Solved cold cases in Washington
7 documented cases.
Jody Loomis
On August 23, 1972, 20-year-old Jody Loomis left her Bothell, Washington home on a bicycle to visit her horse at a nearby stable and was sexually assaulted and fatally shot in the head in the woods of Snohomish County. The case, the county's oldest unsolved murder, went cold for decades until investigative genetic genealogy on semen recovered from her boot identified Terrence Miller, who was arrested in 2019. Miller died by suicide on November 9, 2020, hours before a jury convicted him of first-degree murder.
Judith 'Judy' Weaver
Judy Weaver, a 42-year-old woman, was raped, bound, and strangled in her Everett, Washington home in June 1984, where her killer set a fire in an attempt to destroy evidence. The case stayed cold for nearly four decades until 2023, when a DNA profile developed from the ligatures on Weaver's wrists was entered into the national CODIS database and matched Mitchell Gaff, a convicted rapist whose profile was on file. Gaff pleaded guilty in 2026 and was sentenced to 50 years to life; investigators also linked him to the 1980 murder of 21-year-old Susan Vesey.
Michella Welch
Michella Welch, a 12-year-old girl, disappeared on March 26, 1986, after taking her younger sisters to Puget Park in Tacoma, Washington; she was killed, and her body was found in a nearby gulch. The case stayed cold for more than three decades until investigative genetic genealogy through Parabon NanoLabs identified Gary Charles Hartman, who was arrested in 2018 and convicted in 2022.
Susan Lowe
Susan Barbara Lowe, a 19-year-old woman, was raped and strangled with her own nylon leggings on the evening of April 23, 1980, inside her apartment at the Quorum Apartments on 148th Avenue Southeast in Bellevue, Washington; her roommate found her the next morning. Detectives recovered a semen sample from the scene, but DNA testing did not yet exist and the case was inactivated in 1987. A DNA profile was developed from the preserved evidence in 1999, entered into the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab database around 2001, and produced no match for years. The case broke open in 2012 when the offender database was updated to include the DNA of men civilly committed as sexually violent predators at the Special Commitment Center on McNeil Island. The new profiles produced a Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) hit to Michael Allan Halgren, a serial rapist already confined there who had grown up only three blocks from Lowe's apartment and was 23 at the time of the killing. Halgren was arrested on January 9, 2013, and charged with first-degree murder. Because the decades-old DNA evidence had degraded, prosecutors allowed him to plead guilty to second-degree murder on June 26, 2014. In July 2014 a King County judge sentenced Halgren to 14 and a half years to life in prison; should he ever be paroled, he would be returned to the Special Commitment Center rather than freed.
Susan Schwarz
Susan Schwarz, a 24-year-old woman, was found bound and shot to death in her home in the Alderwood Manor area near Lynnwood, Washington, on October 22, 1979. She had been a high-school friend of Gregory Johnson's estranged wife and had helped that friend escape an abusive marriage, and prosecutors concluded Johnson killed her in revenge. The case went cold for more than three decades. The break came not from forensics but from a criminal informant: in 2010 a prison inmate saw Schwarz featured as the queen of hearts in a deck of cold-case playing cards the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office had distributed to inmates, recognized the case, and told detectives that Johnson had admitted to him that he had killed her. That tip led investigators to a woman who had been Johnson's teenage girlfriend in 1979 and who, breaking decades of fear-driven silence, told them she had been present when Johnson killed Schwarz. Johnson was arrested in 2011, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in January 2012, and was sentenced in March 2012 to a minimum of 24 years in prison.
Susan Vesey
Susan Vesey, 21, was attacked inside her Everett, Washington home on the morning after her 21st birthday in July 1980 while she was alone with her two young children, who were unharmed. She was bound with cord, raped and strangled, and was found by her husband when he returned from a night shift at their residence on Casino Road. The case went unsolved for decades. The break came not in Vesey's case directly but in the 1984 Everett murder of Judy Weaver: DNA developed from that scene was uploaded to the FBI's Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) and matched Mitchell Gaff, a convicted rapist whose profile was in the database because of a 1985 conviction for breaking into the home of two teenage sisters in Everett and raping them. Detectives confirmed Gaff in the Weaver case using an undercover ruse to collect his discarded chewing gum, then re-examined the Vesey killing; in April 2025, DNA from a white cord used to bind Vesey was matched to Gaff. Snohomish County prosecutors charged Gaff in the Vesey murder on March 13, 2026, after earlier charging him in the Weaver case. On April 16, 2026, Gaff pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder with premeditated intent, admitting to both killings, and on May 13, 2026, a judge sentenced him to a minimum of 50 years and a maximum of life in prison.
Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook
Tanya Van Cuylenborg, 18, and her boyfriend Jay Cook, 20, a couple from Saanich, British Columbia, were murdered in November 1987 during an overnight trip to the Seattle area; Tanya was found shot in Skagit County and Jay was found beaten and strangled in Snohomish County. The case went cold for three decades until investigative genetic genealogy identified William Earl Talbott II in 2018. He was convicted in 2019 in what is widely described as the first U.S. criminal trial to use the technique.