Wendy Jerome

Case background and investigation

On the evening of Thanksgiving, November 22, 1984, 14-year-old Wendy Jerome left her family's home in Rochester, New York, to deliver a birthday card to a friend who lived nearby. She was expected back within about an hour but never returned. Hours later, her body was discovered in an alcove at School No. 33 on Webster Avenue, only a few blocks from her house. According to news accounts of the case, Wendy had been raped and beaten, and her throat had been cut.

Rochester police pursued numerous leads in the weeks and years that followed, but no suspect was identified and the case went cold. Physical evidence from the scene, including Wendy's clothing and samples collected during the autopsy, was preserved, and investigators periodically resubmitted material as DNA technology improved. Wendy's mother, Marlene Jerome, remained in regular contact with police for decades; her husband died in 2011 without seeing the case resolved. The break came through familial DNA searching, a technique in which a crime-scene profile is compared against offender databases to identify potential relatives of the source. Officials said the search produced a list of investigative leads that included Timothy Williams, a Rochester native who had lived in the Jerome family's neighborhood in 1984 and moved to Florida a short time after the murder. According to Rochester Police Captain Frank Umbrino, Williams did not know the victim, nor did her family know him.

After follow-up investigation and DNA testing linked Williams to the crime scene evidence, he was arrested on September 9, 2020, at his home in Melbourne, Florida, at age 56, and returned to New York to face second-degree murder charges. He had been 20 years old at the time of the killing. Prosecutors and local media described the case as the first cold-case homicide in New York State solved through familial DNA searching. Williams's first trial, held in late 2023, ended in December 2023 when the judge declared a mistrial over allegations of juror misconduct.

At retrial, a Monroe County jury found Williams guilty on March 8, 2024, of three counts of second-degree murder for Wendy Jerome's death. On April 17, 2024, Judge Alex Renzi sentenced him to concurrent indeterminate terms of 25 years to life in prison on each count. At sentencing, District Attorney Sandra Doorley told Williams, "You didn't get away with murder," and Wendy's brother Bill Jerome said Williams did not deserve to live outside prison walls again. Marlene Jerome, who had worked with investigators for nearly four decades, noted that Williams had 35 years in which he could have come forward. The conviction closed one of Rochester's most enduring cold cases nearly 40 years after Wendy's death.