Torrance police ID suspect in 1972 murder of 11-year-old Terri Lynn Hollis

A 47-year-old mystery as to who killed an 11-year-old girl last seen on Thanksgiving Day in 1972 has been solved, Torrance police said on Wednesday, as they named a man who died in Arizona in 2003 as the murder suspect.

Terri Lynn Hollis had gone on a bike ride and never returned home, with her body found the next day near Point Mugu in Oxnard, along the shoreline of the Pacific Ocean.

Randy Hollis remembers his younger sister as someone who was head strong and always determined.

“She would have grown up and been somebody,” Hollis said. “She had a lot of drive.”

At a press conference held at the city’s police station, it was announced that the cold case had been cracked.

Officials did not disclose details of Hollis’ apparent kidnapping or how or why she ended up in Oxnard but did say she was sexually assaulted and strangled to death by Jake Edward Brown, who was then 36.

“This crime is what nightmares are made of,” Torrance’s Chief Eve Irvine said. “No family should ever have to go through such a tragedy.”

On Nov. 23, 1972, Terri left her home in the 2600 block of Dalemead Street in Torrance to go for a bike ride. Torrance police received a call the following morning from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department that her body had been found on the rocks along the shoreline.

For years, efforts to locate her killer were unsuccessful.

Detectives conducted more than 2,000 interviews and DNA searches, Chief Irvine said.

In 2000, detectives reopened the case file and submitted DNA for comparative testing to the Combined DNA Index System, but received no matches.

Fifteen years later, the department contracted with Virginia-based Parabon-NanoLabs, which conducted a genetic-genealogy analysis on the DNA and, last year, found a potential relative of Brown’s through a public database, officials said.

That eventually led detectives to Maricopa County, Arizona, where Brown had died and was buried.

Detectives exhumed his body and collected bone remains. Police used a company named DNA Labs International in Florida to determine his DNA was a match to evidence collected by the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.

Brown, also known as Thomas Tracy Burum, was not in custody when he died.

But he had arrests for suspicion of robbery, a narcotics violation and a rape in April 1973 and another a year later, police said. The first of those two incidents occurred in Los Angeles.

It wasn’t known if he was convicted of those crimes, but the police chief did say Brown had served time behind bars before dying from ill health.

Police did not know why Brown was in Torrance at the time of Terri’s disappearance, but they said he had multiple addresses in Southern California. He was not known to Terri’s family, police said.

“There was something about the possibility that she might have known her killer that, in some ways, was comforting for a community that thought, ‘This is not just some predator, right?’ But it turns out that’s exactly what it was,” said Jim Wallace, a now-retired Torrance police detective who reopened the case in 2000.

Wallace, who grew up in town with a father on the force and was 10 at the time of the crimes, remembers the case from his childhood.

Randy Hollis, who was 16 at the time of his sister’s disappearance, said he mourns every Thanksgiving and is thankful for the Police Department’s continuous work on the case.

“I only wish my parents were still alive to see this,” he said.

The incident had an impact on the family, of course, especially his father, who became more involved in the Neighborhood Watch program and routinely walked other children along their neighborhood street, Randy Hollis recalled.

“It changed him,” he said.

He also shared his thoughts for other families enduring unsolved murder cases.

“Don’t lose the heart or the drive for resolution,” he said. “You just never know if something will come up and lead to a case being solved.”