$100K Reward, Then a True Bill: Franklin Man Indicted in 2006 Dickus Double Murder

Michael Jerome James. Booking photo provided by Franklin Police Department / City of Franklin, Ind., via WRTV.

$100,000 sat on the table seven days. Then a Johnson County grand jury returned a true bill.

On Sept. 25, prosecutors asked to raise the long-standing reward in the Franklin double-murder case from $25,000 to $100,000 — a public shove at anyone who had stayed quiet for two decades. On Friday, Oct. 2, the same office announced that a grand jury had indicted Michael Jerome James, 35, of Franklin, on two counts of murder in the July 24, 2006 killings of Chynna Dickus, 26, and her stepson Blake Dickus, 10. Franklin police said James was taken into custody after the indictment.

Sean Dickus found his wife and son stabbed to death inside their Aberdeen Drive home, according to WRTV, FOX59, WIBC, and The Republic. For twenty years the case stayed open: billboards, posters, and a $25,000 tip reward that never produced an arrest the department would announce. Chief Kirby Cochran's Oct. 2 release said detectives "reviewed evidence, pursued new leads, leveraged advances in forensic science," and refused to let the file go cold. He credited Capt. Jeff Dawe's leadership as instrumental in getting the matter before a grand jury.

T-cut screens and a refrigerator trail

Detective Sgt. John Borges told WRTV that investigators learned nearly eleven years ago the murders lined up with a string of five daytime burglaries within about a half-mile of the Dickus home in June and July 2006 — including one on the same day and street. In those burglaries, Borges said, the intruder cut window screens in a T-pattern and went through refrigerators after ransacking the houses. Grand-jury secrecy under Indiana code bars the prosecutor from describing what evidence the panel actually heard. Those burglary details are what police have put on the public record about how they kept working the scene pattern; they are not a courtroom finding that James committed those break-ins.

Prosecutor Lance D. Hamner said the crime landed in his first stretch as Johnson County prosecutor and never left him. He told local outlets that seeking justice for the Dickuses was a primary reason he left the bench in 2022 and ran for prosecutor again. The grand jury spent about three weeks on evidence and testimony before returning what the office called a "true bill" — two felony murder counts. An initial hearing is to be set in Johnson Circuit Court. Online records had not yet shown a filed case as of Friday night reporting.

An indictment is not a conviction. Until a court finds otherwise, James stands accused — not proven guilty — of the two murder counts. The Republic noted he would have been about 14 or 15 years old in 2006; he is being prosecuted now as a 35-year-old adult on the grand-jury murder counts.

The clock families already paid

Cold cases do not close on press releases. They close when someone is charged, tried, and — if the evidence holds — sentenced. Johnson County put six figures on the tip line, a Republican prosecutor who quit a judgeship to reopen the fight walked the case into a grand jury, and Franklin's detectives finally got a true bill. The next ledger entry belongs to Johnson Circuit Court: bond, discovery, and a trial calendar the Dickus family has already waited twenty years to see.

Reporting: Franklin Police Department release, Oct. 2, 2026; Johnson County Prosecutor's Office statements via WRTV, WISH-TV, FOX59, WIBC, and The Republic, Oct. 2-3, 2026.

Written by Hoosiers, for Hoosiers.