An Indiana man has been charged with murder in the 2006 stabbing deaths of a 10-year-old boy and his stepmother after a new law closed a years-long jurisdictional gap.
Michael Jerome James, now 35, appeared in Johnson Circuit Court in Franklin on Thursday, Oct. 8, after a grand jury indicted him on four counts of murder in the July 24, 2006, deaths of Blake Dickus and his stepmother, Chynna Dickus, 26. Prosecutors say he killed them while burglarizing or trying to burglarize their home on Aberdeen Drive in the Branigin Woods subdivision. He remains held without bond at the Johnson County Jail.
Fox News reported that James was 14 at the time of the killings. For years after investigators identified him as a suspect, prosecutors could not bring adult charges because of how Indiana’s juvenile jurisdiction rules were written. A 2025 statute finally gave them a path back into court.
The case sat cold for nearly two decades. The family lived with the loss. And a legal technicality stood between a brutal double homicide and a courtroom reckoning.
On July 24, 2006, Sean Dickus returned home and found his son and wife dead. Investigators reported that both Blake and Chynna suffered multiple stab wounds. Blake, only 10, also had blunt-force injuries and signs of smothering.
Blake’s mother, Christina Smith, had planned to pick up her son that day. She arrived to a neighborhood ringed by police. She later described the wounds on her boy’s hands to WTHR.
Christina Smith told reporters:
"His poor little hands were so bad, like, he tried to grab the knife and like, his thumb was almost sliced off. The knife went through his hands... I don't know how that guy could live with himself."
Sean Dickus faced years of public suspicion before investigators cleared him. He has said the ordeal left the family broken.
Sean Dickus told WTHR:
"My family went through torture, so I can't go through anything worse than that."
Franklin police worked the case hard in the early years. Tips poured in. None stuck. Johnson County Prosecutor Lance Hamner has said investigators ran an extensive probe but could not name a suspect for a long stretch of time.
Hamner first won election as Johnson County prosecutor in 1991. He left the office in 2009 for a judgeship while the Dickus murders remained unsolved. In 2021, he learned investigators believed they finally had a break. He later returned to the prosecutor’s office determined to move the case.
Franklin Police Capt. Jeff Dawe has said James is the first lead in the nearly 20-year investigation backed by forensic evidence. Authorities have not publicly disclosed what that evidence is, or what first pointed them to James.
Even with a suspect, the law blocked the charging decision. James had aged out of juvenile court. Adult court, under the old rules, could not take a case for crimes allegedly committed when he was 14 and never charged as a juvenile.
Hamner explained the bind plainly:
"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."
He put the delay in blunt terms:
"That's what took us so long. 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."
Investigators also looked at a string of break-ins within a half-mile of the Dickus home. Hamner declined to say whether evidence suggested a juvenile committed those burglaries, or whether James was tied to them.
In 2023, Indiana lawmakers created a path for adult courts to handle certain serious crimes allegedly committed by juveniles. That statute did not cover every violent offense. It also depended in part on whether prosecutors could have sought adult prosecution while the offender was still a juvenile.
The Indiana Court of Appeals and the Indiana Supreme Court later rejected use of the 2023 law in a separate case involving child molestation allegations. Hamner said that ruling shut the door on the Dickus case under the first statute.
"That means that we couldn't use it either," Hamner said. Prosecutors went back to the legislature. Guided by the high court’s concerns, lawmakers passed a new statute in 2025. Hamner says that law put the office "back in business" to charge James.
Hamner is more confident in the second attempt, though he stops short of certainty:
"Nothing's ever certain, but I'm a lot more confident about this statute than we were with the other one."
Not everyone agrees the new law reaches back to 2006. Criminal defense lawyer Mike Cunningham told Fox 59 News he believes Indiana law still bars adult charges for acts committed before the 2023 change, because defendants lacked adequate notice at the time of the alleged crimes.
Cunningham said:
"For acts that are committed after 2023, if you’re a juvenile and we don’t learn about it until after you’re 21, then you may be held accountable in adult court. But what the court has said is for anything that happened before 2023, the law does not permit that because they did not have adequate notice."
That dispute is now teed up for the courts. James told Judge Andrew Roesener he did not yet have a lawyer but planned to hire one. The judge gave him until Nov. 2 to do so and set a status hearing the same day. A pretrial conference is scheduled for Dec. 10.
Hamner has said the 2021 investigative break helped pull him back into the case after it had "sadly just been languishing all those years." The grand jury’s indictment finally put a name on the docket. The public still does not know the forensic details tying James to the scene. Prosecutors have not released the full charging language or the exact indictment date beyond the recent court appearance.
What is known is hard enough. A 10-year-old boy and his 26-year-old stepmother were stabbed to death in their Franklin home. The father who found them lived under a cloud of suspicion until police cleared him. A mother described her son’s hands nearly destroyed as he fought for his life. And for years after a suspect was identified, the state’s own jurisdictional rules left prosecutors without a courtroom.
Whether the 2025 statute survives a challenge will decide if this case reaches a jury. Until then, James sits without bond, the family waits again, and Indiana’s experiment in closing a juvenile-to-adult charging gap faces its first real test in a murder case this old and this raw.
When the law leaves a child killer’s case in limbo for two decades, victims’ families pay the price for every year the statute stayed broken.
