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.Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York TimesInvestigators used genetic genealogy, a process that involved cross-checking DNA evidence — taken from a hiking boot worn by Loomis — with ancestry records to connect Miller to the unsolved murder. They did not know each other, the authorities said.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.About three hours later, in Snohomish County Superior Court, a jury that had been hearing the case against Miller for two weeks convicted him of the murder of Loomis. The judge in the case announced in court that Miller had died, a local radio station reported.A final determination on Miller’s cause of death won’t be made until at least Tuesday, a spokesperson for the county medical examiner wrote in an email Monday night.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.Laura Martin, the public defender for Miller, contested the integrity of the DNA evidence in an email to The New York Times on Monday night.”Death seemed preferable to letting a jury decide a verdict on tainted evidence,” Martin wrote. “This is a terrible tragedy that began with Jody Loomis’ death and is compounded by an innocent man taking his own life.”When two undercover detectives visited a ceramics business that Miller ran with his wife out of their garage in November 2018, they noticed a nearly 7-month-old newspaper on a table with a headline about an arrest made in another cold case in Snohomish County, the affidavit said. That case involved the double murder of a young couple from British Columbia in 1987, which led to the conviction of William Talbot II.”The presence of the newspaper seemed, at best, an odd coincidence,” the affidavit said. “A fair inference could also be drawn that the defendant was keeping track of the techniques that law enforcement was using to solve cold cases.”This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
