Cold Case Resolved after 41 Years
- Rex Ballard
- Dec 8, 2025
- 4 min read
The Long Road to Justice in the 1984 Murder of Terry Arndt
Burney, California — December 8, 2025 — What began as a quiet teenage date on a secluded mountain road in December 1984 ended in unspeakable violence that haunted a small Northern California community for more than four decades. On December 1, 2025, the man responsible for the brutal murder of 18-year-old Terrance "Terry" Arndt and the repeated sexual assault of his teenage companion finally admitted his guilt in a Shasta County courtroom, bringing a measure of closure to a case marred by a tragic wrongful prosecution and decades of dead ends.
The Night That Shattered a Community: December 14, 1984
On the evening of Friday, December 14, 1984, Terry Arndt — a popular former Burney High School football standout attending Shasta College — parked his parents' car with his 18-year-old date along Mountain View Road, a wooded lovers' lane near Burney Junior-Senior High School in eastern Shasta County. The two were simply talking after a basketball tournament when a stranger approached their vehicle.
Without provocation, the man fired a rifle twice through the car window. One bullet struck Arndt in the head. As the assailant continued the attack, Arndt heroically used his body to shield his companion. The gunman then dragged the young woman from the car, sexually assaulted her multiple times, and left semen evidence on her blouse before fleeing into the night.
In shock and terror, the young woman climbed behind the wheel and drove toward help, but Terry Arndt succumbed to his injuries en route. The randomness and brutality of the crime sent shockwaves through the tight-knit Intermountain area, leaving residents fearful and investigators with a nightmare case.
A Wrongful Accusation and Exoneration: The Thomas Elmer Brewster Saga (1995–1997)
For years, the case frustrated detectives, cycling through 34 different investigators as leads dried up. Evidence, including the semen-stained blouse, sat untested — DNA technology was not yet viable for forensic use in 1984.
In 1995, almost eleven years after the original crime, a breakthrough seemed at hand when the female survivor identified 42-year-old Thomas Elmer Brewster, a local felon with a history of violence and drug issues, in a lineup. Brewster was arrested and charged with murder and sexual assault. He spent two years in jail awaiting trial as the case built toward a potential death penalty prosecution.
But in 1997, eight weeks into Brewster's capital murder trial, everything changed. His defense team located the long-forgotten blouse in evidence storage and demanded DNA testing. The results were conclusive: Brewster was not the perpetrator. Charges were abruptly dismissed, and he walked free after enduring two years of wrongful imprisonment. Brewster later sued and won a $360,000 settlement from the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office for his ordeal.
The exoneration was a devastating blow, sending the case back into the cold files, compounding the pain for Arndt's family, who had believed justice was finally at hand.
Persistence and Modern Science: The Breakthrough After Decades
The Arndt murder never truly faded from the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office docket. Detectives periodically revisited the evidence, waiting for advancements in technology.
That breakthrough came in 2024–2025 when the department partnered with Othram, a Texas-based private lab specializing in forensic genetic genealogy. With funding from nonprofit organizations, Road to Justice and the 525 Project, investigators sent degraded evidence — including trace DNA from the 1984 crime scene — for advanced Forensic-Grade Genome Sequencing®.
Othram built a detailed genetic profile, then used genealogical databases to trace distant relatives, eventually zeroing in on a single suspect: Roger Neil Schmidt Sr., a former Burney resident who had moved to Tucson, Arizona, years after the crime.
The Arrest of Roger Neil Schmidt Sr.: July 2025
In July 2025, Shasta County detectives traveled to Tucson, obtained a search warrant, and covertly collected Schmidt's DNA. It was a perfect match to the DNA in the semen on the victim's blouse.
Confronted with the irrefutable evidence, the 64-year-old Schmidt confessed during interviews to both the murder and the sexual assaults. On July 19, 2025, he was arrested at his Tucson home. Appearing frail in court — wheelchair-bound and reliant on an oxygen tank due to severe health issues — Schmidt was extradited to Shasta County Jail and held without bail.
Born in Shasta County in 1961, Schmidt was just 23 and living in Burney at the time of the crime, mere miles from the murder scene. Records show he graduated from Burney High School in 1977. (No yearbook photo available) He had no prior criminal history, a fact repeatedly emphasized by his defense attorney and law enforcement. After 1984, he relocated to Arizona. There are no indications that Schmidt had any run-ins with the law since the original crime. By all appearances he lived quietly in the Tucson area until the DNA dragnet caught up with him.
The Guilty Plea and Final Resolution: December 1, 2025
On December 1, 2025, Roger Neil Schmidt Sr. appeared in Shasta County Superior Court and pleaded guilty to first-degree murder with special circumstances and multiple counts of sexual assault. The charges carried the possibility of the death penalty under California law.
In a negotiated plea deal with the Shasta County District Attorney's Office, Schmidt agreed to a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. He also waived all rights to appeal, ensuring he will die behind bars and sparing the victims' families a lengthy trial.
Terry Arndt's aging parents were in the courtroom to witness the admission of guilt, a moment 41 years in the making. Formal sentencing is set for December 16, 2025.
Shasta County Sheriff Michael Johnson called the resolution a testament to persistence, noting the case had "rocked" the community for generations. He praised the "extremely expensive" but groundbreaking DNA work that finally delivered justice.
For the Arndt family and the Burney community, the plea ends one of Shasta County's darkest chapters — proof that even the coldest cases can be solved, and that justice, though delayed, can still prevail.
