The man who murdered Roxanne Wood in her own kitchen in 1987, slashing her throat after a sexual assault, was finally arrested just days before the 35th anniversary of her death, ending a cold case that haunted a small Michigan town for generations.
Patrick Gilliam, now 67 years old, sat in a Michigan courtroom in April 2022 and pleaded no contest to second-degree murder, a plea that came after one of the most extraordinary forensic investigations in American criminal history. The case had been deemed impossible by experts. The DNA sample was nearly nothing, just 28 picograms, described by one geneticist as a nat’s eyebrow of DNA, about three percent of what is normally required for analysis.
Roxanne Wood was 30 years old on the night of February 19, 1987. She and her husband Terry had gone to a bowling alley in Niles, Michigan, a small town on the Indiana border where everyone knew everyone. She was ready to go home around midnight.
Terry wanted to stay and bowl another game. They said goodnight the way they always did, a hug, a kiss, love you, drive safe.
Terry arrived home approximately 45 minutes later. He found Roxanne on the kitchen floor in her nightgown, a pool of blood around her. He picked up her head to see if she was alive.
She was not. The fillet knife believed to be the murder weapon was never found. Only its sheath remained near her body.
From that moment, Terry Wood became the primary suspect. Police noted his volatile demeanor when they arrived. He was placed in the back of a patrol car.
When detectives drove him to the station for routine questioning, he asked for an attorney within minutes. A detective looked him in the eye and said, I believe you are the killer, and I will not rest until you are behind bars.
For 35 years, Terry carried that suspicion. He walked into rooms and conversations stopped. He lived under a cloud that never lifted, even when DNA evidence from the crime scene was tested against his own and came back negative.
The DNA was not his. It belonged to someone else entirely. But investigators said the presence of someone else’s DNA did not automatically rule out the husband.
The case went cold. More than 3,500 pages of documents accumulated in Roxanne’s case file over the decades, typed reports, handwritten notes, witness statements, interview records going back to February of 1987. Detective First Lieutenant Chuck Christensen of the Michigan State Police had been working the case and understood that before any new investigation could move forward, someone had to make sense of the paper.
That is where Dr. Ashlyn Kirsten came in. She taught a criminal justice studies program at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and had been talking with Christensen for years about whether her students might be able to help on a real cold case.
Around 2020, they made it happen. Students took the more than 3,500 pages and digitized them into a single searchable database.
Every name, every address, every piece of information from 30 years of investigative work became something a detective could search by keyword in seconds. Student Samantha Rogers described how that changed things. Officers could search by name, see if someone had already been interviewed, check if they needed a follow-up.
What had taken hours of flipping through paper now took moments.
At the same time, Christensen made what he called a Hail Mary pass. He reached out to Colleen Fitzpatrick, the founder and president of Identifinders International, a company specializing in forensic genetic genealogy. Fitzpatrick’s team examined what remained of the DNA from the 1987 crime scene.
What they found was nearly nothing, 28 picograms, a speck of a speck.
Identifinders spent approximately 10 months with the data. They came up empty. It really did feel impossible, Fitzpatrick said.
It really did. Then one day in April of 2021, she happened to be talking with a colleague, a genetic genealogist named Gabriella Vargas, a pink-haired, tattooed mother from California who by her own description enjoyed woodworking and gardening, and who was by every professional account one of the best forensic genetic genealogists in the country.
Fitzpatrick mentioned the case. Vargas said, Why don’t you let me look at it? She looked, and then she said something that nobody else working this case had said.
I concluded that I did not stand with the others. I believe that this case was extremely solvable, and I believe that I could solve it.
In April of 2021, Vargas generated a genetic profile from the trace DNA. Then she turned to GEDmatch, the public ancestry database where people who have used services like 23andMe or ancestry. com can voluntarily upload their results in hopes of finding more relatives if they choose to opt in to assist law enforcement.
She built a family tree.
She went back as far as 1823 on one side, 1797 on the other. Working through the partial matches, tracing genetic lines across generations, she was looking for where the branches converged, what genealogists call a union couple, the point where two sides of the suspect’s family tree meet. She found them, a couple born around 1920.
Based on that, she could project they would have had children in roughly the 1940s and 50s.
One of those children was Roxanne’s killer. That couple had three sons. Vargas passed the information to detectives.
Background checks were run on all three brothers. Two were eliminated. The third had a history, in Christensen’s words, of violent things, sexual deviant things.
You name it, he has probably been involved in it. His name was Patrick Gilliam.
He was living just a few miles from where he had killed Roxanne Wood in 1987. He had never left the area. He had never once been on investigators’ radar.
Back at Identifinders, Fitzpatrick had been following Vargas’s work in real time. She later described the moment Vargas reported her findings, posting to the Roxanne Wood Facebook memorial page that Janet Wood had maintained for years.
Vargas posted, Today is your day, Rox. Today is your day. Four days.
Gabriella Vargas solved the case deemed impossible in four days.
When detectives dug into Patrick Gilliam’s background, they found something that made everything about the night of February 20, 1987 fall into place with a specific and terrible logic. In September of 1979, Gilliam had broken into the home of a woman named Maureen Farig in Gary, Indiana. Her husband, Robert, was away on business and had called ahead asking Maureen to leave the side door open for him.
Gilliam entered the house, was going through Maureen’s purse when she woke up, and chased her. He grabbed her at the bottom of the stairs, got on top of her, and attempted to assault her. He was not successful.
Throughout the attack, Maureen stayed completely silent. Her daughters were 2 years old and 1 year old. She did not wake them.
She protected them at cost to herself.
About a week after the attack, Gilliam was pulled over for a traffic violation. A police officer noticed credit cards on the seat next to him that belonged to Maureen. He was brought in.
When interviewed, he said, All I remember is going into the house and I blacked out and woke up with my pants around my ankles. He was charged with burglary and unlawful deviant conduct.
He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 14 years in Indiana State Prison. He served seven. Approximately 4 months after his release, Roxanne Wood was murdered in her home in Niles, Michigan.
Investigators later concluded that Gilliam had learned something from the Maureen Farig attack, something deliberate and chilling. He had left a witness alive in 1979, and that witness had sent him to prison. He was not going to make that mistake again.
Maureen Farig died in 2018 from cancer, never knowing that the man who attacked her had gone on to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 someone else, never knowing that her survival had cost Roxanne Wood her life. And there was one more missed opportunity buried in the record. In the summer of 1987, just months after Roxanne’s murder, a woman named Rose Caporal was standing in her front yard in South Bend, Indiana, watering her lawn.
She noticed a blue El Camino with a bad muffler and a burned-out tail light circling her street. A man with a stocking cap and a full beard came around the corner of her house. She ran screaming to a neighbor’s house.
A few days later, Rose’s daughter, Tina, spotted the same El Camino in a parking lot. Rose’s husband, Stan, a retired Marine, positioned himself by the car.
When the driver came out, Stan held him at gunpoint and demanded his license. The name on the license, Patrick Gilliam. Police were called, they never arrived.
The family eventually reported it to the South Bend Police Department. No arrest was ever made. Gilliam walked away.
And the case that might have been solved in the summer of 1987, just months after Roxanne was killed, remained open for another 35 years.
In May of 2021, a Michigan State Police undercover surveillance team began following Patrick Gilliam in South Bend. They quickly observed that he was a smoker. Cigarettes are an excellent source of DNA.
Lips directly on the butt, saliva absorbed into the filter. They watched. They waited.
Gilliam flicked a cigarette from his truck window while driving. The team retrieved it.
They sent it to the lab right away. A couple of days later, the lab director called. The DNA was not a match.
Investigators were in shock. Going back through the surveillance footage, they realized a car had driven past at exactly the moment the cigarette left Gilliam’s window. They could not be 100 percent certain the butt they retrieved had been Gilliam’s.
There was only one thing to do. Go back and get another one.
Trooper Ryan Cody was assigned to follow Gilliam on foot this time. He observed Gilliam pull into a laundromat, a window of opportunity. Cody knew Gilliam would likely come outside for a smoke break.
He walked to the gas station on the corner and bought a pack of cigarettes. He sat on a curb next to the laundromat. Gilliam came out and sat down approximately 6 to 8 feet away.
The two men sat together, strangers in the afternoon, and smoked. They made small talk. Gilliam mentioned he liked the Red Wings.
Gilliam finished his cigarette and went back inside. Cody watched the discarded butt land a few feet away by itself. He pulled on a glove, walked over, and picked it up.
It was still warm. The results came back. A perfect match to the DNA from Roxanne Wood’s 1987 crime scene.
In July of 2021, detectives brought Gilliam in for an interview. They told him he was not in trouble. They needed to ask him about an old case.
They asked if he knew anyone named Roxanne. Gilliam said he knew two Roxannes. One he said was a stripper, the other was a 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 addict.
They showed him a photograph of Roxanne Wood. He said he had never seen her, never met her, did not know who she was.
Then they told him the woman in the photograph had been assaulted. Detective Sergeant Jason Bailey, who had been doing this work for 23 years, watched what happened next. Gilliam’s body tensed.
He was nearly hyperventilating. His hands were shaking. Bailey said he had never seen a reaction like that from anyone in his entire career.
Gilliam said, I have to talk to my lawyer, man. The interview ended.
In February of 2022, just days before the 35th anniversary of Roxanne’s murder, Patrick Gilliam was arrested at his South Bend, Indiana home. He was questioned for 5 and a half hours. At different points he said, You guys are telling me I did this, and if I did this, I am a monster.
He said, How do you think your DNA was found with her? I have no clue. He said over and over, I do not remember.
I do not remember doing that.
When Detective Christensen had enough to make the arrest, he did something else first. He went to see Terry Wood. He sat Terry down and told him directly he was no longer a person of interest.
They knew he had nothing to do with it. Terry had carried a cloud of suspicion for 35 years. He had walked into rooms and watched conversation stop, had lived under the weight of an accusation that was never formally made, but never went away.
Terry cried. He was bewildered, Christensen said, in shock. Robert Ferrick, the husband of Maureen, the woman Gilliam had attacked in 1979, was also present for some of the proceedings.
He shook Terry’s hand. He was shaking, crying, Robert said. I felt more empathy for him than I could for any other person I have met.
In April of 2022, Patrick Gilliam walked into a Michigan courtroom and faced the family of the woman he had murdered 35 years earlier. He pleaded no contest to second-degree murder. He was 67 years old.
The judge sentenced him to a minimum of 23 years in prison, effectively the rest of his natural life.
Before the sentence was handed down, Brad Wood, Roxanne’s brother, the 14-year-old who had been getting ready for school the morning his mother told him his sister had been killed, stood and faced Gilliam directly. Patrick Gilliam is the very definition of a nightmare women fear our whole lives, he said.
Then Janet stood. She looked at the man who had taken her sister, who had let Terry live under suspicion, who had served 7 years of a 14-year sentence, and then come back out into a world where Roxanne was waiting. His actions gave all of us a life sentence, she said.
Well, he got to live most of his as a free man. And we are here today to see him finally pay something for what he has done, which is likely the rest of his life in a cage like the vile animal that he is.
When it was Gilliam’s turn to speak, he said, I cannot believe I did what I did and I pray for them every night and I am so sorry. I just hope that someday, with God’s help, that they could start to forgive me.
The word rock meant something specific in this family. It meant the person who was always there, the one who was stable when everything else moved, the one you could count on. Roxanne was that person.
Her sister Janet described what Roxanne had been to the family growing up. Their parents were divorced, and Roxanne, the older sister, had become a kind of anchor.
The one thing that was always stable for me was with Roxanne, Janet said. She was being mom to you. That was Roxanne.
She was the rock. The name stuck for a reason.
Patrick Gilliam exploited every structural gap that existed between himself and justice. He was released early from a sentence he had earned. He came back out into a world where Roxanne Wood lived just a few miles away.
He came to her home on a night when he knew she would be alone, when he knew, from watching the neighborhood or the bowling alley or both, that Terry would not be home for a while.
He used what he had learned from his first attack. He did not leave a witness this time. He exploited CODIS, the national DNA database that had no record of him because his prior conviction had been decades earlier and his DNA had never been entered.
He exploited 35 years of a system focused on the wrong suspect. He exploited a DNA sample so small that the best forensic genealogy firm in the country called it impossible.
And then Gabriella Vargas said it was solvable. And in 4 days she was right. The Western Michigan University students gave detectives a searchable case file for the first time in three decades.
Vargas gave them a name. Undercover Trooper Cody gave them a cigarette. And 35 years of impossibility collapsed into a perfect DNA match.
After everything, the arrest, the plea, the courtroom, Janet described a dream she had about her sister. They were downtown Niles, the two of them, walking, just walking and laughing. And then Janet looked up and everything was quiet.
They were at the gates of a cemetery. Janet said to her, You have to go back. And Roxanne looked at her and said, Yes, but it is fine.
I am good.
Janet woke up. She is really good, she said quietly. That was it.
She was 30 years old. She had said goodnight to her husband with a hug and a kiss and love you and driven home. She was the rock they built themselves around.
She was someone who made every person she met feel like her best friend.
