Last Wednesday I was contacted by email from three women.
Two were reporters, one was a private citizen.
They communicated the same message. “Terri Lynn Hollis’ murderer has been identified.”
What did that have to do with me?
Six months ago I wrote an essay for Green Tea HP about a time in 1972 when I arrived home from Thanksgiving dinner with my young family to be told that 11 year old Terry Lynn Hollis was missing. She was our neighbor. In fact she was the first person who greeted us when we moved into our first home on her block in Torrance, California.
That next morning we were informed that this beautiful, flaxen haired child had been raped, strangled to death, and left naked from the waist down on the rocks of a beach along Pacific Coast Highway in Ventura County.
My essay communicated my feeling of grief and horror about the episode, and my desire to do all in my power to protect my children from that day forward.
After forty seven years, they finally found the murderer.
The following is a timeline describing the history of the investigation:
– After a possible suspect had been arrested and released in 1973 for lack of evidence, the case went cold.
– However, In 2000, Torrance police detective Jim Wallace (who was ten at the time of the murder and grew up in Torrance) reopened Terri’s file to find a DNA swab had been taken from Terri’s body.
– Possible matches from existing databases at the time did not produce any positive results. That is, not until fifteen years later.
– By 2015, a new technology had been created by a lab in Virginia which matched family trees with genetic codes.
– BINGO – a match came up three years later in 2018.
– The suspect’s name? Jake Edward Brown. At the time of the rape and murder, Brown was thirty six years old.
– A relative of Brown’s was contacted. The relative explained that Brown died in Maricopa County, Arizona in 2003.
– Police exhumed Brown’s body and DNA samples were extracted from bone samples. So much degradation had taken place to the samples that a clear identification was impossible.
– Enter the next huge technological breakthrough. A mother-daughter team had created a lab in Florida, which was able to match the murderer’s DNA to that taken from the body.
– And as of last Wednesday September 11, 2019, Torrance Chief of Police, Eve Urvine, announced that Terri’s murderer had been found.
The case is finally solved, and my memory of that night can finally be put to rest. Kind of.
Now my mind turns to Jake Brown: You can run, but you can no longer hide. More on Brown in a moment.
Other interesting and hopeful thoughts come to mind:
Women played a role in finally bringing this long nightmare to an end. From the female broadcasters who covered the story, to the mother-daughter team that provided the breakthrough technology, to the female Chief of Police who coordinated the effort to close the case, women now “stand guard on the wall protecting us.”
Age was a “meaningful coincidence” when it came to solving the crime. The detective who reopened Terri’s file, and the chief of police who closed out the case were just about Terri’s age when the tragedy occurred. Terri would be fifty eight today. Eve is fifty eight, and Bill is fifty seven. Children remember each other and work to bring about justice.
And technology broke the whole case wide open. No matter where wrong is committed on earth – whether in California, Virginia, Florida, Salt Lake City, or Arizona, etc. – technology has become the game changer. Ultimately, there will be no place a bad actor can hide.
So, I now end with a rearrangement of the song from the tv program COPS. Jake Brown: “What you going to do when the cops come for you bad boy, bad boy? Where you going to hide when the cops come for you bad boy, bad boy.” You going to hide six feet under far away bad boy? Won’t work, cops have found you bad boy. Terrible boy
Say Nothing Predictable, Or Mushy, But Outrageous Is Acceptable