1972 Washington Oldest Case SOLVED 48 Years Later –
A borrowed pair of boots, a sunny afternoon bike ride, and a stain so small, so easy to miss, that it sat unnoticed in an evidence room for 36 years. When investigators finally found it, it contained the DNA of a k!ller who had been living 5 miles from the crime scene the entire time. Raising a family, running a business, going to casinos, and growing quietly old while a young woman’s family buried their grief alongside two parents who died never knowing the truth.
This is the story of Judy Loomis, and this is the story of the evidence that refused to stay silent. If this is the kind of story that keeps you up at night, you are in the right place. Subscribe to Cold Case Vault right now, and hit that notification bell so you never miss the moment justice finally arrives. And before we go any further, drop a like on this video.
It takes 1 second, and it tells us to keep bringing you stories like this one. Snohomish County, Washington, 1972. The county sits northeast of Seattle, a stretch of land that in those years was still finding itself between rural and suburban. There were horse properties out there, dirt roads that went nowhere in particular, and long quiet stretches where neighbors were more of a concept than a presence.
It was the kind of place where life moved slowly and people trusted the space around them. It was the kind of place where a young woman could borrow her little sister’s boots, climb onto a bicycle on a sunny afternoon, and feel perfectly safe doing it. That safety was an illusion, and on the 23rd of August, 1972, the illusion shattered in a stretch of dense forest off Penny Creek Road, and would not be fully accounted for for nearly five decades.
Judy Loomis was 20 years old. She lived with her parents, her fiance Jim Roberts, and her 12-year-old sister Janna at 20 Winesap Road in unincorporated Snohomish County, rural land that would eventually become part of what is now known as Mill Creek. She was a young woman rooted in the rhythms of the life around her.
She kept a horse named Sadie at a stable on Stroma Road, about 6 miles northeast of the family home. She rode regularly. She usually drove out to the stable the way most people would, but on this particular afternoon, a warm golden August day, she decided to take the bicycle instead. She borrowed her little sister Jana’s Waffle Stomper boots.
She stepped out the front door somewhere around 5:00 in the evening. She turned onto Penny Creek Road with the sun still high in the sky above the tree line. Nobody in that house could have known it would be the last time they saw her walk out that door. The route to the stable cut through quiet wooded stretches of dirt road, isolated, peaceful, the kind of path that felt like it belonged to a simpler world.
Near the midpoint of her ride, a narrow dirt track branched off Penny Creek Road and disappeared into dense forest. That track is where Judy’s afternoon ended. Around 5:30 in the evening, a young couple drove up that same dirt road with plans to do some target shooting in the woods. They came expecting to fire at cans.
Instead, they found a woman lying on the ground. She was mostly unclothed. She had been sexually assaulted and she had a gunshot wound above her right ear fired from a .22 caliber pistol. She was still breathing when they found her, but completely unresponsive. The couple carried her to their car and drove west toward Stevens Memorial Hospital in Edmonds, about 15 minutes away, with a dying woman in their backseat.
Judy Loomis was pronounced dead on arrival. Investigators worked to reconstruct what had happened from the physical evidence left at the scene. Judy had been forced off the road at gunpoint and taken deep into the trees. She was sexually assaulted. The shot was fired as she tried to dress herself. The gunshot wound was the cause of death.
Her white 10-speed bicycle was found at the point where she had been intercepted on the dirt track. Her clothing was collected from the scene, including the Waffle Stomper boots she had borrowed from Janna just hours before. Everything was sealed into evidence and transported to the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office for storage.
The names of the young couple who found her were never released to the public. Deputies canvassed the surrounding area in the days that followed. A few local men drew attention early in the investigation. One was a ranch owner who had previously behaved inappropriately toward Judy. The kind of conduct that neighbors had noticed for years, but never formally reported to police.
Another was a tenant on a nearby property who had been seen chopping wood close to the dirt track that same afternoon and could not clearly account for his time. Both men were questioned. So were several others in the area. None of them could be connected to the crime through physical evidence or witness testimony. There were no fingerprints recovered from the scene.
PART 2 ↙️
There were no witnesses to the attack itself. There was nothing that pointed a definitive finger at any specific person for what had happened in those woods off Penny Creek Road. By the end of 1972, the case had gone cold. Snohomish County’s newest homicide had become its most frustrating one. A full crime scene, physical evidence, a dead 20-year-old woman, and not a single lead that held up under any real scrutiny.
The evidence went into long-term storage. The file went onto a shelf alongside every other case that the system had not yet managed to close. The detectives who had worked it moved on to new assignments. The Loomis family did not move on. Janna Loomis was 12 years old the afternoon her sister borrowed those boots and did not come home.
She grew up inside the shadow of that day, watching her parents carry a grief that never softened, never faded, and never became something they could leave behind. The family kept Judy’s bedroom exactly the way it was for a long time after she died. Jana would later recall that you could still smell the patchouli oil when you walked in.
Judy’s leather purse sat right where she had left it on the last morning of her life. “Their parents,” Jana said, “hurt so much.” That was the shape of the Loomis family after August 23rd, 1972. A daughter gone, a bedroom frozen in place, a case that produced nothing year after year after year. Jana grew up, graduated, married, and became Jana Loomis Smith.
Her parents aged through those same decades carrying that same open wound, calling the sheriff’s office for updates that never came because there was nothing to update. Both of Judy’s parents died without ever learning who k!lled their daughter. They raised a girl, lost her on a summer afternoon, spent the rest of their lives waiting for an answer, and died still holding the same question they had carried since 1972.
After they were gone, Jana became the sole voice of her family. She kept calling detectives. She showed up at press conferences whenever the sheriff’s office made another push. She refused to let the file disappear quietly. In 2008, when the case finally began moving again, she told reporters she wanted whoever did this to sweat.
She wanted them to know that someone was still paying attention. She had been carrying her sister’s case for 36 years by then, longer than Judy had ever been alive. If you are still watching at this point, drop a comment right now and type the words I am still here. Let’s see who is truly following this story all the way through. 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 from the very beginning. He re-interviewed people where he still could, and he sent anything with DNA potential to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab for modern testing.
Three years later in 2008, a crime lab technician found something on the outside of Judy’s left boot that had been sitting there since the night of August 23rd, 1972, a semen stain, small, overlooked, missed by investigators at multiple agencies across 36 years. The boot had been in evidence storage the entire time, handled, cataloged, moved between facilities, and examined more than once across three decades.
No one had ever seen it. Not until this technician examined the boot under different lighting conditions with modern equipment. The technician extracted a partial DNA profile from the stain and submitted it to CODIS, the FBI’s national database of DNA profiles collected from convicted offenders. The principle is straightforward.
If the person who left DNA at a crime scene has ever been convicted of a qualifying offense and submitted a sample, the database flags a match. No match came back on Judy’s case. The man who k!lled her was not in CODIS. That did not 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 submission.
The partial profile was entered into the database and left to run, automatically checked 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 submitted the profile to new databases as they became available, looked for new angles wherever he could find them, and stayed in regular contact with Janna, calling her with updates even when the update was that there was nothing new to report.
The file had collected dust for 33 years before he picked it up. He was not going to let that happen again. In July of 2018, Scharf tried something different. He sent the DNA profile to Parabon Nano Labs, a private forensic laboratory in Virginia that specializes in a technique called genetic genealogy. The method works on a completely different principle than CODIS.
Instead of matching crime scene DNA against a database of convicted offenders, genetic genealogy uploads the profile to public ancestry platforms like GEDmatch, where millions of ordinary people have voluntarily submitted their own DNA to trace their family history. If anyone in that database shares enough DNA with the crime scene sample, it means they are biologically related to whoever left it.
From there, trained genealogists build outward, constructing family trees branch by branch, generation by generation, narrowing the field until a specific individual comes into focus. Parabon brought in Deb Stone, a genetic genealogist based in Oregon. Her job was to take the distant DNA matches that came back from GEDmatch and build a family tree.
Working backward through generations of births, marriages, deaths, and relocations using nothing but publicly available records. She spent 57 hours on this project alone, combing through online family trees, court documents, census records, and every other piece of public documentation she could locate. The branches of that tree eventually pointed to a family in the Edmonds area of Snohomish County.
Genealogy could identify a family. It could not prove which member of that family had walked into those woods off Penny Creek Road on August 23rd, 1972. For that, detectives needed a direct DNA sample from the suspect himself. 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 retrieved it. The cup went directly to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. In September of 2018, the lab confirmed what the genealogy had predicted.
The DNA profile extracted from that discarded coffee cup matched the DNA profile from the semen stain on Judy’s left boot. The statistical probability of a coincidental match was 980 million to one. After 46 years, tens of thousands of investigative hours, dozens of detectives across multiple agencies, a discarded coffee cup at a casino had given them what nothing else could. His name was Terrence Miller.
Everyone called him Terry. He had been living 5 miles from the crime scene for 46 years. He had raised a family, run a small ceramics business out of his garage called Miller’s Cove, gone to casinos, and grown quietly old. While the evidence that would eventually identify him sat in a storage room, and the Loomis family buried both parents without answers.
To his neighbors and regular customers, he was Terry the ceramics guy, a retired heavy equipment operator living a quiet life in Edmonds. That was the version of him that the world around him saw. Court records told a different story. His history stretched back well before Judy’s murder. He had married a 14-year-old girl when he was 18 years old.
In 1968, 4 years before the k!lling, he drove a company truck up alongside a teenage girl walking in Mount Lake Terrace, called her over, and exposed himself to her. He admitted it to police during an interview, and was cited for lewd conduct. In 1972, the year Judy was k!lled, Miller was 33 years old 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 had been focused on local men who knew Judy personally, or had been seen near the dirt track that afternoon. Miller fit neither category. He was never questioned, never interviewed, and his name did not appear on a single list anywhere inside the case file.
He lived 5 miles from where she died, and stayed completely invisible to every person who spent years trying to solve it. The accusations did not stop after 1972 either. He faced allegations of sexual misconduct at least five times across three decades following that original lewd conduct citation. Accusations of molesting a preteen surfaced in the mid-1970s.
Two sisters reported in 1990 that he had touched them inappropriately, but later said it may 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 across 30 years, not one conviction after that first citation in 1968. Detective Scharf, who had spent 14 years working Judy’s case by the time the arrest was announced, called Miller a real predator. On April 11th, 2019, deputies arrested Terrence Miller at his home in Edmonds and charged him with first-degree murder in the death of Judy Loomis. He was 77 years old.
Bail was set at $1 million. He posted it and went home to the same house in Edmonds with the same ceramic shop still sitting in the garage. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment. The judge ordered him to surrender any firearms from the property and placed him under electronic home monitoring. The trial was delayed by more than a year, partly by the pandemic and partly by defense motions challenging the admissibility of the DNA evidence.
In October of 2020, a judge denied the motion to suppress the genetic genealogy results, clearing the way for proceedings to begin. Jury selection started in late October 2020 in Snohomish County Superior Court with Judge David Kurtz presiding. The trial ran for two full weeks through early November.
Prosecutors Craig Matheson and Bob Langbein built their case entirely around the DNA evidence chain. They started with the semen found on the boot in 1972 and walked the jury forward through every step. The partial profile developed in 2008, the Parabon analysis, and Deb Stone’s genealogy work in 2018. The coffee cup surveillance at the Tulalip Casino, the Washington State Patrol Lab confirmation that September, and the 980 million to one statistical match that connected every piece of it together.
The defense attacked every single link in that chain. Public defenders Laura Martin and Frederick Mall argued that five decades of evidence handling had introduced contamination that made the DNA results fundamentally unreliable. Martin told the jury the prosecution’s entire case rested on what she described as a botched DNA analysis of the outside of a boot.
Mall laid out the specifics for jurors. Deputies at the 1972 autopsy had not worn gloves. Evidence had been lost and unaccounted for during large stretches of the three decades between the murder and the first round of DNA testing. And the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab analyst’s own DNA had turned up on a reference sample during testing.
The defense’s argument was direct and deliberate. The chain of custody was broken beyond repair. Nothing recovered from that boot decades later could be trusted. Janice stood and spoke in that courtroom, too. 48 years after her sister’s murder, she stood in front of the jury and faced the man charged with taking Judy’s life.
She told the court that for those of us who remain, all we have is the hope of justice and accountability for the hideous theft of Judy’s life. She described what those 46 years had looked like from the other side of the wound. The accused celebrating birthdays and Christmases and every holiday in between, marrying, raising children, going on living a full life while her family lived with a hole that never closed and never healed.
Closing arguments concluded on Friday, the 6th of November, 2020. The jury began deliberating that afternoon and adjourned for the weekend. On Monday morning, the 9th of November 2020, Terrence Miller was found dead at his home in Edmonds from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 78 years old. The Snohomish County Medical Examiner confirmed it as suicide.
The jury did not know. They had resumed deliberations that same Monday morning at the courthouse, working through the evidence, weighing the contamination arguments, measuring everything they had heard across 2 weeks of testimony with no idea that the defendant was already gone. That afternoon, they returned their verdict, guilty of first-degree murder.
12 jurors who had no idea the defendant was already dead, looked at 48-year-old DNA evidence, weighed every argument the defense had made about contamination and decades of mishandling, and decided the chain held. The semen on the boot was Miller’s. The coffee cup confirmed it. He k!lled Judy Loomis in those woods off Penny Creek Road in August of 1972.
And the evidence he left on her little sister’s borrowed boot is what proved it, 48 years later. Miller’s defense team filed a motion to vacate the conviction. Their argument was that because Miller died before the verdict was formally read, he had been denied his constitutional right to appeal, and the conviction should therefore be erased.
Judge Kurtz held a hearing in December of 2020. He heard from attorneys and from family members on both sides. 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. 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 Janna and the surviving members of the Loomis family. Not a sentencing, not a prison term, not the moment of watching the man who took Judy be led away in handcuffs to spend his remaining years behind bars. Terrence Miller had already taken that from them, too. Right at the very end, just as the truth was finally being spoken aloud in a courtroom, Janet Loomis was 12 years old when she lent her sister those waffle stomper boots on a sunny afternoon in August of 1972.
She was 60 years old when the jury said guilty. Both of her parents were gone by then. She heard the verdict without them. And somewhere in all of that, in the 57 hours a genealogist spent tracing a family tree, in the 14 years a detective refused to let a file go cold again, in the 36 years a stain sat on the outside of a boot waiting to be found, somewhere in all of that is the reason we keep telling these stories.
Because the evidence does not forget, even when everyone else has moved on, even when the years pile up into decades, even when a family buries two parents and keeps making phone calls anyway. The evidence does not forget, and neither do we. If this story stayed with you, please subscribe to Cold Case Vault right now.
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