Terri Lynn Hollis' Brother Encourages Others Not To Give Up After His Sister's 1972's Murder Was Solved This Year.

Terri Lynn Hollis

She too was blond, very open and curious, and genuinely nice. She was an innocent little girl. Terri was everything you could hope for in a daughter. She was lovely. She was the spark of life and excitement. She was someone special in her love for people.

Terri was born on April 4th, 1961, in Los Angeles County, California to Ronald John Hollis and Shirley Ruth Pearce.  

She was a sixth-grade student at Hillside Elementary School. She often led prayers and made requests for prayers at church

On November 23rd, 1972 at 3 p.m., 11 year old Terri left her home at 2600 block of Dalemead Street to go bike riding in her Torrance neighborhood. She never returned. The local police were alerted and Terri was officially reported as missing. Officers arrived at the girls home at around 9 p.m. and searched throughout the night to no avail.

The next day her body was found dumped on a rocky beach near the Pacific Ocean in Southern California. She was naked with the exception of a white T-shirt. An autopsy showed she had been strangled and sexually assaulted.

Police canvassed the local and surrounding areas and conducted over 2000 interviews, including known sex offenders. They arrested their first suspect a month after Terri's murder, 29 year old Ronald Paul Kozack. Although Kozack did have a history of child molestation, there was no evidence to connect him to Terri Lynn’s murder and the charges were later dropped. 

The only thing that authorities could surmised is that Terri might have rode her bicycle to a nearby park where she was likely abducted.

In 2000, Torrance police detectives open Terri Lynn Hollis’ murder case file and find a DNA swab taken from Teri Lynn’s body when it was found in Ventura County. The sample was sent to the Los Angeles County Crime Lab.

In 2006, Torrance detectives received word the DNA swab did not match any profiles in CODIS.

In 2015, Torrance police contract with Virginia-based Parabon-NanoLabs, which conducted a genetic-genealogy analysis on the DNA to create a profile.

In 2018, The analysis returns a match to a potential relative of the suspect. Detectives find the relative and discover the suspect had died and was buried in Maricopa County, Arizona.

In 2019, After exhuming the body of the potential suspect for bone evidence, Florida-based DNA Labs International tested the DNA from the bones to the swab taken by Ventura County Sheriff’s Department and discovered it was a match for Jake Edward Brown, who was 36 years old at the time of the crime. Brown had an arrest history that included two other rape allegations in April 1973 and April 1974. He also had been arrested on suspicion of robbery and narcotics possession. Brown was also known as Thomas Tracy Burum. He was not in custody when he died.

Terri Lynn’s parents did not live long enough to see the case solved, but her brother did. He encourages the family members of victims lost to unsolved crimes not to give up hope of resolution.