On November 9, 2020, a jury in Snohomish County, Washington, returned a verdict of guilty for the 1972 murder of Jody Loomis. The defendant, Terrence Miller, was already dead, dead by his own hand in his Edmonds home that morning, a fact the jury did not know when they delivered the only verdict the system had left to give. The conviction stood. A judge later refused to erase it, saying it was not the right thing to do.
For the family, it was the only thing the system could still give them. No sentencing. No prison term. Miller had taken that from them too.
Jody Loomis had turned twenty in June of 1972. She lived with her parents, John and Rosemary, her fiance Jim Roberts, and her twelve-year-old sister Jana on Winesap Road in Bothell, Washington. The neighborhood was farmland and dirt roads then. Jody was small, under five feet tall, with round glasses.
She kept a horse named Saudi at a stable on Strum Road, about six and a quarter miles from home, and most days her parents drove her there. August 23rd was the first time she decided to make the ride herself. Before she left, she knocked on the back window of her neighbor’s house. Linda Hook was home, packing to move back to California.
Jody asked if she wanted to come ride horses. Hook said no. Nearly fifty years later, Hook would sit on a witness stand and struggle to compose herself as she described seeing Jody’s face disappear from the glass. Jody left the house in a cropped shirt and jeans, a horse bridle slung over her shoulder.
She borrowed Jana’s back-to-school shoes without asking, brownish St. Moritz ankle-high boots, size five and a half. Jana was flattered her older sister thought they were cool. She did not think twice.
Jody climbed onto her white ten-speed bicycle and headed north into the warm afternoon. She made it about halfway to the stable before pausing to talk with a friend. Then she continued east across the Bothell-Everett Highway. At the corner of 164th Street and the highway, a fourteen-year-old girl named Kenda McCora was working her family’s fruit stand.
She noticed a young woman with a dark blonde ponytail coasting to a stop on a bicycle. Two things registered as odd. The woman was cycling in boots, and she paused at the intersection for a long time, longer than made sense, before pedaling east onto Penny Creek Road. Then she disappeared behind the tree line.
Kenda McCora was the last person to see Jody Loomis alive and well. In the years that followed, she would return to the Snohomish County Courthouse every few years, not because anyone asked her to, but because Jody never left her memory. For decades, the answer was always no. Around 5:30 that evening, a couple drove up the same dirt track off Penny Creek Road to do some target shooting.
A fallen tree blocked the path. They got out to move it and found a woman on the ground. No identification. Glasses askew.
One boot untied. She was barely alive. They carried her to their car and drove fifteen minutes to Stevens Memorial Hospital in Edmonds. She was pronounced dead on arrival.
Investigators reconstructed what happened between approximately 5:00 and 5:30 p. m. Jody had been forced off the road and taken into the woods at gunpoint. She was attacked.
She was shot once behind the right ear with a . 22 caliber pistol as she tried to dress herself. The gunshot wound was the cause of death. Her bicycle was recovered at the scene.
The horse bridle she had been carrying was never found. Jana’s St. Moritz boots were sealed into an evidence bag and taken to storage at the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office. Deputies canvassed the area.
A few local men drew attention. A ranch owner with a prior pattern of inappropriate behavior toward Jody. A tenant on a nearby property who had been chopping wood close to the dirt track that afternoon and could not clearly account for his time. Both were questioned.
Neither could be connected to the crime through physical evidence or witness testimony. A biker gang active in the area became a focus. Detectives built DNA profiles and eliminated members one by one as they tracked them across the country. None matched.
There were no fingerprints, no witnesses to the attack. The . 22 caliber pistol was never identified. By the end of 1972, the case had stalled.
The evidence went into long-term storage. The file went onto a shelf. The man who stopped Jody on Penny Creek Road lived five miles from that dirt track. He was never questioned.
He would live there for the next forty-six years. Jana was twelve years old when the police came to the door on Winesap Road. Jody’s bedroom stayed the way it was. The leather purse on the dresser.
The horse mural painted across the walls. Jana grew up in the shadow of that afternoon. She graduated. She married.
She became Jana Loomis Smith. She had a daughter. Through every year of it, she kept calling the sheriff’s office, showed up at press conferences, and refused to let the file disappear into a cabinet. John Loomis died without an answer.
Rosemary Loomis died without an answer. Jana became the family’s only voice. In 2005, cold case detective Jim Scharf of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office pulled Jody’s file. The case was thirty-three years old, the department’s oldest unsolved homicide.
Scharf was methodical. He went back through the original evidence, re-interviewed anyone he could locate, and sent anything that might yield biological material to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab for modern testing. He knew the chain of custody was imperfect. Deputies at the 1972 autopsy had not worn gloves.
Items had been transferred and cataloged across three decades. Some were unaccounted for. Scharf worked with what remained. He also called Jana regularly, even when the update was that there was no update.
Three years into his review, in 2008, a technician at the state crime lab examined Jana’s old boots under different lighting conditions with modern equipment. She found something on the outside of the left one. A small stain. It had been there since August 23rd, 1972.
The boots had passed through the county coroner’s office, sheriff’s detectives, and the FBI across thirty-six years of storage, transfers, and re-examinations. Nobody had seen it. The technician extracted a partial DNA profile and submitted it to CODIS, the FBI’s national database of DNA profiles from convicted offenders. No match came back.
That did not mean the man who killed her 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 ran automatically against every new addition, month after month, year after year. No hit.
In July 2018, Scharf tried something the investigation had never tried before. He sent the DNA profile to Parabon NanoLabs, a private forensic lab in Virginia specializing in forensic genealogy. The technique works differently than CODIS. Instead of checking against convicted offenders, it uploads the profile to public ancestry platforms like GEDmatch, where millions of people have voluntarily submitted their own DNA.
Any relative in that database becomes a thread. Genealogists pull those threads, build a family tree, and narrow it down. A genealogist named Deb Stone spent fifty-seven hours combing through online family trees, court papers, census records, and public databases. The branches converged on a family in the Edmonds area.
Six brothers, six sons of the same couple, all raised within miles of Penny Creek Road. Detectives began the process of elimination quietly. Five names came off the list. One remained.
They needed a DNA sample, something the suspect would leave behind in public without anyone watching. On August 28th, 2018, an undercover task force followed the suspect to the Tulalip Resort Casino, north of Everett. They watched him buy a coffee, sit down at a machine, play, and finish the drink. He stood up, tossed two stuck-together cups into a garbage can, and walked away.
Officers collected the cups. The cups went directly to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. In September 2018, the results came back. The DNA extracted from the cups matched the profile recovered from the stain on Jana’s left boot.
The statistical probability of a coincidental match was 980 million to one. The man the genealogy named had been living five miles from that dirt track for all forty-six of those years. His name was Terrence Miller. Everyone called him Terry.
To his neighbors in Edmonds, he was the ceramics guy, running a weekend pottery operation out of his garage with his wife Linda, together since 1976. He was a retired heavy equipment operator. He was thirty years old when Jody Loomis was killed. Investigators could find no connection between them.
She had simply crossed his path on an August afternoon. The record behind the picket fence told a different story. A 1968 citation for lewd conduct, exposing himself to a teenage girl from a company truck. An accusation involving a preteen in the mid-1970s.
Two sisters in 1990 who reported contact but later said it may have been accidental. No charges filed. A report in 1999 involving a man with developmental disabilities that prosecutors determined fell outside the statute of limitations. Five accusations across three decades, not one conviction after 1968.
When Scharf announced the arrest, he called Miller a real predator. On April 11th, 2019, forty-seven years after the murder, deputies took Terrence Miller into custody as he walked through his own front door. The trial opened in October 2020 in Snohomish County Superior Court. Prosecutors built their case around the DNA chain, from the stain discovered in 2008 through Deb Stone’s fifty-seven hours of genealogy work, the casino surveillance, the two stuck-together cups, and the 980 million to one match.
The defense attacked the chain at every weak point. Fifty years of handling. Lost items. Ungloved deputies at the 1972 autopsy.
A state crime lab analyst whose own DNA had appeared on a reference sample during testing. The defense told the jury the entire prosecution rested on what they called a botched DNA analysis of the outside of a boot. Then Jana took the stand. A court officer brought out the boots, the same St.
Moritz shoes sealed in evidence since the day after a summer afternoon when a twelve-year-old lent her older sister her back-to-school shoes without thinking twice. Jana Loomis Smith saw them for the first time in forty-eight years. She began to cry. She composed herself.
She confirmed what they were. She told the jury that for those who remained, all they had was the hope of justice and accountability for the hideous theft of Jodi’s life. Closing arguments ended Friday, November 6th, 2020. On Monday morning, November 9th, Terrence Miller was found dead at his Edmonds home from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The medical examiner confirmed it as suicide. He was seventy-eight years old. The jury did not know. They returned to the courthouse that same morning and resumed deliberations, weighing the DNA chain and the contamination arguments without any knowledge that the defendant was already dead.
That afternoon, they reached their verdict. Guilty. First-degree murder. Seven women and five men looked at the evidence, decided the chain held, and returned the only verdict the system had left to give.
Miller’s defense team filed a motion to vacate. Their argument was that he had died before the verdict was read and had been denied his right to appeal. Judge David Kurtz heard from both families and the attorneys. Then he ruled against the motion.
It was not the right thing to do, he said, to erase what the jury had found. The conviction stands. Jana Loomis Smith was sixty years old when twelve strangers said the word guilty. Her daughter was beside her.
Both her parents were gone. She had been twelve years old when she lent her sister those boots. Kenda McCora, the fourteen-year-old at the fruit stand who watched a girl on a bicycle pause too long at an intersection and disappear, had driven to the courthouse every few years for decades just to ask if anyone had found an answer. They found it in a storage room, in a boot, in a stain that thirty-six years of investigators had looked at and walked past.
It was small enough to miss and strong enough to last.