California Man In Prison For 1995 Murder Charged In 1994 Murders Of Washington Mom, Toddler

An inmate in California has been formally charged in the 1994 murders of a woman and her toddler in Washington.

Jerome Jones, 51, was charged with two counts of aggravated murder for the deaths of Stacy Falcon-Dewey, 23, and her son, Jacob Dewey, 3, according to documents from the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office sent to Oxygen.com. Charging documents accuse Jones of raping Falcon-Dewey before likely killing her child in front of her and then killing her.

“In this case, the defendant bound Stacy Falcon-Dewey, beat her, orally raped her and likely shot her child to death in front of her before killing her,” the record states. “The extraordinary violence and cruelty of these murders demonstrated the extreme danger he presents to society.”

Jones is currently housed at the Kern Valley State Prison in California while serving a 56-year prison sentence for a different murder he committed in March 1995. He is listed as eligible for parole in 2030 but, if convicted of the Washington state murders, he would no longer be eligible.

According to the victim's mother, who created a Facebook fundraiser in 2019, Stacy Falcon-Dewey celebrated her 23rd birthday with friends on the night of her death before leaving to pick up Jacob from his regular babysitter. Somewhere along the way, she crossed paths with a “ruthless killer.”

In the early morning hours of Oct. 28, 1994, a newspaper carrier found the bodies of mother and son in the middle of a dead-end Renton, Washington road near her 1984 Buick Century, according to the probable cause affidavit. The killer had bound Falcon-Dewey with packaging tape — found at the scene — and beaten her in the head before shooting her in the head, arm and shoulder. The boy was shot twice in the head.

Authorities believed that there had been a struggle after finding the contents of Falcon-Dewey's purse strewn about and the buttons ripped from her shirt. Her shoes, cigarette box and the vehicle’s floor mat were found outside the car. 

In 2002, detectives with the Renton Police Department tested DNA from semen samples found in the victim’s mouth and underneath her fingernails. The DNA matched Jerome Jones, who was already serving a sentence in California.

At the time his DNA was identified, Jones was incarcerated for his role in the 1995 murder of Gregory Hebdon, 30, in Irvine, California, according to the Seattle Times. According to the Los Angeles Times, Hebdon was shot twice outside his home in the middle of the day on March 31, 1995 by two men who reportedly first beat him with their guns before attempting to force him into the trunk of their car. Hebdon was found with handcuffs around one wrist, police told the L.A. Times.

Jones, who had been paroled in California in April 1993 after a series of arrests and convictions for violent crimes starting in 1987, the paper reported, was identified as one of Hebdon's killers in April 1995 and arrested in Washington in May of that year. He was known to police there already: He had been arrested in Washington for drug possession in August 1993, according to the Seattle Times and L.A. Times, was convicted, served two months — ending in December 1993 — and was subjected to a year's probation. There was a warrant issued for his arrest on the probation violation in January 1995.

Jones was living with his girlfriend and three children at the time of his arrest in Hebdon's murder and was carrying a .45-caliber handgun, according to the L.A. paper.

Authorities went to California to interview Jones after identifying his DNA in 2002, but Jones denied knowing Falcon-Dewey or her son. Investigators learned, however, that Jones had been living at the Kenton Ridge apartment complex in Kent, where Falcon-Dewey and her son had lived until just a few months before her murder.

Falcon-Dewey had picked her son up from the babysitter’s on the night of the murders in that same complex.

(The Seattle Times, who covered the story in a series titled “In The Dark,” questioned why authorities didn’t arrest Jones in 2002. The case reportedly slipped through the cracks and remained officially unsolved for the next 20 years due to budgeting concerns in the prosecutor's office and “other procedural hiccups.”)

Vianne Falcon, Falcon-Dewey's mother, hadn’t officially learned about the DNA tying Jones to her daughter’s and grandson’s murders until March 2019, according to her fundraiser. The news came days after she requested files from the Renton Police Department — which is after she heard about it from a Seattle Times reporter.

“I got the shock of my life when I found out that the police and detectives had a DNA match back to 2002 but had not charged the b*****d,” Falcon posted in 2019. “His name is Jerome F. Jones, and he is in prison in California for killing a businessman, and because he is already incarcerated, they weren’t going to go through the expense of charging him and paying for him to be brought to Washington to be tried for the double homicide.”

The probable cause affidavit filed against Jones on Tuesday indicates that, following Falcon's renewed advocacy and the Seattle Times reporting, prosecutors and crime scene analysts re-examined other evidence in the case — a request, the Seattle Times had noted in "In The Dark," that had originated in 2004.

Detectives learned in 2021 that semen was also detected on the child’s jacket sleeve, according to the charging documents. That sample also matched Jerome Jones.

“It’s about time; that’s what I want to say about it,” Vianne Falcon, now 74, told the Seattle Times. “I’m really, really happy that they’re filing these charges before he had a chance to get released. Because if he got released, they never would’ve caught up with him.”

During his incarceration in California, Jones “brutally assaulted” a corrections officer and was convicted for crimes committed while behind bars, including a felony assault in 2004, a felony assault in 2013 and felony weapon possession in 2016.

Jones is scheduled to appear for arraignment on Feb. 28 at the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent, Washington, according to an email sent to Oxygen.com by the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office.

Requests to the Renton Police Department were not immediately returned to Oxygen.com.