Roxanne Wood Bio-Roxanne Wood Wiki
Roxanne Wood was born and raised in Niles Township, Berrien County, Michigan. She was a member of Niles Junior Achievement. She worked in the customer service department of Automated Molded Plastics Co. in South Bend, Indiana, USA. She has one sister named Janet Wood and three brothers namely Jerry Wood, Bruce Wood, and Rick Wood. They all live in Niles.
AGE:
Roxanne Wood was 30 years old.
DETAIL OF INCIDENCE:
Authorities searched for whoever killed Roxanne Wood, who was found dead on the kitchen floor of her home in Niles Township, Mich., lying in a pool of blood with her throat cut after a night out bowling with her husband and their friends She had been stabbed multiple times and raped.
The case went cold for decades until Michigan State Police detectives with the help of tenacious students in Western Michigan University’s new Cold Case Program and their professor used genetic genealogy to identify Patrick Wayne Gilham, as the killer.
Arrested on February 18, 2022, Gilham pleaded no contest in mid-March to second-degree murder in Wood’s murder, Michigan State Police announced in a release on March 18. He agreed to a minimum sentence of 23 years in prison.
Students in Western Michigan University’s Cold Case Program helped detectives track down Patrick Gilham who admitted to fatally stabbing Roxanne Wood.
A group of criminal justice students at Western Michigan University got more real-world experience in one semester than they ever dreamed they would when they helped detectives solve a murder – the students’ first cold case ever.
Dr. Kuersten began working on the case with two doctoral students in Jan. 2021, when she launched the university’s Cold Case Program in partnership with the Michigan State Police and began developing the program’s curriculum. Kuersten says. In the fall, the doctoral students were joined by five undergraduate students, who began helping them to digitize the records, including scans of post-it notes and other handwritten documents using state-of-the-art character recognition software.
After being identified as a possible suspect, Gilham had been surveilled extensively in undercover units and interviewed on two separate occasions,”. While they were surveilling Gilham, he discarded a cigarette that detectives scooped up, using DNA from the cigarette to confirm that DNA found at the crime scene belonged to Gilham, Det. Christensen said Gilham was arrested for open murder in South Bend, Ind. on an arrest warrant issued by the Berrien County Prosecutor’s Office.
“This is a great experience for anyone who wants to go into law enforcement,” Kuersten tells It’s important that students have real-world experience.
Under Kuersten’s leadership, doctoral students Ashley Chlebek and Carl Huber worked more than 1,200 hours over the course of eight months.