James Jerold Koedatich was born in Morristown, New Jersey on June 12, 1948, one of four brothers. His father is described in the accounts as violent towards their mother.
In June 1971 he was arrested in Florida for armed robbery and escaped from the county jail while awaiting trial. On June 13 he strangled his roommate, Robert Anderson, who was forty. He was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to fifteen years. While serving it he killed his cellmate; that death was ruled self-defence and he was not charged.
He served eleven years and was paroled from Raiford prison in August 1982. He went back to New Jersey.
On November 23, 1982 he abducted Amie Hoffman, eighteen, a cheerleader at Parsippany Hills High School, from the car park of a shopping mall in Hanover Township. He sexually assaulted her, stabbed her repeatedly, and put her body in a water tank at the Mendham Borough reservoir, where it was found two days later.
Twelve days after that, on December 5, he took Deirdre O'Brien, twenty-five, from a diner in Parsippany, stabbed her repeatedly and left her at a truck stop. She was still alive when she was found and died of her injuries.
He was arrested on January 18, 1983. What drew attention to him was a report he made himself: he stabbed himself and told police he had been attacked.
He was convicted of both murders along with aggravated sexual assault, two counts of aggravated assault and kidnapping, and sentenced to death on October 29, 1984.
He was resentenced to life imprisonment in 1990, and is serving consecutive life terms at New Jersey State Prison. This entry previously attributed the commutation to New Jersey's abolition of the death penalty in 2007, which commuted the sentences of everyone then on its death row. That is a real event but it is not what happened here; his resentencing came seventeen years earlier.
He has never accepted either conviction. In 2018 a Superior Court judge allowed the State Police to examine five microscopic slides holding sperm cells recovered from Amie Hoffman's body, to establish whether they could support new DNA testing. He had by then been denying the murder for thirty-six years.
Four corrections to this entry as it stood. Amie Hoffman's name was given as Amy. Deirdre O'Brien's age was given as twenty-nine; she was twenty-five, and her surname was spelled O'Brian. The two New Jersey killings were dated to 1982 and 1983; both were in 1982, twelve days apart. And the arrest was dated May 12, 1983; he was arrested in January.