Jerome Dennis was born in 1966. He was first charged in Essex County, New Jersey in 1981, at fourteen, and was sentenced as an adult to thirty years for rape, criminal restraint and armed robbery. He served the mandatory minimum of ten years and was paroled from the state prison at Yardville on November 19, 1991. He went to live at a three-family house on North Walnut Street in East Orange.
The authorities said the offences began in December, less than a month after his release.
On December 12 a woman of twenty-six was raped and survived. Robyn Carter, forty-one, of Newark, was found dead there on December 16; it was not clear how she had died or how long she had been dead. On February 22 a woman of twenty-three was attacked and survived.
Three bodies were found on Friday April 10, 1992. An East Orange police officer found Jamillah Jones, sixteen, dead of stab wounds at ten to three in the morning on Main Street. As the search widened, officers found Elizabeth Clenor, thirty, the mother of two children, at quarter past six; she had been reported missing by her mother on February 17 and had died of a blow to the head. Stephanie Alston, thirty, was found at four in the afternoon. The next afternoon a fourth body was found decomposed under foliage near Oraton Parkway and Route 280, and was not identified.
The bodies were left in unlit places under railway trestles and along highway embankments, all within walking distance of the East Orange police station, and the two women who survived were attacked in the same area. His house was a few blocks north of where they were found. An earlier version of this entry said most of the dead were women using drugs and that the bodies were left in vacant buildings and lots; neither is in the source.
He was arrested before dawn on Sunday April 12 and charged two days later, two days after the agencies involved had formed a task force. At the arraignment an assistant Essex County prosecutor, Norman Menz, said he had confessed to everything and had been identified by two East Orange women he was also accused of attacking, and that one of them had identified the knife found near Jamillah Jones's body as belonging to him. Three of the five dead women had been raped.
What the authorities would not say became the story locally. They declined to explain what had led them to him, refused to discuss motive or how the women were chosen, would not say whether there was any connection between him and them, whether any witness had come forward, or anything about his early life or prison record. The acting prosecutor said only that Dennis had not been plucked out of thin air. The one common thread they would give was that the women, like Dennis, were black.
Two further questions were put and not answered: whether the parole authorities had been monitoring him, and whether the pattern of attacks had been investigated before.
More than two hundred people came to the East Orange 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.
Two other deaths the task force was investigating were not among the charges. Maria Ferguson, twenty-seven, of East Orange, was found on August 28, 1991, which was before his release. The other body, badly decomposed, was found on the Wednesday before his arrest and was not identified. Both were in an abandoned building about a mile from where the rest were found.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment on March 2, 1993.