On August 23rd, 1972, a 20-year-old woman in Bothell, Washington, borrowed her little sister’s Waffle Stomper boots, climbed onto a white 10-speed bicycle, and pedaled toward a horse stable 6 miles northeast of her family’s home. It was a sunny afternoon and the first time she’d taken the bike instead of driving.
She never made it to the stable. A stain on the outside of the left boot went unnoticed for 36 years. The boot was examined by investigators at agencies over the decades, and nobody saw it. When a state crime lab technician finally found it in 2008, it contained the DNA of the man who killed her.
Her name was Judy Loomis. She was 20, lived with her parents, her fiance Jim Roberts, and her 12-year-old sister Janna at 20 Winesap Road in unincorporated Snohomish County. The area is part of Mill Creek now, but in 1972, it was rural. Dirt roads, horse properties, a lot of space between houses, the kind of place where you could ride a bike for miles and not see another person.
Judy kept a horse named Saudi at a stable on Stroma Road, about 6 miles from home. She rode regularly and usually drove to get there. August 23rd was the first time she decided to take the bike instead. She borrowed Janna’s Waffle Stomper boots, left the house around 5:00 p.m., and headed out on Penny Creek Road with the sun still high.
The ride cut through wooded stretches of dirt road with almost no traffic. Near the midpoint, a dirt track branched off Penny Creek into dense forest. That dirt track is where Judy’s ride ended. Around 5:30 p.m., a young couple drove up that same dirt track to do some target shooting in the woods. They came to shoot at cans, and instead they found a woman lying on the ground.
She was mostly naked, had been sexually assaulted, and had a gunshot wound above her right ear from a .22 caliber pistol. She was still breathing, but unresponsive. They picked her up and carried her to their car. They didn’t stop to cover her up. They drove to Stevens Memorial Hospital in Edmonds, about 15 minutes west, with a dying woman in their backseat.
She was pronounced dead on arrival. The couple’s names were never released publicly. Investigators pieced together what they could from the scene. Judy had been forced off the road at gunpoint and taken deep into the trees. She was sexually assaulted and shot as she tried to dress herself.
The gunshot wound was the cause of death. Her white 10-speed bicycle was found on the dirt track where she’d been intercepted. Her clothing was collected at the scene, including the Waffle Stomper boots she’d borrowed from Janna that afternoon. Everything was sealed and taken to evidence storage at the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office.
Deputies canvassed the area in the days that followed. A few local men drew attention. One was a ranch owner who had previously behaved inappropriately toward Judy. The kind of behavior that neighbors noticed, but nobody had reported to police. Another was a tenant on a nearby property who’d been chopping wood close to the dirt track that afternoon and couldn’t account for his time clearly.
Deputies questioned both of them and several others. None could be connected to the crime through physical evidence or witness testimony. There were no witnesses to the attack itself, and no fingerprints were recovered from the scene, and nothing tying any specific person to what happened in those woods.
By the end of 1972, the case had stalled. Snohomish County’s newest homicide was already its most frustrating one. There was a full crime scene, physical evidence, a dead 20-year-old woman, and not a single lead that held up under scrutiny. The evidence went into long-term storage at the Sheriff’s Office.
The file went onto a shelf with the other unsolved cases. The detectives who worked it moved on to new assignments. The Loomis family did not. Janna Loomis was 12 years old the day her sister borrowed her boots and didn’t come home. She grew up in the shadow of that afternoon, watching her parents carry a grief that didn’t soften with time.
The family left Judy’s bedroom the way it was for a long time after she died. Janna said, “You could still smell the patchouli oil when you walked in.”
Judy’s leather purse was right where she’d left it on the last day of her life. Their parents, Janna said, “Hurt so much.”
That was the shape of the family after August 23rd, 1972. A daughter gone, a bedroom frozen in place, and a case that produced nothing year after year. Janna went from 12 to 20 to 30 to 40. She graduated, married, became Janna Loomis Smith. Her parents aged through those same decades carrying the same open wound, calling the Sheriff’s Office for updates that never came.
There was nothing to update. The file was technically still open, but it wasn’t moving. Both of Judy’s parents died without ever learning who killed their daughter. They raised a girl, lost her on a summer afternoon, spent the rest of their lives waiting for an answer, and died with the same question they’d had since 1972.
Janna became the family’s voice after her parents were gone. She kept calling detectives and showing up at press conferences when the Sheriff’s Office made another push. She refused to let the file slide into a cabinet and disappear. In 2008, when the case finally started moving again, she told reporters, “She wanted whoever did this to sweat.”
She wanted them to know someone was still paying attention. She’d been carrying her sister’s case for 36 years by that point, longer than Judy had been alive. She told reporters the family missed Judy’s love and her sisterhood, that the pain had become part of their surviving life. She put it more plainly, too.
“Judy had her whole life ahead of her,” Janna 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 Judy’s file off the shelf. The case was 33 years old by then, the county’s oldest unsolved homicide.
Scharf was a methodical investigator. He went back through the original evidence, re-interviewed people where he could, and sent anything that might yield DNA to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab for modern testing. Three years later, in 2008, a WSP crime lab technician found something on the outside of Judy’s left boot that had been there since 1972.
Semen. A small stain that investigators at multiple agencies had missed since the night of the murder. The boot had been in evidence storage at the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office the entire time. It had been handled, cataloged, moved between facilities, and stored for 36 years. And nobody had noticed the stain until this technician examined it under different lighting conditions and with modern equipment.
The technician extracted a partial DNA profile from the stain and submitted it to CODIS. CODIS is the FBI’s national database of DNA profiles collected from convicted offenders. If the person who left the DNA at a crime scene has been convicted of a qualifying offense and submitted a sample, the database flags a match.
If they haven’t, it returns nothing. The system only knows about the people who’ve already been put into it. No match came back on Judy’s case. The man who killed her in 1972 wasn’t in CODIS. That didn’t mean he had a clean record. It meant his offenses either predated mandatory DNA collection laws or fell outside the categories that required a sample.
Judy, the partial profile sat in the database for the next 10 years, running automatically against every new entry as people were convicted and added to the system. Year after year, no hit ever came back. Scharf kept the case open through all of it. He looked for new angles, submitted the profile to new databases as they came online, and stayed in contact with Janna.
He’d call her with updates even when the update was that there was nothing new. The file had collected dust for 33 years before he touched it, and he wasn’t going to let that happen again. In July 2018, Scharf tried a different approach. He sent the DNA profile to Parabon NanoLabs, a private forensic lab in Virginia that specializes in a technique called genetic genealogy.
It works on a completely different principle than CODIS. Instead of matching crime scene DNA against convicted offenders, genetic genealogy uploads the profile to public ancestry platforms like GEDmatch, where millions of ordinary people have submitted their DNA to trace their family history. If anyone in the database shares enough DNA with the crime scene sample, it means they’re biologically related to whoever left it.
From there, genealogists build a family tree and narrow it down. Parabon brought in Deb Stone, a genetic genealogist based in Oregon. Stone’s job was to take the distant DNA matches from GEDmatch and build a family tree outward. She started with second and third cousins of the unknown male and worked backward through generations of births, marriages, deaths, and relocations using public records.
Stone spent 57 hours on the project combing through online family trees, to court papers, census records, and anything else she could find in public databases. The branches of the tree eventually pointed to a family in the Edmonds area of Snohomish County. Genealogy could point to a family, but it couldn’t prove which member of that family left the DNA at a crime scene in 1972.
Detectives needed a direct sample from the suspect to confirm the match. On August 28th, 2018, law enforcement officers followed him to the Tulalip Casino north of Everett. They watched him buy a coffee, sit down at a machine, finish the drink, and toss the cup into a garbage can. After he walked away, they moved in and collected it.
The cup went straight to the WSP crime lab. In September 2018, the lab confirmed what the genealogy had predicted.
“Uh the DNA profile extracted from the coffee cup matched the DNA profile from the semen on Jody’s left boot.”
The statistical probability of a coincidental match was 980 million to one. After 46 years and tens of thousands of hours across dozens of investigators, a discarded coffee cup at a casino had given them what nothing else could.
Detective Scharf had spent 14 years working the case by that point. The cup was the break he’d been waiting for since 2005. The man who killed Jody Loomis had been living 5 miles from the crime scene for 46 years. He’d raised a family, run a business, gone to casinos, and grown old while the evidence sat in a storage room, and the Loomis family buried both parents without answers.
His record started before Jody’s murder. He married a 14-year-old girl when he was 18. In 1968, 4 years before the killing, and he drove a company truck up to a teenage girl walking in Mount Lake Terrace, called her over, and showed her he was naked from the waist down. He admitted the exposure to police during an interview and was cited for lewd conduct.
In 1972, the year Jody was killed, he was 33 and living in Edmonds with his third wife. He worked as a heavy equipment operator. His name never came up during the original investigation. Deputies were looking at local men who knew Jody or had been seen near the dirt track that afternoon. Miller didn’t fit either category.
He was never questioned or interviewed, and his name didn’t appear on a single list anywhere in the case file. He lived 5 miles from the crime scene and stayed completely invisible to the people trying to solve it. He married a fourth time after that. His wife Linda married him around 1976, and they stayed together for more than four decades.
They ran a ceramic shop out of their garage called Miller’s Cove, a small operation they kept going for years. To their neighbors and customers, he was Terry the ceramics guy, a retired heavy equipment operator living quietly in Edmonds. Court records told a different story.
He was accused of sex crimes at least five times across three decades following the 1968 citation. Accusations of molesting a preteen surfaced in the mid-1970s. Two sisters in 1990 reported that he’d touched them, but later said it could have been accidental, and no charges were filed. In 1999, a man with developmental disabilities reported that Miller had sexually abused him, but prosecutors determined the incident fell outside the statute of limitations.
Five known accusations spanning 30 years, and not one of them led to a conviction after the original lewd conduct citation. Scharf, the cold case detective who’d spent 14 years on the case by that point, called Miller, “A real predator,” when the arrest was announced.
His name was Terrence Miller. Everyone called him Terry. He was 77 years old when deputies arrested him at his Edmonds home on April 11th, 2019, and charged him with first-degree murder in the death of Jody Loomis. Bail was set at a million dollars, and he posted it. Sheriff Ty Trenary held a press conference in Everett and credited the cold case team’s persistence and the new DNA technology.
47 years from murder to arrest. Miller pleaded not guilty at his arraignment and was released on bail to await trial. So, the judge ordered him to surrender any weapons or firearms from his home and placed him under electronic home monitoring. He went home to the same house in Edmonds where he’d lived for decades, the same house with the ceramic shop in the garage.
The trial was delayed by over a year, partly due to the pandemic and partly due to defense motions challenging the DNA evidence. In October 2020, a judge denied the defense’s motion to suppress the genetic genealogy evidence, clearing the way for trial. Jury selection began in late October in Snohomish County Superior Court with Judge David Kurtz presiding.
The trial ran for 2 weeks through early November. Prosecutors Craig Matheson and Bob Langbein built their case around the DNA evidence chain, and they started with the semen found on the boot in 1972 and walked the jury through the partial profile developed in 2008. Then, the Parabon analysis and Deb Stone’s genealogy work in 2018, the coffee cup surveillance at the Tulalip Casino, the WSP lab confirmation that September, and the 980 million to one match that tied all of it together.
The defense attacked the chain at every weak point. Public defenders Laura Martin and Frederick Mall argued that five decades of evidence handling had introduced contamination that made the DNA results unreliable. Martin told the jury the prosecution’s entire case rested on what she called, “A botched DNA analysis of the outside of a boot.”
Mall laid out the specifics for jurors. Deputies at the 1972 autopsy hadn’t worn gloves, and evidence had been lost and unaccounted for during large stretches of the three decades between the murder and the first DNA testing. Under cross-examination, prosecution witnesses acknowledged that a WSP crime lab analyst’s own DNA had turned up on a reference sample during testing.
The defense argued that the boot had been contaminated, and the evidence handling was so flawed the jury couldn’t trust what any lab found decades later. Jana spoke in the courtroom, too. 48 years after her sister’s murder, she stood in front of the jury and the man charged with killing Jody. She told the court, “For those of us who remain, all we have is the hope of justice and accountability for the hideous theft of Jody’s life.”
She listed what those years had looked like from the other side.
“In the 46-plus years since that day,” she said, “and the accused had celebrated birthdays and Christmases and every holiday in between. He’d married and raised children and gone on living a full life while her family lived with a hole that never closed.”
Closing arguments ended on Friday, November 6th, 2020. The jury began deliberating that afternoon and adjourned for the weekend. On Monday morning, November 9th, 2020, Terrence Miller was found dead at his home in Edmonds from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The Snohomish County medical examiner confirmed it as suicide. He was 78 years old.
The jury didn’t know. They had resumed deliberations that same Monday morning at the courthouse, working through the evidence and the defense’s contamination arguments without any idea that the defendant was already dead. That afternoon, they reached their verdict. Guilty of first-degree murder. Our 12 jurors, who had no idea the defendant was dead, looked at the DNA evidence, weighed the defense’s argument that five decades of handling had corrupted it, and decided the chain held.
The semen on the boot was Miller’s. The coffee cup confirmed it. He killed Jody Loomis in those woods off Penny Creek Road in August of 1972, and the evidence he left on her sister’s boot is what proved it 48 years later. Detective Scharf said he was glad the family got to hear the verdict, “That it was good for them.”
It was the only thing left that the system could give Jana and the surviving members of the Loomis family. Not a sentencing, not a prison term. The man who killed Jody had already taken that from them, too. Miller’s defense team filed a motion to vacate the conviction. So, their argument was that because Miller died before the verdict was read, he’d been denied the constitutional right to appeal, and the conviction should be thrown out.
Judge Kurtz held a hearing in December 2020. He heard from family members on both sides and from 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.”
Jana was 12 years old when she lent her sister those waffle stomper boots on a sunny afternoon in August. She was 60 when the jury said guilty, and both of her parents were gone by then. She heard the verdict without them.
