On the afternoon of August 23, 1972, Rosemary Loomis pressed a dime into her daughter’s hand and told her to call if she was going to be late. Not a weapon. Not a warning. Just enough for a phone call.
Twenty-year-old Jodi Loomis took the dime, climbed onto her white ten-speed bicycle, and rode away from her family’s home outside Bothell, Washington. She was heading to a stable six miles away to check on her horse, Saudi. It was supposed to be a simple ride. Six miles there, six miles back.
Jodi never reached the stable. The dime was later found near her body. What happened to her over the next several hours would remain unsolved for forty-seven years. Jodi lived on Winesap Road, in the stretch of country between Mill Creek and Bothell, with her parents, John and Rosemary, her twelve-year-old sister Jana, and her fiancé Jim Roberts.
She was the kind of person people genuinely described as gentle, someone who took in injured animals and nursed them back to health without being asked. Her bedroom walls were covered with a mural she had painted herself, running horses mid-stride. That afternoon, she planned to ride her bike to the stable where Saudi was boarded. Before leaving, she stopped at a neighbor’s house to ask her friend Linda Hook if she wanted to come along.
Linda couldn’t; she was packing to move to California. So Jodi continued alone. One of the last confirmed sightings placed her near a fruit stand by the Bothell-Everett Highway, roughly halfway between her house and the stable. A fourteen-year-old girl selling apples that afternoon remembered Jodi clearly, a young woman on a bicycle wearing boots, who paused there for an unusually long time before continuing toward what was then called Penny Creek Road.
No one ever established why she stopped. She was seen crossing the highway around five o’clock. About thirty minutes later, she was found in the woods, about three hundred yards south of Penny Creek Road. She had never reached her horse.
Two people driving down that wooded dirt road, looking for a place to go target shooting, came across a fallen tree blocking the way. Walter Morris was behind the wheel of his small two-seat Saab Sonett, with eighteen-year-old Kathy Gogle in the passenger seat. When Walter got out to check the tree, he saw a young woman lying near it. She was alive, barely, and unable to speak.
Walter thought she wouldn’t fit in his tiny car, and told Kathy he would go for help while she stayed behind with the injured woman. Kathy refused. She was afraid whoever had done this was still out there, and she didn’t think there was time to wait for help. Somehow, neither of them could later explain how, they got Jodi into that car.
Kathy did what she could to cover her while Walter drove. They reached Stevens Memorial Hospital in Edmonds at 5:45 p. m. Jodi died shortly after arriving.
She had been shot in the right side of the head, just above the ear, with a . 22-caliber bullet. She had also been sexually assaulted. Investigators later theorized, though it was never confirmed, that Jodi may have still been on the ground, trying to put her clothes back on, when the unidentified man stood over her and fired the shot.
Her bicycle was found about 180 feet from where she had been discovered, thrown down a ravine. A bridle she had brought for Saudi was never recovered. It is still missing today. In 1972, forensic DNA profiling did not exist.
Investigators had a violent crime and a small amount of physical evidence, but no way to extract a genetic fingerprint from any of it. They interviewed witnesses, followed leads, and eventually ran out of places to look. The case went cold, not from lack of effort, but from lack of tools. The case was not forgotten.
In 2008, Jodi’s face appeared on the ten of hearts in a deck of cold case playing cards created by the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office. The cards featured unsolved cases from across the county and were distributed to inmates in local jails and the state prison system, in the hope that someone might remember something they had heard. No breakthrough came from the cards. The real breakthrough was sitting in the evidence room.
Jodi had been wearing waffle stomper style boots the day she died. They were not hers. She had borrowed them from her twelve-year-old sister Jana before leaving the house. When the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab reexamined those boots in 2008, they found a small stain on the left boot.
Testing confirmed it contained semen. For the first time in thirty-six years, there was a genetic profile connected to the person responsible for Jodi’s death. That profile was entered into CODIS, the national DNA database used to match crime scene evidence to known offenders. There was no match.
Whoever left that stain had never been arrested for a crime requiring a DNA sample. The same gap that had protected him in 1972, the absence of the technology, had simply been replaced by another gap. He had never been caught for anything else. In 2018, a decade after the boots were retested and forty-six years after Jodi died, investigators tried forensic genetic genealogy, the same technique that had recently cracked the Golden State Killer case.
Genealogists searched for distant relatives who shared only fragments of DNA with the unknown suspect, and used those fragments to build out an entire family tree until one name was left standing. The profile from Jodi’s boot was sent to Parabon NanoLabs. A genealogist named Deb Stone took the case and eventually narrowed the search to a single family with six brothers. One of them was Terrence Miller, a retired heavy equipment operator who had lived in Edmonds, about five miles from where Jodi was attacked, for most of his life.
Court records revealed something else. Miller’s name had come up in connection with sexual offenses before, on five separate occasions: 1968, 1978, twice in 1990, and once in 1999. Only one of those allegations led to a conviction, for lewd conduct. One resulted in a deferred prosecution.
Two were never charged, reportedly because the girls involved later said the contact could have been accidental. The last was declined for prosecution, likely because the statute of limitations had run out. Allegations are not convictions, and most of these never went to trial, but they were enough to make him a serious person of interest. Genetic genealogy can point toward a name, but it cannot place handcuffs on someone.
Investigators needed a direct DNA sample from Miller, ideally one he discarded without knowing it was being collected. In August 2018, detectives followed Miller to the Tulalip Resort Casino. At some point during his visit, he threw away a coffee cup. A detective retrieved it and sent it to a lab.
The DNA on the cup matched the profile taken from the stain on Jodi Loomis’s boot. On April 10, 2019, Terrence Miller was arrested at his home in Edmonds. He was seventy-seven years old. Prosecutors charged him with first-degree premeditated murder.
He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment, appearing by video monitor. His bail was initially set, then lowered after the defense argued for reduced conditions. Miller posted $750,000 and was placed under house arrest. Then prosecutors accused him of planning to violate the terms of his release by taking his wife bowling.
The judge raised his bail back to $1 million and gave him until nine in the morning to come up with it or return to jail. Miller posted the full amount and was released again by early afternoon. For Jodi’s family, watching the man accused of killing her walk in and out of custody over bowling was its own kind of injury. The two-week trial opened in Snohomish County Superior Court in late October 2020, presided over by Judge David Kurtz.
A jury of seven women and five men was seated. The DNA was the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case. The defense pushed back, questioning how nearly five-decade-old biological evidence had been stored and handled, pointing to samples that had been lost over the decades, and asking why the semen stain on the boot had not been found sooner. Defense attorney Laura Martin told the jury plainly, “The pieces just don’t fit.
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The defense also raised questions about Walter Morris, the man who had found Jodi’s body. He had owned a . 22-caliber rifle, and over the years, he had allegedly given shifting explanations for why he and Kathy Gogle had been on that road that day. This was a line of defense argument, not established fact, and by the time of trial, Morris had died and could not respond.
Kathy Gogle could. She testified, despite being in treatment for metastatic breast cancer at the time. The prosecution’s counter was simple. None of the alternative theories explained why Terrence Miller’s DNA was on the boot Jodi was wearing when she was assaulted and murdered.
Jurors also heard a recorded jail call between Miller and his wife. On it, Miller said he believed he was going to prison, and that the case was “unwinnable” because it was a DNA case. The defense argued that was not a confession, just a frightened man convinced he would be wrongly convicted. Closing arguments wrapped on November 6, 2020.
The jury began deliberating that Friday afternoon. After several hours, the judge sent them home for the weekend. Deliberations were set to resume Monday morning. Just before ten o’clock on Monday, November 9, Miller’s wife called 911.
Terrence Miller had shot himself at home. He did not survive. The Snohomish County Medical Examiner confirmed he had died from a gunshot wound and ruled the manner of death suicide. The jury did not know any of this.
They gathered at the courthouse that morning to begin their second day of deliberations with no idea the defendant was already dead. Hours later, they returned to the courtroom. The judge told them what had happened, then let them deliver their verdict anyway. After three more hours of deliberation, they came back with it: guilty of first-degree murder.
Terrence Miller was seventy-eight years old. He never heard the word. Because Miller died before he could be sentenced, his attorneys argued the guilty verdict should not stand. There was no clean legal precedent for a defendant dying between deliberation and verdict.
In December 2020, on what should have been Miller’s sentencing day, Judge Kurtz held a hearing to sort through it. Jodi’s sister Janna spoke first, addressing the court on behalf of her sister. The judge also heard from Miller’s own family and from both the defense and the prosecution. He ruled against the defense.
Miller could not be sentenced. There would be no prison term. But the judge signed a formal finding that Miller’s guilt had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Prosecutor Craig Matheson put it this way afterward: “We got an answer whether Mr.
Miller was there or not. It wasn’t a sentence, but it was an answer. ”
Jodi’s father John died in 2005, never knowing who killed his daughter. Her mother Rosemary, the one who had handed her that dime, died in January 2019.
Terrence Miller was arrested just months later. She missed it by weeks. Janna, the sister whose boots Jodi had borrowed that day, was the one left to carry the case to its end. After the verdict, she thanked the investigators, prosecutors, genealogists, and scientists who kept working until the evidence finally spoke.
She put it simply: “Truth never dies. They thought it was going to die. They thought it was so old that we wouldn’t be able to follow through with the truth. ”
A tiny biological stain survived for decades on a pair of borrowed boots.
That is what it took to answer a question a family had been asking since 1972. The gap in this case was not a mistake anyone made. It was a technology that had not been invented yet, and an unidentified man who happened to live inside that gap for almost half a century, resurfacing again and again in court records no one connected until DNA finally did it for them.