Suspect Identified In 46-Year-Old Cold Case Kidnapping, Murder Of Torrance Girl
TORRANCE (CBSLA) — Police say they have identified a suspect in the 1972 kidnapping and murder of an 11-year-old girl in Torrance.
Terri Lynn Hollis left her home in the 2600 block of Dalemead Street to go for a bike ride on Thanksgiving Day in 1972. Her body was found the following day by fishermen on a cliff below Pacific Coast Highway in Oxnard.
She was found wearing only a T-shirt, according to a 1972 article from the Los Angeles Times.
Torrance police says its detectives worked the case for several years, conducting over 2,000 interviews and looking into several leads. Detectives in 2000 submitted DNA evidence collected from the young girl to the Los Angeles Sheriff's Crime Lab, but there were no hits.
Last year, DNA technology company Parabon-Nanolabs completed a genetic geneaology analysis using only publicly-available databases and got a hit to a possible relative in the case, Torrance police said. Detectives who followed up on the hit followed it to a potential person of interest who had died in Arizona.
The body of the person of interest was exhumed and its bone remains submitted to DNA Labs International, which confirmed the bones were a one-in-21 septillion match to the evidence collected from Terri Lynn Hollis.
Jake Edward Brown, also known as Thomas Tracy Burum, was officially named the suspect in the case in July. Detectives say the case of Terri Lynn Hollis is now closed, but they are now looking into whether Brown may have been involved in other unsolved crimes.
