Jody Loomis and The Unsolved Murder of JonBenet Ramsey

Suspect in 1972 Murder Dies in Apparent Suicide Hours Before Conviction

A man who eluded homicide investigators in Washington state for nearly 50 years — until a DNA match on a coffee cup cracked the cold case — died in an apparent suicide Monday just hours before a jury convicted him of murder, authorities said.

The man, Terrence Miller, 78, was charged last year with killing Jody Loomis in 1972 in Snohomish County, which is about 20 miles north of Seattle.

Loomis, 20, had been riding her bike to visit her horse at a nearby stable when she was sexually assaulted and then shot in the head with a .22-caliber gun, according to a probable cause affidavit.

Genetic genealogy has been instrumental in identifying more than 40 suspects in languishing cold cases, most notably the so-called Golden State Killer in California. It also led to a double-murder conviction in another high-profile case in the same Pacific Northwest county where Loomis was killed.

Just before 10 a.m. Monday, sheriff’s deputies in Edmonds, Washington, responded to a report of a suicide and found what they believed to be Miller’s body, the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office said. Miller had been out on bond, and a family member reported the suicide, the sheriff’s office said.

For decades, the killing of Loomis had stumped investigators. A couple who had gone out target shooting discovered her partially nude body off a secluded dirt road near Bothell, Washington, on Aug. 23, 1972. Semen was recovered from Loomis’ body and from a “waffle stomper” hiking boot that she had been wearing at the time and had borrowed from her sister.

In 2008, the samples were sent to the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory for DNA testing, but they did not return a match.

The breakthrough in the case came in 2018 when investigators, working with Parabon NanoLabs, were able to put together a family tree of possible suspects based on the semen sample found on the heel of the victim’s hiking boot. The company uses DNA to help law enforcement agencies find genetic matches.

That’s when investigators began their surveillance of Miller, whom they followed to a nearby casino and from whom they retrieved a coffee cup that he had thrown in the garbage, the probable cause affidavit said. The DNA sample was an exact match to the semen found on Loomis’ boot, the affidavit said. He was arrested in April 2019 and charged with first-degree murder.

Both of Loomis’ parents are deceased, and her sister could not be immediately reached for comment Monday night.