Washington 1972 Cold Case Solved – arrest shocks community 

Washington 1972 Cold Case Solved – arrest shocks community 

On the afternoon of August 23rd, 1972, a young woman of 20 slipped on her younger sister’s waffle stomper boots, hopped onto a white 10-speed bicycle, and set off toward a horse stable roughly 6 miles from her family’s home in Bothell, Washington. The sun was still bright overhead. It was the first time she’d chosen the bike over the car.

 She never arrived at the stable. A small stain on the outer left boot went undetected for 36 years. Investigators from multiple agencies examined that boot over the decades, and not one of them spotted it. When a state crime lab technician finally identified it in 2008, it held the DNA of the man who had taken her life. Her name was Jodi Loomis.

She was 20 years old and lived with her parents, her fiance Jim Roberts, and her 12-year-old sister Gianna at 20 Winesap Road in unincorporated Snohomish County. The area falls within Mill Creek today, but back in 1972, it was open, rural land, dirt roads, horse properties, wide stretches of quiet between neighbors.

The kind of place where a person could ride for miles without passing another soul. Jodi kept a horse named Saudi at a stable on Stroma Road, about 6 miles from the house. She rode regularly and always drove to get there. August 23rd was different. She decided to take the bike instead, borrowed Gianna’s waffle stomper boots, walked out the door around 5:00 p.m.

, and headed down Penny Creek Road with plenty of daylight left. The route wound through wooded stretches of dirt road with almost no traffic. Near the halfway point, a dirt track branched off Penny Creek into dense forest. That dirt track is where Jodi’s ride ended. Around 5:30 p.m., a young couple drove up that same dirt track to do some target shooting in the woods.

They came to shoot at cans, and instead, they found a woman lying on the ground. She was mostly naked, had been assaulted, and had a gunshot wound above her right ear from a .22 caliber pistol. She was still breathing, but unresponsive. They picked her up and carried her to their car.

 They didn’t stop to cover her up. They drove to Stevens Memorial Hospital in Edmonds, about 15 minutes west with a dying woman in their backseat. She was pronounced dead on arrival. The couple’s names were never released publicly. Investigators pieced together what they could from the scene. Jaud had been forced off the road at gunpoint and taken deep into the trees.

 She was assaulted and shot as she tried to dress herself. The gunshot wound was the cause of death. Her white 10-speed bicycle was found on the dirt track where she’d been intercepted. Her clothing was collected at the scene, including the waffle stomper boots she’d borrowed from Janna that afternoon.

 Everything was sealed and taken to evidence storage at the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office. Deputies canvassed the area in the days that followed. A few local men drew attention. One was a ranch owner who had previously behaved inappropriately toward Jaud, the kind of behavior that neighbors noticed, but nobody had reported to police.

Another was a tenant on a nearby property who’d been chopping wood close to the dirt track that afternoon and couldn’t account for his time clearly. Deputies questioned both of them and several others. None could be connected to the crime through physical evidence or witness testimony. There were no witnesses to the attack itself, no fingerprints were recovered from the scene, and nothing tying any specific person to what happened in those woods.

By the end of 1972, the case had stalled. Snohomish County’s newest homicide was already its most frustrating one. There was a full crime scene, physical evidence, a dead 20-year-old woman, and not a single lead that held up under scrutiny. The evidence went into long-term storage at the Sheriff’s Office.

 The file went onto a shelf with the other unsolved cases. The detectives who worked it moved on to new assignments. The Loomis family did not. Jana Loomis was 12 years old the day her sister borrowed her boots and didn’t come home. She grew up in the shadow of that afternoon, watching her parents carry a grief that didn’t soften with time.

 The family left Jodi’s bedroom the way it was for a long time after she died. Jana said you could still smell the patchouli oil when you walked in. Jodi’s leather purse was right where she’d left it on the last day of her life. Their parents, Jana said, hurt so much. That was the shape of the family after August 23rd, 1972.

 A daughter gone, a bedroom frozen in place, and a case that produced nothing. Year after year, Jana went from 12 to 20 to 30 to 40. She graduated, married, became Jana Loomis-Smith. Her parents aged through those same decades, carrying the same open wound, calling the sheriff’s office for updates that never came.

 There was nothing to update. The file was technically still open, but it wasn’t moving. Both of Jodi’s parents died without ever learning who killed their daughter. They raised a girl, lost her on a summer afternoon, spent the rest of their lives waiting for an answer, and died with the same question they’d had since 1972. Jana became the family’s voice after her parents were gone.

She kept calling detectives and showing up at press conferences when the sheriff’s office made another push. She refused to let the file slide into a cabinet and disappear. In 2008, when the case finally started moving again, she told reporters she wanted whoever did this to sweat. She wanted them to know someone was still paying attention.

She’d been carrying her sister’s case for 36 years by that point. Longer than Jodi had been alive. She told reporters the family missed Jodi’s love and her sisterhood, that the pain had become part of their surviving life. She put it more plainly, too. “Jodi had her whole life ahead of her,” Janice said, “and it was just taken away.

Just taken away, and we live with that every day.” In 2005, cold case detective Jim Scharf of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office pulled Jodi’s file off the shelf. The case was 33 years old by then, the county’s oldest unsolved homicide. Scharf was a methodical investigator. He went back through the original evidence, re-interviewed people where he could, and sent anything that might yield DNA to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab for modern testing.

Three years later, in 2008, a WSP Crime Lab technician found something on the outside of Jodi’s left boot that had been there since 1972, semen. A small stain that investigators at multiple agencies had missed since the night of the murder. The boot had been in evidence storage at the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office the entire time.

 It had been handled, cataloged, moved between facilities, and stored for 36 years, and nobody had noticed the stain until this technician examined it under different lighting conditions and with modern equipment. The technician extracted a partial DNA profile from the stain and submitted it to CODIS. CODIS is the FBI’s national database of DNA profiles collected from convicted offenders.

 If the person who left the DNA at a crime scene has been convicted of a qualifying offense and submitted a sample, the database flags a match. If they haven’t, it returns nothing. The system only knows about the people who’ve already been put into it. No match came back on Jodi’s case. The man who killed her in 1972 wasn’t in CODIS. That didn’t mean he had a clean record.

It meant his offenses either predated mandatory DNA collection laws or fell outside the categories that required a sample. The partial profile sat in the database for the next 10 years, running automatically against every new entry as people were convicted and added to the system. Year after year, no hit ever came back.

Scharf kept the case open through all of it. He looked for new angles, submitted the profile to new databases as they came online, and stayed in contact with Jana. He’d call her with updates even when the update was that there was nothing new. The file had collected dust for 33 years before he touched it, and he wasn’t going to let that happen again.

In July 2018, Scharf tried a different approach. He sent the DNA profile to Parabon NanoLabs, a private forensic lab in Virginia that specializes in a technique called genetic genealogy. It works on a completely different principle than CODIS. Instead of matching crime scene DNA against convicted offenders, genetic genealogy uploads the profile to public ancestry platforms like GEDmatch, where millions of ordinary people have submitted their DNA to trace their family history.

 If anyone in the database shares enough DNA with the crime scene sample, it means they’re biologically related to whoever left it. From there, genealogists build a family tree and narrow it down. Parabon brought in Deb Stone, a genetic genealogist based in Oregon. Stone’s job was to take the distant DNA matches from GEDmatch and build a family tree outward.

She started with second and third cousins of the unknown male and worked backward through generations of births, marriages, deaths, and relocations using public records. Stone spent 57 hours on the project combing through online family trees, court papers, census records, and anything else she could find in public databases.

 The branches of the tree eventually pointed to a family in the Edmonds area of Snohomish County. Genealogy could point to a family, but it couldn’t prove which member of that family left a DNA at a crime scene in 1972. Detectives needed a direct sample from the suspect to confirm the match. On August 28th, 2018, law enforcement officers followed him to the Tulip Casino north of Everett.

 They watched him buy a coffee, sit down at a machine, finish the drink, and toss the cup into a garbage can. After he walked away, they moved in and collected it. The cup went straight to the WSP crime lab. In September 2018, the lab confirmed what the genealogy had predicted. The DNA profile extracted from the coffee cup matched the DNA profile from the semen on Jod’s left boot.

The statistical probability of a coincidental match was 980 million to one. After 46 years and tens of thousands of hours across dozens of investigators, a discarded coffee cup at a casino had given them what nothing else could. Detective Sharf had spent 14 years working the case by that point. The cup was the break he’d been waiting for since 2005.

The man who killed Jod Loomis had been living 5 miles from the crime scene for 46 years. He’d raised a family, run a business, gone to casinos, and grown old while the evidence sat in a storage room, and the Loomis family buried both parents without answers. His record started before Jod’s murder.

 He married a 14-year-old girl when he was 18. In 1968, 4 years before the killing, he drove a company truck up to a teenage girl walking in Mount Lake Terrace, called her over, and showed her he was naked from the waist down. He admitted the exposure to police during an interview and was cited for lewd conduct.

 In 1972, the year Jod was killed, he was 33 and living in Edmonds with his third wife. He worked as a heavy equipment operator. His name never came up during the original investigation. Deputies were looking at local men who knew Jod or had been seen near the dirt track that afternoon. Miller didn’t fit either category.

 He was never questioned or interviewed, and his name didn’t appear on a single list anywhere in the case file. He lived 5 miles from the crime scene and stayed completely invisible to the people trying to solve it. He married a fourth time after that. His wife Linda married him around 1976 and they stayed together for more than four decades.

They ran a ceramic shop out of their garage called Miller’s Cove, a small operation they kept going for years. To their neighbors and customers, he was Terry the ceramics guy, a retired heavy equipment operator living quietly in Edmonds. Court records told a different story.

 He was accused of crimes at least five times across three decades following the 1968 citation. Accusations of molesting a preteen surfaced in the mid-1970s. Two sisters in 1990 reported that he touched them, but later said it could have been accidental and no charges were filed. In 1999, a man with developmental disabilities reported that Miller had abused him, but prosecutors determined the incident fell outside the statute of limitations.

Five known accusations spanning 30 years, and not one of them led to a conviction after the original lewd conduct citation. Scharf, the cold case detective who’d spent 14 years on the case by that point, called Miller a real predator when the arrest was announced. His name was Terrence Miller. Everyone called him Terry.

He was 77 years old when deputies arrested him at his Edmonds home on April 11th, 19, and charged him with first-degree murder in the death of Jodi Loomis. Bail was set at a million dollars and he posted it. Sheriff Ty Trenary held a press conference in Everett and credited the cold case team’s persistence and the new DNA technology.

47 years from murder to arrest. Miller pleaded not guilty at his arraignment and was released on bail to await trial. The judge ordered him to surrender any weapons or firearms from his home and placed him under electronic home monitoring. He went home to the same house in Edmonds, where he’d lived for decades, the same house with the ceramic shop in the garage.

The trial was delayed by over a year, partly due to the pandemic and partly due to defense motions challenging the DNA evidence. In October 2020, a judge denied the defense’s motion to suppress the genetic genealogy evidence, clearing the way for trial. Jury selection began in late October in Snohomish County Superior Court, with Judge David Kurtz presiding.

 The trial ran for 2 weeks through early November. Prosecutors Craig Mat and Bob Langbane built their case around the DNA evidence chain. They started with the semen found on the boot in 1972 and walked the jury through the partial profile developed in 2008. Then the Parabon analysis and Deb Stone’s genealogy work in 2018, the coffee cup surveillance at the Tulalip Casino, the WSP lab confirmation that September, and the 980 million to one match that tied all of it together.

The defense attacked the chain at every weak point. Public defenders Laura Martin and Frederick Mall argued that five decades of evidence handling had introduced contamination that made the DNA results unreliable. Martin told the jury the prosecution’s entire case rested on what she called a botched DNA analysis of the outside of a boot.

 Mall laid out the specifics for jurors. Deputies at the 1972 autopsy hadn’t worn gloves and evidence had been lost and unaccounted for during large stretches of the three decades between the murder and the first DNA testing. Under cross-examination, prosecution witnesses acknowledged that a WSP crime lab analyst’s own DNA had turned up on a reference sample during testing.

The defense argued that the boot had been contaminated and the evidence handling was so flawed the jury couldn’t trust what any lab found decades later. Jana spoke in the courtroom, too. 48 years after her sister’s murder, she stood in front of the jury and the man charged with killing Jord. She told the court that for those of us who remain, all we have is the hope of justice and accountability for the hideous theft of Jord’s life.

 She listed what those years had looked like from the other side. In the 46-plus years since that day, she said, “The accused had celebrated birthdays and Christmases and every in between. He’d married and raised children and gone on living a full life while her family lived with a hole that never closed.” Closing arguments ended on Friday, November 6th, 2020.

The jury began deliberating that afternoon and adjourned for the weekend. On Monday morning, November 9th, 2020, Terrence Miller was found dead at his home in Edmonds from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The Snohomish County Medical Examiner confirmed it as suicide. He was 78 years old. The jury didn’t know.

 They had resumed deliberations that same Monday morning at the courthouse, working through the evidence and the defense’s contamination arguments without any idea that the defendant was already dead. That afternoon, they reached their verdict. Guilty of first-degree murder. Our 12 jurors, who had no idea the defendant was dead, looked at the DNA evidence, weighed the defense’s argument that five decades of handling had corrupted it, and decided the chain held.

 The semen on the boot was Miller’s. The coffee cup confirmed it. He killed Jody Loomis in those woods off Penny Creek Road in August of 1972, and the evidence he left on her sister’s boot is what proved it 48 years later. Detective Sharp said he was glad the family got to hear the verdict, that it was good for them. It was the only thing left that the system could give Jana and the surviving members of the Loomis family, not a sentencing, not a prison term.

The man who killed Jord had already taken that from them, too. Miller’s defense team filed a motion to vacate the conviction. Their argument was that because Miller died before the verdict was read, he’d been denied the constitutional right to appeal, and the conviction should be thrown out. Judge Kurtz held a hearing in December 2020.

He heard from family members on both sides and from the attorneys, then he ruled against the motion. “It was not the right thing to do,” Kurtz said, “to erase what the jury had found. The conviction stands.” Jana was 12 years old when she lent her sister those waffle stomper boots on a sunny afternoon in August.

She was 60 when the jury said guilty, and both of her parents were gone by then. She heard the verdict without them. If you enjoyed this case, go check out the other solved cases in the playlist.