Nevada law enforcement officials on Wednesday closed two cold cases after advances in DNA technology linked a man to murders in both Las Vegas and Westminster, Colo., for nearly 16 years. It was announced that.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said in a press conference that in May 1991, officers responded to a report of a suspicious death inside an apartment in the 1000 block of Monroe Avenue.
Officers met with friends and relatives of 31-year-old Sherry Bridgewater, who had just been found dead inside her apartment.
The homicide unit took over the case due to suspicious circumstances in the manner in which Bridgewater’s body was found, and an autopsy revealed that Bridgewater had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death. The murder investigation team worked “relentlessly” for years to solve the case, but unfortunately it remained unsolved.
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Thanks to DNA advances, police learned that Shelley Bridgewater (left) and Terry Becker were murdered by Thomas Martin Elliott. (Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department)
In 2013, the police department submitted a sexual assault kit obtained during the investigation for DNA testing. DNA testing allowed detectives to create a suspect profile of the person they believed to have killed Bridgewater, but they were unable to put a name to the DNA profile.
The detectives who filled out the profile received a hit in the CODIS database related to a second unsolved murder that occurred in December 1975 in Westminster, Colorado.
LVMPD detectives immediately began working with the Westminster Police Department, where they learned that a woman named Terry Becker had been found dead in a field. She performed an autopsy on Becker and found that she had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death.
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Thomas Martin Elliott, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1991, was linked by DNA evidence to the murders of Sherry Bridgewater in Las Vegas in 1991 and Terry Becker in Westminster, Colorado in 1975. did. (Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department)
Both agencies had the same suspect profile, but at the time, technology was not available to identify the suspect without taking DNA from him.
In 2018, the two agencies worked together to submit the case for forensic genealogy research, and the suspect’s DNA was sent to a lab and then to a company in Denver, Colorado. Four years later, in 2022, detectives were able to identify the suspect as Thomas Martin Elliott.
Investigations conducted by both law enforcement agencies showed that Elliott was in Colorado at the time of Becker’s murder in Westminster, Colorado, and the Bridgewater murder occurred in Las Vegas, Nevada in 1991.
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Thomas Martin Elliott’s body, buried in a Las Vegas cemetery, was exhumed to extract DNA for two cold case investigations. (Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department)
In November 1991, Elliott was found dead in Las Vegas from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was later buried in a local cemetery in Las Vegas.
Elliott was identified as a suspect, but detectives weren’t 100% sure until they could collect DNA from his body.
Due to the high cost of exhuming the body, both law enforcement agencies worked together to encourage the Las Vegas Justice League to help pay for Elliott’s exhumation to obtain DNA.
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Elliott’s body was exhumed in October 2023, and detectives were able to obtain tissue and bone samples, which they submitted to a laboratory. While in the lab he had a DNA sample extracted and compared to both cases. According to police, both results were a 100% match.
