Terry Jean Brady

For her oldest daughter, Joelle Aguirre, the memory of her fourth birthday party is forever etched in her mind as the day she sat on her grandparents' back porch, watching the gate for a mother who would never arrive. That haunting image is the only memory she has of Terry Jean Brady, a 23-year-old mother of three from Bloomington, Minnesota, whose life was violently cut short in the spring of 1971. Terry was described as a petite woman, standing five feet, two inches tall with blonde hair and blue eyes.

On the evening of May 2, 1971, Terry attended a party near Bloomington. It was the last time she was seen alive. The next morning, her father, Earl Jones, filed a missing persons report with the Blaine Police Department when she failed to come home. Soon after, her red 1965 Pontiac LeMans convertible was found abandoned on the side of a road in Bloomington. A rear tire was flat, and inside the trunk were two tricycles, a poignant reminder of the young children she left behind. Her family held onto hope, but they knew she would never willingly miss her daughter's birthday. When she didn't show up for the party, their worst fears were confirmed.

Ten days after she vanished, on the morning of May 12, 1971, a man measuring the depth of the Minnesota River for P.V. Elevators discovered Terry's body floating near the Bloomington Ferry Bridge in Scott County. An autopsy would later reveal the horrifying details of her death. She had been strangled before her body was placed in the water, and her hands were bound behind her back with a small rope. Investigators explored theories, including the possibility that she had been weighed down by a cinder block found near where her body was recovered.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) launched a comprehensive investigation. Detectives conducted dozens of interviews and pursued numerous leads, compiling a case file that would grow to 1,500 pages. Despite their efforts, the case grew cold, leaving a void of unanswered questions for Terry’s family. Shortly after the murder, Terry's husband moved with their three young children to California to start a new life.

For decades, a wall of silence surrounded Terry’s death. Her daughter, Joelle Aguirre, grew up knowing her mother was gone but not how or why. It wasn't until she was 18 that relatives in Minnesota finally told her the devastating truth: her mother had been murdered. The revelation brought a painful clarity but did little to heal the trauma of a childhood marked by unspoken grief. "We didn't grow up with any information about my mom at all," Aguirre said. "We knew it was a thing, but we didn't know what happened. We just knew that we didn't talk about it."

More than 50 years after the murder, Aguirre has taken on the search for answers herself, recently obtaining her mother's extensive case file from the BCA. She is determined to understand the final days of her mother's life, no matter how painful the details may be. "I need this to go on with my life," she explained. "I just need to know how it unfolded." The trauma of her mother's sudden disappearance has had a lasting impact. "My brain still processes goodbye as a 4-year-old little girl," Aguirre shared.

As of October 2026, the homicide of Terry Jean Brady remains an active, unsolved cold case with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Decades have passed, but for a daughter still haunted by the image of a backyard gate, the quest for justice and closure is more urgent than ever.