She almost missed it. 36 years of detectives, 36 years of evidence boxes, storage rooms, case files, and agency transfers. The FBI had looked at these boots, the county coroner’s office had looked at these boots, sheriff’s detectives had looked at these boots, and in 2008, under a different light, a state crime lab technician examined the outside of the left one and stopped.
Something was there. Something small. Something that had been there since August 23rd, 1972. She didn’t know yet whose it was. She didn’t know yet what it would cost to find out. She only knew that whatever lived in that stain had survived every single person who had failed to see it. >> >> And it had been waiting.
Welcome back to Crime Watch Central, where no case stays cold forever. Drop a comment right now and tell us where you’re watching from. We read every single one. New here? Hit like and subscribe. It’s what keeps us digging cases like this one. Now, let’s get into it. Her name was Jody Loomis. She had turned 20 in June of 1972.
Two months later, she was dead. Jody lived on Winesap Road in Bothell, Washington. A single-story house shared with her parents, John and Rosemary, her fiance Jim Roberts, and her 12-year-old sister Jana. In 1972, the neighborhood was farmland and dirt roads. The kind of place where a bike ride through the trees felt like nothing at all.
Jody was small, under 5 ft tall, with round glasses her prosecutor would later compare to John Lennon’s. She wore English riding clothes when she was with her horse. She had painted her bedroom walls floor-to-ceiling with a mural of running horses in the room she still slept in at home. Her horse was named Saudi.
She kept him at a stable on Strum Road, about 6 and 1/4 miles from the house. Most days, John or Rosemary would drive 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.
She and Jodi were close, about the same age, practically next-door mirrors of each other. Jodi asked if she wanted to come ride horses. Hook said no. >> >> She was packing to move back to California. She watched Jodi’s face disappear from the glass. Nearly 50 years later, Linda Hook would sit on a witness stand in a Snohomish County courtroom and try to hold herself together.
She said, “I can see her cute little face peeking in my back window.” Then she composed herself. Jodi left the house in a summery cropped shirt and jeans. She had a horse bridle slung over her shoulder, Saudi’s bridle, which she planned to use that afternoon. She borrowed Jana’s back-to-school shoes without asking, brownish St.
Moritz ankle-high waffle stompers, size 5 and 1/2. Jana was 12 and flattered that her older sister thought they were cool. She didn’t think twice about it. Jodi climbed onto her white 10-speed bicycle and headed north into the afternoon sun. >> >> It was warm. The roads were quiet. The land along Penny Creek Road was rural in a way that would be unrecognizable today.
The same stretch is now Mill Creek Road, lined with condos and asphalt. In 1972, it was remote enough that people drove out there on summer evenings to shoot cans in the trees. Jodi made it about halfway to the stable before pausing to talk with a friend on 164th Street Southwest. Afterward, she continued east crossing the Bothell-Everett Highway.
At the corner of 164th and the highway, a 14-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. A while later, the police showed up. Kenda McCora was the last person to see Jodi Loomis alive and well. She was 14 years old. In the years that followed, she would return to the Snohomish County Courthouse every few years, not because anyone asked her to, but because Jodi never left her memory.
She would walk in and ask if there had been any progress. 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. They found a woman on the ground.
No identification, glasses askew, one boot untied. She was barely alive. They didn’t stop to cover her. They carried her to their car and drove west 15 minutes to Stevens Memorial Hospital in Edmonds. She was pronounced dead on arrival. The couple’s names were never released publicly.
They had gone out to shoot cans. 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 white 10-speed bicycle was recovered at the scene. Her clothing was collected. The horse bridle she had been carrying was not found. It has never been found. Jana’s St. Moritz boots, the size 5 and 1/2 waffle stompers, borrowed without asking on a summer afternoon, were sealed into an evidence bag and taken to storage at the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office.
Deputies canvassed the area in the days that followed. >> >> A few local men drew attention. A ranch owner with a prior pattern of inappropriate behavior toward Jody, the kind neighbors had noticed but nobody had reported. A tenant on a nearby property who had been chopping wood close to the dirt track that afternoon and could not account for his time clearly. Both were questioned.
>> >> Neither could be connected to the crime through physical evidence or witness testimony. Investigators cast wider. 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. The bridle was never found. No one seen near the road that afternoon could be tied to what happened in those trees. By the end of 1972, the case had stalled. The evidence went into long-term storage. The file went onto a shelf.
The detectives moved on to new assignments. The man who stopped Jodi on Penny Creek Road did not appear on a single list anywhere in the case file. He was never questioned. He lived 5 miles from that dirt track. He would live there for the next 46 years. Jana was 12 years old when the police came to the door on Winesap Road. Jim Roberts ran out in shock.
John and Rosemary Loomis learned that their daughter, the one who had painted horses across her bedroom walls and smelled of patchouli, was gone. Jodi’s bedroom stayed the way it was. The leather purse on the dresser, the horse mural, the scent still in the air when you walked through the door. Jana grew up in the shadow of that afternoon.
She went from 12 to 20 to 30 to 40. 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.
They had raised a girl, lost her on a summer afternoon, waited the rest of their lives, and died holding the same question they had carried since 1972. Jana became the family’s only voice. When the case began moving again in 2008, she told reporters she wanted whoever did this to sweat. She’d have been carrying Jodi’s case for 36 years by then, longer than Jodi had been alive.
She put it plainly, “Jodi had her whole life ahead of her,” Jana said, “and it was just taken away. Just taken away, and we live with that every day.” In 2005, cold case detective Jim Scharf of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office pulled Jodi’s file. The case was 33 years old, the department’s oldest unsolved homicide.
Jodi’s name had appeared on a cold case playing card the Sheriff’s Office distributed publicly. A volunteer named Chuck Rygg had carried one in his wallet for a decade, writing about her in the Mill Creek Beacon just to keep her name alive. 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 hadn’t 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. The file had sat untouched for 33 years before he opened it.
He was not going to let that happen again. >> [snorts] >> Every case on Primewatch Central is weeks of digging, >> >> court records, forensic reports, real lives behind every file number. If the Jodi Loomis case is landing for you, take 5 seconds and hit like and subscribe. It’s what keeps us going. And now, back to the boot that outlasted everyone who ever looked at it.
Three years into Scharf’s review in 2008, a technician at the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab examined Jana’s old boots under different lighting conditions with modern equipment. She found something on On outside of the left one, a small stain. It had been there since August 23rd, 1972. The boots had passed through investigators from the county coroner’s office, sheriff’s detectives, and the FBI across 36 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. A qualifying conviction means a match gets flagged. No match came back on Jody’s case. That didn’t 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 entered the system and ran automatically against every new addition, month after month, year after year. >> >> No hit. Scharf kept the case open. He stayed in contact with Jana.
He was waiting for the technology to catch up to the evidence. 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. Parabon brought in Deb Stone, a genealogist based in Oregon.
Stone spent 57 hours combing through online family trees, court papers, census records, and public databases, building the tree of an unknown man, branch by branch, generation by generation. The branches converged on a family in the Edmonds area of Snohomish County. Six brothers, six sons of the same couple, all raised within miles of Penny Creek Road.
Detectives began the process of elimination quietly, without alerting anyone. Five names came off the list, one remained. Genealogy could point to a name, >> >> it could not prove guilt. They needed a DNA sample, something the suspect would leave behind in public without anyone was watching. They began to watch.
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, finish the drink. He stood up, tossed two stuck together cups into a garbage can, and walked away. Officers moved in.
They 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, 980 million to one. After 46 years, tens of thousands of investigative hours, a stain that sat invisible for 36 of them, 10 years of silence from the national database, and 57 hours of genealogy work.
The answer had been sitting in a discarded coffee cup. Jim Scharf had spent 13 years on this case. This was the break he had been waiting for since 2005. The man the genealogy named had been living 5 miles from that dirt track for all 46 of those years. 5 miles from where Kenda McHoro watched Jodi pause at the intersection and disappear.
While John and Rosemary Loomis waited and died without answers. While Jana kept calling. >> His name was Terrence Miller. Everyone called him Terry. To his neighbors in Edmonds, he was Terry the ceramics guy. He ran Miller’s Cove out of his garage, a weekend pottery operation with his wife Linda, together since 1976, more than 40 years.
A hand-painted sign on the picket fence. He was a retired heavy equipment operator who had worked across western Washington and never really left the county. His house was 5 miles from his childhood home. He was 30 years old when Jodi Loomis was killed. He did not know her. Investigators could find no connection between them.
She had simply crossed his path on an August afternoon. He lived four blocks north of the intersection where Kenda McHoro last saw Jodi alive. 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 incident he admitted to police. 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 Sharff announced the arrest, he called Miller a real predator. On April 11th, 2019, 47 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, Judge David Kurtz presiding. Prosecutors Craig Matheson and Bob Langbein built their case around the DNA chain from the stain discovered in 2008 through Deb Stone’s 57 hours of genealogy work, the casino surveillance, the two stuck-together cups, and the 980
million to one match. Matheson told the jury he did not know Jody Loomis. He did not date her. This sperm should not be on her boot. Defense attorneys Laura Martin and Frederick Mall attacked the chain at every weak point. 50 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.
Martin told the jury the entire prosecution rested on what she 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 Waffle Stompers, size five and a half, sealed in evidence since the day after a summer afternoon when a 12-year-old lent her older sister her back-to-school shoes without thinking twice.
Janna Loomis Smith saw them for the first time in 48 years. She began to cry. She composed herself. She confirmed what they were. She told the jury, “For those of us who remain, all we have is 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 suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The Snohomish County Medical Examiner confirmed it as suicide. He was 78 years old. The jury did not know. They had returned to the courthouse that same morning and resumed deliberations, weighing the DNA chain, the contamination arguments, 48 years of evidence 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, he had died before the verdict was read and had been denied his right to appeal.
Judge Kurtz heard from both families and the attorneys. Then he ruled against the motion. “It was not the right thing to do,” Kurtz said, “to erase what the jury had found. The conviction stands.” Jim Scharf said he was glad the family got to hear it. It was the only thing left that the system could give, not a sentencing, not a prison term.
Terrence Miller had taken that from them, too, on a Monday morning in November, in the same house where he had lived beside his picket fence for decades. Janna Loomis Smith was 60 years old when 12 strangers said the word guilty. Her daughter was beside her. Both her parents were gone. She had been 12 years old when she lent her sister those boots.
She had not seen them in 48 years until a court officer placed them in front of her on a witness stand and asked her to confirm what they were. She confirmed them. Kenda Macoro, the 14-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 36 years of investigators had looked at and walked past. It was small enough to miss and strong enough to last. If this case stayed with you, and it should, hit like, subscribe, and tell us in the comments which moment hit hardest. Was it Jana seeing those boots for the first time in 48 years, the fruit stand, the picket fence? We read every comment.
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