Roxanne Wood 44:17

To enjoy this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, check us out on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Forensic Tales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. Roxanne Wood was murdered inside her Berrien County home on February 19th, 1987. Her throat had been cut.

Her husband found her dead after the couple had driven separately to go bowling, and Roxanne returned home first. The case went cold, and although Michigan State Police reopened it in 2001, and again in 2020, it remained unsolved. That is, until students involved in Western Michigan University's cold case program got involved. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 235, The Murder of Roxanne Wood.

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Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola. Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast with a forensic science twist. Each episode features real stories highlighting how forensic science was used, from fingerprinting to criminal profiling to DNA. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold.

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Roxanne Wood was just 30 years old when she was found dead inside her home in Niles, Michigan in 1987. She had been sexually assaulted, beaten with a frying pan, and was bleeding from a neck wound, which the police believe came from a fillet knife from her own kitchen. But her murder went unsolved for nearly 35 years, with her husband Terry's life damaged after being plagued with rumors that he was the killer.

Let's talk about Roxanne's case and how a tiny DNA sample the size of a human cell was finally able to bring justice to her murder. February 19, 1987, Roxanne Wood, who sometimes went by Rock, and her husband Terry met for dinner and then headed to their favorite local bowling alley to meet up with some friends. Terry played in a bowling league, so it was pretty common for them to go bowling together for a date night.

They had been married for five years and were talking about starting a family soon. Roxanne and Terry showed up in two separate cars that night. So when Roxanne called it a night sometime around midnight, she kissed Terry goodbye before heading home. Terry hung out around the bowling alley for a little bit longer, but arrived back at the house just about 45 minutes later. But during that small window of time, his entire life changed.

When he got inside the house, Roxanne was lying on the kitchen floor. Her nightgown pulled up and her underwear pulled down. Terry immediately went to feel for a pulse, but he couldn't feel one, so he called 911. When Terry got on the phone with dispatchers, he was hysterical. Now, Terry's behavior on this 911 call is going to be something that's talked about a little bit later.

But the person who took the call thought that he seemed both aggressive and belligerent. He wasn't happy with how long the paramedics and the police were taking to get there. And he just seemed super agitated at this 911 dispatcher. At one point, the dispatcher had to tell Terry, hey, stop screaming and yelling at me because I can't even understand what you're saying.

They said, quote, don't scream into the phone because the phone distorts and I can't understand you that well. OK, then Terry says, you mean so you can get a recording on it? Dispatcher. No, I'm trying to get some information from you. OK, Terry. Yeah, right. Now, we all respond to traumatic events differently and you can't always judge someone by how they sound on a 911 call.

Like in this case, Terry just found his wife dead on the kitchen floor when he was just with her about an hour earlier. So maybe this particular 911 dispatcher just simply mistook his grief for aggression. Either way, his demeanor on this phone call will definitely come into play a little bit later on. And it didn't seem to stop even when the cops got there.

When the police showed up at the house, Terry was still so angry and he was screaming that at one point paramedics had to put him in the back of a patrol car just to calm him down and that they could get to work without having him around screaming at them. When the officers from the Michigan State Police Department got there, they discovered that Roxanne had not only been beaten with a frying pan, but she also had her throat slit with some type of fillet knife.

They couldn't be exactly sure what kind of knife was used because they couldn't find it. They only found the knife sheath that was left on the floor next to Roxanne and saw that one of the kitchen drawers had been pulled out, so whoever had done this must have taken it with them. They also found semen and a bloodstain on the outside of their back door.

All of this makes sense, because all signs pointed to the fact that Roxanne had been sexually assaulted, since her nightgown was pulled up and her underwear was pulled down. And the blood probably came from whoever did this. Maybe they cut themselves during the attack and left a drop of their blood on the back door.

For investigators themselves, this was a really brutal crime scene. Blood was everywhere. There were clear evidence that Roxanne had been sexually assaulted, and they had no idea who could have wanted to kill her. She was just a typical 30-something-year-old young wife who just got back from a date night with her husband.

Later on, detectives who worked on the case told the TV show 48 Hours, quote, that it was a brutal, savage murder, adding, quote, there are kids who grew up locking their doors and being scared when they went to bed at night just because of this case, end quote. So naturally, the first person the police wanted to chat with was Roxanne's husband, Terry. I probably say this in every single episode involving a husband and a wife, but

but it's always the husband who did it. If a wife turns up dead, the police always suspect the husband or the boyfriend. And this case was no different. The Michigan State Police wanted to sit down and speak with Terry about what happened earlier that night. Not just because he was the husband, of course, but also because they didn't find any signs of a forced entry. No windows or doors were broken, which made things even more confusing.

So Terry was brought down to the police station to be questioned, but he wasn't very cooperative with them. I don't think that's surprising since he gave the police such a hard time when they first got there, as well as the 911 dispatcher. But instead of wanting to talk to investigators, he decided to lawyer up and not answer anything.

Of course, this is well within his legal right. Anyone being brought down to the police station to be questioned about a brutal murder is absolutely allowed to get an attorney. But for investigators, this really stood out as a red flag. If this guy was innocent, why did he feel the need to get an attorney so quickly? So now the police are starting to wonder if Terry could have had something to do with this.

The victim is his wife, and they just spent the evening together. So he was probably one of the last people to see her alive. There were no signs of forced entry. Now, Terry claimed that the lock on the back door was broken, so theoretically anyone could have entered the house.

The knife came from their own kitchen, which is really suspicious because what person is going to break into someone's house, assault them, and then murder them without bringing a weapon with them? Who's going to risk it by assuming that you're just going to find something in the house? Now, going back to how he was on that 911 call.

To the police, it was just weird. He was aggressive. He was almost confrontational with the same people that are simply there to try and help him. And now he would rather get a lawyer than sit down and answer some questions for them.

They also thought that he could have been lying. Terry told the police that he slipped in Roxanne's blood as he lifted her head to check on her, but there were no blood smears on his clothes, suggesting that he actually did that. So did he lie about that? Then the police thought they discovered a potential motive when they looked into Roxanne and Terry's past. Both of them were having affairs.

So I think it's pretty safe to say that this was a personal attack on Roxanne. Whoever did this was really, really angry at her. And that usually only happens when, number one, the victim and the attacker know each other. And number two, it's done over something personal. One person is really angry or upset with the other. And if they're both having romantic affairs and cheating on each other, well, that's definitely personal and a really good motive to murder.

But even Roxanne's sister Janet struggled to believe that Terry could have done something like this. He just wasn't a violent person, and two of them had known each other for years. Plus, everything the police had was just really suspicious and weird, but none of it amounted to enough to make an arrest.

Terry might have been suspect number one, but there was nothing they could do. No physical evidence connected to anything, really. So for the Michigan State police officers working on the case, they had to explore other possibilities. Roxanne's murder was really difficult for her family, especially her younger brother Brad and her sister Janet. Ever since their parents got divorced, Roxanne sort of took on this motherly role for both Brad and Janet.

As the oldest kid, she really took her job seriously and looked after them. Her sister Janet described her as a tall, beautiful person who was always dressed to the nines. Looking good was always important to her. But she was also kind and sweet. She didn't meet anyone who she didn't like. Roxanne was born and raised in Niles, Michigan, near the Indiana state line.

She graduated from Niles High School in 1974, and that's where she met Terry. He was on the wrestling team, and from the moment they first met, it was pretty much love at first sight. They got married in 1982, and ironically, Roxanne's maiden name was Woods. So when she got married to Terry, all she had to do was drop the S, and now her new married name was Wood.

Six years later, Roxanne's sister Janet married Terry's brother Rob. So, she also dropped the S and became Janet Wood. Roxanne was described as a fun, generous sister, daughter, and friend. She loved flowers and was particularly proud of the red roses that she grew. She liked cooking and baking and always wanted to share the recipes with her family and friends.

One of her favorite songs was Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead or Alive. On the night of Roxanne's murder, she and Terry had dinner and then headed to the bowling alley where Terry was on a bowling league. Most of the people there that night were guys. So when Roxanne walked in the front door, she turned a lot of heads. There was a lot of attention on her because she was this beautiful tall woman walking into a bowling alley of pretty much all men.

So if Terry hadn't done it, then any of these other guys could have. Maybe one of them left the bowling alley early without anyone else noticing and then followed her home. Around midnight, Roxanne told Terry that she was tired and wanted to go home. But Terry wasn't ready to call it a night, so he stuck around. They kissed goodbye and Roxanne went home.

Of course, we already know that less than an hour later, when Terry got home, he found her dead. So whatever happened to her happened within basically only an hour. When it came to the physical evidence, they only had a small amount of DNA they managed to collect at the crime scene.

But this was back in 1987, so there wasn't much that they could really do with it. There wasn't any type of advanced DNA testing, so all they could do was get the DNA and simply put it into evidence. And that's what they did. Over the next several years, Terry remained on top of the suspect list, but there was never anything that the investigators could do.

And during that time, dozens of investigators worked on the case. But eventually it went cold. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. What are some of your self-care non-negotiables? Maybe you never skip leg day or therapy day. When your schedule is packed with kids' activities, big work projects, or podcasting like me, it's easy to let your priorities slip.

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That's betterhelp.com. By 1999, 12 years after Roxanne's murder, DNA technology had gotten a lot better, and the DNA sample was eventually uploaded to CODIS, the National DNA Database. But when they uploaded it, they didn't get a match.

Everyone hoped that the DNA would come back as a match to Terry, since he was still well considered to be suspect number one. But, to everyone's disappointment, it wasn't Terry's DNA. But for the police, that didn't completely rule him out. And here's why. For the police, that just meant it wasn't his semen. But that didn't mean he didn't kill her.

Detective Lieutenant Chuck Christenton told the show 48 Hours, quote, just because you find semen in somebody doesn't necessarily mean that the person is the one that killed them, end quote. So they really thought that there was still a pretty good chance that Terry was their guy, even with the DNA evidence pretty much excluding him, or at least excluding him from the sexual assault part.

And it wasn't just the police who suspected Terry. Pretty much everyone in town thought that he did it. When he would walk into bars or go to the supermarket for his groceries, people would call him Slash. They taunted him or harassed him pretty much everywhere he went. No one in Niles, Michigan could accept that he might actually be innocent. In their eyes, he was the cheating husband, so he had to have been the one who did it.

The only people who seemed to stand behind him were Roxanne's brother and sister, which is kind of unusual because in most cases, the victim's family believes in whatever suspect that the police come up with. But this case was different. Instead of thinking that Terry was guilty, they actually thought that he was innocent. And they felt really bad over the years that he was basically being treated like a criminal for something that they didn't think he was capable of.

The case once again went cold after the DNA was tested in 1999 without any matches and CODIS. This time, it was cold for another two decades until 2020. In 2020, the Michigan State Police decided to reopen the case. By that point, DNA testing was nowhere near the same as it was in either 1987 or 1999. So they hoped that something could actually be done this time.

But now they had another problem. The DNA sample originally collected from the crime scene had been so badly degraded over the years. Even though it was stored in police evidence this entire time, and it was only tested once in 1990, it had become a really, really bad sample. By 2020, it was only about the size of a single human cell. The other problem was time.

When the investigation first started back in 1987, all of the reports were done on paper with a pencil. None of them had been digitized or put onto a computer.

So if any of the investigators in 2020 wanted to go back and review the reports or review the evidence in the case file, they literally had to do just that, dig through the paper file, which by this point had well over 3,000 pages. So before trying to do anything at all with the small amount of DNA, they finally had to get those reports digitized.

Insert Professor Ashlyn Kurtzen and her students at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. They started by helping the Michigan State Police with doing just that. This particular professor teaches a criminal justice class, and for a lot of years she's been talking with state detectives about how she thinks her students in this program might actually be able to help them solve a cold case.

So this professor and the state police came up with a simple plan. Dr. Kurtz and students would process around 3,500 pages of documents accumulated since the day that Roxanne was murdered into a single digitized database, making it much faster and much easier for investigators to go through evidence for information. They could finally do things like search by name and see if they've already been interviewed or not.

They could search locations if they needed to do a follow-up. Things that they just couldn't do very easily by flipping through literally thousands of pages of information. Now it seems really simple for us today, just log on to a computer and search for something like that. But back in 1987, of course, that's what investigators had to do if they wanted to review a case file like this. They had to basically dig through all the pieces of paper.

Now, around the same time that the students begin doing this, Detective First Lieutenant Chuck Christensen from the state police decided it was time for a Hail Mary pass. He reached out to genetic genealogist and the president of Identifinders International, Colleen Fitzpatrick, a company that helps to identify unidentified remains, as well as people involved in violent crimes by looking at their DNA.

You may have also heard about her because she's one of the pioneers in forensic genetic genealogy, the same technology that helped to catch the Golden State Killer. The hope was that Colleen Fitzpatrick and her company could still do something with the small amount of DNA that they had in the case, which really was their only chance at figuring out who the killer was.

When she got her hands on the sample, she described it as, quote, small as a gnat's eyebrow. The amount of DNA was so small that it was only about 3% of what they usually use. And actually, it was the lowest amount of DNA that Colleen's company had ever worked with to try and solve a crime. So when I say that this was a Hail Mary pass, this is what I'm talking about.

So identifiers spent the next 10 months working with a sample, but basically came up empty. And during that time, Colleen wasn't even sure that it was going to be possible to find a match with a sample like that until one day in April 2021.

After about 10 months of testing the DNA, Colleen Fitzpatrick discussed the case with Identifiers International consultant Gabriela Vargas, a self-proclaimed, pink-haired, tattooed mom from California who enjoys woodworking and gardening. She also just so happens to be one of the most talented investigative genetic genealogists in the entire world, according to the investigators she's worked with.

So Gabriela Vargas got to work. The first thing she did was create a genetic profile from the killer's DNA. From there, she was able to determine that the guy was Caucasian. So right away, that ruled out a lot of possible suspects. The second thing she did was upload that genetic profile to an online database, the same kind of database that we upload our own DNA when we use websites like 23andMe and Ancestry.com.

They all eventually end up in a broader database called GEDmatch. That's where Gabriela Vargas hoped to find some relatives of Roxanne's killer. If some of these relatives chose to opt into the law enforcement matching program, then she could see if any of them were a match to the suspect. Once the profile was in GEDmatch, Gabriela started building a family tree. But as we know, that's not a very easy thing to do.

To try and find this guy, Gabriela had to start way, way back, all the way back to 1823. The year 1823 was the first relative of Roxanne's killer she was able to identify. So from there, she had to work her way forward in time all the way up to 1987, the year that Roxanne was murdered. So as you can imagine, there's going to be a lot of relatives to try and find.

Essentially, she had to look among these matches and see where they connected to each other. That's when she was led to a union couple, a couple where two sides of the family tree meet. This couple was born around 1920, and based on that, she could guess that they had kids sometime between 1940 and 1950, and Roxanne's killer was likely one of them.

This particular couple had three sons, so the next step for the police was to run background checks on all of them. That's when they were able to eliminate two out of the three brothers as possibilities, which meant that one of them couldn't be excluded. They were down to the last brother.

Now, the reason why this brother stood out was because of his criminal background. He had a record the size of a phone book, including arrests for violent crimes. You name it, he was probably involved in it. So once they were able to connect the DNA with someone with a violent history, then you get a pretty good suspect.

After 34 years and one last chance at solving the case with a speck of DNA too small to see with the human eye, they finally had a good suspect, Patrick Gillum, a man who was living just a few miles away from Roxanne. He also checked off all the boxes. He had a violent criminal record. He was a drinker. He was into different drugs. Just a bad person who was into a lot of bad things over the years.

When detectives dug into Patrick Gillum's criminal history, they found a connection to another case eight years before Roxanne's murder, Maureen Farag in 1979. Maureen and her husband, Robert, lived in Gary, Indiana with their two young daughters back in September of 1979. Robert was the economic director for the city, and Maureen was an art teacher at a local middle school.

They were just a normal married couple enjoying life together. One night, while making his way home from a business trip, Robert called Maureen with a favor. He said, Hey Maureen, I don't have my keys to the house. Could you just leave the side door open for me? And Maureen said, Sure, no problem. I'll see you when you get home. But when Robert got home around 11 p.m. that night, he was confronted with a dozen police cars in front of his house.

As he would come to find out, a man broke into their house and assaulted Maureen. She was lying in bed when she heard what sounded like someone opening the side door to the house. And when she got up, she saw a man going through her purse. When he saw her, he got scared and started chasing her back upstairs. He managed to grab her at the bottom of the staircase and get on top of her.

He tried his best to sexually assault her, but she fought back and he eventually gave up. That's when he decided to take her purse and run out of the house instead. Throughout the entire incident, Maureen had stayed quiet because she didn't want to wake up her two girls, who were also home at the time. About one week later, Gillum was pulled over in Gary for a traffic violation. That's when a police officer noticed some credit cards on the seat next to him. They were Maureen's.

They took him down to the police station where they questioned him about assaulting her. And this is exactly what he said about the whole thing. Quote, End quote. Patrick Gillum was ultimately charged with burglary and unlawful deviant conduct.

He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 14 years in an Indiana state prison. But he only served seven years of that sentence, and about four months later, the police suspected that's when he killed Roxanne. On a side note, Maureen Farag died in 2018 from cancer, not knowing anything about the Roxanne Wood case.

But before the cops could go in and arrest Patrick Gillum, they needed to get a sample of his DNA to compare to the profile they had from the crime scene. So in May of 2021, a team of undercover police officers began surveilling Patrick's every move.

And right away they noticed something. He was a smoker. And cigarettes are generally a good source of DNA. You put your lips directly on the butt of the cigarette so your saliva gets on it. Therefore, there's a good amount of DNA, usually. So one day, while watching Patrick, they saw that he flicked a cigarette butt outside of his truck window while driving. But there's a twist.

The police immediately sent it to the crime lab. But a couple of days later, the lab director called and said it wasn't a match. DNA is DNA. If it's not a match, it's not a match.

The police were completely shocked that he wasn't a match. They almost thought maybe they picked up the wrong cigarette butt because there was no way that he wasn't their guy. Or maybe the crime lab screwed up and tested the wrong piece of evidence. So they went back to get another cigarette butt. This time, they followed Patrick to a laundromat where they waited for him to take a smoke break.

But they weren't going to take their chances and get the wrong cigarette butt this time. So one of the undercover officers walked across the street to a gas station and bought a pack of cigarettes. Even though he wasn't a smoker himself, he wanted to sit down next to Patrick when he came out to have a smoke break. That way, this officer would be right there next to him when he threw it out.

So they waited for Patrick to eventually come outside. And when he did, the officer sat down right next to him on the curb. They engaged in a little bit of small talk so he wouldn't look suspicious. And then when Patrick was done, he put his cigarette down and went back inside to finish his laundry. That's when the officer quickly picked it up and took it to the crime lab.

This time, they got a match. It was a perfect match to the DNA left at that 1987 crime scene. But once again, investigators still weren't ready to make an arrest. Instead, they brought him in for an interview in July 2021. The detectives made a pretty typical move. They told Patrick he wasn't in any type of trouble. They just needed to talk to him about an old cold case.

He was there voluntarily, and after he answered a few questions, he could be on his way. They first asked him if he knew a woman named Roxanne Wood. He said he knew two Roxannes. One was a stripper, and the other one was a drug addict. Which, of course, Roxanne Wood was neither of those. But that's when detectives showed him a picture of Roxanne and asked him again if he knew her.

But Patrick said no. He didn't recognize her and he had no idea who this woman was. So they showed him a second photo of Roxanne, one that was a little more recent. But once again, Patrick said, nope, he had no idea. Ever seen her? Nope. Ever met her? Nope. So the police decided to show their cards and told him that he was there because Roxanne had been assaulted and killed back in 1987.

That's when Patrick put his hands up in the air and said that he needed to talk to a lawyer, which at that point meant conversation over. But it wasn't the end of the story. In February 2022, just days shy of the 35th anniversary of Roxanne's murder, Patrick Gillum was arrested at a South Bend, Indiana home. It didn't matter if he wanted to talk or not. They had his DNA.

For Roxanne's family, this moment didn't even feel real. It had been over three decades. And for most of that time, Roxanne's husband, Terry, was always considered the prime suspect. The police were totally wrong about what his behavior on the 911 call actually meant. And it isn't always the husband who does it. So now, to have someone else entirely arrested for her murder, it was amazing.

The police questioned Patrick for about five and a half hours at the police station in South Bend. Most of the time, he just kept talking in circles and said things like, I can't believe I did it. If I did it, but you're saying I did it. Or, you guys are telling me I did this, and if I did this, I'm a monster. I'm a monster, man. If I did that, that's a monster. That's a monster, man.

Here's part of the conversation. Detective Sergeant Jason Bailey. Let me ask you this. How do you think your DNA was found with her? Patrick Gillum. I have no idea. Jason Bailey. How do you think? Patrick Gillum. I have no clue, man. He also kept saying, I don't remember. If the police asked him a question, it was pretty much always, I don't remember. But he didn't have to remember. The police had pretty much everything they needed to by this point.

There was no way to deny the DNA evidence. So on April 25, 2022, he pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and was sentenced to a minimum of 23 years in prison. He won't be eligible for parole until at least 2040, when he'll be 86 years old. The WMU students from the Cold Case Program who helped digitize evidence in the case were also in the courtroom to witness his sentencing.

We have no idea what the motive was for murdering Roxanne. My best guess is that Patrick Gillum lived nearby and probably saw Roxanne around town a few times. And on that particular night, he saw that Roxanne came home alone and decided to make his move. It wasn't the first time he broke into someone's house and assaulted them. But this time, it just went too far and Roxanne was murdered.

And if it weren't for a tiny amount of DNA, the size of a gnat's eyebrow, he might have gotten away with it. To share your thoughts on the story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales. After each episode, I release a bonus episode where I share my personal thoughts and opinions about the case.

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Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings. ♪

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