[2] In early 1992, Jones left Miami with one of his girlfriends and moved to Baxter Springs, Kansas, where he lived with a highschool friend named Justin Judd.
[2] After the murder of Jennifer Judd, Jones broke up with his girlfriend, left Baxter Springs, and began to live a criminal lifestyle.
He was subsequently convicted of the drug possession charge and sentenced to two years imprisonment, which he served at the Dick Conner Correctional Center in Hominy.
During his trial, Jones, on the advice of his attorney, agreed to plead guilty on three counts of assault and sexual harassment, but his victims refused to appear in court, due to which their testimony was considered questionable.
Upon learning of this, Jones left Oklahoma and moved to Joplin, Missouri, where he met a woman in a bar whose son, John Paul Chapman, was serving a sentence at a state prison.
Sometime afterwards, he persuaded the woman to sell him her son's papers and social security card for $50, after which he stole the man's identity and left the state in December 2000.
[4] However, due to a glitch in the system, his true identity was not revealed, and when his fingerprints were entered a second time, he was falsely identified as John Paul Chapman.
Upon his release in early September, he left Georgia and headed for Alabama, where there was a desperate need to repair buildings in cities across the state, which had recently been hit by Hurricane Ivan.
[2] On September 15, 2004, Jones arrived in Turnerville, a small community near Satsuma, where he had been hired to do some construction and renovation work for Mark and Kim Bentley.
According to Coleman's later testimony, Jones found a .25 caliber handgun while searching the closet shelves, which he appropriated for himself under the guise of protecting himself from looters who were stealing from vacant houses during the hurricane.
On the day afterwards, everyone started doing repairs in the backyard when they were suddenly visited by 43-year-old Lisa Marie Nichols, a neighbor who had recently returned to Turnerville after waiting for Hurricane Ivan to pass.
During this time, they noticed that Jones was acting weirdly, expressing no emotion upon hearing of the body being discovered and refusing to cooperate with the Mobile County Sheriff's Department during interviews.
While officers were investigating the house, they found three .25 caliber bullets lodged into a wall - when questioned, Bentley admitted to having a gun and gave it to the police.
Investigators determined from the smell of gunpowder, soot residue and bullet casings that the gun had been fired recently, and when sent for an examination, it was revealed to be the murder weapon.
[4] While searching for him, the Mobile County Sheriff's Department relayed their known information to neighboring states, after which the Missouri Attorney General's Office notified them that their suspect had the same birth date and social security number as someone serving time at a prison in their jurisdiction.
Sheriffs went to interview the real John Paul Chapman and, afterwards, his mother revealed that she had sold her son's identity to a man named Jeremy Bryan Jones.
After learning of this, they obtained fingerprint samples from the Miami Police Department dating from Jones' 1990 arrest, conclusively establishing that that was his true identity.
Jones initially insisted that he was innocent, but after forensic tests confirmed that Lisa Nichols was killed with the Bentley's handgun and that the fingerprints on the beer can were his, he amended his claims and admitted responsibility.
On November 4, Jones changed his story again, this time claiming that he had broken into her house and attempted to sexually assaulted her at gunpoint, but was unable to sustain an erection - because of this, he instead threw a towel over Nichols' head and shot her.
In an interview with police, Freeman unexpectedly stated her belief that Jones was responsible for the murder of 16-year-old Amanda Greenwell, a next-door neighbor of theirs while they were living in Douglasville, Georgia.
According to Jones' testimony, on February 21, 1996, in Delaware County, Oklahoma, he broke into the trailer of 38-year-old Daniel "Danny" Oakley, where he assaulted him and his roommate, 41-year-old Doris Harris.
On September 11, after the pair drank a huge quantity of alcohol at a local bar, he claimed that he intentionally injected Hutchings with excessive amounts of methamphetamine mixed with an unspecified chemical.
During his interrogation, he indicated on a map the location of the mine where he had dumped Ashley Freeman and Bible's remains, but their bodies were never found and this cast doubt on his testimony.
[12] Investigators did not rule out the possibility that he may have learned details about the case by watching television, as a story about the murders and the missing girls was shown on an episode of America's Most Wanted.
Jones also claimed that in early January 2004, he met 46-year-old prostitute Katherine Collins in New Orleans, Louisiana, after which he raped, stabbed and bludgeoned her with a tire iron.
In the subsequent search, police officers found her purse, personal items, food in the microwave and her car, which was in the parking lot next to the salon without any sign of forced entry.
[17] High-ranking police officers from the three states organized a meeting and formed a plan to prosecute Jones, where it was decided that he would be extradited to Alabama first, then to Louisiana and Georgia for the respective cases.
Shortly before the trial began, representatives from the FBI issued a formal apology to the relatives of Nichols and other potential victims for the glitch that allowed for his release.
His attorney Habib Yazidi supported these claims, arguing that his client had taken advantage of the media attention and perjured himself in order to obtain privileges, such as more and longer phone calls, as well as better food.
[23] This was further exacerbated when Tommy Lynn Sells, another murderer who claimed to be a serial killer, also confessed to some of the crimes Jones supposedly committed.