The 1985 Arlington Murder That Went Unanswered for 4 Decades 

The 1985 Arlington Murder That Went Unanswered for 4 Decades 

On the morning of February 14th, 1985, a 22-year-old woman in Arlington, Texas baked a heart-shaped cake for the man she was going to marry. He was flying home that evening from a business trip. By the time he landed, she was dead. Her engagement ring was gone. The man who took it left something of his own behind at the scene, and it sat in evidence storage for 38 years.

 Her name was Terry McAdams. She was 22, originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, the oldest of three sisters. Her younger sisters were Karen and Pamela. Terry had moved to Arlington to attend the University of Texas at Arlington and was living with her fiance at the Walnut Ridge Apartments on Walnut Hill Circle. It was a ground-floor unit in a large complex near campus, sure the kind of place where a college student with a fiance and a $5,000 engagement ring could start building a life.

 Karen later described Terry as the best big sister she could have asked for. By February of 1985, Terry was engaged and planning a wedding. She was going to classes at UTA, talking to her sisters on the phone, calling her mother Ann back in Little Rock. She was doing what a 22-year-old does when the pieces are coming together.

Young women had been disappearing across the Fort Worth area since late 1984. Katherine Davis, a 23-year-old aspiring model, vanished in September. Marilyn Hartman, a 29-year-old middle school teacher, was found strangled in her bedroom in October. Three days later, Cindy Heller, a 23-year-old TCU graduate, she was found strangled in a creek bed on the university campus.

In November, another teacher named Katherine Jackson was found strangled in her bathtub with the water still running. By December of 1984, eight women were missing or dead across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The Fort Worth Police Department formed a homicide task force and other agencies across the region joined the effort.

The news covered it heavily. Women across the area changed the way they lived. Parents called their daughters. Roommates checked on each other. The whole region felt the fear. And for young women living alone or with boyfriends who traveled, it was worse. Terry felt it more than most. Her mother Ann told reporters that Terry called her in Little Rock to talk about it, sometimes more than once a day.

 She was terrified, Ann said. And all the girls who disappeared or were killed were about her age, and they were young, pretty girls. So, naturally, being that far from home in a strange town, and something like that going on, you would be afraid. Terry quit her job in Irving, so she wouldn’t have to drive home after dark.

When her fiance was out of town on business, she became reclusive. She stopped going out at night, even for groceries. She locked the doors and the windows and stayed inside her apartment and called her mother and her sisters and waited for morning. She took every precaution she thought necessary, Ann said later.

She changed her routines, gave up income, limited her movements. It didn’t matter. The man who killed her didn’t meet her on a road or in a parking lot or at a job she drove to after dark. He came through the door of her own bedroom while she was inside the apartment she’d into the safest place she knew. On Thursday, February 14th, 1985, Terry’s fiance was in another city on a business trip.

 He was scheduled to fly home that day, and Terry was supposed to pick him up at the airport. She spent the afternoon baking a heart-shaped cake for him. That evening, she got on the phone with her sister and they talked for a while. It was the last conversation anyone had with Terry McAdams. After she hung up, someone broke into the apartment through a sliding glass door in the bedroom.

 He sexually assaulted her, beat her to death with blunt force, and took the engagement ring off her finger, the one she’d been wearing while she baked that cake. A maintenance worker at the Walnut Ridge Apartments found her body the next morning when he entered the unit to check on a reported issue. Arlington police arrived and processed the scene.

They collected biological evidence from the apartment, dusted for prints, and documented a distinctive boot print outside in the dirt near the point of entry. They photographed the broken sliding glass door, the interior of the bedroom, and the position of the body. The scene told them what had happened. It didn’t tell them who did it.

Nearly 40 years later, Detective Devon Caufer said the officers who worked the case in 1985 were very thorough and collected a lot of physical evidence that turned out to be critical. That evidence, collected carefully and sealed into storage in February of 1985, is the only reason this case was ever solved.

 And the detectives didn’t know what they were preserving. They just knew to preserve everything. Terry’s fiance was eliminated as a suspect almost immediately. He’d been out of town on a documented business trip. He flew home expecting to see her at the airport. Instead, he came back to a crime scene. Investigators turned their attention outward.

Arlington police retraced Terry’s steps from earlier that day. They canvassed the Walnut Ridge Apartments and the surrounding blocks, knocking on every door in the complex. They ran the print found in the dirt outside the bedroom door through their records. They questioned dozens of people who lived in or near the complex and in the surrounding neighborhoods.

And they checked criminal records for anyone with a history of violence against women in the Arlington area and ran background checks on every name that came in from tips and door-to-door interviews. One name stood out. A man who lived near the complex and had been arrested twice for sex crimes. He was 30 years old, a registered sex offender with a criminal history involving violence against women.

 Detectives went through his background, checked his alibi, looked at what they could verify. The boot print outside Terry’s bedroom matched his shoe size, but matching a shoe size wasn’t the same as matching a person. Dozens of men in Arlington wore the same size boot. And in 1985, there was no DNA testing, no CODIS, no national DNA database, no genetic genealogy.

 The DNA left at the crime scene could have identified the killer conclusively, but the tools to read it didn’t exist yet. Without DNA, the strongest physical evidence they had was a shoe size and an address. The man was questioned and released. The investigation continued. More names came in from tips and canvassing. More people were questioned across Arlington and the surrounding cities.

 Detectives worked the phones, followed up on every tip, and tracked people down for interviews. They re-canvassed the apartment complex a second time, talked to residents who hadn’t been home during the first round, and expanded the search radius into neighboring communities. The Fort Worth task force investigating the string of murdered women was still active, and Arlington detectives checked whether Terry’s case fit the pattern.

It didn’t match cleanly. The Fort Worth cases involved strangulation. Terry had been beaten to death. But the methods were different enough that investigators treated her case separately. The case file grew thicker without getting any closer to an answer. By the end of 1985, the McAdams homicide was an open case with no viable suspects and no way forward.

 The detectives who worked it did what they could with what existed. What existed wasn’t enough. The file was shelved and the case joined the growing list of unsolved homicides in the Arlington Police Department’s records. The detectives who had worked the case moved on to new assignments over the following years. Some of them retired without ever knowing whether the murder of Terry McAdams would be solved.

The McAdams family back in Little Rock waited for a phone call that didn’t come. Karen McAdams was Terry’s younger sister. She was a kid when her big sister was killed. Now, after February 14th, 1985, she carried her sister’s case the way family members of unsolved homicide victims always do. She called the detectives office and asked if there was anything new.

The answer was always the same. She learned to live with the not knowing, learned to talk about Terry in past tense, while part of her still expected the phone to ring. She grew up, built a life, and the question of who killed her sister sat underneath all of it. Years turned into decades. Karen married and became Karen Hopper.

Her husband Brad became part of the family that lived with this. Pamela married and became Pamela McInnis. Their mother Ann had listened to Terry’s frightened phone calls from Little Rock in the weeks before she was killed. She knew her daughter had been living in fear. Well, Ann passed away without ever learning who killed her daughter that night.

Their father died without knowing, too. Terry’s stepmother Carol Ann McAdams stayed connected to the case and to the sisters through all of it. She was still there in 2024 when the answer finally came. Karen said later that the family had come to terms with the idea that police would never find the person responsible.

“They’d given up hope,” she said at the 2024 press conference. “After 39 years of silence from the detective’s office, hope runs out. It doesn’t disappear in a single moment. It thins out over decades until one morning the phone just stops meaning anything.” Karen had spent more years carrying her sister’s case than Terry had been alive.

The case file didn’t move for most of those 39 years, and a different detectives inherited it over the decades as officers retired or transferred to other assignments. Each one read the original reports, reviewed the evidence logs, and looked for something that might have been missed. They reread the witness statements, went back through the list of names that had come up during the original investigation, and checked whether any new forensic techniques could pull something from the crime scene evidence.

Homicide detectives at the Arlington Police Department revisited the case several times over the years, sending evidence to labs and checking expanding databases as new forensic technology became available. Each time, they hit the same wall. The physical evidence was there, but the technology to match it to a specific person still wasn’t.

 Nothing produced a viable lead, and the evidence from the crime scene stayed sealed in storage waiting for the science to catch up. In 1998, some of that science arrived. The FBI launched CODIS, a national DNA database that allowed crime scene profiles to be run against millions of convicted offenders across the country. If the person who left the DNA had been convicted of a qualifying offense and required to submit a sample, the system would flag a match automatically.

 For cold cases with biological evidence sitting in storage, it was a breakthrough. Investigators submitted the evidence from Terry’s case. No match came back. The man who killed her wasn’t in the system. In 2023, the Arlington Police Department reached out to the FBI’s investigative genetic genealogy team at the Dallas Field Office for help.

In January 2024, at the case was assigned to APD homicide detective Devin Cauffer. Investigative genetic genealogy works on a different principle than CODIS. Instead of matching crime scene DNA against a database of convicted offenders, it uploads the profile to public ancestry platforms and looks for biological relatives of the unknown person.

If a cousin or uncle or second cousin has submitted their own DNA to a genealogy website, the system can find the family connection. From there, investigators work backward through public records, births, deaths, marriages, addresses to build a family tree and identify the person who left the evidence at the crime scene.

The technique had solved hundreds of cold cases across the country since 2018, including cases where CODIS had returned nothing for years. The genealogy work pointed to a name. But there was a problem that most genetic genealogy cases don’t have. The man at the center of the family tree was dead. He’d been dead since 1985.

His DNA had never been collected by any law enforcement agency while he was alive, and there were no existing samples in any database anywhere in the country. Investigators couldn’t confirm the match without a direct comparison, and the man they needed to compare against was in a grave. In most cold cases solved by genetic genealogy, the suspect is still alive, and investigators can collect a coffee cup or a cigarette butt or a piece of trash with their DNA on it.

 That wasn’t possible here. So, the FBI went looking for a living relative who shared enough genetic material to confirm the connection. They found one. An out-of-state relative who was close enough genetically to serve as a reference sample. FBI agents traveled to contact the relative in person. They explained what they were investigating and why they needed help, and asked if the person would be willing to provide a voluntary DNA sample.

The relative agreed. Without that agreement, the identification would have stalled. The entire case came down to one person’s willingness to help. The sample was sent to the University of North Texas Health Science Center for Human Identification in Fort Worth, one of the leading forensic DNA labs in the country.

The center specializes in connecting DNA to individuals through advanced genetic analysis. The lab ran the comparison between the relative’s DNA and the crime scene evidence collected from Terry McAdams’s apartment in February of 1985. And the lab confirmed what the genealogy work had predicted. It matched.

 His name was Bernard Sharp. Sharp was 30 years old in 1985. He lived near the Walnut Ridge Apartments in a neighborhood just minutes from where Terry was killed. He had a criminal record that included at least two arrests for sex crimes and was a registered sex offender with a history of violence against women. He was the man Arlington police had questioned in the weeks after Terry’s murder, the one who lived nearby and matched the physical profile from the crime scene.

They couldn’t connect him with the tools available in 1985 and let him go. The DNA that would have identified him was sitting in a storage room at the time of that interview, 9 months after he killed Terry McAddams on November 3rd, 1985, Jay Sharp forced his way into a home in Arlington where his estranged wife, Denise, was staying with her best friend, Deborah Della Torre, and a cousin.

He was armed and determined. He shot Denise, who was 29 years old. He shot Deborah, who was 25. He critically wounded the cousin, leaving her badly bleeding on the floor. The cousin managed to run to a neighbor’s house for help, stumbling out of the house and onto a street where someone answered the door and called for an ambulance.

Then Sharp turned the gun on himself. Three people dead and one critically wounded. The connection to Terry’s case was never made. In 1985, there was no mechanism to link what happened on Valentine’s Day to what happened on November 3rd. The McAddams case was an unsolved sexual assault and homicide with no confirmed suspect.

 While the November shootings were a domestic murder-suicide with a clear perpetrator who was already dead. The files sat in different parts of the department, handled by different detectives, categorized under different case types. Nobody had a reason to draw a line between a stranger rape-murder in February and a domestic shooting in November.

The common thread was a dead man whose name had been on an interview list 9 months earlier. The attack on Terry McAddams was random. Police said Sharp had no connection to her. He didn’t know her name or that she was a student or that she had sisters who loved her. He didn’t know she’d been calling her mother in Little Rock every day because she was afraid of exactly the kind of man he turned out to be.

He picked an apartment, found a way in, and killed a woman he had never met. Yet, he had been dead for 39 years by the time the DNA proved it was him. Detective Coffer got the call from the lab confirming the match. He said later that getting that call meant everything in the world. On August 14th, 2024, the Arlington Police Department and the FBI’s Dallas Field Office held a joint press conference.

 Chief Al Jones stood at the podium and named Bernard Sharp as the man who killed Terry McAdams 39 years earlier. FBI special agent in charge Chad Yarbro called investigative genetic genealogy one of the most valuable tools police have access to today. Detective Coffer credited the original investigators from 1985 for their careful evidence collection, the work that made everything that followed possible.

Then the family spoke. Karen Hopper stood in front of the cameras. She 39 years after her big sister was murdered on Valentine’s Day. She told the room that Terry was an amazing girl, beautiful and full of life. She said she honestly could not believe they were standing there that day. After nearly four decades, a name had finally been attached to what happened in that apartment.

 There are not words sufficient enough to define how this feels, she said. The only thing the announcement could give the family was the truth. No arrest, no trial, no sentencing. The man who killed Terry had been in a grave since November of 1985. There was no one left to hold accountable. Chief Jones said that over the years it would be easy to lose faith and accept that the case might never be solved.

 But Terry’s family never gave up hope, he said, and the detectives never wavered. On the morning of February 14th, 1985, while Terry baked a heart-shaped cake for the man she loved, he was coming home that day. She never got to give it to him. If you enjoyed this case, go check out the other solved cases in the playlist.