Teen suspected of killing boy and stepmom was in prosecutors' sights for years — until new law let them strike

Indiana investigators identified a suspect years before charging a man with the 2006 murders of 10-year-old Blake Dickus and his 26-year-old stepmother, Chynna Dickus, but prosecutors say an unusual gap in state law prevented them from bringing the case.

Johnson County Prosecutor Lance Hamner told Fox News Digital that authorities had identified Michael Jerome James as a suspect in the double murders, but spent years working to establish a legal path to prosecute him for crimes he allegedly committed at age 14.

"That's what took us so long," Hamner said. "We had a suspect identified. We weren't able to bring charges for several years because we were trying to get the jurisdictional statute in place."

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James, now 35, appeared in Johnson Circuit Court in Franklin on Thursday, Oct. 8, following a grand jury indictment in the July 24, 2006, deaths of Blake and Chynna.

James faces four counts of murder. Prosecutors accuse him of killing Blake and Chynna while burglarizing or attempting to burglarize their Franklin home.

During his court appearance, James told Johnson Circuit Court Judge Andrew Roesener that he did not have an attorney yet but planned to get one. Roesener gave James until Nov. 2 to hire an attorney and set his next status hearing for the same day.

James' age at the time of the killings is what created an unusual problem for the state, Hamner said.

Indiana law historically gave juvenile courts jurisdiction over crimes committed by minors, creating a dilemma when authorities identified an alleged juvenile offender only after that person had aged out of the system.

Since authorities did not identify or charge James while he was a juvenile, prosecutors faced the question of whether an adult court could legally hear the case.

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"That leaves a gap because this person is alleged to have committed a crime when he was 14, was not charged in juvenile court, and now that he's over the age of 18 could not be charged in adult court because of the way that law was written," Hamner said.

In 2023, state law changed. A new legal path was created for adult courts to handle certain cases involving those accused of committing serious crimes as juveniles. The law did not cover every violent crime and depended partly on whether prosecutors could have sought adult prosecution when the offender was a juvenile.

Hamner said another case involving child molestation allegations tested the 2023 statute. The Indiana Court of Appeals rejected its application in that case, and the Indiana Supreme Court later reached the same conclusion.

"That means that we couldn't use it either," Hamner said.

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"We started back over. We went back to the legislature and, with the guidance of the decision in that 2023 statute, drafted a new law that would satisfy the concerns that the Indiana Supreme Court had."

Hamner said lawmakers passed a new statute in 2025 after considering the conc