation. She had been killed somewhere else and dumped at the location.

 Her personal belongings were scattered in the grass nearby. There was no identification on her at first and it took investigators several days to determine who she was. Once they identified her, they began piecing together her movements that day working backward from the scene to the detention center in Brighton. The connection to the jail visit gave detectives a timeline.

 She had signed the visitor log at the detention center and seen her boyfriend. When the visit ended, she walked out of the building and started looking for a ride south. The last confirmed sighting of her alive was at the detention center. Everything after that was unknown. That road was open country in 1975, farmland and two-lane highway.

 A car could pull over and nobody would see it. The area around 100th and Lowell was undeveloped enough that a body could go unnoticed for 2 days before anyone found it. Detectives worked the case through the end of 1975 and into 1976. They tracked her movements, confirmed the jail visit through visitor records, and tried to find anyone who had seen her after she left the facility on December 4th.

Staff at the detention center were interviewed. Other visitors who had been there that day were contacted. The highway between Brighton and Westminster was canvassed with detectives stopping at gas stations and rest stops along the route talking to truck drivers who ran the road regularly.

 Nobody came forward with a description of the driver or the car. The detention center kept records of visitors but not of the roads outside its gates. Hitchhiking homicides were among the most difficult crimes to investigate in the 1970s. The victim entered a stranger’s car voluntarily. There was no forced entry to investigate and no address [music] to canvas.

 Nobody could place the attacker at the scene because there was no scene other than the inside of a car on a highway. The only connection between Terry and the man who killed her was a roadside encounter that nobody witnessed. He pulled over and she got in. That was the entire point of contact and it happened on a stretch of empty highway where no one else was watching.

Surveillance cameras did not exist in 1975. There were no cell phone records to pull, no toll booth receipts to trace. The road between Brighton and the northern suburbs was open farmland with nothing to record who drove it on any given afternoon. The physical evidence collected at autopsy was sealed and placed in storage at the police department.

 At the time, no laboratory anywhere could extract a genetic identity from that kind of material. The samples were labeled boxed and stored alongside her clothing and everything else recovered from the scene. Without a witness or a suspect, the investigation went cold. New investigators inherited it over the years, pulling the records, rereading the interviews, checking whether advances in forensic science could be applied to the stored material.

Each one reached the same dead end. The evidence was there, but no technology existed to read it. The investigation outlasted the careers of the original investigators. Some retired before it was solved. Others left the department entirely. The samples sat in an evidence locker at the same address year after year untouched.

 David Becker was Terry’s brother. He stayed in contact with the police department over the years, calling periodically to ask whether anything had changed. The answer was always the same. Nothing new, no leads, no name. His parents died without knowing who killed their daughter. His sister died, too. By the time anyone identified the man responsible, David was the only surviving member of his immediate family.

 He had carried the question for decades through the years when the calls produced nothing and the years when he stopped expecting them to. He kept calling anyway. The police department never told him to stop and he never did. Teree had graduated from Kelly Walsh High School in Casper and worked at the Golden Bell Press, a local newspaper, before moving to Denver.

 She held conversations with anyone she met and lived without much hesitation. Her family said she was independent, curious, and unafraid of starting over in a city where she did not know anyone. She was 20 years old and building a life when someone took it from her on a highway north of Denver. David’s sister, gone at 20 with no name attached to the person who killed her.

 He had lived with that for nearly 50 years. In 2003, 28 years after the murder, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation processed the physical material from the autopsy and extracted a male DNA profile. Earlier methods had been too crude to work with what the evidence contained, but by 2003, the technology had advanced enough to produce usable genetic data from a sample that had been in storage since the Ford administration.

 An analyst entered the profile into CODIS, the FBI’s national database of convicted offender profiles. If the man who killed Teree had been convicted of a qualifying offense anywhere in the country and required to provide a sample, the system would flag a match. It came back empty. The man’s DNA existed nowhere in the criminal justice system.

He could have had a record and still been invisible to every database in the country if his convictions predated the collection laws. The results sat in CODIS without a name attached to it. The result ran automatically against new entries for the next 10 years. Every time the national system expanded with new offender submissions, it checked the Becker result against them.

 Every check came back the same way. The DNA was their only lead, and it pointed nowhere. Terri had been a kid from Casper, Wyoming, who moved to Denver and ended up hitchhiking to a county jail on a December afternoon to visit her boyfriend. She caught rides north, made the visit, walked out, and never came home.

 Her brother David was still making phone calls to the police department 28 years later, asking the same question he had been asking since 1975. By 2013, nobody had an answer for him. Then, in 2013, something changed. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department submitted DNA from an unsolved 1991 murder to the national system. The evidence came from a different crime scene in another state, 750 miles away, involving a different victim entirely.

The Las Vegas submission had been part of a broader effort by Nevada law enforcement to enter old evidence into the system, cases that predated routine database submissions. When that profile entered CODIS, it flagged a match. The DNA from the 1991 killing in Nevada matched the DNA from Terri Becker’s death in Westminster.

The same man had attacked both women in two states 16 years apart, and nobody knew his name. The Nevada case involved Sherri Bridgewater. She was 30 years old, a mother of two, living in an apartment on West Monroe Avenue on the west side of Las Vegas. She had been working to turn her life around and had been attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the area.

People who knew her said she was trying to get stable and build a safe home for her children. On the 12th of May, 1991, she was assaulted and strangled in her home. Investigators believed the killer had met her at one of the AA meetings. She had let someone into her home, someone she believed she could trust, and that person killed her.

 The Clark County Coroner ruled the cause of death as strangulation. A forensic kit was collected and the evidence was stored. The murder went unsolved the same way Terri’s had. Las Vegas police worked it for years without identifying a suspect. Investigators followed leads, interviewed people connected to the AA meetings Bridgewater had attended, and ran names through criminal records systems.

 None of it produced a viable suspect. Sherry’s father called detectives periodically over the years asking whether there had been any progress. He died without an answer. Both of her parents were gone before anyone was identified. Las Vegas detectives stayed in contact with Sherry’s two children over the years, updating them when there was something to report and checking in when there was not.

 The 2013 database had linked the two cases for the first time. The man who killed Terri in Westminster in 1975 was the same man who strangled Sherry in 1991. He had moved between Colorado and Nevada without being detected. He targeted women who were alone and vulnerable, and after 38 years, his DNA still belonged to an unnamed entry in a federal system.

Investigators knew they were looking for one person instead of two. They still had no idea who he was. In 2018, investigators determined that the Becker evidence was strong enough to submit for genetic genealogy. The technique had been used successfully in other cold cases by then. Three organizations took on the work.

 The Colorado Bureau of Investigation, Parabon NanoLabs in Virginia, and Solved by DNA, a Denver-based genealogy company run by an investigative genealogist named Michelle Kennedy. Kennedy had been in law enforcement since 1993 and had helped solve dozens of cold murders in Colorado. The process works by uploading crime scene DNA to public ancestry databases, where millions of Americans have voluntarily submitted their genetic data through consumer testing services.

 If a distant relative of the unknown person has taken one of those tests, a genealogist can identify the shared segments. From there, the team builds a family tree backward from the match and narrows the search to a specific individual. Distant relatives appeared in the results. Kennedy and the team began building the tree, but the work stalled almost immediately.

 The unknown man’s parents had divorced when he was young, and he had been adopted by his stepfather. He grew up using his stepfather’s surname, which created a fundamental problem for the genealogists. The genetic matches from the ancestry databases pointed to his biological family, but the name he had lived under, the name on his arrest records and prison intake forms, belonged to a different family >> [music] >> entirely.

 That disconnect between his bloodline and his legal identity added years to the work. The genealogists would trace a branch of the family tree forward and lose the trail because the surname did not match any of the genetic relatives. They checked court records for adoptions in multiple counties across both Colorado and Nevada. They cross-referenced birth certificates with marriage records, looking for women in the family tree who had remarried and had a child take a new surname.

The trail kept splitting in directions that led nowhere. Kennedy and the team worked the file for 5 years. 5 years of tracing bloodlines, pulling records from county offices and courthouses in multiple states, and trying to close the gap between what the DNA said and what the paper trail showed. Other investigations came and went during that time.

 The Becker and Bridgewater work kept circling back to the same unanswered question. By late 2023, the tree had narrowed enough to identify a suspect born in 1950. A criminal record in both Colorado and Nevada, dead since 1991, the same year Sherry Bridgewater was strangled. After 5 years of dead ends, Kennedy said, “We finally had a name.

” His name was Thomas Martin Elliott. Elliott was born on the 14th of December 1950. He spent most of his adult life in and out of prison. Shortly before the murder in late 1975, he committed a burglary in Lakewood, Colorado. He was convicted and sentenced to 6 years in the Colorado Department of Corrections.

 While he was locked up for the burglary, the Becker murder sat unsolved at the Westminster Police Department. The man who killed her was in a state prison 40 miles away, serving time on a completely unrelated charge. His name never appeared in connection with the Westminster investigation. Nobody in Colorado law enforcement connected him to what happened that December.

 He served his time on the burglary, went through the system, and was processed out the other side. He was released in 1981 and moved to Nevada. Shortly after arriving in Carson City, he sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl. He was arrested, convicted of the assault on the girl, and sentenced [music] to 10 years in the Nevada prison system.

 He served the full sentence, a full decade behind bars, and was released again in early 1991. When he walked out of prison that year, he had spent the majority of his adult life locked up, cycling between Colorado and Nevada facilities. Each time the system processed him on the charges it knew about and released him. Each time, he found another victim.

 The convictions on his record were for burglary and sexual assault. What the record did not show was that he had already killed woman in Colorado in 1975. Within months of his release from the Nevada prison system, he encountered Sherry Bridgewater through AA meetings in Las Vegas. On the 12th of May, 1991, he strangled her in her apartment on West Monroe Avenue.

 Five months later, on the 30th of October, 1991, Elliott killed himself in Las Vegas. He was 40 years old. Every time the system released him, he attacked someone. His body was buried at the Southern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Boulder City, about 30 miles southeast of the Strip. A short military enlistment earlier in his life had qualified him for burial there.

He was put in the ground under a government headstone with his name and dates of service. And for the next 32 years, nobody connected him to what he had done. In October of 2023, investigators obtained a court order to exhume Elliott’s remains from the cemetery in Southern Nevada. The process required coordination between multiple agencies and jurisdictions across state lines.

 The Vegas Justice League, a Las Vegas advocacy group that supports cold case investigations, covered the costs of the exhumation. A detective and a senior criminalist from the Westminster Police Department flew to Nevada to witness the process. Elliott had been in the ground for 32 years. The exhumation took place under controlled conditions at the cemetery grounds, with forensic technicians carefully extracting tissue and bone samples from the remains.

 The samples were submitted to a laboratory for genetic analysis and comparison against the crime scene profiles from both the Becker and Bridgewater cases. The process took several weeks. In December of 2023, the results confirmed what the genealogy had predicted. The sample from Elliott’s remains matched the unknown male profile from both cases. The match was definitive.

 On the 31st of January 2024, the Westminster Police Department and Las Vegas Metropolitan Police jointly announced that both cases had been solved. Thomas Martin Elliott was formally identified as the killer of Terry Becker in 1975 and Sherry Bridgewater in 1991. The announcement came 49 years after Terry’s death and 33 years after Sherry’s death.

 David Becker was alive to hear it. He was the last surviving member of Terry’s immediate family. “I can’t say enough how grateful I am,” he said. “It’s hard to believe after all these years. Just knowing the person responsible is not out there taking away some other sibling’s life,” he said. “To me, there’s comfort in that.

” Elliott had been dead for 33 years by the time investigators named him. He was never once questioned about either woman. He died as a man with convictions for burglary and child sexual assault, not as someone suspected of two murders across state lines. The connection between those two crimes, between a field in Westminster and an apartment on West Monroe Avenue, took 38 years to establish.

 Three decades of forensic advances, a database match that linked two cold murders across 750 miles, five years of genealogy tracing a family tree through an adoption and a name change, and the exhumation of a body from a government cemetery in the Nevada desert. From the original crime to the final identification, the investigation passed through the hands of dozens of investigators, genealogists, and lab technicians across state lines and nearly five decades.

 A young woman in a field near 100th and Lowell, found by a couple on motorcycles on a December morning in 1975. The man who left her there was buried under a government headstone in the Nevada desert for 32 years before anyone connected him to what he had done. It took 49 years to find his name. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments.

 More solved cases in the playlist.