In February 1987, Roxanne Wood said goodnight to her husband Terry on the parking lot of a bowling alley in Niles, Michigan. It was just past midnight. She was ready to go home; he wanted to stay for one more game. They did what couples do: a hug, a kiss, “I love you, drive carefully.
” Roxanne got in her car and drove home. Terry stayed and played another round. About 45 minutes later, he walked through the garage door and found her on the kitchen floor. She was wearing her nightgown, lying in a pool of blood.
She had been sexually assaulted and her throat had been cut. Roxanne Wood was 30 years old. The man who killed her had already served time in prison for attacking another woman. He had been sentenced to 14 years for that assault, served seven, and had been free for about four months before Roxanne was murdered.
But he would not be arrested until February 2022, almost 35 years later. The way investigators finally found him involved a family tree, a university research project, 28 picograms of DNA, and a discarded cigarette butt. Niles is a small town in southwestern Michigan, right on the Indiana border. Roxanne, born Roxanne Woods, was 30 that winter.
She had married Terry a few years earlier, and her sister Janet had married Terry’s brother Rob, so the families had become one. Roxanne and Terry had recently started working on opposite sides of the state line, she in South Bend, Indiana, for some breathing room. The marriage was good. They were happy and planning to start a family.
People who knew Roxanne describe her the same way: tall, striking, beautifully dressed. But what everyone returns to is something harder to define. She made people feel like they were her best friend. She just loved everyone.
Her sister Janet said Roxanne, the older sister, had been the family’s anchor after their parents divorced. The only thing that was always stable was Rock. She was like a mother to you. The nickname existed for a reason.
On the night of February 19, 1987, a Thursday, Roxanne and Terry met for dinner in downtown Niles, then went to a local bowling alley in separate cars. Roxanne stood out when she walked in. It was a men’s bowling league, and there were not many women present. Around midnight, she was ready to leave.
Terry wanted to stay, so they said goodnight as they always did. Terry played one more game. When he got home, he found Roxanne and called the local police. His posture during that call, the anger in his voice, immediately raised alarms for investigators.
At the station, he asked for a lawyer within minutes. A detective looked him in the eye and said, “I believe you are the murderer, and I will not rest until you are behind bars. ” That set the direction of the investigation for the next 35 years. There were no signs of forced entry.
A fillet knife, believed to be the murder weapon from a kitchen drawer, was never found. Investigators learned that both Roxanne and Terry had had extramarital affairs and wondered about motive. They noted that Terry’s account of lifting Roxanne’s head and kneeling in her blood did not match the blood evidence at the scene. Everything pointed toward the man who found her.
Terry insisted he was innocent, and Janet believed him. I knew him too well, she said. He could have a sharp tongue but was never violent. The case stalled.
Police could not charge Terry without enough evidence, but the shadow over him never lifted. For 35 years, the husband who found his wife on the kitchen floor carried not only grief but suspicion, an exhausting form of innocence that had to be proven without ever being fully believed. DNA from the crime scene survived. In 1999, it was entered into CODIS, the national DNA database.
There was no match. When Terry’s DNA was finally compared, it produced a result: the DNA was not his. It belonged to someone else. That should have cleared him completely.
It did not. Investigators said the presence of someone else’s DNA did not automatically exclude the husband. The suspicion lingered. Over the decades, more than 3,500 pages of documents had accumulated in Roxanne’s file.
First Lieutenant Chuck Christensen of the Michigan State Police understood that before a new investigation could move, someone had to organize that paper mountain. Around 2020, he worked with Dr. Ashlyn Kersten, a professor at Western Michigan University, to have her criminal justice students digitize the entire case file into one searchable database. Every name, every address, 30 years of detective work became something an investigator could search in seconds.
For the first time in three decades, police could see the whole case at once. At the same time, Christensen did what he called a last resort. He contacted Colleen Fitzpatrick, president of Identifinders International, a company specializing in forensic genetic genealogy. What remained of the 1987 DNA was almost nothing: 28 picograms, a fraction of what is normally usable.
Fitzpatrick described it as about three percent of what her company usually works with, the smallest amount they had ever attempted. They spent about ten months on the data and found nothing. It felt truly impossible, Fitzpatrick said. Then, in April 2021, she mentioned the case to a colleague, Gabriella Vargas, a forensic genealogist from California.
Vargas looked at the evidence and said something no one else had ever said. I concluded I thought differently from the others. I believe this case was extremely solvable. And I believed I could solve it.
In April 2021, Vargas generated a genetic profile from the trace DNA. She turned to GEDmatch, the public genealogy database, and built a family tree, going back to 1823 on one side and 1797 on the other. Tracing shared segments through generations, she found a couple born around 1920, the point where two sides of the suspect’s family came together. That couple had three sons.
Two were eliminated. The third had a history of violent and sexually deviant offenses, in Christensen’s words. His name was Patrick Gilliam. He lived only a few kilometers from where Roxanne was killed in 1987.
He had never left the region. He had never appeared on investigators’ radar. Vargas solved the case that was considered impossible in four days. When investigators dug into Gilliam’s background, they found something that made everything fall into place with a specific and terrible logic.
In September 1979, Gilliam broke into the home of a woman named Maureen Feerick in Gary, Indiana. Her husband was away on business. Gilliam entered, searched her purse, and when she woke, grabbed her at the bottom of the stairs, pinned her down, and tried to assault her. He failed.
Throughout the attack, Maureen stayed completely silent. Her daughters, ages two and one, were sleeping nearby. She did not wake them. She protected them at her own expense.
About a week later, police stopped Gilliam for a traffic violation and spotted Maureen’s credit cards on the seat. He pleaded guilty to burglary and was sentenced to 14 years. He served seven. About four months after his release, Roxanne Wood was murdered.
Investigators concluded Gilliam had learned something from the attack on Maureen: he had left a witness alive, and that witness sent him to prison. He was not going to make that mistake again. Maureen Feerick died of cancer in 2018, never knowing the man who attacked her had killed someone else. There was another missed chance buried in the files.
In the summer of 1987, months after Roxanne’s murder, a woman in South Bend, Indiana, named Rose Caporal saw a blue El Camino with a broken tail light circling her street. A man with a cap and full beard came around the corner of her house. She fled to a neighbor. Days later, her family spotted the same car.
Her husband, a retired Marine, confronted the driver at gunpoint and demanded his license. The name was Patrick Gilliam. Police were called but never came. No arrest was made.
The case that might have been solved in 1987 stayed open for another 35 years. In May 2021, undercover surveillance teams began following Gilliam. They saw he was a smoker. Cigarettes are an excellent source of DNA.
When Gilliam flicked a butt out of his truck window, the team recovered it and sent it to the lab. It came back: no match. Reviewing the video, they realized another car had passed exactly when the cigarette flew out. They could not be sure the butt was his.
They had to go back for another. Agent Ryan Cody got the assignment. He saw Gilliam park at a laundromat. Knowing Gilliam would likely come out for a smoke break, Cody bought a pack of cigarettes at the gas station on the corner and sat on a curb nearby.
Gilliam came out and sat about two meters away. The two strangers smoked and made small talk. Gilliam said he was a Red Wings fan. When Gilliam finished and went back inside, Cody walked over and picked up the still-warm butt.
The results came back: a perfect match to the DNA from Roxanne Wood’s 1987 crime scene. In July 2021, investigators brought Gilliam in for questioning. They asked if he knew anyone named Roxanne. He said he knew two, describing one as a stripper and the other as a drug addict.
When they showed him Roxanne’s photo, he said he had never seen her. Then they told him the woman in the photo had been sexually assaulted. Detective Jason Bailey, with 23 years on the job, watched Gilliam’s body stiffen. He was nearly hyperventilating.
His hands shook. Bailey said he had never seen such a reaction in his entire career. Gilliam said, “I need to talk to my lawyer, man. ” The interview ended.
In February 2022, days before the 35th anniversary of Roxanne’s murder, Patrick Gilliam was arrested at his home in South Bend. He was interrogated for five and a half hours. At various points he said, “You’re saying I did this, and if I did this, I’m a monster. ” He repeated, “I don’t remember.
” Thirty-five years of “I don’t remember. ”
Before making the arrest, Christensen went to Terry Wood. He sat him down and told him he was no longer considered a suspect, that they knew he had nothing to do with it. Terry had lived under a cloud for 35 years, walking into rooms where conversations stopped.
Now the weight was gone. He cried. He was in shock, Christensen said. Robert Feerick, the husband of the woman Gilliam attacked in 1979, was also present at some of the hearings.
He shook Terry’s hand. He was trembling and crying, Robert said. I felt more empathy for him than anyone I ever met. In April 2022, Patrick Gilliam, 67, walked into a Michigan courtroom and pleaded no contest to first-degree murder.
He was sentenced to at least 23 years in prison, effectively the rest of his natural life. Brad Wood, Roxanne’s brother, looked directly at him and said that Patrick Gilliam was the definition of the nightmare women fear their whole lives. Janet stood and faced the man who had taken her sister, left Terry under suspicion, and returned to a world where Roxanne was still waiting. His actions gave us all a life sentence, she said.
He lived most of it as a free man. We are here today to see him finally pay. When Gilliam spoke, he said he could not believe what he had done, that he prayed for them every night, and that he was sorry. He hoped they could forgive him.
After everything, Janet described a dream she had about her sister. They were in downtown Niles, walking and laughing. Then Janet looked up and everything was quiet. They stood at the gates of a cemetery.
Janet told her she had to go back. Roxanne looked at her and said, “Yes, but it’s okay. I’m doing okay. ” Janet woke up.
She’s really okay, she said softly. Roxanne was 30 years old. She had said goodnight to her husband with a hug, a kiss, and “I love you,” and drove home. She was the rock her family was built around.
She was someone who made everyone she met feel like her best friend.