Washington 1972 Cold Case Solved — Her Mother Gave Her a Dime. She Never Came Home

This was such an innocent victim. She was just riding her bicycle down the road when she ended up being raped and murdered. And it's the oldest case that we have here in Snohomish County, where we have DNA evidence. She was told to take a dime with her, not a weapon, not a warning, a dime, just enough for a phone call if she was gonna be late. Her mother pressed it into her hand before 20-year-old Jody Loomis rode away on her white 10-speed bicycle heading toward a stable six miles from her home outside Bothell, Washington. She was going to check on her horse. It was supposed to be a simple ride, six miles there, six miles back, but Jody never reached the stable. That dime was later found near her body. What happened to her over the next few hours would remain unsolved for 47 years. Not because no one tried, but because the evidence that could eventually answer the question was hiding in plain sight, waiting for a science that didn't exist yet. This is a story of Jody Loomis and how a routine bicycle ride to see her horse became one of the longest-running cold cases in Snohomish County history. If you're new here, this is Crime of Opportunity, where we look at the gaps in the system that let predators walk free, sometimes for decades. Subscribe, and stick around. You'd be shocked at what finally cracked this case or what happened the moment the verdict came in. Jody Loomis was 20 years old in 1972, and by every account, she was the kind of person who couldn't walk past something hurt without stopping. She loved horses. She loved painting. If you'd walked into her bedroom that year, you would have seen a mural she'd painted herself, running horses, mid-stride, covering the walls. She was known, genuinely known, by people who loved her for taking in injured animals, nursing them, not because anyone asked her to, because that was just who she was. Jody lived on Winesap Road, in the stretch of land between Mill Creek and Bothell, with her parents, John and Rosemary Loomis, her 12-year-old sister, Janna, and her fiance, Jim Roberts. And she had a horse of her own, Saudi. Saudi was boarded at a stable about six miles from the house. Most days, her parents would drive her there. It was routine, safe, predictable. But on the afternoon of August 23rd, 1972, Jody decided to ride her bike instead. It was a small decision, the kind of decision that means nothing until later. It means everything. Before she left, her mother reminded her, Rosemary expected her home before dark. Jody took the dime. She never used it. On her way out, Jody stopped by a neighbor's house, her friend, Linda Hook, to see if she wanted to come riding too. Linda couldn't. She was packing to move to California. So Jody kept going, alone. One of the last confirmed sightings of her alive was near a fruit stand by the Bothell-Everett Highway, roughly halfway between her house and the stable. A 14-year-old girl was selling apples there that afternoon, and she remembered Jody clearly, a young woman on a bicycle, wearing boots, who paused there for an unusually long time before continuing on toward what was then called Penny Creek Road. No one ever established why she stopped there. By some accounts, Jody was seen crossing the highway around 5 p.m. Roughly 30 minutes after that, she was found not at the stable, but in the woods. She never reached her horse. The spot where she was found sat about 300 yards south of what was then Penny Creek Road, close to where 164th Street Southwest meets the Bothell-Everett Highway. Today, that stretch of road is part of Mill Creek. Later that afternoon, two people who had nothing to do with any of this were driving down that wooded dirt road, looking for a place to go target shooting. Walter Morris was behind the wheel. 18-year-old Kathy Gogel was in the passenger seat. They hit a fallen tree blocking the road. Walter got out to check it. That's when he saw her, a young woman lying near the tree, alive, barely, unable to speak. Walter was driving a two-seat Saab Sonett, a small car. He looked at it and thought, she won't fit. He told Kathy he'd go for help and she should stay behind with the injured woman. Kathy said no. She was afraid whoever had done this was still out there and she didn't think there was time to wait for help to arrive. So somehow, and neither of them could really explain how, afterward, they got Jody into that tiny car. There wasn't time to fix her clothing. Kathy did what she could to cover her while Walter drove. They reached Stevens Memorial Hospital in Edmonds at 5.45 p.m. Jody Loomis died shortly after arriving. She had suffered a gunshot injury to the right side of her head, just above her ear. The bullet was a .22 caliber. She had also been sexually assaulted. Investigators later theorized, and this remains a theory, not confirmed fact, that Jody 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 that ended her life. Her bicycle was found later, about 180 feet from where she'd been found, down in a ravine, like it had been thrown there. A bridle she'd brought along for Saudi was never recovered. It's still missing today. We're about halfway through this video. At this point in the story, Jody's family still doesn't have an answer, and for 36 years, neither will investigators. If that gap is starting to feel unbearable, imagine living inside it for decades. Stick around to see how it finally closes, and let me know in the comments where you're watching from. Here's where the exploited gap in this case becomes clear. In 1972, forensic DNA profiling didn't exist. Investigators had a violent crime, a small pool of physical evidence, and no way to extract a genetic fingerprint from any of it. They interviewed witnesses, they followed leads, and eventually, they ran out of places to look. The case went cold, not from lack of effort, from lack of tools, but the case wasn't forgotten. In 2008, Jody's face appeared on the 10 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 Snohomish County, and were distributed to inmates in local jails and the state prison system. Investigators hoped someone might recognize a crime, remember something they'd heard, or provide a clue that had been missed, but no breakthrough came from the cards. The real breakthrough was sitting somewhere else, inside the evidence room, a pair of boots. Jody had been wearing Waffle Stomper-style boots the day she died, they weren't hers. She'd borrowed them from her 12-year-old sister, Jana, before leaving the house that afternoon. When the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab reexamined those boots in 2008, they found something small, a stain, on the left boot. Testing confirmed it contained semen. For the first time in 36 years, there was a genetic profile connected to the person responsible for Jody's death. The genetic profile was put into CODIS, the national DNA database law enforcement uses to match crime scene evidence to known offenders. The result was no match. Whoever left that stain had never been arrested for a crime that required giving a DNA sample. The gap in the system had protected him for decades, first by not existing at all, and now, simply by him never having been caught for anything else. In 2018, a full decade after the boots were retested, and 46 years after Jody died, investigators tried something new, forensic genetic genealogy. This is the same technique that had just cracked open the Golden State Killer case, and it works differently than a standard DNA match. Instead of searching for an exact hit, genealogists looked for distant relatives, people who share only fragments of DNA with an unknown suspect, and use those fragments to build out an entire family tree, branch by branch, until one name is left standing at the center. The profile from Jody's boot was sent to Parabon Nano Labs. An Oregon-based genealogist named Deb Stone took the case, searching for the exact point where distant family branches intersected. That search eventually narrowed down to a single family. A family with six brothers, one of them was Terrence Miller, a retired heavy equipment operator who had lived in Edmonds for most of his life, about five miles from where Jody was attacked. And investigators found something else waiting for them in court records. This was not the first time Miller's name had come up in connection with sexual offenses. According to court papers, he had allegedly been accused of sex crimes on five separate occasions, in 1968, 1978, twice in 1990, and once in 1999. Of those five allegations, only one 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. And the last was declined for prosecution, likely because the statute of limitations had already run out. None of that proved Miller was the person responsible for the death of Jody Loomis. It's important to note that allegations are not convictions, and most of these never went to trial at all. But it was enough to make him a serious person of interest. Genetic genealogy can point you toward a name. It can't put handcuffs on someone. For that, investigators needed a direct DNA sample from Miller, ideally one he had discarded without knowing detectives were collecting it, so they started watching him. In August of 2018, detectives followed Terrence Miller to the Tulalip Resort Casino. At some point during that visit, Miller threw away a coffee cup. The detective who has been following Miller retrieved the coffee cup and sent it straight to a lab. The DNA on it matched the profile taken from the stain on Jody Loomis' boot. 46 years after a 20-year-old woman got on her bicycle to see her horse, a discarded coffee cup gave investigators the DNA match that would lead to a murder charge. On April 10th, 2019, Terrence Miller was arrested at his home in Edmonds. He was 77 years old. Prosecutors charged him with first-degree premeditated murder. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment, appearing by video monitor. His bail didn't stay put for long. It was initially set, then lowered after the defense argued for reduced conditions. Miller posted $750,000 and was placed under house arrest in Edmonds. Then came a strange wrinkle. Prosecutors accused Miller of planning to violate the terms of his release by taking his wife bowling. In response, the judge raised his bail back up, this time to $1 million, and gave him until 9 a.m. to come up with it or return to jail. Miller's defense attorney pushed back, but the judge held firm. Miller posted the full amount and was released again by early afternoon. For Jody's family, watching the man accused of killing her walk in and out of custody over bowling, of all things, was its own kind of injury. The two-week trial opened in Snohomish County Superior Court in late October of 2020, presided over by Judge David Kurtz. A jury of seven women and five men was seated to hear the case. The DNA was a centerpiece of the prosecution's case. The defense pushed back hard, questioning how nearly five-decade-old biological evidence had been stored and handled, pointing to the samples that had been lost over the decades, and asking why the semen stain on the boot hadn't been found sooner. Defense attorney Laura Martin argued the physical evidence didn't add up cleanly to guilt. In her closing argument, she told the jury plainly, the pieces just don't fit. They also raised questions about Walter Morris, the man who'd found Jody's body. Morris had owned a .22-caliber rifle, and over the years, he'd allegedly given shifting explanations for why he and Kathy Gogol had been on that road that day. It's worth being clear, this was a line of defense argument, not an established fact, and by the time of the trial, Morris had died and couldn't respond to it himself. Kathy Gogol 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 Jody 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, that the case was, in his words, unwinnable because it was a DNA case. The defense argued that wasn't a confession, just a frightened man convinced he'd be wrongly convicted. Closing arguments wrapped on November 6th, 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. They never got that far, not in the way anyone expected. Just before 10 a.m. on Monday, November 9th, Miller's wife called 911. Terrence Miller had shot himself at home. He didn't survive. The Snohomish County medical examiner later confirmed that Miller had died from a gunshot wound and ruled the manner of death as suicide. Here's the part that still doesn't feel real. The jury didn't know any of this yet. 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 and then let them deliver their verdict anyway. After three more hours of deliberation, they came back with it, guilty, first-degree murder. Terrence Miller was 78 years old. He never heard the word. Lead detective Jim Scharf, who had worked the case for years, later told reporters simply, I'm glad that we got to hear the verdict. Because Miller died before he could be sentenced, his attorneys argued that the guilty verdict should not stand. Legally, that's genuinely murky ground. There wasn't a clean precedent for a defendant dying between deliberation and verdict. In December of 2020, on what should have been Miller's sentencing day, Judge Kurtz held a hearing to sort through it. Jody's sister, Jana Loomis-Smith, was the first to speak, 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, arguing over whether the timing of his death should erase the verdict. He ruled against the defense. Miller couldn't be sentenced. He was gone. There would be no prison term, no chance for him to ever answer for it directly. But the judge signed something almost as significant, 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. Jody's father, John, died in 2005. He never knew who killed his daughter. Her mother, Rosemary, the one who'd handed her that dime, died in January of 2019. Terrence Miller was arrested just months later. She missed it by weeks. Jody's younger sister, Jana, the same sister whose boots Jody 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 afterward, 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. And this helps. A tiny biological stain survived for decades on a pair of borrowed boots. That's what it took to answer a question a family had been asking since 1972. The gap in this case wasn't a mistake anyone made. It was a technology that hadn't 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 that no one connected until DNA finally did it for them. If this case affected you the way it affected me while researching it, tell me in the comments specifically, what part hit hardest? Was it the dime, the boots, the jury delivering a guilty verdict to a man who had taken his life? Subscribe if you want to keep tracing these cases, the ones where science eventually closed the gap that lets someone walk free far longer than they should have.