Dawn Jerome

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 c ...