Dawn Jerome, a 20-year-old White woman, was killed on October 2, 1979, when she was found strangled to death. In the wake of the murder, her husband, Richard K. Jerome, was left to raise their two daughters—Amber, who was seven, and Amy, who was one—while the case itself slipped into the brutal limbo that families know too well: the kind where the calendar keeps turning, but the answers never arrive.
What makes the record especially stark is how plainly it states what investigators could not give the family. The killer was never identified, and no arrest is described in the court record discussing the aftermath of her death. Instead, what survives on paper is the practical wreckage—ambulance costs, funeral expenses, and the scramble for child care and housekeeping—ordinary needs made urgent by extraordinary violence.
Over the years, Dawn Jerome’s name has occasionally been mentioned alongside discussions of Carl Eugene Watts, a serial killer later convicted of murders in Michigan and known for attacks that included strangulation and stabbing, with authorities and writers describing him as a suspect in numerous unsolved killings across the 1970s and early 1980s. Some secondary accounts place Dawn Jerome’s murder in Taylor, Michigan and present it as potentially fitting the broader pattern attributed to Watts, but those accounts do not describe a formal charging decision tied to her case.
As far as the available public record in the cited court materials goes, Dawn Jerome’s homicide remains unsolved: no named suspect, no filed charge, no trial, no conviction—just a family permanently altered and a case still defined by the same line that has haunted cold-case files for decades: the killer has never been found.
