Las Vegas man, ID’d by genetic genealogy, charged in 1989 Everett killing

For about 30 years, Everett police detectives believed Maryann Daniels was killed either by a former lover or the man who managed the transitional apartments she moved into less than three weeks before her nude body was discovered in early 1989.

Advances in DNA technology proved their theories wrong.

Joseph Andrew Jacquez, 61, one of Daniels’ neighbors, was interviewed once by detectives in the days after Daniels was killed but wasn’t considered a person of interest at the time. Jacquez, who lived in Mount Vernon before moving to Las Vegas in recent years, was charged last week with premeditated first-degree murder, accused of strangling Daniels with a ligature crafted from a bra, purse strap and electrical cord, according to Snohomish County prosecutors.

Jacquez was identified as a possible suspect through forensic, or genetic, genealogy, a technique increasingly being used by law enforcement agencies across the country to identify possible suspects in decades-old crimes. Forensic genealogy builds family trees from DNA profiles recovered from crime scenes through a combination of traditional genealogy and the DNA profiles of relatives who used sites, such as Ancestry.com or 23andMe, to generate their own DNA profiles and then uploaded them to GEDmatch, a public genetic-genealogy website.

Jacquez was arrested Saturday in Las Vegas and booked into jail in Clark County, Nev., jail and court records show. He is to be extradited back to Snohomish County, where prosecutors have requested he be held in lieu of $2 million bail.

In requesting bail, prosecutors invoked the memory of another man, Terrence Miller, charged with first-degree murder in a decades-old homicide who was out of custody on a $1 million bond when he killed himself in 2019. After a two-week trial, Miller, 78, was convicted of shooting 20-year-old Jody Loomis in 1972 when she was on a bike ride to see her horse.

The state expressed concern that Jacquez is a danger to the community and to the administration of justice by failing to appear in court, according to the charges.

“This concern by the State is not mere hyperbole,” Deputy Prosecutor Melissa Stamp wrote in charging papers. “One does not have to go back any further than 2019 when defendant Terrence Miller, in very similar circumstances, committed suicide during the pendency of his murder trial while out on bail.

“The State desires its day in court in this matter,” Stamp wrote of Jacquez.  

Except for a misdemeanor conviction for reckless driving in King County in 1992, Jacquez does not have any prior criminal history, court records show.

Daniels, 31, who had a developmental disability, was moved into a former garage that had been subdivided into four rooms in the 2100 block of Hoyt Road by her advocate on Jan. 9, 1989, according to the charges. Jacquez was then a new resident of the house at the same address, which had also been subdivided.

Everett police were called to the garage on Feb. 1 to investigate a suspicious death and found Daniels’ body face down on the bed in her room with a ligature wrapped tightly around her neck, the charges say.

The property manager told police he found Daniels’ door ajar when he went to collect rent two days earlier but quickly left when he saw the lower portion of a woman’s body on the bed and thought she was sleeping or passed out, according to the charges. When he went to check on Daniels on Feb. 1, he saw she was lying in the same position and had a ligature around her neck, which is when he called 911.

A TV Guide found on the nightstand next to Daniels’ bed was open to listings for shows that aired from 11:30 p.m. and onward on Jan. 28, which with the condition of her body led detectives to believe she had been killed sometime that night, the charges say.

A cut electrical cord was found next to the bed and police collected two hairs that did not appear to belong to Daniels from her lower back, the charges say.

During the investigation, police learned from Daniels’ friends that she previously had a sexual relationship with a man while she was living at a Lynnwood motel but more recently had talked about a relationship with her neighbor “Joe,” according to the charges.

Police interviewed the property manager who “quickly became belligerent” with detectives, refused to give his birth date and was ultimately found to have provided a false name before he was arrested on a felony warrant and sent back to prison in Oregon, the charges say. That man has since died.

Police also interviewed Daniels’ former lover, who initially denied having a sexual relationship with her before eventually admitting they had sexon several occasions, according to the charges. While detectives were mostly able to verify his alibi for the time of Daniels’ killing, the man made several statements that police considered “odd and at least a bit concerning,” the charges say. He too has since died.

For three decades, police believed either man was “the likely killer of Maryann Daniels,” the charges say.

When police interviewed Jacquez on Feb. 1, 1989, he told detectives he went to work on the day Daniels was killed, returned home to shower and change, went to dinner by himself, then to a bar, where he stayed until closing, charging papers say. When asked about his relationship with Daniels, Jacquez told detectives “he had no sort of relationship with her … beyond that of casual neighbors,” the charges say.

Police did not contact Jacquez about Daniels’ killing again before this year.

In 2011, male DNA from a check swab collected during Daniels’ autopsy excluded her former lover and property manager as contributors along with a third man who by then had been identified as a possible person of interest, the charges say.

A decade later, in 2021, a private forensics lab in California generated a male DNA profile from one of the hairs found on Daniels’ back and the profile was uploaded to GEDmatch. A genetic genealogist first identified Jacquez as a likely person of interest in Daniels’ killing in 2022, based on the genealogical links between himself and the DNA profile uploaded to GEDmatch, according to the charges.

After learning that Jacquez was living in Las Vegas, an Everett police detective contacted Las Vegas police and requested help in obtaining a covert DNA sample from Jacquez, the charges say. An undercover officer followed Jacquez to a restaurant, collected his discarded beer bottle and had it shipped to the Everett Police Department.

Male DNA from Daniels’ cheek swab and blood found on the bra tied around her neck matched DNA recovered from the beer bottle, the charges say. As of last week, there were several items still awaiting forensic testing and detectives planned to ask a judge for permission to collect a reference DNA sample from Jacquez so direct comparisons can be made, according to the charges.

Because Jacquez is in custody in another state, Snohomish County court records do not indicate which attorney will be representing him.