The 1975 rape and murder of a 20-year-old Colorado woman has been solved when investigators matched DNA found at the scene with DNA from an ex-convict who committed suicide in 1991.
The discovery also solved the 1991 rape and murder of a 30-year-old Las Vegas mother.
Teree Becker, originally from Wyoming, had moved to Denver, Colorado shortly after graduating high school. She was last seen on December 4, 1975, when she hitchhiked to Brighton, Colorado, to visit her boyfriend in the Adams County Jail.
Two days later, a couple riding motorcycles found her body in a field in Westminster, according to the Westminster Police Department. Investigators identified the body, and an autopsy determined she had been raped and died from asphyxiation before her body, her clothing, and personal items were dumped in the field.
Investigators worked the case periodically over years and in 2003 extracted DNA from an unknown male that was found a piece of evidence in the rape kit, but no match was found in the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) until 2013, when the Las Vegas Metro Police Department entered an unknown sample from a 1991 rape and murder. The two samples matched, and investigators determined that the same person who killed Becker killed the Las Vegas victim, who had been identified as 30-year-old Sherrie Bridgewater, KVVU reported.
Five years later, the profile developed by Colorado and Nevada investigators was determined to be a good candidate for genetic genealogy. Genetic genealogy companies worked with investigators for the next five years to connect the DNA to a family and ultimately came up with a suspect: Thomas Martin Elliott.
Elliott was 50 when he committed suicide and had spent several years in prison, starting with a burglary conviction that saw him jailed for six years in Colorado, KVVU said. According to the Westminster Police Department, Elliott committed the burglary shortly before he raped and murdered Becker, but was arrested and sent to prison after the murder.
He was released in 1981 and promptly convicted of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl and sentenced to 10 more years in prison. After his release from prison in 1991, he raped and killed the Las Vegas victim in May and killed himself on October 30.
Las Vegas police said they believed Elliott and Bridgwater met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
Las Vegas police got permission to exhume Elliott’s body in October 2023, and his DNA was a match for the killer of both Bridgewater and Becker.
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[Featured image: Sherrie Bridgewater/Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and Teree Becker/Westminster Police Department]
