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MURDERED: Wendy Jerome

When a teenage girl goes out to deliver a birthday card to her best friend, she never makes it home alive. Her family and police would search for her killer for decades, and in the process, this case would make history in the state of New York.
Duration
1h 1m
Broadcast on
18 Aug 2025
Audio Format
other

When a teenage girl goes out to deliver a birthday card to her best friend, she never makes it home alive. Her family and police would search for her killer for decades, and in the process, this case would make history in the state of New York.

 

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Hi, grime junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers, and I'm Brit, and the story I have for you today is the shiny example of why you should never give up hope, and why you should never jump to conclusions, because in the span of multiple decades after a young girl's death, a number of people come on police's radar who you would think just have to be the guy, but it turns out the guy was hiding right under their noses all along. This is the story of Wendy Jerome. [Music] It's about 8 p.m. November 22nd 1984, when 30-year-old Marlene Jerome just like jolts away from a post-Thanksgiving dinner nap on the couch. She doesn't know what it is that woke her, but immediately she senses that something is wrong, and being a mother, her mind immediately goes to her kids, specifically her 14-year-old daughter Wendy, and so she kind of like pops off the couch and starts looking all over the house for her, like she just needs to lay eyes on her, and then everything will be okay. But Wendy isn't home. Marlene's husband, Wayne, tells her that Wendy went to her friend's house a couple of blocks away to deliver a birthday card, and this is like her best friend that she's going to see her name soon. But that was over an hour ago, and she has now missed her 8 p.m. curfew, and she's about to miss having pumpkin pie, which is her favorite, and they all plan to eat it together after Marlene's nap. Now, listen, she's only missed curfew by a few minutes at this point, but Marlene is just like getting progressively more worried, so she calls Sue's house, though that doesn't exactly help settle her fears, because nobody answers over there. So then she tries other friends who live nearby, but no one has seen Wendy. Now, despite her gut instinct, Marlene told our reporter that she was clinging to the hope that maybe Wendy had gone somewhere with Sue's family, and it's a thought that she holds on to for hours as she tries telling herself not to overreact. I mean, in 1984, it is "waited out" or "call the police," not a whole lot in between. But that last shred of hope that she had is torn to pieces at 11.30 p.m. when Marlene finally gets a hold of Sue's mom. Yes, Wendy had come by, but way earlier, and no, she hadn't been with them, like she left their house at about 7.30. And Sue's mother must kind of get a rush of the type of fear that has been building in Marlene for hours, because she knew something that she didn't want to tell Marlene over the phone. On her way home, she had driven by a bunch of police and, like, commotion on the local school grounds. So as she's like having this realization, all she can bring herself to say to Marlene was, "You need to hang up and call the police immediately." Which Marlene does, and she said police were at her door within minutes. Now she wanted to show the officer a picture of her daughter that was missing, so he knew who to look for, but she said that he couldn't even bring himself to look at it. All he said was Wendy had an accident. And even in that moment, her mom is looking for all the explanations that aren't the worst one. She said she remembered thinking, "Oh, like, maybe she got hit by a car or something." And you can almost pinpoint the moment in her story when the real trauma happened and Marlene's brain started trying to protect her from it, because the actual words that came out of the officer's mouth are fuzzy to her now.

Transcription truncated.

When a teenage girl goes out to deliver a birthday card to her best friend, she never makes it home alive. Her family and police would search for her killer for decades, and in the process, this case would make history in the state of New York.