Nigel Cawthorne - The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

Convicted killer Jeremy Bryan Jones confessed to killing eight women in metropolitan Atlanta, including five prostitutes. He talked of picking them up on streets lined with strip joints, murdering them and dumping their bodies in wooded areas and, in one case, dropping the body off a bridge in a river. Although he passed a polygraph test, he has since retracted his confession. His court-appointed lawyer, Habib Yazdi, said that he would confess to anything if he was allowed to talk to his mother and girlfriend.

Jones is certainly guilty of other killings. On 26 October 2005, Jones was convicted of burglary, sexual assault, rape, kidnapping and the homicide of 45-year-old Lisa Nichols. During the trial he blamed Nichols’ neighbour for her death, but he had earlier confessed to killing Lisa and burning her body while high on crystal meth.

On 18 September 2004, Lisa Nichols, the divorced mother of two daughters from Mobile County, Alabama, had been found in her bathroom. She had been raped, shot in the head three times and her body set on fire. However, while the body and the room were scorched, the fire did not destroy the house as intended—and with it vital forensic evidence.

Neighbours recalled seeing a vehicle parked outside Nichols’ home and one recalled part of the licence plate number. This lead to a itinerant labourer known locally as “Oklahoma”. His employer gave the police his birth date and social security number. This identified him as John Paul Chapman, an alias used by Jeremy Bryan Jones.

Four days later, Chapman called Detective Paul Burch of the Mobile Country Police Department who was investigating the Nichols murder. The call was traced and Chapman was arrested, still on the phone, in a house not far from where Lisa Nichols lived.

Chapman was already known to the police as a small-time drug user. However, fingerprints had failed to link him to Jeremy Bryan Jones of Miami, Oklahoma, who had been in trouble with police since, at the age of 16, he had been charged assault of a boy and his mother. He was also suspected of murdering 20-year-old Jennifer Judd, the wife of a former schoolmate and next-door neighbour Justin Judd. She had been stabbed to death in the kitchen of her own home. Her body was discovered by her husband. They had been married just ten days. Justin Judd had regularly reported Jones to the police after hearing women’s screams issuing from Jones’ house.

Jones was charged with rape on 5 November 1995, and again on 10 January 1996. On the second occasion he was found in possession of methamphetamine—crystal meth. Out on bail the next day, he pointed a loaded gun at a woman’s vulva and threatened to pull the trigger.

He pleaded guilty to three charges of sexual assault on 3 March 1997 and was sentenced to five years’ probation. Two rape victims were afraid to testify. He defied court orders requiring him to provide DNA samples and was kicked off his sexual-offender counselling sessions. Then on 19 October 2000 his probation was revoked and a warrant was issued for his arrest, citing probable cause. Rather than go to jail, Jones skipped the state.

In Joplin, Missouri, he met the mother of convicted criminal John Paul Chapman who was serving time in Missouri State Penitentiary. She took pity on him and gave him her son’s birth date and social security number. Equipped with a new identity, Jones headed for Atlanta.

As Chapman, he was picked up three times for minor offences in Georgia, but each time his fingerprints were run through, the FBI database in West Virginia failed to identify him as Jeremy Bryan Jones. Each time he was released, leaving him free to kill. He has been charged with three more murders during that period and remains a suspect in a fourth.

The first was that of 38-year-old Tina Mayberry in 2002. She was attending a Halloween fancy-dress party dressed as Betty Boop in Gipson’s restaurant in Douglasville, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. Stepping outside for a breath of fresh of air, she staggered back into the party moments later, bleeding profusely from stab wounds. She died that night in an Atlanta hospital. She had not been robbed and there was no evidence of sexual assault. The murder appeared to be motiveless.

On 12 March 2003, 16-year-old Amanda Greenwell disappeared from a trailer park in Douglas County where Chapman also lived. She went to make a call from a local payphone and never returned home. In April, her badly decomposed body was found in a wooded area nearby. She had been stabbed and her neck had been broken “with great force”, according to the post mortem report. But again, there were no clues, no suspect and no apparent motive.

Jones has been charged with the murder of Katherine Collins, who was found stabbed to death in the Garden District of New Orleans on 14 February 2004. Police say Katherine worked as a prostitute in the city.

He is also a suspect in the murder of Patrice Endres, who had gone missing from her beauty parlour Tambers’ Trim-’n’-Tan in Chunchula, Alabama on 15 April 2004. Before leaving home that morning, she had left a billet-doux on her second husband’s car saying: “The best is yet to come.”

Although Endres’ early life had been scarred by drugs, she had turned her life around. She had gone to hairdressing school and had opened her own salon. She married Rob Endres and had a 16-year-old son from a previous relationship whom she doted on. The family planned to move to Flagler, Florida, where they intended to buy a bed-and-breakfast.

At work that morning, Patrice was seen smiling and joking with the clientele, but when a client turned up for her 12 o’clock appointment, she found the salon empty. The front door was unlocked and her keys were on the table. Patrice’s car was outside, though it was parked at an odd angle. Although the till was empty, her purse was on her desk and her lunch was in the microwave. The police were convinced she had run away. Family and friends protested that she had never been happier, but the offer of a $17,000 reward, a poster campaign and extensive search only elicited a witness who said they had seen a white utility van, that could have been Jones’, outside the salon, but no further leads.

After he was arrested, the police say that Jones confessed to killing her and dumping her body in Sweetwater Creek in Forsyth County, Georgia. But after an exhaustive search of the creek, police still have no body and no physical evidence to base a charge on.

Jones is also suspected in the murder of a young prostitute whose decomposed torso was found near Wright City, Missouri on 28 June 2004. Passers-by told investigators that they saw a white utility van at the rest stop off Interstate 70, near where the torso was found.

While in custody, Chapman made a number of phonecalls from the jail’s pay phone to a number in Miami, Oklahoma. This belonged to Jeanne Beard, Jeremy Bryan Jones’s mother. At last the police tied Chapman to the earlier outstanding warrants.

Awaiting trial, Jones confessed to numerous other murders including eight women in Atlanta. He even produced sketch maps of the places he had dumped bodies in Georgia, Oklahoma, Kansas and Alabama dating back to 1992. He confessed to murdering 19-year-old Justin Hutchings by “lethal injection” in Pitcher, Oklahoma. And police in Delaware County, Oklahoma, believe Jones was responsible for the murder of 38-year-old Daniel Oakley and 41-year-old Doris Harris in 1996. He is thought to have shot them, then set the trailer they lived in on fire to hide his crime.

However, before his trial, he recanted all his confessions. He has now been convicted in the Lisa Nichols’ case and has been sentenced to death by lethal injection. Before that he faces trial in Georgia for the killing of Amanda Greenwell of Douglas County. No doubt other trials will follow.