At ten minutes to three on the morning of Friday, April 10, 1992, an East Orange police officer found the body of Jamillah Jones, sixteen, on Main Street in East Orange, New Jersey. She had been raped and stabbed, and her body had been thrown from a pedestrian overpass. By the end of the day the search had found two more women. Elizabeth Clenor, thirty, a mother of two, lay dead of a blow to the head; her mother had reported her missing on February 17. Stephanie Alston, thirty, was found at four that afternoon. The next afternoon a fourth body, badly decomposed, turned up under foliage near Oraton Parkway and Route 280. Four of the bodies were within about a hundred yards of one another, in unlit places under railroad trestles and along highway embankments, all within walking distance of the East Orange police station.
The man who killed them lived a few blocks north, in a three-family house on North Walnut Street. Jerome Dennis was twenty-five. He had been out of prison for less than five months.
He was born in Newark on December 14, 1966, the seventh of nine children, and grew up in the Columbus Homes housing project, raised mostly by his mother. He left school in the seventh grade. In 1981, at fourteen, he was charged in Essex County with rape, criminal restraint and armed robbery, tried as an adult and sentenced to thirty years. In prison he took cooking classes, baked, joined a Bible study group and was regarded as a model inmate. He served the mandatory minimum of ten years and was paroled from the state prison at Yardville on November 19, 1991. He went to work as a porter at the Pleasantdale Bakery in West Orange, and parole officials later described him as a model parolee.
The attacks began within a month. On December 12, 1991, a woman of twenty-six was attacked and survived. Four days later he raped and strangled Robyn Carter, forty-one, in Newark, and her body was found the same day. On February 15, 1992, he abducted Elizabeth Clenor as she walked home from applying for a job at McDonald's, raped her, beat her to death and left her in an abandoned house. On February 21 he stabbed Stephanie Alston to death and left her near where Clenor lay. The next day a woman of twenty-three was attacked and got away. On April 10 he raped and stabbed Jamillah Jones.
Contemporary reporting described the fifth victim, the decomposed body found near Route 280, as unidentified. One later account names a fourteen-year-old, Shakia Hedgespeth, among the bodies found in those days; the newspaper coverage of the charges does not.
The agencies involved formed a task force, and two days later, before dawn on Sunday, April 12, Dennis was arrested at his home; some accounts date the arrest to April 13. He was charged with five murders and four rapes and with attacking the two women who survived. At the hearing in Essex County Superior Court, Assistant Prosecutor Norman Menz said Dennis had made statements admitting the killings, that the two women had identified him, and that one of them had recognized the knife found near Jamillah Jones's body as his. Three of the five dead women had been raped. Judge Joseph A. Falcone set bail at $2 million. "Taking into account his prior criminal history, I don't think this bail is unreasonable," he said.
What the authorities would not say became the story in East Orange. They declined to explain what had led them to him, refused to discuss motive or how the women were chosen, and would not say whether he had any connection to them or whether a witness had come forward. The acting prosecutor said only that Dennis had not been plucked out of thin air. The one common thread officials offered was that the women, like Dennis, were Black. Nobody answered whether the parole authorities had been watching him, or whether anyone had looked into the pattern of attacks before. More than two hundred people came to the City Council meeting that evening. Some thanked the police. One woman said the media had been after them and what they needed was a suspect fast. Another resident said the sketchiness of what had been released reminded him of the Warren Commission report. The case drew sustained criticism of the New Jersey parole system.
The task force was also looking at two other deaths that were never charged to him. Maria Ferguson, twenty-seven, of East Orange, was found on August 28, 1991, before his release. Another badly decomposed body was found the Wednesday before his arrest and was not identified. Both were in an abandoned building about a mile from the others.
He pleaded not guilty at first. A psychiatric evaluation was requested, and one account says he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. On February 27, 1993, under a negotiated agreement, he waived trial and pleaded guilty to thirteen charges: five counts of murder, two of aggravated sexual assault, two of false imprisonment, and one each of aggravated assault, armed robbery and parole violation. On March 2, 1993, he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of sixty years. His parole eligibility date is recorded as April 10, 2052, when he would be eighty-five, and he was sent to New Jersey State Prison.