Man arrested for the murder of a 14-year-old girl that he killed 36 YEARS AGO

When it comes to murder, I absolutely love forensic science. I don’t think forensic scientists even get enough credit for how brilliant they are.

Now we have a fascinating story by The New York Times:

The last time Wendy Jerome was seen alive she was leaving her home in Rochester, New York, to deliver a birthday card to a friend who lived nearby. It was around 7 p.m. on Thanksgiving and Wendy, who was 14, had to be home by an 8 p.m. curfew.

The date was Nov. 22, 1984.

When Wendy didn’t return home on time, her parents became frantic. Less than three hours later, their worst fears were confirmed when a passerby found Wendy’s body in an alcove behind a school near her home. She had been raped and beaten to death.

The police sifted through hundreds of leads and hunches, all of them leading nowhere, and the case went cold.

Then, suddenly, out of the blue, 36 years later, investigators pulled up to the home of Wendy’s mother, Marlene Jerome, and told her that they had solved her daughter’s murder case.

Using familial DNA, which relies on genetic evidence to identify the relatives of suspects and eventually the suspects themselves, police said they had arrested Timothy L. Williams at his home in Melbourne, Florida, on Wednesday and charged with him with murdering Wendy.

Williams, 56, was 20 at the time of the killing and lived near Wendy in Rochester, police said. The two did not know each other, investigators said.

Speaking through tears at a news conference Friday, Jerome thanked the police for never giving up on the investigation, even as the original detectives on the case retired and the trail went cold.

“I never thought I would see this day, and now it’s here,” Jerome said. “I just wish my husband had been alive to see this. He passed away in 2011, and I know he’s up there with her, smiling and saying: ‘It’s over. It’s finally over.’”

At a court hearing in Florida on Thursday, Williams waived extradition to Rochester and is set to face a charge of second-degree murder, the police said. The statute of limitations for a rape charge has expired, prosecutors said. It was not immediately clear if Williams had a lawyer.

The brutal rape and murder of Wendy — who fought back when she was attacked — haunted Rochester for years.

There’s more beauty to this story, of a child who was inspired.

Julie Hahn was 11 in 1984 when her mother told her that another girl in Rochester had been killed. The case became “part of my life,” she said, and helped persuade her to become a prosecutor. As chief of the Major Felony Bureau in the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office, she has worked on the investigation since 2011 and was among the investigators who went to Jerome’s house Thursday to tell her the news of Williams’ arrest.

“Marlene and her family deserve justice,” Hahn said. “This community deserves justice for victims of violent crime whose cases go unsolved. And, finally, Wendy deserves justice.”

Williams was identified with the help of increasingly sophisticated DNA technology.

The first attempt to use DNA to find a potential suspect failed in 2000, he said, when a semen sample collected at the crime scene did not result in any matches in the Combined DNA Index System, which law enforcement authorities use to identify criminal suspects.

But the police continued to work the case, he said.

In 2016, investigators found “more items of potential evidence” that could be tested with DNA technology, Umbrino said, declining to identify the items. After an initial application for familial DNA testing was rejected for lack of sufficient evidence, the state gave investigators permission to conduct that type of search in April 2019.

The results came back in July, with a list of potential suspects, Umbrino said. Investigators, he said, then went back and found reports and evidence from the 1990s, which helped “close our circle a little bit tighter around our suspect,” he said.

Eventually, investigators were able to take a DNA sample from Williams, which strengthened the case against him, Hahn said.

At the news conference Friday, Umbrino wept as he spoke to Jerome about the 36 years that it took to arrest a suspect.

“Marlene,” he said, “I’m sorry it took so long. But we finally did it.”

Portions of this article originally appeared in The New York Times.

My only thoughts… Even at the age of 20, how do you kill a 14-year-old girl, and take someone’s child away from them, just cause you want to have sex with her? They say rape is a control thing. In this case, clearly it’s a PERVERSION.