At 9:50 on the morning of November 9th, 2020, paramedics found a 77-year-old retired heavy equipment operator dead in his Edmonds, Washington bedroom. A single self-inflicted gunshot ended his life, discovered by his own family. 3 hours later, 12 jurors in a Snohomish County courtroom delivered a unanimous first-degree guilty verdict, unaware the man they convicted had died that very morning.

 The court kept his death secret. The verdict stood, unshaken. Bothell, Washington, 1972. Jody Loomis, 20 years old, left her family farm on August 23rd to ride her horse, lacing up hiking boots borrowed from her 12-year-old sister. An hour later, she was found shot in the head, partially dressed, on a logging spur off Penny Creek Road, just 5 miles from her killer’s home.

 He vanished into ordinary life for 47 years. This is the story of Jody Loomis, a cold case cracked by genetic genealogy, a microscopic stain on a borrowed boot, and a detective who built a unit for cases just like hers. This is how science finally caught the man the woods had hidden for nearly half a century.

 Jody Loomis was 20 years old in the summer of 1972. She was petite and fit. Her long, sandy blonde hair caught the light when she moved, and Jody was almost always moving, riding a horse through the trails north of Bothell, riding her white 10-speed bike through rural Snohomish County, climbing a ladder in her bedroom with a paintbrush in her hand and a wall half painted behind her.

She lived at 20 Winesap Road on the edge of Bothell with her parents and her 12-year-old sister, Janna. She was studying to become a registered nurse. She was also taking advanced art and painting classes, a mix that showed she hadn’t yet decided if her future would be shaped by the careful hands of a nurse or the freer hands of an artist.

She had been working for months on a custom mural of running horses on one wall of her bedroom. The room had a faint, steady smell of patchouli oil. Her horse was named Saudi. They rode the same trails almost every afternoon. She was newly engaged. Her fiance was a young man named Jim Roberts. They were getting ready to start their lives together.

That was Jody Loomis in August of 1972. A nursing student, an artist, a sister, a daughter, a young woman painting horses on a wall, riding one through the woods, and building a future in real time. She had one afternoon left. The Loomis property on Winesap Road was in the rural area north of Bothell, where paved roads turned into gravel and houses were spread out over large pieces of land instead of small lots.

Saudi was kept on Strum Road, 6 and 1/4 miles north of the family farm. Jody rode him almost every day, a routine so steady and part of her summer rhythm that her family used it to mark the hours of the afternoon. She would leave the house in the late afternoon. She would ride for an hour or two. She would come home.

That was the pattern of her days. On the afternoon of August 23rd, 1972, the pattern was the same. The leaving was the same. Only the coming back was different. There were no warning signs in Jody’s life, no enemies, no stalker, no shadow trailing her steps. The real danger hid in the landscape and in a stranger she would never meet.

The corridor she traveled, Penny Creek Road, the Bothell-Everett Highway crossing, the wooded path to Strum Road stable, wound through second-growth timber and logging spurs, ending in dirt cutouts swallowed by trees. Teenagers used these roads for target practice, Their shots echoing where no one lived close enough to hear.

In 1972, a young woman riding alone was visible to anyone watching, but invisible to anyone who might help. Just 5 miles away in the Mount Lake Terrace and Edmonds corridor, lived 29-year-old Terrence Miller. Four years before in June 1968, Miller had been arrested for indecent exposure after pulling his work truck beside a 17-year-old girl asking for directions and exposing himself.

She memorized his license plate and he was identified within hours. The court handed down a deferred sentence, a fine, and a mandatory psychiatric evaluation. By 1972, Miller had already been married and divorced three times. He lived 5 miles from the trail Jody rode each afternoon. None of this was visible to her or to her family.

 In 1972, it was invisible to anyone who might have stopped what was coming. On the late afternoon of August 23rd, 1972, around 4:30, Jody set out from 20 Winesap Road eager for a ride on her horse. She pedaled away on her white 10-speed, Saudi’s bridle slung over her shoulder. Her outfit was a patchwork of summer and adventure.

 A halter top, denim shorts, knee-high socks, and a pair of St. Moritz Waffle Stomper boots borrowed from her younger sister Janna, who handed them over as Jody headed out. She cycled northeast aiming for the Strum Road stable more than 6 miles away. The journey carried her along quiet rural roads past open fields and dense stands of timber into a narrowing corridor that rose away from Bothell.

The last sighting of Jody came at about 5:00 as she crossed the Bothell-Everett Highway 3 and 1/2 miles into her trip. She never reached Saudi’s stall. Somewhere between that highway and the stable, in the hush where gravel faded to dirt and dirt to a logging spur, a man emerged from the trees or pulled up beside her, forcing her at gunpoint off the road and into the waiting woods.

Jody had only 30 minutes left. At about 5:30 in the afternoon, two teenagers turned off Penny Creek Road onto a logging road. Their names were Walter Morris and Kathy Gaul. They had driven down that road to practice shooting. They were looking for a quiet spot in the trees, the same kind local teenagers had used for years.

 A log was lying across the path. They got out and moved it. When the path was clear, they saw what the log had been hiding. A young woman in the brush. She was partly dressed, knee-length socks still on. One St. Moritz waffle stomper boot pulled back onto her foot. The other boot was next to her.

 She had been trying to get dressed but had not finished. There was a single bullet wound on the right side of her head, just above her right ear. She had been shot from very close. She was bleeding heavily and could not speak. She was still breathing. Morris and Gaul did not have a radio or a phone. All they had was a car and a road.

 Their car was a small two-seater sports car. They lifted Jody Loomis into the passenger seat and drove quickly for 20 minutes south to Stevens Memorial Hospital in Edmonds, the closest emergency center. She did not wake up in the car. Her airway was full of blood. Jody Loomis was declared dead when she arrived at Stevens Memorial Hospital at about 5:50 in the evening.

 Walter Morris and Kathy Gaul had driven down Penny Creek Road that afternoon to shoot bullets into the trees for fun. Instead, they carried out the body of a young woman who had been really shot in those same trees. They had been looking for a quiet place. They found the quietest place a the can find. She was 20 years old.

 She was wearing her little sister’s boots. She had left her house an hour and 20 minutes earlier to ride her horse. When Snohomish County Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the hospital, the boot was still on her foot. Detectives pieced together the last 30 minutes of Judy Loomis’s life by looking at how her body was positioned, the state of her clothes, the path of the bullet, and the dirt on the boots.

 She was stopped somewhere between the Bothell-Everett Highway crossing and the Strom Road stable while riding north. The spot was along a part of the road that narrowed where a vehicle could pull up next to a cyclist without warning. Her bicycle was found at the bottom of a steep slope where her killer had thrown it. Saudi’s bridle was missing from the scene because he had taken it with him.

The struggle happened in the trees. She had been forced at gunpoint, as shown by the cuts and scrapes on her body, to leave the road and go into the woods into a clearing made by logging. Her clothes had been taken off. Both boots had come off her feet. The autopsy and important evidence found later on one of the boots showed she had been sexually assaulted.

 Then she tried to get up and get dressed. Later forensic work showed that after the assault, Judy Loomis had put one of the borrowed boots back on her foot. She was working on the second boot when her killer shot her. This means she was alive and aware after the assault and tried, despite her condition, to put her sister’s boots back on before what happened next.

She got one boot on, but not the second. Then she was shot once with a .22 caliber pistol from just inches away in the right side of her head, just above her right ear. The shot was so close that powder residue and tissue damage showed the gun was touching or almost touching her skin. She did not die right away.

The bullet did not go all the way through. She fell where she was shot and bled into the dirt, but kept breathing. During the time between the shot and when two teenagers came looking for a place to shoot targets, her killer dragged a log across the path, went back to his vehicle, threw her bicycle down the slope, took her horse’s bridle, and drove away from the road where Jody Loomis was bleeding to death.

He did not take the boots. He did not know then, but the boots were the only thing that would have mattered if he had. He would not find that out for 47 years. The official cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head. The weapon was a .22 caliber handgun. The death was ruled a homicide. The shot did not kill her immediately.

The medical exam showed that Jody Loomis was still alive when Morris and Goal found her. Alive when they put her in the passenger seat of their car, and alive for most of the drive to Stevens Memorial Hospital. She died on the way. Her death certificate recorded the time she was declared dead at the hospital around 5:50, not the time she was shot.

The autopsy confirmed what the crime scene suggested. Signs of sexual assault matched the removal of her clothes and the physical evidence on her body. There was a single close-range gunshot. Scrapes on her skin showed she had been forced to walk through brush at gunpoint. She still wore knee-length socks. One boot was back on her foot.

 The other boot was beside her. The crime scene was photographed. The bicycle found on the embankment was collected. Jody’s removed clothes were collected. The boots, the borrowed St. Moritz Waffle Stompers, were put into evidence storage. They were placed in a cardboard box in a Snohomish County evidence locker. By the night of August 23rd, 1972, everything that would later convict her killer was in that box.

No one in 1972 had the tools to realize it. The case was given to two Snohomish County Sheriff’s detectives, Donald Don Schultz and Charles Chuck Stewart. They were experienced investigators working in 1972 with the tools of that time, pen, notebook, telephone, walking, and the skill to ask questions of everyone who might have seen a girl on a white 10-speed bicycle on the road between Winesap Road and Strum Road on the afternoon of August 23rd.

They asked more than 200 people. The FBI’s Seattle Field Office helped with background checks, tracking evidence, and coordinating across state lines for any leads outside Washington. The federal agents did not run the case. They helped Schultz and Stewart, who led it. The group of suspects Schultz and Stewart created and then ruled out was large.

 They talked to temporary construction workers from job sites in the area. They talked to farm and ranch workers. They talked to people with traffic offenses in Snohomish County. They talked to local teenagers known to have used Penny Creek Road for target shooting. The same kind of teenagers as the two who found Jody.

 Every interview had the same result. None of the men said they were in the area at the time of the killing. None gave alibis that fell apart. None shared details that only the killer could know. None came back for a second interview ready to talk. The .22 bullet was small and had not passed through. No murder weapon was found.

 There were no witnesses to the stopping, the attack, or the shot. There was no surveillance video in 1972, not in rural Snohomish County, not anywhere. The only witnesses to Jody Loomis’s death were the trees, the girl herself, and the man who pulled the trigger. The semen sample stayed in the evidence locker. In 1972, DNA testing did not exist.

 There was no profile to check, no database to compare it to. The sample was biological material with no use for the investigation. It was kept because the rules said to keep biological material, not because anyone in 1972 thought it would ever help. Within months, the active part of the investigation slowed down. By the late 1970s, the case was, in every real way, inactive.

 The man Schultz and Stewart never talked to was a 29-year-old heavy equipment operator who lived 5 miles from Penny Creek Road. He had a 1968 indecent exposure conviction in Snohomish County District Court for bothering a 17-year-old girl from his work truck. He had been divorced three times. Within 5 years, he would marry for the fourth time, have five daughters from those marriages, work 40 years for the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 302, retire in 1995, and open a small ceramic shop with his wife. His name was Terrence Miller. He

lived in Edmonds. Don Schultz and Chuck Stewart never knocked on his door. If you want to see what happens when a 47-year-old crime scene meets a 2008 forensic lab, stay with me. Science is about to do what 1972 could not. Two people refused to let the case end. The first was Rosemary Loomis, Jody’s mother.

 For more than 40 years after her daughter’s death, Rosemary kept Jody’s bedroom at 21 Sap Road exactly as Jody had left it on the afternoon of August 23rd, 1972. The custom mural of running horses stayed half finished on the wall. The patchouli oil remained in the curtains. Jody’s leather purse sat where she had left it. The room was not a shrine.

 It was a fixed point in a house where time moved forward everywhere else except here. Rosemary lived with that room for 46 years. She lived with the unanswered question of who had killed her daughter for 46 years. She lived with the silence of the road between Winesap and Strum for 46 years. She died in January 2019.

The second person was Detective Jim Scharf. Scharf was not a detective in 1972. He joined the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office later in his career and over time he created the cold case unit, not joined it, created it. He built a system designed to do what Schultz and Stewart could not.

 Look again at closed but unsolved cases with the tools of a later time. Jody Loomis’s case was one he reopened. For years, Scharf carried her death the way detectives who work cold cases carry their files. Quietly, persistently, without expecting an answer on any given day. He kept the case visible inside the office. He kept the boots, the evidence box, and the autopsy report on the active list.

 The Snohomish County cold case playing card deck, a project that put faces of unsolved cases on regular playing cards given out in county jail so inmates would see them, talk about them, maybe say something to someone, featured Jody Loomis on the 10 of hearts. Her face passed through thousands of inmates hands for over a decade.

 Scharf later said in interviews after the case closed that his deepest private fear in working the Loomis file was not that he would fail to identify the killer. It was that he would identify the killer and the killer would take his own life before a jury could deliver a verdict. That the man would leave the case the way he had left the woods off Penny Creek Road in 1972.

On his own terms, in his own time, leaving the family with a name but no sentence. Jana Loomis Smith had a fear of her own, said more plainly back in 2008. “I want them to sweat. I want them to know we’re looking. Imagine 36 years thinking you’ve got away with it. She was 12 when her sister did not come home.

 She had lent out those boots. She had grown up across the hall from a bedroom that did not change. She was the one who would in 2019 stand on a witness stand and identify the boots she had given Jody on the afternoon of August 23rd, 1972. She had waited 47 years to do it. Rosemary did not live to see the arrest. She died 3 months before it happened.

The bedroom did not change. That is the first fact of the cold years. For four decades, the door at 20 Whinesap Road opened onto a room frozen on the afternoon of August 23rd, 1972. The mural of running horses is half-finished on the wall. The leather purse, untouched. Books, art supplies, and the remains of a 20-year-old’s daily life stopped at a single hour.

 Rosemary entered the room. She did not redecorate it. She did not pack it up. The patchouli oil stayed in the fabric of the curtains for years longer than the chemistry of patchouli should have allowed. The second fact of the cold years is the evidence box. In a Snohomish County storage facility, the contents of Jody Loomis’s case sat in a cardboard container alongside thousands of other unsolved files.

The box was recorded. The box was moved between facilities as evidence storage rules changed over the decades. The box outlasted the original detectives’ active careers. The box outlasted the 1970s, the 1980s, and most of the 1990s. But not all of the evidence outlasted the storage facility. Over those decades, items disappeared.

 The original autopsy swabs taken from Jody’s body, the swabs that contained, in 1972 terms, the killer’s biological material went missing from storage. Jodi’s underwear, removed at the autopsy and bagged for evidence, went missing. The bullets, both the one recovered from her body and other related ballistic material, went missing.

By the time Snohomish County cold case detectives began re-examining the file in the 2000s, the items the 1972 detectives had listed as their best biological evidence were gone. What remained were the boots, a pair of St. Moritz Waffle Stomper hiking boots that had not belonged to Jodi, that she had borrowed from her 12-year-old sister on her way out the door, which had been taken from her feet at Stevens Memorial Hospital and placed into evidence storage because the rules said to keep everything she had been

wearing. The boots were the accident. Everything that had been carefully kept as evidence was lost. The boots, a normal item, not marked for biological testing, not seen as central to the case, were the only physical evidence that survived. The third fact of the cold years is forensic science. In 1986, DNA fingerprinting was used for the first time to convict a killer in the United Kingdom.

In the 1990s, American crime labs began building DNA testing ability. By the early 2000s, DNA databases, CODIS in the United States, were in regular use. By the mid-2000s, the question for cold case detectives was no longer whether biological evidence could be tested. The question was whether biological evidence from older cases could still give a profile after decades of cold storage, and whether re-examining stored physical evidence might find biological material the original investigators had missed.

On August 26th, 2008, forensic scientist Heather L. Linscott of the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory took the St. Moritz boots from the Loomis evidence box for re-examination. Three days had passed since the 36th anniversary of Jodi’s murder. Lynn Scott used a high-intensity alternate light source, a forensic method that did not exist in 1972, to scan the surfaces of the boots.

Under the ALS, biological material that is invisible to the naked eye glows. On the outside of one of the boots, the light found a tiny stain. It was a seminal stain. It had been on the outside of the right boot since the afternoon of August 23rd, 1972. It had survived 36 years of evidence locker storage in a facility that had not kept everything else from the case.

Heather Lynn Scott saw it on August 26th, 2008. She recorded it. She took it out. She created a DNA profile from it. The profile did not match anyone in CODIS. That was the state of the case in 2008. A complete DNA profile of Jodi Loomis’s killer with no name attached to it, sitting in a forensic database that contained the genetic identities of millions of Americans, but not his.

The case went cold again for another decade. The first breakthrough in the Loomis case was not a name. It was a new method. In April 2018, a retired California police investigator named Paul Holes and a genealogist named Barbara Rae Venter publicly identified the Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo, using a method that had never been used before to solve a major American murder.

The method was called investigative genetic genealogy. It worked like this. Instead of checking a crime scene DNA profile against CODIS, which only has profiles from convicted criminals and people arrested, investigators uploaded the profile to a public genealogy database called JedMatch. JedMatch had genetic profiles from people who had sent their DNA to commercial services like Ancestry and 23andMe and then chose to upload their results to a shared site.

 The database was not made to catch killers. It was made so adopted children could find biological relatives, hobbyists could build family trees, and distant cousins could connect. But genetic profiles do not separate hobbyists from crime samples. A profile is a profile. If a killer’s DNA shared enough markers with a hobbyist on JedMatch, that hobbyist would show up as a distant relative.

From that distant relative, a skilled genealogist could build a family tree backwards through generations, then forward through descendants, until the tree narrowed down to a small group of people, and finally to one person. The Golden State Killer case showed the method worked. Within months, cold case units across the country were eager to use forensic genealogy.

Snohomish County was one of them. In 2018, Detective Jim Scharf sent the Loomis crime scene DNA profile to Parabon NanoLabs, a forensic genetics company in Virginia that had created one of the first commercial systems for investigative genetic genealogy. At Parabon, the case was given to a forensic genealogist named Deb Stone, who would build the Loomis family tree.

Stone uploaded the killer’s DNA profile to JedMatch. The first results showed distant relatives, not parents, siblings, or close cousins, but more distant matches like third and fourth cousins. From those matches, Stone started building the family tree backwards. This is the slow, unglamorous heart of forensic genealogy.

It is not lab work. It is like library research. Stone looked at census records, birth records, marriage records, death records, newspaper obituaries, and immigration lists. She built a tree starting with a few distant cousins on GEDmatch and expanded outward through their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, searching for the one ancestral couple all the matches shared.

 That one ancestral couple, when she found them, defined the group of possible suspects. The killer of Jody Loomis was, the genetic markers showed, a descendant of that couple, a man of a certain estimated age and ancestry, fitting within a tree whose branches Stone now had to follow forward in time. She followed the tree forward.

 She traced the descendants of that ancestral couple down through their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, generation by generation, branch by branch, looking for living male descendants who would have been adults in 1972 in the Pacific Northwest near Bothell, Washington. The tree narrowed. It narrowed to a family of brothers.

More exactly, it narrowed to six brothers. Six men born to the same parents in the mid-20th century, descended from the ancestral couple Stone had found, living near Edmonds and Mountlake Terrace in Snohomish County. The killer’s genetic profile matched the family. The killer was, with near certainty, one of those six brothers.

But genetic genealogy cannot tell full biological brothers apart. Brothers share about 50% of their DNA, but the exact parts they inherit are random. A genetic profile that points to one of these six men cannot point to this specific one. To go from six to one, the case needed direct biological proof. Detective Scharf and his team took the list of six brothers and started working on it.

 They ruled out brothers who had died before the murder. They ruled out brothers who were clearly somewhere else on August 23rd, 1972, out of state, in the military, or in the hospital. They checked each remaining brother’s history, where they lived, work records, and any past contact with the police. One brother stood out. Terrence Miller, in his mid-70s in 2018, was a retired heavy equipment operator living in Edmonds, Washington.

He had lived in the Mount Lake Terrace-Edmonds area his whole adult life. 5 mi from Penny Creek Road in 1972. Four marriages, five daughters. In June 1968, he was convicted in Snohomish County District Court for indecent exposure, pulling his work truck alongside a 17-year-old girl and exposing himself from the passenger’s window.

He got a deferred sentence, a fine, and a required psychiatric evaluation. This kind of record, 4 years before Jody Loomis was taken from the corridor between Winesap and Strum and led into the trees, showed a pattern of using a vehicle to approach a young female alone on a rural road. Miller became the main suspect.

 But being the main suspect is not proof. To confirm Miller as the source of the seminal stain, Scharf’s team needed Miller’s direct DNA, collected without alerting him, without making him run, and without legal problems about taking a secret sample. They watched him. The investigation file showed that Miller, in retirement, often went to the Tulalip Resort Casino on the Tulalip Indian Reservation north of Marysville.

He went on weekends. He went often enough that detectives could plan around his visits. One day, Miller drove to the casino and detectives followed. They positioned themselves where they could watch his table. They waited. He ordered a coffee. He drank it. He put the cup down. He stood up and walked away without taking the cup.

A detective picked up the cup. The cup went to the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory. The rim of the cup had Miller’s saliva. From the saliva, a DNA profile was made. The profile was compared to the seminal stain Heather Lynn Scott had recorded on August 26th, 2008. They matched. The match was exact.

 It was not close relative similarity. It was a direct individual match. The genetic signature of the man who had ejaculated on the outside of a 12-year-old’s borrowed hiking boot on August 23rd, 1972 was the same as the genetic signature of the 76-year-old retired heavy equipment operator who had set down a coffee cup at the Tulalip Casino in 2018.

 Terrence Miller was the killer of Jody Loomis. In April 2019, detectives arrested Miller at his home in Edmonds. He was 77 years old. He had been free for 46 years and 8 months. He had finished three marriages and started a fourth. He had five daughters. He had worked 40 years operating heavy equipment for IUOE Local 302, retired in 1995, opened a ceramic shop with his wife, kept a regular golf schedule, and became a regular at the Tulalip Casino.

He had grown old in plain sight, 5 miles from a logging road off Penny Creek Road, where a 20-year-old nursing student was once shot above her right ear with a .22 caliber pistol. He was arrested. He was charged with first-degree murder. Bail was set at $1 million with the option to pay $100,000 in cash. Miller paid the cash.

He was released to home confinement with an ankle monitor while waiting for trial. He returned to his Edmonds home. The same home detectives had watched, the same home 5 miles from the road where he had killed Jody, and waited there for the trial that would start in November 2020. Rosemary Loomis died in January 2019, 3 months before the arrest.

The cold case of Jody Loomis had become a closed case. Science had done what the hard work of Don Schultz and Chuck Stewart could not do in 1972. A tiny stain on the outside of a borrowed boot, invisible to the 1972 coroner and FBI lab, had survived 36 years of storage, glowed under Heather Lynnscott’s special light on August 26th, 2008, and gave a profile that through Parabon, through Deb Stone, through Jed Match, through a family tree traced backward and forward across generations, through ruling out five brothers, and finally through a coffee

cup left on a casino table, pointed to one man. 47 years from the shot to the warrant. That is what investigative genetic genealogy did to the Loomis case. That is what it has done since 2018 to hundreds of other cases like it across the United States. The boot Jana Loomis Smith lent her older sister on August 23rd, 1972, was the chain of custody that put her sister’s killer in handcuffs in April 2019.

The science had not failed. The science had only been waiting. Terrence Miller was 77 years old when he was arrested. He was a retired heavy equipment operator who had spent 40 years working inside the cab of machines, moving earth at construction sites in the Puget Sound area. He belonged to IUOE Local 302. He retired with a union pension in 1995 and had not worked since.

After retiring, he and his fourth wife opened a small ceramic shop. He played golf during the long Pacific Northwest summers. On weekends, he drove to the Tulalip Casino and sat at the same kind of table where in 2018 he had left the coffee cup that would identify him. He had been married four times and had five daughters from those marriages.

By 2019, several of his daughters were adults with their own families. To them and his neighbors in Edmonds, he seemed like a frail grandfather, small, white-haired, soft-spoken, the kind of older man who would help a neighbor fix a fence on a Saturday morning. In 1972, he was 29 years old.

 He had already been through three marriages and his personal life was still unsettled. He was driving a commercial work truck through rural roads he knew well. Four years earlier, in 1968, he had pulled that truck alongside a 17-year-old girl and exposed himself from the passenger window. Close enough in his past to suggest a pattern, but far enough away in the eyes of 1972 police to keep him off any active suspect list.

Don Schultz and Chuck Stewart had made their 1972 suspect list from transient workers, farmhands, teenagers, and traffic offenders. They had not included married heavy equipment operators with a single minor exposure conviction four years earlier living in a residential area 5 miles away.

 In 1972, he was exactly the kind of suspect their categories left out. He spent 47 years in the gap that their categories missed. Terrence Miller’s trial started in late October 2020 at the Snohomish County Superior Court. The jury was chosen. Evidence was shown over 2 weeks. Miller said he was not guilty. The prosecution was led by Craig Matheson, the Snohomish County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney.

 Laura Martin, a public defender, led the defense. Matheson’s case focused on the boot. In his opening statement, he told the jury, “48 years ago, the defendant thought he had left a perfect crime in the mud of Penny Creek, but science caught up to him. That boot didn’t just carry Jody Loomis into those woods. It carried the definitive signature of her killer.

” The prosecution explained to the jury the history of the evidence. The boots were taken from Jody’s body in 1972 at Stevens Memorial Hospital. They were stored in an evidence locker for decades. Heather Lynn Scott re-examined them on August 26th, 2008. They found an important stain. A DNA profile was created.

In 2018, the evidence was submitted to Parabon. Genealogy narrowed the suspects to six brothers. Surveillance at the Tulalip Casino and a coffee cup led to a match. Jana Loomis Smith was called to testify. She was 60 years old. She put on latex gloves and was given state exhibit number 139, the St.

 Moritz Waffle Stomper boot that had been carefully tracked for 48 years. She identified it for the record. The last time she touched that boot, she was 12 and handing it to her older sister on a summer afternoon without gloves. The last piece of evidence was a recording. While Miller was in jail between his April 2019 arrest and his bail release, his phone calls were recorded as usual.

One call was to his wife. The jury heard him say it themselves. “When it’s all over and done with, the trial and all that, I’m going to be in prison. This is not a winnable case. That’s the thing.” “I don’t like to hear that,” his wife said. “I know, Mama, but that is that is what that’s the way it is.

 This is not a winnable case. This is a DNA case, and they have an extremely strong case. You’re not going to beat it. The recording was played in court. The jury heard the defendant’s own voice explaining how strong the case against him was. He admitted that DNA evidence can prove things that witness statements and indirect clues cannot.

He told his wife from jail that he was going to prison. He had pleaded not guilty. He said the case could not be won. He was wrong about going to prison. The defense argued the evidence was contaminated. In her closing statement, Laura Martin told the jury, “What the state is showing you is not a perfect case.

 It is a guess based on old and damaged science. This boot was handled, thrown in boxes, and moved through unclean places for 50 years before we had modern rules to prevent contamination. You cannot convict a man based on a tiny speck that we cannot date, cannot prove where it came from, and cannot confirm is uncontaminated.” Before the trial, the judge decided that Miller’s 1968 indecent exposure conviction could not be used.

 The jury would only consider the DNA evidence and the recorded call without knowing his past record. The jury got the case on Friday afternoon, November 6th, 2020. They chose a leader and started reviewing the evidence and family tree mapping. They paused for the weekend without a decision. They met again on Monday morning, November 9th, 2020.

Around 9:50 a.m., emergency services were sent to Terrence Miller’s home in Edmonds. His family found him dead from a single self-inflicted gunshot wound. One gunshot. In 1972, he had killed Jody Loomis with one. In 2020, he killed himself with one. The shape was the same. The place was different.

 This time, the body was his own. The court was told, but did not tell the jury. Doing so during their decision-making could have affected the fairness of the verdict. The jury kept discussing behind closed doors. Around 1:00 p.m., 3 hours after Miller died, the jury told the bailiff they had a unanimous decision. They went back to court and said he was guilty of first-degree murder.

The man they convicted had been dead for 3 hours. He had told his wife on a recorded jail call that he was going to prison. He was wrong about that. The verdict was given in a courtroom where he was just a name on a list and a body in a coroner’s van. Jana Loomis Smith was there.

 She had waited 48 years and 78 days from the day she handed her older sister a pair of boots to the moment a jury named the man who killed her while wearing them. The man who forced her older sister into the woods at gunpoint never heard the verdict. Jody Loomis was 20 years old on the afternoon of August 23rd, 1972. She was wearing boots that were not hers.

She had borrowed them from her 12-year-old sister as she left. She put on one boot but did not finish with the second. Those boots came back from the hospital and were stored in a box. The original autopsy swabs, her underwear, and bullet fragments were also kept in the same evidence locker. Over the next 36 years, the swabs, underwear, and bullets were lost.

 The boots were the only items kept. They were re-examined on August 26th, 2008 by a forensic scientist using a special light that did not exist in 1972. This light revealed what no one had seen before. 11 years later, the boots helped to arrest a man. 48 years after her death, in a Snohomish County courtroom, 12 jurors who did not know they were convicting a dead man gave a unanimous verdict naming her killer.

 Rosemary Loomis kept her daughter’s bedroom unchanged for 46 years. She died 3 months before the arrest. Jody’s face was featured on the Snohomish County cold case playing card deck as the 10 of hearts, and her image was shown in county jails for over a decade before her killer was found. Detective Jim Scharf, who created the cold case unit that worked on her file, said his biggest fear was that the killer would take his own life before a jury could decide.

 The killer died on the morning of his verdict by his own hand using the same kind of weapon he used on her. In that way, the fear was both true and not important. The verdict came anyway, 3 hours after he died. On December 17th, 2020, a Snohomish County judge rejected the defense’s post-trial requests and officially confirmed the conviction.

 Jana Loomis Smith spoke at that hearing. She said, “I didn’t want vengeance. I simply wanted the truth written in the court record that Miller murdered my sister. The truth is now in the court record. Bothell, Washington, 1972, a cold case solved. 47 years. A pair of boots that did not belong to her. If this true crime story stayed with you, and you believe victims like Jody Loomis should be remembered as real people and not just case numbers, please subscribe and hit the like button.

 Every week, we revisit cold case files and bring back the names that time tried to forget.