Semen was recovered from Ms. Loomis’s 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 Mr. 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 Ms. Loomis’s boot, the affidavit said. He was arrested in April 2019 and charged with first-degree murder....
Laura Martin, the public defender for Mr. 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,” Ms. Martin wrote. “This is a terrible tragedy that began with Jody Loomis’s death and is compounded by an innocent man taking his own life.”
When two undercover detectives visited a ceramics business that Mr. Miller ran with his wife out of their garage in November 2018, they noticed a nearly seven-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....
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33 comments:
Is there a point to convicting a man after he's dead? Well maybe if he had a substantial estate, a conviction might secure some of it for the victim's relatives.
But otherwise it sure seems to accomplish nothing substantial. At least I'm not seeing that there is a purpose in pursuing it.
I suppose next they’ll be exhuming corpses and putting them in the courtroom, as Charles I did with Oliver Cromwell.
I imagine it would be devastating to the family to get that far to a sense of closure and not finish.
In answer to the question posed by jrapdx, though not the reason the government has (which I don't know at this time), it allows for the family of the victim to pursue charges against the guilty parties' estate
THEOLDMAN
A few years ago, I dated a woman whose husband is now serving life in a FL prison due to a DNA match found only because he got sloppy and roughed up another young woman. They found him guilty of kidnapping and imprisonment (and more) in a cold case from years before my friend and him were married. Better to find out late, than never.
Having already gone through the expense of having a trial, why not get a verdict?
They'll do this with Trump too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod
jrapdx said...Is there a point to convicting a man after he's dead?
Yes, you can close the case and move on.
investigators connected DNA from the crime scene with information that Miller's relatives posted on genealogy websites....
OK so "justice" was served.
But this sends a chill up my spine.
I apply for a job. Corporation X searches DNA info from relatives. Conclusion? I might be subject to expensive health care costs that hurt the company in insurance premiums. Rejected.
Many possible, and disturbing, scenarios when your DNA is available through a surrogate.
It just seems like a variation on a disappearing defendant.
In New York State, when a party to a civil case has died, the paper counsel files with the court to have him dismissed from the case is called a Suggestion of Death.
What's the point of this?:
Death seemed preferable to letting a jury decide a verdict on tainted evidence,” Ms. Martin wrote. “This is a terrible tragedy that began with Jody Loomis’s death and is compounded by an innocent man taking his own life.”
"I apply for a job. Corporation X searches DNA info from relatives. Conclusion? I might be subject to expensive health care costs that hurt the company in insurance premiums. Rejected."
Someday you'll get rejected if one of your relatives once expressed a non-PC opinion.
No worries JAORE. Trump says if you like your pre-existing condition you can keep your pre-existing condition.
Due to certain experiences regarding family in two cases, friends in another, and the frequent news reports, I wouldn't trust a prosecutor for the time of day. That goes exponentially with a half-century old case.
I recall when the FBI's lead matching procedure was GOLD. I wonder how many convictions have been overturned after that fell apart. Ahh, I kill myself.
Bite match experts? Heck of a gig.
I think we need phrenology. More plausible.
getting actual legal proof to the court that someone died and that the person who died actually was the defendant is not instantaneous and can last longer than jury deliberations,
and in times of civil unrest, or in the case of very rich or well-connected defendants, the possibility of a fraudulently claimed death is probably significant.
I suppose next they’ll be exhuming corpses and putting them in the courtroom, as Charles I did with Oliver Cromwell.
Cromwell deserved what he got, that genocidal Irish-killing Puritan-prick English bastard. Says this Catholic Irish-American.
Charles II
It’s a shame on the credibility of crime labs, my first thoughts are how valid are the DNA Results...
@Dave, you’re right.
Greg Hlatky said...
They'll do this with Trump too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod
And the NYT will certainly do a feature article on how hip, cool, and ultra-modern it is to scream "I want answers!" at a corpse.
Just when you thought that you found a perfect way to get away with murder.
What phwest wrote @6:14am. The expense of the trial was over. I wasn't a juror and didn't hear the evidence presented, but at that stage of the trial; with the evidence presented and the jury already deliberating, it seems reasonable to let the jury reach a decision.
My greater concern was the quality of other evidence presented? From what I've read of DNA evidence, the science isn't as settled as prosecutors want people to think. If all they have is DNA evidence, which is what seems to have broken the cold case; then I have doubts. The method of obtaining the evidence provides a greater amount of doubt, both in leading to the defendant and obtaining a sample from the defendant. If you want to eliminate that doubt; I'd want to know how plausible it was that Mr. Miller was anywhere near Ms. Loomis at the time of death. I read nothing eliminating that doubt from the NYT or Fox13. 5 miles isn't close enough.
So who gets the bail money?
What I worry about is some dishonest lab tech faking results the way that drug tester did in Massachusetts.
"Detectives believe Miller was living in the Edmonds area at the time of the murder, about five miles from where Loomis’ body was found"
Was he there or not? It would be hard for me to prove I was somewhere, or not, 48 years ago. Did the State prove he was there, beyond saying "He might have been because we believe he was living hear there"?
Blogger Rob said...
the case is called a Suggestion of Death.
Sounds like Monty Python. "Oh now. Gramps isn't dead, he's merely pining for the fjords"
John Henry
I seem to recall Enron's Ken Ley being convicted and then dying before sentencing phase, so the verdict had to be tossed. So what was this Judge's point?
Someday you'll get rejected if one of your relatives once expressed a non-PC opinion.
"MENLO PARK, CA – A Peninsula school board president abruptly resigned Sunday amid a media firestorm after his wife's racist and misogynist social media tirade attacking Vice President-elect Kamala Harris surfaced.
"Yes! All she needs to be qualified is a black pussy"
"The possibilities are endless for little girls who whore their ways to the top!!! What a powerful message!!! Yay team Gaga!!" she wrote in another tweet.
Not exactly a tirade, in my opinion. but, what evah..
@FullMoon
First, that woman is a hero.
Second, Menlo Park?
That's got to be one of the most liberal (and richest) towns in America.
If the current Prince of Wales outlives his Mum and becomes King Charles, what number will he be? And will he be credited with digging up the remains of Cromwell?
Do the police need to be honest about how they found the initial DNA match if only the coffee cup DNA
evidence is used at trial? I've always wondered if the "ancestry website" might be a cover story and they don't
want potential criminals to know all the ways they can find a DNA match.
The Times didn't actually provide much more information on the evidence presented at the trial, and yet there are men here who seem to feel they're experts on the case: the Times just let the defense hag make stuff up, and they lapped it up.
Richard Aubrey, and a few others: you sound like the sanctimonious twats who sat on the juries that let Joseph P. Smith free, time after time, for kidnapping and killing women, with multiple witnesses to some of the kidnappings, until a video camera literally captured him snatching 11-year old Carlie Brucia, whom he then raped and murdered.
Good thing for justice you weren't on his juries.
Good thing for you Carlie Brucia wasn't your daughter.
Sixteen years later, the ACLU is STILL burning through our tax dollars, some $18 million to date, trying to get Smith's death sentence overturned on technical grounds that his torture-rape-murder of Brucia and another women don't meet the "heinous" standard as established at the time of his capture. You think that's a good use of money? That type of garbage is why people like me, who experienced something less deadly but well in the wheelhouse a few blocks from Carlie's abduction site, never got a day in court. I was told there wasn't enough money to try serial sex offenders for every rape they commit because of the cost of the endless appeals the defense bar gets. So my guy walked early again and offed who knows how many more women before fist-raping an elderly woman into an early grave. And the ACLU succeeded in getting his life sentence for that crime overturned on a paperwork technicality. If you're so doubtful about DNA, care to send him your mom's address? He likes 'em old.
You whine about prosecutors and believe all the fake statistics churned up by the Innocence Project. You know nothing about the realities of our criminal justice system, evidence, false acquittals, faked Innocence Project "statistics," and the millions of crime victims consequently denied justice.
Why do we sometimes continue prosecutions in the rare case of a defendant dying during the trial? To drill some common sense into potential jury pool ignoramuses who fall for the mountains of lies planted in the media by the defense bar and the Innocence Project. Because the judge understands that documenting this type of relatively novel prosecution is crucial for future cases.
Because raped and murdered women and their survivors also deserve justice. Despite what you think they deserve, Richard.
What, no fight back? You pathetic, ignorant cowards.
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