It was Valentine’s Day 1985, and Terri McAdams, like many others, had a special gift she planned to give to the one she loved.
While the 22-year-old couldn’t spend the day with her fiancé, who was on a business trip, she hoped to give him the heart-shaped cake she baked for him once he returned, Karin Anderson, the host of The Reporter’s Notebook Podcast and former reporter for the Dallas Morning News, told CBS News.
Later that night, an intruder broke into McAdams’ fiancé’s apartment in Arlington, Texas, where McAdams was staying, and attacked her. She was brutally beaten, sexually assaulted, and murdered, local and federal authorities said in a statement. The Tarrant County medical examiner’s office ruled her cause of death as blunt force trauma.
Arlington police believed the killer entered the apartment through a sliding glass door that connected to a bedroom, and they ruled out McAdams’ fiancé as a suspect. But decades would pass before authorities would be able to identify her killer.
After years of investigation, multiple pieces of physical evidence from the case were sent to a lab for DNA testing in 2021. From that testing, a DNA profile for an unknown male suspect was developed. That profile was entered into CODIS, a national database of DNA profiles from convicted offenders, missing persons, and unsolved crimes, but it never produced a match.
In August 2023, the police department asked the FBI Dallas Field Office to see if forensic genetic genealogy was an option to help push the case forward. The office agreed, and months later, the testing led authorities to a potential suspect — a deceased man named Bernard Sharp.
Authorities said Sharp was involved in a double murder-suicide in Arlington on Nov. 3, 1985 — nine months after Terri was killed. “He shot three people, killing two of them, before turning the gun on himself,” the statement reads.
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Since they weren’t able to compare his DNA to the genealogy results, authorities found one of Sharp’s close relatives, who agreed to provide the team with their own DNA profile.
That sample was sent to a lab at the University of North Texas Health Science Center and in August 2024, results confirmed that Sharp was a genetic match to the suspect DNA sample taken from the crime scene.
“Over the years, it would be easy to lose faith and accept that this case might never be solved,” Arlington Police Chief Al Jones said in the statement. “But Terri’s family never gave up hope and our detectives never wavered. Now, we get to provide answers that this department has wanted to provide for nearly four decades.”
After the identity of McAdams’ killer was announced, her sister, Karen Hooper, told CBS News she knows that “she and my mom and dad are smiling down on this miraculous moment.”
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.org.
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