Washington 1989 Cold Case Solved — He Hid in Plain Sight for 36 Years 

Washington 1989 Cold Case Solved — He Hid in Plain Sight for 36 Years 

36 years after the murder of a woman in Everett, authorities have arrested a suspect. In a statement to police, the family of Mary Ann Daniel says she lived a hard life and she is now in peace. On the afternoon of February 1st, 1989, the manager of a small house on Hoyt Avenue in Everett, Washington opened a door at the back of the property to collect rent from a tenant who had stopped answering.

He had been to the same door 2 days earlier. He had looked inside, seen the lower portion of a woman lying on the bed, decided she was sleeping or passed out, and quickly left. When he came back on February 1st, she was in the same position. This time he saw the cord around her neck. She was 33 years old, disabled, and had been placed in transitional housing only 3 weeks earlier.

The killer left blood on the cord, but no laboratory in 1989 could read it. The case stayed open for 36 years, and through every one of them her sister waited. The man who killed her did not. This is how they finally found her killer. Her name was Mary Ann Daniels. She had lived with a developmental disability since childhood and needed help with the everyday things most people handle on their own.

Her brother described her as trusting and carefree. Someone who always believed the good in people. Her sister Sandi lived close enough to stay in regular contact. Everett sat 30 miles north of Seattle on the eastern shore of Puget Sound. In 1989, it was a working-class city of about 60,000 people built around the lumber mills, the naval station, and the railroad lines that ran along the waterfront.

 The Bayside neighborhood, on the eastern edge of the city, was a quieter part of town. Older houses and duplexes, some of them subdivided into smaller units for tenants who could not afford their own place. Rents were cheap. Foot traffic was thin even during the day. On a On a night in January, the streets emptied out by 9:00. On January 9th, 1989, Mary Ann’s case worker placed her in transitional housing.

 The housing itself was a converted garage at the back of a house on the 2100 block of Hoyt Avenue, broken up into four small rooms. Up front, the main house had also been subdivided into separate units. The whole property functioned as informal low-rent housing for people who needed somewhere to live and could not afford anywhere else.

 Mary Ann was assigned one of the rooms in the back. For Mary Ann, the room in Bayside was supposed to be the start of something, a place where she could practice managing her own life, somewhere she could spend her evenings, learn the neighbors, walk to the store when she needed to, and build a life in a city where she did not yet know many people.

 Her sister Sandi was close to her and never felt good about the placement. She lived alone in the room. At night, she watched the small television set against the wall. She was trying. She had been in that room for less than 3 weeks when she was killed. The last time anyone could confirm Mary Ann was alive was the evening of Saturday, January 28th, 1989.

 On the nightstand beside her bed, a TV Guide lay open to the listings for shows that aired from 11:30 at night onward on January 28th. The page she had turned to was the last thing she had read. It told investigators, decades later, that she had been watching television late on a Saturday night when whatever happened began.

 January in Everett is dark and wet. The sun sets before 5:00 in the afternoon, and the rain comes off the sound in sheets that can last for days. The streets in Bayside were slick and empty after dark. Streetlights cast circles of orange on the wet sidewalks and parked cars. The only sound on the block on a winter Saturday was the rain and the occasional car passing.

 Sometime late that Saturday, someone came into Mary Ann’s room. There was no sign of forced entry. Nothing about the door had been broken or pried. Whoever had come in had either been let in or had walked through a door that was already open. The walls in the subdivided garage were thin. No one in the other rooms reported hearing anything.

 On the morning of January 30th, the property manager came to the house on Hoyt Avenue to collect rent. He went around to the back of the property and walked up to Mary Ann’s door. The door was ajar. He looked inside. Through the doorway he saw a body on the bed. He told himself she was sleeping. He pulled the door shut and walked away.

>> Two days passed. The body stayed in the same position. Other tenants in the house came and went and did not knock. The neighbors on Hoyt Avenue went about their lives. Mary Ann’s case worker did not come by either. From January 28th through February 1st, nobody close enough to her walked up to her door and noticed the silence.

 On the afternoon of February 1st, the property manager came back. He stepped up to the same door he had walked away from two days earlier. The body had not moved. This time he saw what he had missed before, the binding wrapped around her throat. He called 911. Everett police arrived at the room at the back of the subdivided house in Bayside.

 Mary Ann was face down on the bed, undressed and motionless. Around her neck was a single binding made from three separate items twisted together, a bra, the strap from her purse, a cut electrical cord. By the time her body was found, she had been dead for four days. The autopsy estimated the time of death as late on Saturday, January 28th.

>> The cause of death was strangulation. Three items braided and pulled tight from behind with enough force to leave deep marks on the skin and stop the breath. Whoever had done it had taken time to braid the binding. It was not the work of a moment. There was something else. There was blood on the cord that did not belong to Mary Ann.

 The killer had cut or scraped himself in the process, and his blood had soaked into the fabric in the strap. There were also two short hairs on her lower back that did not belong to her. Detectives photographed the binding before they removed it. They documented the room from every angle. They lifted the rest of the cut electrical cord from beside the bed and the TV guide from the nightstand.

 Each piece was tagged and sealed. Everything was placed into long-term evidence storage at the department. Everett detectives focused on the three men closest to Mary Ann’s life in the days after her body was found. The property manager who had found her, a man she had once been involved with, and a neighbor who had moved into the same property at around the same time as Mary Ann. All three were brought in.

 The neighbor told detectives he barely knew her. He had no prior arrests, no history of violence, nothing in his background flagged him as a danger to anyone. They took his statement, ran his record, and moved on. He was not considered a person of interest in 1989. Detectives canvassed the property and the surrounding blocks.

 They talked to the other tenants in the converted garage and the main house. They walked Hoyt Avenue and the cross streets, asking the neighbors the same set of questions. Who had been on the block on the night of January 28th? Who had seen anyone unfamiliar in the area? Who had heard anything through the thin walls of the building? Investigators interviewed Mary Ann’s family, her case worker, and the other tenants on the property.

 They built a timeline of her last week. They documented who had visited her, who had called her, who had checked on her. The list was short. The case worker told them she had not been to Hoyt Avenue in the days before Mary Ann was killed. The original investigators worked the case through the spring of 1989 and into the summer.

 They re-interviewed each of the three suspects. They cross-checked alibis. They followed up on every lead the file generated. They walked the block at the same time of night Mary Ann had been killed, watching the windows and the cars and the people. By the end of the year, they had a thick case file and three names that nothing in their hands could connect to the binding.

Nobody had seen anything. Nobody had heard anything. Nobody could place a stranger near the property or describe a car on the street. Investigators left the canvas with a stack of statements that all said the same thing, a quiet Saturday on a quiet street in a quiet neighborhood. For most of the next 30 years, detectives focused on the other two men they had interviewed in the first weeks.

 They believed Mary Ann had been killed either by the former lover or by the property manager, the men she had known, the men with access. The blood on the binding was their best lead. No new suspect emerged in the 1990s. None in the 2000s, either. The case file went into the cold homicide drawer at the department, pulled out every few years when a new investigator inherited the open cases and looked for something that might have been missed.

 Sandi waited. Now her sister’s case file would sit unsolved for decades. Sandi carried the grief. She carried the knowledge that whoever came through her sister’s door on a Saturday night in January had walked into a city where nobody was looking for him. The 1990s came and went. The 2000s came and went. Everett changed around the fixed point of Mary Ann’s unsolved murder.

 Down at the waterfront, the mill sites gave way to mixed-use buildings. The Boeing factory expanded. The city’s economy shifted away from logging and toward aerospace and technology. Bayside stayed quieter than the rest of town, a pocket of older houses and subdivided rentals where the foot traffic was thin and the street lights cast long circles over empty sidewalks.

 The house on Hoyt Avenue changed tenants and changed tenants again. The small room at the back of the converted garage where she had been killed became just another room in just another low-rent property. Original investigators retired. Each new investigator who inherited the file read the same notes and witness statements and ran into the same wall.

 The blood was there. The hairs were there. The science to read them was not. Every year the anniversary of Mary Ann’s death came and went without a press conference, without an arrest, without a name. 20 years passed, then 25, then 30. Each anniversary the case stayed open. Each anniversary the file was a little thicker for the new investigator’s notes.

 Each anniversary she was a little further from the world she had been killed in. Other families in Everett got those calls in those years. The 1990s and the 2000s saw arrests in old homicides as DNA work matured. The Daniels family kept waiting for the call that did not come. When it finally came in January of 2025, Mary Ann would have been 69 years old.

 In 2011, the department sent samples from the autopsy to a lab for testing against the men they had been watching for 22 years. By then DNA testing had gotten good enough to compare an old degraded sample against samples from specific people. They wanted confirmation of what they had believed since the first weeks of the investigation.

 The results came back. The DNA from Mary Ann’s body did not match the former lover. It did not match the property manager. And it did not match a third man who had been added to the suspect list sometime over the years. Someone the original investigation hadn’t focused on, added to the file later. All three of the people the original investigation had focused on were ruled out by the DNA.

The detectives now knew with certainty that the killer was someone else, not the former lover, not the property manager, not the third man who had attracted attention along the way. Someone the original investigation had either missed entirely or seen briefly and let go. The case stayed open. The evidence stayed in storage.

 Nine more years passed. In 2020, the department submitted samples from the binding to a forensic lab in Texas called Astrium. Astrium had been founded in 2018 specifically to take on cases where DNA samples were too small, too old, or too degraded for traditional crime labs. They specialized in pulling profiles from material that other labs had returned with no usable result.

 By 2020, departments across the country were sending them old evidence and waiting to see what came back. Their scientists worked with what had been sitting in evidence storage in Everett for over three decades. They built a profile. For the first time in the history of the case, what had been left on the binding in Mary Ann’s room had been turned into a string of genetic markers.

 The markers could be searched against the millions of profiles that ordinary people had uploaded to public ancestry websites in the years since at-home DNA tests had become common. The profile went to a forensic genealogist at Astrium named Deb Stone. Stone uploaded it into the public ancestry databases and looked for matches that suggested a family connection. She found distant relatives.

She built outward from those matches, tracing branches through marriage records, birth records, census data, and obituaries, following the family tree forward through generations and sideways through siblings and cousins until the tree narrowed to one person. Each branch she added cut the number of candidates in half.

 Each new generation of records eliminated more candidates. By the time both sides of the tree had been traced all the way back, only one name remained at the bottom. By 2022, Stone had a name. It was a man who had once lived in Everett. He had moved away in the years after 1989. He was now 61 years old. The name in Stone’s file was familiar to anyone who had read the original case notes from 1989.

 Everett Police Detective Susan Logothetti had been the one who pulled the file in the first place. She had read the original 1989 reports. She had read the 2011 results that had cleared the three previous suspects. She had submitted the samples to Off-Ramp in 2020. When Stone’s findings came back in 2022, Logothetti read the name with the original case file in front of her.

 Logothetti was the kind of detective who pulled old case files and worked them. In 2024, she had closed a 1984 Everett homicide. 42-year-old Judith Weaver, killed in her own home that year, had been linked by new DNA to a man named Mitchell Gaff. The Daniels file was next on Logothetti’s desk. Logothetti contacted the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and asked for help getting a sample to confirm the match.

The man’s DNA was not in any law enforcement database. The only way to confirm the match was to get a sample directly from him. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department had a homicide unit experienced with this kind of work. By 2022, when Logothetti’s call came in, they had handled their share of decades-old murders.

 They knew how to surveil without being seen. They knew what kind of physical evidence held up in court. They knew that the difference between a confirmed match and a charge that fell apart at trial could come down to the chain of custody on a single sample. They took the case seriously. They assigned officers to it.

 They began watching. Las Vegas officers watched him for days. They followed his routine without approaching him. Where he ate, what he drove, when he came home. What they needed was a piece of physical evidence he had touched but would not need back. They followed him to a restaurant. They watched and waited for the moment he would leave something behind that a lab could read. He sat.

 He drank. He paid his bill. When he walked out of the restaurant, they collected the bottle off the table. The DNA on the rim went to the lab for comparison against the markers built from the 1989 evidence. The result came back. The genetic profile from the beer bottle in Las Vegas matched the profile built from the blood on the cord wrapped around Mary Ann Daniel’s neck in January 1989.

 After 36 years, the blood had a name. His name was Joseph Andrew Jacquish. He was 61 years old. In 1989, he was 25. He had moved into the property on Hoyt Avenue on the same day Mary Ann had, January 9th, 1989. He had been one of her closest neighbors for the 19 days she was alive in that room.

 After the 1989 interview, he had no contact with police about Mary Ann’s case for decades. Not a traffic stop with a question about that Saturday. Not a knock on his door from a new investigator. Not a follow-up call when 2011 cleared the other suspects. Nothing. He left Everett sometime after the investigation.

 He moved north to Mount Vernon in Skagit County and lived there for years. Eventually, he moved again. This time east across two states to Clark County, Nevada. He settled in Las Vegas, a desert city more than a thousand miles from the wet skies of Puget Sound. In all the years between 1989 and 2025, his criminal record showed exactly one entry.

It was a 1992 misdemeanor conviction for reckless driving in King County, Washington. Beyond that single citation, the record was clean. No assaults. No domestic incidents. No arrests of any kind. He had lived as an ordinary man. As of his arrest in 2025, Mary Ann was the only person whose name had ever been connected to his in any criminal investigation.

 In late January 2025, Logothetti flew to Las Vegas. She had spent five years working the case from her desk. She wanted to be there for the arrest. Before she left, she made a phone call. She told Sandi Daniels London there was going to be an arrest. Sandi had been waiting for that call most of her adult life.

 On January 25th, 2025, Detective Logghetti and officers from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department arrested Joseph Andrew Jackson at his home in Clark County. He was booked into the Clark County Jail. The department announced the arrest 3 days later. On January 28th, the 36th anniversary of the Saturday night Mary Ann had died. He was charged with premeditated first-degree murder in the death of Mary Ann Daniels.

The crime had been committed in 1989 in the room next to his on a Saturday night in a converted garage on Hoyt Avenue. Nevada extradited him to Washington in the weeks after his arrest. And he was booked into the Snohomish County Jail. Snohomish County prosecutors filed the case.

 Their case rested on the DNA match between the binding from 1989 and the bottle collected in Las Vegas. There was no eyewitness. There was no confession. What they had was the cord. In March 2025, Jackson appeared in Snohomish County Superior Court and pleaded not guilty. Superior Court Judge Richard T. Okrent found probable cause to hold him on first-degree murder and set bail at $2 million.

 Sandi Daniels London released a statement after the arrest. She thanked Detective Logghetti for the work that had led to it. She thanked the lab and the genealogist who had built the family tree from the DNA on the binding. She said what she had believed for 36 years. Her sister had been placed in a house that should have been safer than it was.

 The case worker who had put her there should have protected her. Instead, she had put her in danger. In the end, Mary Ann had lost her life. Sandi closed by saying her sister had a hard life and was now at peace. Her brother, Terri Lee Selene, released his own statement. He said his sister had never been forgotten by her family.

 Everett Mayor Cassie Franklin commended the police department and partner agencies for their dedication to getting justice for victims like Mary Ann. Her heart, she said, went out to Mary Ann’s family. Everett Police Chief John De Roux said it was Logothetti’s perseverance that had closed a case the department had carried for nearly four decades.

 And Officer Natalie Given, also of the department, said the city had an obligation to hold accountable people who went after the most vulnerable. The man arrested for Mary Ann’s murder in 2025 had walked out of the converted garage in 1989, walked out of Everett, and lived the next decades of his life across two states.

 No record, no flag, no reason for anyone to look at him. By the time his name was finally spoken with hers, Mary Ann had been gone longer than she had been alive. Three weeks of a life on 8th Avenue. 36 years of silence. A bra, a strap from a purse, and an electrical cord twisted together around a woman’s neck in a small room at the back of a subdivided house in Everett.

 The blood on that cord sat in storage for 36 years before it said a name.