Posted on 11/09/2020 11:54:39 PM PST by nickcarraway
Terrence Miller, the 78-year-old man on trial for the murder of 20-year-old Jody Loomis 48 years ago, killed himself Monday, hours before a jury found him guilty of the heinous crime.
According to the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office, deputies responded to a reported suicide about 10 a.m. Monday in the 15900 block of 52nd Place West. The man who was found dead is believed to be Miller, though the Medical Examiner's Office will have to positively identify him.
Miller had been on trial for a first-degree murder charge. He's accused of raping and shooting 20-year-old Jody Loomis in 1972 in a heavily wooded area near what is now Mill Creek Road, east of the intersection of Bothell-Everett Hwy and 164th Street SW. Loomis was riding her bicycle to visit her horse in Snohomish County.
Loomis's death went unsolved for 47 years, until investigators connected DNA from the crime scene with information that Miller's relatives posted on genealogy websites.
Detectives believe Miller was living in the Edmonds area at the time of the murder, about five miles from where Loomis’ body was found.
Miller would have been 30 years old when Jody was killed.
His was arrested and charged with murder in April 2019 and later released on a $1 million bail. The bail company told Q13 News at the time that Miller had to come up with $100,000 in cash for the bond, money he would not get back.
Miller's lawyer tried to have his charges dismissed after learning of his death, but the judge overseeing the case overruled and the jury returned a guilty verdict Monday afternoon, according to The Everett Herald.
Some people are in such a hurry to get to Hell.
I would like to think that this guy spent every day of those 48 years looking over his shoulder in fear of being caught. (Probably not. Hmm. About the same amount of time as Biden in public office!).
I hope the guy’s suicide was very slow and painful.
Self execution is cheaper than keeping the bastards alive and well in jail for years or decades. Glad justice was finally done for the poor woman who was killed.
Total bastard......lives a full life,then denies justice......most likely a filthy coward weasel Democrat.
The prosecution argued against bail saying he was a suicide risk.
Not sure where he got the bail money.
He had been researching the use of dna evidence in criminal trials.
Apparently the cold case investigators found a small smudge on her pants and hoped it was semen and were able to get dna from that, then they matched it with familial dna that they got from a commercial database.
Of course the visitation tape from jail where he told his friend that it was a dark time in his life etc and prior sex crimes did not help him.
Sounds like a cold case file episode is on its way to the ID channel.
An interesting bit of judicial trivia is if you die before a verdict is rendered in a criminal case you can’t be convicted post-mortem, so even if you kill 50 people and then die of natural causes or kill yourself before the verdict comes down you die with a clean criminal record. Now usually this is rather meaningless, but some states do have victim restitution laws as part of criminal convictions which the victims or their family would lose out on with no conviction. They could still in theory bring a civil lawsuit against your estate, but that would a costly and drawn out process where the restitution would have been automatic.
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