After being arrested for murder in 1985, a woman mourned a brother she barely knew

Sometimes Jerry Watkins would look at his giggling little sister in 1985 and ask his mother with an enthusiastic yell, “Mommy, mommy, when is she going to go?” He shared his candy with his one-month-old sister, who was crawling around her home in Terra Alta, West Virginia, waiting for her first steps.

“Unfortunately, that day never came for him,” said his sister Jamie Cole, now 38. “And it hurts. It’s always been quite painful for me.”

Jerry, whose full name was Jeremiah Matthew Watkins, was a brown-eyed boy who loved Kit Kat chocolate, rode his bike through the West Virginia hills, and growled to the lyrics of “Old Time Rock & Roll.” He was 13 years old when he was severely beaten and fatally stabbed in 1985. His body, according to the authorities, was found on November 12 of the same year in a shallow pit near the railway tracks in the city of Terra Alta.

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For nearly 40 years, the case remained unsolved, with Jerry’s sister and mother, Enid Nicola, still haunted by his absence and furious at the lack of leads in the investigation. But on Tuesday, the Preston County Sheriff’s Office said it had arrested David Monroe Adams in connection with the murder after a thorough review of the case that began earlier this month.

Adams, 56, of Westover, West Virginia, was charged with second-degree murder after the sheriff’s office said he “eventually confessed” to investigators that, when he was 18, he had an argument over stolen bike made him commit suicide. Jerry to the barn and kill him.

Adams could not be contacted for comment on Thursday and it is not clear if he has a lawyer.

After years of being told that the chances of finding Jerry’s killer were slim, Cole said she experienced a mixture of emotions when her mother informed her of the arrest. Feeling angry, numb, and overwhelmed, Cole got into her car outside her home in Lexington, Kentucky, to process the news.

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“I was screaming through my tears,” she said.

Nicola, 74, said in an interview that a Preston County sheriff’s deputy came to her apartment and asked if she knew Jeremiah.

“Yes, this is my son,” she said.

The officer told her about the arrest and gave her the phone number of the man in charge of the case, Captain Travis Tichnell. Nicola and Cole called him that night and he gave some details about his findings, which were included in the sheriff’s office press release about the arrest. But many questions remain, Cole said: What was behind the stolen bike controversy? Who stole? And who was Adams, a man unknown to Nicola?

In a brief interview, Tichnell declined to answer most questions about the case, saying he did not want to jeopardize the case. Asked why he and the sheriff’s office decided to review the case this month, he said, “It was a case that I was familiar with and had the opportunity to review.”

He said he noticed “some inconsistencies” in Adams’ statements in 1985 and decided to interview him a couple of times with a colleague. He declined to share these inconsistencies or say if there was other evidence that may have linked Adams to the murder.

According to Tichnell, it was during these interviews that Adams confessed to killing Jerry.

This incident was remembered by many in the district with a population of about 34,000 people. Law enforcement officers interviewed many people in the 1980s and looked for possible leads, but made no arrests.

The pain of killing a child was felt most acutely in Nicola’s home, where the little girl began to grow up and wonder what had happened to her brother, whom neighbors and friends remembered as “the cutest boy.”

“I didn’t know this for most of my life, but now that I’m older and thoughtful, I can just say how broken she was,” Cole said, referring to his mother.

She watched Nicola cry as “Stand By Me” was playing on the radio. She will then hear excerpts from Nicoli about what happened in the fall of 1985.

And Cole said that at times she felt stuck in a fog of disappointment: who did this to her brother, whom she barely knew, but whose presence she had felt all her life? In high school, according to Cole, she had a recurring vision of her sitting in a high chair as an infant and Jerry looking at her and laughing.

“I feel like I had a memory or two of him,” she said. “But, you know, at one o’clock, how long do you remember?”

When she was in college in the early 2000s, Cole said she contacted authorities to see if there were any further investigations, but officials said it was extremely unlikely to find the culprit due to the passage of time.

This week, she said, she realized that “it’s clear that someone hasn’t given up on it.”

On Tuesday, after learning of the arrest, she stayed in the car for several minutes, screaming, crying, running images of Jerry in her mind. And on her phone, she saw a photo of Adams with gray hair. Almost 40 years never got caught, she thought. Nearly four decades stolen from her older brother, and who would he be if given the chance?

She entered her house, where there were photographs of Jerry in a box.

“He was just a real person,” Cole said. “A boy who never became a man, who would have been a wonderful person.”

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