Everyone Thought That Her Husband Murdered Her Until Decades Later Police Found Out The Truth

On the night of February 20, 1987, Roxanne Leigh Wood, 30, went out for a drink at a bar and played bowling with Terry, her husband. As the woman was already tired, she decided to leave earlier to her house located in Niles, a town in Michigan.

45 minutes later the man also decided to retire however when he arrived at his home he made a terrible discovery and that is that his wife’s lifeless body lay on the kitchen floor.

Apparently someone had hit Roxanne on the head with a frying pan and injured her in the throat with a knife that had disappeared. Next to the body was only the cover of that weapon.

When the investigators arrived at the place, they observed that neither the door nor the windows had been forced. After this, the agents’ efforts focused on finding the murder weapon, so a team of divers spent hours looking for it in a lake in the area. Even so, they never managed to find her.

On the other hand, the autopsy determined that the attacker had abused Roxanne, which is why they were able to extract unknown DNA samples that when entering the database did not give results and that they kept in case it was useful in the future.

Terry, the husband, was never arrested because this DNA did not match his own but he was named the main suspect in the original investigations and also in the subsequent ones of the group of unresolved cases.

The case cooled down until in August 2020 the cold cases department reopened it to analyze it from a new perspective. To do this, they reviewed more than 3,000 pages of documents, re-examined the evidence of the police of the time and re-interviewed possible witnesses.

Many years later...

In 2021, the agents received information from a credible source that pointed out a man as a suspect: It was 67-year-old Patrick Gillium.

The detective that led the passage of time helped in the case among other things because personal relationships are changing and if someone who knew the culprit was not willing to talk then now he did want to do it.

The authorities discovered that at the time of the events Patrick lived just 15km from Roxanne’s home, but not only that. It seems that this individual had been in prison for robbery and abuse, however 6 months before the murder he was released.

In June 2021, the investigators recovered the cigarette butt of a cigarette that Patrick had thrown on the street to compare it with the DNA found in the woman’s body. The original sample was so degraded that it took several months to obtain the result.

Finally, in 2022, it was confirmed that both samples coincided.

In March of that same year in a guilt settlement, Patrick was accused of second murder and sentenced to spend a minimum of 23 years in prison.

Even so, this man never admitted his guilt since, according to his lawyer, he doesn’t remember what happened. What he did was apologize.

“I am very sorry for what I did. I’m very sorry. I hope that at some point in the future, with God’s help, you can forgive me.”

Terry, who always maintained his innocence, is now completely acquitted of the murder of his wife, but for years he had to face painful speculations.

Janet, Roxanne’s sister, declared that her brother-in-law had suffered irreparable damage and that he had had to deal with all the rumors. The woman described the murder of her sister as a life sentence for the family.

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