A breakthrough in a decades-old cold case has led investigators to identify a suspect in the brutal murder of an Ohio woman and the rape of a teenager in 1987. Thomas Collier Jordan, who passed away in 2009, has been linked to both crimes through DNA evidence.
On August 10, 1987, Janice Christensen went missing after going for a jog on a park bike path in Hudson Township, Ohio. Her partially naked body was found the next day with five stab wounds, and she had been sexually assaulted. A pair of shoelaces was discovered next to her body, and her car and car keys were missing.
Two months prior to Christensen’s murder, a 17-year-old girl, Michelle Puett-Howard, reported a sexual assault at a park in Cuyahoga Falls. The teen was walking alone on a trail when a man armed with a knife grabbed her, bound her hands and ankles with shoelaces, and sexually assaulted her. The suspect took her underwear and car keys.
Despite the similarities between the cases, including the use of shoelaces to bind the victims, the investigation went cold due to limited DNA technology at the time. However, in 2022, DNA evidence was resubmitted to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation’s laboratory, leading to a match with Jordan’s offender profile.
BCI agents traveled to Yuma, Arizona, in April 2024 to exhume Jordan’s body and obtain his DNA. Testing confirmed the link between Jordan and the crimes against Christensen and Puett-Howard. Jordan had an extensive criminal history in Ohio, with convictions for grand larceny, burglary, malicious entry, and rape.
Jordan’s ties to multiple states, including Arizona, Nevada, California, Louisiana, and Michigan, have prompted BCI to share information about the case with law enforcement nationwide, in hopes of solving additional cases.
