Taped phone call: Jones admits killing Mobile County woman

<p>The jury in the capital murder trial of accused serial killer Jeremy Bryan Jones heard a recorded telephone conversation Friday in which he admitted killing a Mobile County woman while high on drugs.</p><p>"It was like a nightmare, I was in a movie," Jones said in the Dec. 10, 2004 recorded conversation from jail. After hearing it played to the jury, Jones wiped his eyes with a handkerchief as the courtroom fell silent.</p><p>In the taped call, Jones told Mark Bentley, a former friend and a neighbor of the slain woman, Lisa Marie Nichols, that he needed prayer.</p><p>"Pray for you?" asked Bentley. "Do you think it will do any good?"</p><p>"Yeah, it can't hurt, can it?" Jones said.</p><p>Bentley, a prosecution witness, testified Friday morning that he had allowed Jones, a 32-year-old construction worker from Miami, Okla., to stay in Bentley's home when Jones arrived unannounced days before Hurricane Ivan struck in September 2004.</p><p>Jones had worked for Bentley several years earlier.</p><p>Nichols lived alone in a mobile home near Bentley in the rural Turnerville community, which lost electrical power during the hurricane.</p><p>Nichols, 44, was raped and shot three times in the head on Sept. 17, 2004. Her body was burned and later found by her two daughters and a son-in-law.</p><p>Jones also is charged with murder in the death of Amanda Greenwell, a 16-year-old in Douglasville, Ga., whose remains were found in April 2004, and Katherine Collins, a 45-year-old New Orleans woman whose body was found in February 2004.</p><p>In testimony, Bentley described how they entered the smoke-filled home with a flashlight and discovered the body.</p><p>"I was freaked out," Bentley said. "She was burned up. It just about killed me."</p><p>Jones had remained behind in the Bentley home and didn't go to the crime scene.</p><p>"He asked me what did it look like over there," Bentley recalled.</p><p>In the Dec. 10 taped statement, Jones said he didn't know why he did it.</p><p>"I was higher than I had ever been in my whole life," Jones said.</p><p>Bentley told Jones, "I thought I knew you, but I don't."</p><p>"You knew me. You just didn't know me on drugs," Jones replied.</p><p>When arrested Sept. 21, 2004, Jones was using the alias John Paul Chapman, later determined to be Missouri prisoner.</p><p>Jones' attorney has conceded that Jones had a history of abusing methamphetamines, but argued that police had arrested the wrong man.</p><p>Jones' girlfriend, Vicki Freeman of Douglasville, Ga., his mother, Jeanne Beard of Miami, Okla., and several other relatives attended Friday's court session.</p><p>Jones mouthed "I love you" to his mother seated in the courtroom for the first time Friday. Beard said she believes her son is innocent. "I only have two sons," she said. "He's a good boy."</p><p>Jones has also been charged with murder in separate slayings in Georgia and New Orleans. An investigator said Friday that about 10 other unsolved slayings have possible links to Jones and the number could be 20.</p><p>Mobile County sheriff's detective Paul Burch said some of the other cases without charges apparently involve slain Atlanta prostitutes.</p><p>Authorities have said Jones confessed to or is being investigated in the deaths of a couple and the disappearance of two teenage girls in Oklahoma, as well as the killing of another woman in Georgia.</p>

http://accesswdun.com/article/2005/10/136936