Serial rapist and killer: Who was Thomas Collier Jordan?

The man who took Janice Christensen’s life in 1987 was a seasoned criminal known to authorities in Arizona, California, Louisiana, Michigan and at least four Ohio counties.

On the day Thomas Collier Jordan stalked Christensen on her morning run in an Ohio park, the 61-year-old had spent five decades building a lengthy record that mostly included crimes like grand larceny, burglary, drug offenses and shoplifting.

In August, Ohio authorities connected Jordan to violent attacks against three Summit County women in 1987 — the murder of Christensen, and the rape of two others.

At the time, records show, Jordan was on parole for stabbing, raping and robbing a Geauga County woman.

Law enforcement suspect the now-deceased drifter from Cleveland may have left a string of terrorized victims in his wake.

55 years and 5 states: What we know about Thomas Collier Jordan's life of crime

Ohio’s crime lab has issued a bulletin so that police agencies across the country can consider him in their unsolved cases. His DNA, collected by exhuming his remains, is in a national database.

Investigators could find no living relatives or anyone who knew Jordan personally. Only public documents and newspaper clippings can offer insight into the life of a man whose cruel acts are now coming into focus.

Jordan struggles in school and has first arrest before he turns 18

Jordan died in Yuma, Arizona, in 2009.

His life began in Cleveland in 1926.

His mom, Ruth Shy, was a Northeast Ohio native. His father, from Missouri, used the name Thomas Jordan in some documents, Collier Jordan in others.

They lived in the Fairfax neighborhood on Cleveland’s east side, a predominantly Black enclave supported by several manufacturing plants.

When Jordan was 4, he and his 23-year-old mother lived with her sister’s family across the street from the present-day Cleveland Clinic. His mom worked as a maid at a private home.

The U.S. Census shows Jordan’s father was not living with them. It was 1930, the year after the Great Depression began, and it's possible that Thomas Sr. was away seeking work, leaving his wife and son in the care of family.

By the 1940 census, the couple were together again and raising their 14-year-old son. If Ruth or Thomas Sr. had any other children, Ohio authorities could find no evidence.

Thomas Sr. repaired machinery at a local heating plant. He and his wife were both high school graduates, and, according to the census, Ruth completed two years of college.

But their son — later described as having “average intelligence” in a prison evaluation — did not seem to share their affinity for the academic setting.

He attended Thomas A. Edison School, a school for male students with disciplinary problems, through the seventh grade. He dropped out and at some point his parents divorced.

Jordan later claimed to have completed high school while imprisoned at Michigan’s Jackson State Prison in the 1950s.

But his criminal career started earlier than that.

Investigators found his first arrest in October 1943, probably in Cleveland, when he was 17. Incomplete records leave no clue as to what he had done. Four years later, he was arrested for robbery in Cleveland Heights.

Thomas Collier Jordan AKA 'Robert Smith' lands in and out of jail and continues crime spree

In 1948, Jordan moved to New Orleans and adopted the alias Robert Smith. Louisiana authorities became acquainted with him almost immediately, arresting him for trespassing that June.

The 22-year-old then moved to Michigan, and in 1949, “Robert Smith” stole two cars that sent him to Jackson State Prison with a sentence of up to five years.

He was released early and in 1953, Detroit police nabbed him for shoplifting.

Jordan returned to Ohio, and, in 1958, he was convicted of grand larceny in Trumbull County. He and an associate had stolen $30,000 in money and valuables from cars parked at motels in Warren, Newton Falls and Strongsville.

He served only a year, was paroled in 1960 and subsequently was caught breaking into homes in Cleveland and Portage County.

The first hint that Jordan may have been capable of violence against women was in 1961, when he was questioned in the Jan. 6 stabbing of a Cleveland woman, 57-year-old Cecelia Farron, who was attacked in front of her home on Mann Avenue.

Jordan wasn’t charged in that case, but during his interrogation he confessed to that string of home robberies and was sentenced to six to 50 years in prison.

He was paroled in 1969, violated his parole and returned to prison in 1970, paroled again the next year, returned to prison a year after that, and paroled again a few months later.

Mere weeks after he was released in April 1972, he was charged with “malicious entry” in Geauga County and went back to prison.

Jordan is convicted of raping and stabbing a Geauga County woman

In 1975, while on parole from the Geauga crime, he committed the only violent act against a woman for which he was convicted.

He raped, stabbed and robbed a Geauga County woman and was sentenced to a minimum of 16 years in prison.

He served nine.

In 1985, he was released, promptly committed grand theft and was back in jail.

Jordan was paroled from that crime, and a few years later he put Ohio in his rearview mirror and headed to the southwest, landing in Las Vegas in the summer of 1990.

He added to his rap sheet with crimes in Yuma, Arizona, in 1992, and in El Centro, California, in 1998. He went to Safford federal prison for drug offenses in El Centro. He was caught distributing marijuana in jail.

In 2001, he was placed on supervised release, and he returned to Yuma. He died there on July 5, 2009, of respiratory failure at the age of 83.

Lindsay Mussell, an agent with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the investigator responsible for finding most of Jordan’s criminal history, said there is a lot of personal information missing from Jordan’s death certificate because nobody knew his roots or his background.

He was buried in the indigent section of Yuma Pioneer Cemetery, and for the next 15 years, he was all but forgotten.

What nobody knew was that Jordan still lived on in nightmares.

In 1987 — when repeated parole violations weren’t enough to convince the judicial system to keep him away from the public — at least three Summit County women paid a terrible price.

Janice Christensen is killed on hiking trail 1987

Aug. 10, 1987, marked the end of a weekend of hard rain in Northeast Ohio, and as the sun began peeking through the clouds, Janice Christensen was ready to take advantage.

The 31-year-old Cuyahoga Falls woman headed for one of her favorite running spots — the Summit County Bike and Hike Trail.

Wolf, a 70-pound Rhodesian ridgeback, often accompanied her, but she told her mom during a phone call she didn’t want a wet dog on the car ride home. So, she went alone.

When her husband, Ken, returned home that afternoon, his wife was gone. When he learned she had also missed a luncheon date with her mother, he called Cuyahoga Falls police and reported her missing.

An evening of searching proved fruitless, and, in the early morning hours, when Ken finally drifted off, he was tormented by dreams that his wife was falling. At the crack of dawn, he grabbed a flashlight and he and Wolf set out again.

At 6:30 a.m., Ken and Wolf parked at the Bike and Hike Trail. Janice’s car wasn’t there, but they started down the isolated trail anyway. Within minutes, Wolf started acting up, and Ken followed him through the underbrush.

They found Janice, partially undressed, her T-shirt covered in blood, and cold as ice.

Janice’s Toyota was later found in Cuyahoga County.

Hudson detectives continue to investigate Christensen’s murder

Over the next 35 years, detectives repeatedly pulled Christensen’s cold case from the file hoping to find a new avenue of investigation.

In 2014, they submitted DNA evidence to the state crime lab. But it only yielded a partial profile — not enough to be run through the national database where 17 million offenders have their DNA on file.

It was a problem that only time and science could fix.

In 2020, the Ohio Attorney General’s Office launched a cold case unit, inviting police departments throughout the state to submit their unsolved homicides for consideration.

Hudson detectives Tavis Campbell and Brian Kozul put together a PowerPoint presentation for the state team, and their case was accepted. State investigators pulled in a panel of experts to take their banker’s box of paper and analyze everything.

“The evidence that we had was old,” Campbell said. “Some of it had been tested before, and, in that process, they basically used up all the testable DNA.”

But in a stroke of luck, investigators discovered the Q-tip that DNA testers had used in 2014. It still had testable DNA on it.

Again, it offered a partial DNA profile — just enough to show the Y chromosomes or the male side of the murderer's DNA, but not enough to run through the national DNA database.

Investigators had to get creative. There was a good chance that Janice was not her killer’s first sexual assault. And if she wasn’t, could there be another crime out there — maybe DNA sitting in someone else’s cold case file?

Campbell said the team started looking at other assaults from 1987, and news clippings pointed the way to Michelle Puett, a 17-year-old Akron girl raped in Cuyahoga Falls just four months before Janice's slaying.

She was attacked in a park by a man with a knife, like Janice. She had been tied up with shoelaces, like Janice. Janice’s car was stolen; the man who raped the Falls teen took her car keys, though he decided against stealing her car, likely after seeing a police cruiser parked next to it.

Teen’s rape case provides key evidence to solving murder

Incredibly, Cuyahoga Falls police still had Michelle’s rape kit, even though the statute of limitations for rape in 1987 was only six years and the evidence could have been purged.

“I think it's a minor miracle that it was actually kept,” Campbell said.

It took three tries, but the DNA in that rape kit finally provided a full DNA profile of Michelle’s rapist. It was submitted to the DNA database, and immediately matched to Thomas Collier Jordan.

To make the jump to Janice’s killer, however, more steps were needed. After investigators couldn’t find living relatives of Jordan, they had his body exhumed from the cemetery in Arizona.

Armed with his actual DNA, they could now compare it to the partial DNA found in Janice’s case. It matched. Technically, it meant a male in Jordan’s family was responsible, but Jordan had no brothers and his father was long dead.

“So, really, it boiled down to just being him,” said Campbell, who added that learning of Jordan’s extensive criminal career sealed the case.

It was a highlight of Campbell’s career the day he told Ken Christensen that they’d solved his wife’s murder after more than three decades.

“It’s rare in law enforcement that you get to be the bearer of good news,” he said.

But naming Jordan as Janice’s killer and Michelle’s rapist was just the beginning. Investigators with years of experience say there is no way the trail ends there.

“Zebras don't change their stripes … There's a good probability that it occurred somewhere else,” Campbell said.

And Campbell was right.

Within days of state investigators announcing DNA had identified Jordan as a rapist and killer, a woman named Vicki Farinacci was on the phone to Akron police.

In April 1987 — one month before the attack on Michelle and three months before the murder of Janice — she was raped by a man who invaded her home. When she read a story in the Akron Beacon Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network, about the DNA discovery, she was struck by similarities between her rape and the crimes against Michelle and Janice.

She wondered: Could Thomas Collier Jordan also have been her rapist?

Keep reading: 'That's him!' Mother raped by stranger in home gets closure. Police seeking other victims.

Resolved: The trail of a serial rapist. How many more victims are there?

• Part 1: 'Saved my own life': Woman raped as teen shares story of her rape solved 37 years later

• Part 2: Serial rapist and killer: Who was Thomas Collier Jordan?

• Part 3: 'That's him!' Mother raped by stranger in home gets closure. Police seeking other victims

• Part 4: Treat rape like murder: Should statutes of limitations be eliminated?

Resolved is a collaboration of the Akron Beacon Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network, and the Ohio Mysteries podcast. Stephanie Warsmith can be reached at swarsmith@thebeaconjournal.com. Paula Schleis can be reached at feedback@ohiomysteries.com.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: DNA tests link rapes and murder in Ohio to Thomas Collier Jordan