Roxanne Wood Was Killed in Her Home, and DNA Evidence Finally Identified Her Attacker 35 Years Later

In the early hours of February 20, 1987, Roxanne Wood, 30, was killed inside her home in Niles, Michigan. The investigation that followed would last decades and affect the lives of many people.

The Night of February 19, 1987

Roxanne Wood and her husband, Terry, met for dinner at a restaurant in downtown Niles after work on Thursday, February 19, 1987. They then went to a local bowling alley, where Terry was taking part in a men’s league.

The couple had traveled to each location in separate cars. Few women were present at the alley that evening, and Roxanne’s arrival drew attention from the men there.

As midnight approached, Roxanne decided she was tired and wanted to go home to bed. Terry preferred to stay and keep enjoying the evening. Witnesses saw the couple say goodnight with a hug, a kiss and a reminder to drive safely.

Roxanne left alone and drove to the house she shared with Terry in Niles. Terry remained at the alley and bowled one more game before heading home. He arrived about forty-five minutes after his wife.

He entered through the garage and walked into the kitchen. Roxanne was lying on the floor in her nightgown, and a large pool of blood had formed around her.

She had been bleeding heavily from her neck. Terry later told police that he rushed to her side, got behind her, and lifted her head to check whether she was still alive. He found no signs of life.

Terry grabbed the telephone and called the local police station. He also noticed that Roxanne’s underwear had been pulled down to around her knees or ankles and that her nightgown had been pulled up.

The dispatcher tried to collect basic information from him, but Terry grew angry and began shouting into the receiver. The dispatcher asked him to stop yelling because the phone distorted his voice and made him difficult to understand, and explained that the details were necessary.

Investigators regarded his behavior on the call as unusual. Michigan State Police Detective First Lieutenant Chuck Christensen noted that people in such circumstances are typically in shock and distraught, and that the anger in Terry’s voice went well beyond what he would normally expect to hear.

Police officers then arrived at the home. Detective Sergeant Jason Bailey said that Terry had fits of rage there, and that at one point he screamed that he wanted the dispatcher’s supervisor, a sergeant.

First responders ultimately subdued him by placing him in the back of a patrol car. He was driven to the police post for routine questioning, where he quickly asked for an attorney. A detective told him that he believed Terry was the killer and would not rest until Terry was behind bars.

The family learned of the killing that morning. Roxanne’s brother, Brad Woods, was 14 years old and getting ready for school when his mother pounded on the bathroom door and told him to hurry because she needed to talk to him.

When he came out, she told him that Roxanne had been killed. Another of Roxanne’s siblings answered a telephone call and heard the caller break down before saying that someone had murdered their sister. The family knew of no enemies Roxanne had and could not imagine why anyone would want to harm her.

Suspicion Without Evidence

Terry and Roxanne Wood. Credit: CBS News

Detectives who examined the house found no sign of forced entry. Terry told them that the lock on the back door had been giving the couple trouble and did not work. Near Roxanne’s body, investigators found a sheath for a fillet knife.

The knife itself, which was believed to be the murder weapon, had been taken from a kitchen drawer and was never recovered. Investigators found it odd that an intruder would arrive at a home without a weapon.

Terry had told police that he slipped in Roxanne’s blood as he lifted her head, but investigators found no blood smears that would indicate this had happened.

Police also looked into the couple’s past and discovered that both Roxanne and Terry had been involved in extramarital affairs.

Investigators considered jealousy as a possible motive, and one detective remarked that the violence reflected a rage that only someone close to Roxanne would feel.

Janet, Roxanne’s sister, did not share that view. She had known Terry for years and could not reconcile the detective’s description with the man she knew. She said he occasionally had a sharp tongue but was never a violent person.

Despite investigators’ strong suspicion of Terry, prosecutors did not believe there was enough evidence to charge him. Within a few months, the case went cold, and Terry remained under a cloud of suspicion for decades.

The crime scene did offer one significant piece of evidence. Roxanne had been sexually assaulted, and her attacker had left his DNA behind.

A sample was preserved, but the technology available in 1987 could do little with it. Roxanne’s family never gave up hope that the person responsible would one day be found.

As DNA technology advanced, the sample was eventually uploaded to the criminal DNA database CODIS in 1999. No match was returned. Many people hoped the result would at least clear Terry, so the sample was compared with his DNA. It was not his.

Investigators did not remove him as a person of interest, however. They noted that finding one man’s DNA at a crime scene did not prove that he was the killer. After that, the case produced no new leads until 2020.

A New Approach to an Old Case

An open drawer in the Wood home kitchen where a filet knife, thought to be the murder weapon, was kept. Credit: Michigan Department of State Police

By 2020, more than three decades of work had left police with thousands of reports on the case. That year, a professor and a group of students at Western Michigan University found a way to speed up the review.

Dr. Ashlyn Kuersten, who teaches in the university’s criminal justice studies program, had spoken for years with Christensen about how her students might help with a cold case. She described the real-world experience as priceless for them.

The two settled on a plan. The students would convert roughly 3,500 pages of documents, collected since the day of the murder, into a single digital database.

The task was demanding. Some of the documents were older than the students themselves, and each one had to be scanned and reviewed to decide whether the information was relevant.

The finished database could be searched by keyword. Officers could look up a name to find out whether a person had already been interviewed or needed a follow-up, and they could search by location.

Neither task would have been practical while turning through thousands of pages by hand. Samantha Rogers and McKenzie Stommen were among the students who worked on the files. Stommen said the decades-old documents were a solemn reminder of how long some victims wait for justice.

Around the same time, Christensen decided to try a second method. He hired Identifinders International, a company founded and led by Colleen Fitzpatrick that specializes in genetic genealogy, which combines DNA analysis with family-tree research.

The approach has been used in forensic cases to identify unknown remains and violent offenders.

The company found that very little DNA remained from the crime scene. The sample measured only 28 picograms, which is too small to see with the naked eye and about three percent of the amount normally used.

It was the lowest amount the company had ever worked with to solve a case. For about ten months, the company analyzed the data the sample produced, but it found nothing useful, and the case had been judged unsolvable.

In April 2021, Fitzpatrick was talking with Gabriella Vargas, an investigative genetic genealogist who worked as a consultant for Identifinders. Vargas asked to look at the case herself. Unlike the others who had worked on it, she believed it could be solved.

She began by generating a genetic profile from the trace DNA, which revealed the ancestral origins of the person who left it. The profile showed that he was Caucasian.

Vargas then turned to GEDmatch, an online database. People who take consumer DNA tests such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com can upload their results to it in the hope of finding relatives, and they can choose to allow law enforcement to see whether they match a suspect.

Using the matches she found, Vargas began building the family tree of the unknown man. The top ancestor on one side of the tree was born in 1823, and the top ancestor on the other side was born in 1797.

She searched for the point where the two sides of the family joined and found a married couple born around 1920. Their children would have been born around 1940 or 1950, and the man she was looking for had to be one of them.

The couple had three sons. Vargas passed her findings to detectives, who ran background checks and eliminated two of the brothers as possibilities. The entire genealogical effort took Vargas four days. Only one brother remained.

The Suspect Is Identified

The remaining brother was Patrick Gilham, who lived in South Bend, Indiana, only a few miles from where Roxanne Wood had been killed. When detectives examined his criminal history, they found a connection to another case from eight years before the attack on Roxanne.

In September 1979, Robert and Maureen Farag lived in Gary, Indiana, with their two daughters, who were one and three years old. Robert worked as the city’s economic director, and Maureen taught art at a local middle school.

One night, Robert was traveling home from a business trip when he called Maureen and asked her to leave the side door unlocked because he did not have his house keys. At about eleven o’clock, he turned onto his street and saw police cars outside his home.

Maureen told him that a noise downstairs had woken her while she was in bed. She saw a man going through her purse. The man chased her, and as she started up the stairs he grabbed her at the bottom, got on top of her, and tried to assault her sexually.

He did not succeed. He then took her purse and fled. Throughout the attack, Maureen stayed quiet so that she would not wake her daughters.

About a week later, police in Gary stopped Gilham for a traffic violation. An officer noticed credit cards on the seat beside him, and they belonged to Maureen.

Gilham told police that all he remembered was going into the house, blacking out, and waking up with his pants around his ankles. He was charged with burglary and unlawful deviate conduct, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to 14 years in Indiana State Prison.

He served seven years of that sentence. Police believe he assaulted Roxanne Wood about four months after his release.

The Farags later moved to a different house in a different neighborhood, and Maureen told almost no one about the attack because she considered it a private matter. She died of cancer in 2018 and never learned of the Roxanne Wood case.

Investigators now needed a sample of Gilham’s DNA to compare with the profile from the crime scene.

In May 2021, Trooper Ryan Codde of the Michigan State Police, who was assigned to the fifth district’s fugitive recovery team, and his colleagues began an undercover surveillance of Gilham in South Bend.

After several days, they noticed that he smoked. A cigarette butt is a good source of DNA because saliva from the smoker’s lips ends up on it. While following Gilham, the team watched him flick a cigarette butt out of his truck window as he drove. They collected it and sent it to the laboratory.

A few days later, the laboratory director called Detective Sergeant John Moore to say that the sample was not a match.

Surprised, Moore telephoned Codde and asked whether he could have lost sight of the cigarette butt. Codde replied that a car had driven past at the moment the butt left Gilham’s hand, so the item that had been tested might not have been his.

Investigators decided to try again. When Gilham stopped at a laundromat, Codde followed him on foot rather than in a car.

He noticed a gas station on the corner, bought a pack of cigarettes, and sat on the curb next to the laundromat, where he expected Gilham to take a smoke break. Gilham came out and sat six to eight feet away.

The two men made small talk, and Gilham mentioned that he liked the Red Wings. When Gilham finished his cigarette, he dropped it and went back inside.

The butt was lying alone on the ground, still warm. Codde picked it up with a glove, wrapped it, and walked away. This time, the laboratory results showed a perfect match to the DNA from the 1987 crime scene.

Arrest and Sentencing

Patrick Gilham was arrested at his South Bend, Indiana, home in February 2022, just days shy of the 35th anniversary of Roxanne Wood’s murder. Credit: Michigan Department of State Police

Investigators were not ready to make an arrest. In July 2021, they asked Gilham to come in for an interview, telling him that he was not in trouble, that he was there voluntarily, and that they needed to speak with him about an old case.

Bailey asked whether he knew anyone named Roxanne. Gilham said he knew two, one a stripper and the other a drug addict. Shown a photograph of Roxanne Wood, he said he had never met her.

Investigators then showed him an older photograph, and he said he had never seen her and did not know who she was. When Bailey told him that the woman had been assaulted, Gilham’s body tensed, he nearly hyperventilated, and his hands began to shake.

He asked to speak with his lawyer, and the interview ended. Bailey said he had never seen such a reaction in 23 years of police work.

On February 17, 2022, just days before the 35th anniversary of the murder, Gilham was arrested at his home in South Bend.

When investigators came to the door to tell the family that they had their man, Brad Woods said, it did not seem real and was nothing like what he had imagined for all those years.

Christensen then met with Terry Wood and told him that he was no longer a person of interest and that investigators knew he had nothing to do with the crime. Terry was emotional and began to cry. He was bewildered and in shock.

Investigators questioned Gilham for five and a half hours at a police station in South Bend. He asked for an attorney only at the very end, and at times he spoke in circles. When pressed, he said repeatedly that if he had done it, he was a monster.

He said he had no idea how his DNA came to be found with Roxanne. When he was confronted with the facts of the case, he repeated that he did not remember. Prosecutors charged Gilham with open murder and breaking and entering of an occupied dwelling.

A separate encounter from the summer of 1987 also became part of the case. Months after Roxanne’s death, on a hot night in South Bend, Rose Caparell was watering her front lawn when she heard a loud car come down the street.

She saw a blue El Camino with a tail light out. A few minutes later, the same car came back, now with a loud muffler. A man in a stocking cap and a full beard, with only his eyes visible, came around the corner of her house.

Rose believed he intended to rape her. She ran screaming down the street to a neighbor’s home and called the police, but the man escaped.

A few days later, Rose was driving to dinner with her family when her daughter Tina spotted the same El Camino in a parking lot. Rose and Tina left to call the police, and Rose’s husband, Stan, a retired Marine, stayed to wait for the car’s owner.

When they returned, Stan was holding a gun on a man who was sitting on the ground. Stan had demanded the man’s driver’s license, and it carried the name Patrick Gilham. The family had never heard the name before.

The police never arrived, so Stan lowered the gun and let Gilham leave. Rose later reported the incident at the South Bend Police Station, but no arrest was made. Decades later, after seeing reports of Gilham’s arrest, Rose and Tina gave their account to Michigan police.

In March 2022, Gilham pleaded no contest to second-degree murder under a plea agreement, even though he had told investigators that he did not remember murdering Roxanne.

At the sentencing hearing on April 25, 2022, Brad and Janet addressed him directly. Janet told the court that his actions had given their family a life sentence, while he had lived most of his own life as a free man. Gilham wore headphones in order to hear.

Janet strongly resembles her sister, and Gilham appeared confused when he looked at her. When it was his turn to speak, Gilham offered an apology and said he prayed for the family every night, hoping that with God’s help they might someday forgive him.

The judge sentenced Gilham, who was 67 at the time, to a minimum of 23 years and a maximum of 50 in prison. Terry Wood was in the courtroom.

Remembering Roxanne

Roxanne Wood, nicknamed “Rock,” was described by her younger brother and sister as the rock of their family. Credit: CBS News

Roxanne Wood was known to her family as Rock. Those who knew her describe a woman who made everyone feel like her closest friend and who loved the people around her.

She was tall and statuesque, took great pride in how she dressed, and was known for her striking hair. She carried herself with grace and was considered very classy.

Her parents divorced, and Roxanne took on a maternal role with her younger siblings. Brad has said that moving between two households left him feeling unsettled, and that Roxanne was the one stable presence in his childhood. The nickname fit, because Roxanne was the rock of the family.

Shortly after graduating from high school, Roxanne began working at the company owned by Terry Wood’s father. Terry was still a high school student and a member of the wrestling team.

When he walked in wearing his wrestling shorts, Roxanne was immediately smitten. The two married in 1982, a day she described as the happiest of her life. Six years later, Janet married Terry’s brother Rob and changed her last name from Woods to Wood.

Terry and Rob both worked for the family business, and Roxanne and Terry spent nearly all of their time together. They dressed in the morning together, rode to work together, came home for lunch together, and returned to work together.

The arrangement proved to be a little too much togetherness, so Roxanne took a job in nearby South Bend, Indiana. The time apart helped the marriage. By early 1987, the couple was content and happy, and they were looking forward to starting a family.

Roxanne’s family says she remains with them as a source of strength. Her memory gives them the courage to move forward.

Solar Panels Could Get 1,000x Stronger After Major Tech Breakthrough

Titanium solar panels — Free for use under the Pixabay Content License

Scientists have discovered a way to make solar panels harvest much more electricity without taking up more space. Researchers have engineered a precisely layered, ultra-thin material capable of producing up to 1,000 times the electric current of pure barium titanate on its own, by harnessing far more light photons. The innovation opens the door to vastly more efficient solar cells.

Solar Cell Breakthrough in Brief

Physicists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) in Germany created a new material using layered crystal engineering to produce a much higher photovoltaic effect, publishing their findings in the journal Science Advances.

A research team led by physicist Dr. Akash Bhatnagar from the Center for Innovation Competence SiLi-nano at MLU constructed a material with 500 extremely thin layers—totaling roughly 200 nanometers in thickness—alternating between three crystals: barium titanate, strontium titanate, and calcium titanate.

Yeseul Yun, a PhD student at MLU and the study’s first author, described how the barium titanate was sandwiched between the other two crystals by vaporizing them with a high-power laser and redepositing them onto carrier substrates.

Under laser light, the structure generated a current up to 1,000 times greater than that of pure barium titanate of similar thickness, despite the proportion of barium titanate—the material’s main light-absorbing component—having been cut by almost two-thirds.

The new technology is fundamentally different from anything currently on the market. Most commercial solar panels make electricity using two different forms of silicon to create an electric field across the panel, but ferroelectric crystals like barium titanate don’t need that kind of interface to produce a photovoltaic effect.

Dr. Bhatnagar noted that the interaction between the layers appears to produce a much greater permittivity, letting electrons flow more easily once excited by light—and that the effect remained nearly constant when tested six months later.

Solar Cell Breakthrough Significance

Solar power is one of the fastest-growing energy sources in the world, but panels still need to become more efficient so they can generate more electricity from the same surface area. More efficient panels should also be cheaper, since fewer would be needed to meet demand, and a thinner design could shrink the footprint of a standard installation—especially useful in densely populated areas.

The researchers believe panels made with this material would be both more efficient and cheaper to manufacture than conventional silicon panels.

Dr. Jennifer Rupp, a professor at MIT who was not involved in the study, said the discovery was very exciting and could have a significant impact on the development of more efficient solar cells, adding that the material’s durability and ease of production made it even more attractive.

According to the International Energy Agency, combined solar photovoltaic and concentrating solar power technologies could supply up to a quarter of the world’s electricity by 2050—enough to make solar the single largest electricity source ahead of fossil fuels, wind, hydro, and nuclear. The MLU team’s research could play a major role in realizing that vision.

Other scientists are also working toward this goal. Researchers at the University of Oxford have developed an ultra-thin perovskite solar cell now independently certified at over 27% conversion efficiency, matching traditional silicon panels for the first time.

Dr. Shuaifeng Hu, a post-doctoral researcher there, said their stacking, or multi-junction, approach had lifted efficiency from around 6% to over 27% in just five years, and could eventually pass 45%. Dr. Junke Wang, another Oxford postdoctoral fellow, noted that applying these materials as a coating lets the team match and even outperform silicon while gaining flexibility.

Solar Cell Breakthrough Description

The massive increase in electric current is largely down to the unique interaction between the crystals used to build the layered structure. Stacking them in a specific pattern allows the combined structure to interact with light in a way that harnesses far more energy than before.

On its own, barium titanate absorbs only a meager amount of light.

Embedding it between strontium titanate and calcium titanate fundamentally changes that behavior. Dr. Bhatnagar noted that the photovoltaic effect was further enhanced by alternating a ferroelectric material with a paraelectric one, since a paraelectric material can become ferroelectric under certain conditions, such as at low temperatures or with a slightly altered chemical structure.

His team found the effect was strongest of all when a ferroelectric layer was sandwiched between two different paraelectric layers, rather than just one.

Concurrently, other researchers are building highly efficient solar cells using halide perovskite materials, which Suchi Guha, a physics professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, hails as the semiconductors of the 21st century. Her team has studied the material’s fundamental optical properties using ultrafast laser spectroscopy.

Meanwhile, Gavin King, a physics professor at Mizzou, has used a technique called ice lithography—cooling the material below -150°C and etching it with an electron beam—to pattern thin films of the material at the nanometer scale to create specialized devices.

Solar Cell Breakthrough Future Prospects

While the 1,000-fold increase is a significant finding, it will take time before this design makes it into commercial solar panels. Researchers still need to study how it can be scaled up into full-size panels, and Dr. Bhatnagar’s team is continuing to investigate exactly how the different materials interact while working on a prototype. If all goes well, commercial-grade panels using the new structure could arrive within the next few years.

Other researchers are also moving toward commercialization. Oxford PV, a spin-off company from Oxford University Physics working to commercialize silicon-perovskite tandem cells, expects to reach meaningful scale in specialized markets, such as aerospace, in 2025, before entering the residential solar market in 2026 and scaling toward utility-scale in 2026 and 2027, according to CEO David Ward.

The shared goal behind all this research is a solar panel that can harvest far more electricity from the same amount of sunlight—one that could make solar power cheaper, shrink the footprint of installations, and potentially help solar overtake fossil fuels as the world’s leading electricity source.

Different manufacturers will likely pursue this goal in different ways, with some chasing maximum efficiency and others prioritizing the lowest possible cost.