Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags: Dead at Daddy's Hands

Episode Date: November 27, 2021

A South Carolina dad drives his five children around the deep south for nine days. Their bodies are in garbage bags in the trunk. Timothy Jones, Jr, strangles four of them. The other, a six-year-old boy named Nahtahn, is forced to exercise until he dies. The dad uses the activity as punishment after he accuses Nahtah of breaking an electrical outlet in the home. After driving for almost two weeks, Jones dumps the bags off a logging road in rural Alabama. Today on Body Bags, forensic expert Joseph Scott Morgan explains what happened to the children's bodies.   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan, Death Investigator, Professor of Forensics, Jacksonville State University. Joe Scott Morgan has been on over 10,000 death scenes, and now he takes apart, in a way that only he can, the homicides that we are all investigating, whether you're in the thick of it with the police department or the FBI, or you're an armchair sleuth, Joe Scott Morgan will give you answers. Body bags, Joe Scott Morgan. Follow and subscribe now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast.

Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. There's an old Bible verse that talks about a man whose quiver is full is truly blessed. And I've always taken that to mean that a man that's been blessed with children is a man that throughout his days will be happy and whole. In this case, we have a man that took those arrows out of the quiver and literally snapped them in two, discarding them like they were nothing more than rubbish. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. I'm joined today with my good friend, Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, what can you tell us about this

case? Joe, this is a particularly difficult case to talk about. Timothy Jones Jr. had five children, children treated very poorly. Jones killed his children one at a time and then traveled with their bodies across the South. Let me lay out for you the order that these children died. Jones, 37 years old, exercised his six-year-old boy, Natant, until he died. It began with a broken electrical outlet in the home. The father, again, Jones, 37, made the boy run around their home until he collapsed. The oldest child, eight-year-old Mara, and then there was seven-year-old Elias, strangled to death by their father.

Then he choked two-year-old Gabriel and one-year-old Elias strangled to death by their father. Then he choked two-year-old Gabriel and one-year-old Abigail as well. After the children were dead, Jones wrapped the bodies in plastic and then drove around the southeast for nine days before dumping their bodies. It's hard to understand, Joe, how someone can hurt another human, let alone their five children. Give me an idea. This poor child, the six-year-old, ran, was made to exercise. Tell me what was going on with his body. You know, Jackie, we've covered cases like this in the past where we have individuals that just absolutely collapse as a result of total and physical exhaustion. And when you begin to think of the physiology of, say, a young child, you think that they can kind of go on forever and ever, that they're, I'm not going to say necessarily bulletproof, but their young bodies are not inhibited by some of the factors that come along with age.

But, you know, there's potential potential for a terminal event with any child whatsoever. And so when you begin to press a child into this constant state of movement, and he actually did this, Jones actually described how he would make this child run in place, run around the exterior of their mobile home, and then do something called wall sits, which is where he makes the child sit with his back like he's sitting in an imaginary chair with his back placed against the wall. And it puts incredible strain upon the skeleton and the muscles. And not just that, but you have to also factor in

this idea of fear. Can you imagine this little child? He is at the mercy of this grown man, telling him how worthless he is, how he's possessed, perhaps by demons. This has been brought up at some point in time. And the adrenaline is pumping in this little boy's body. And he's sitting there in total and complete fear. So you've got these two factors that make up a perfect storm here physiologically, where you are wearing this child down physically. And then emotionally and mentally, he's being driven to exhaustion just by this overdose of things like dopamine and adrenaline. And, of course, at some point in time, you're going to collapse as a result of total exhaustion.

Not to mention, there's also been a hint that there was some type of striking that was going on with this little boy. But like you had said, and this kind of gives a hint as to what wound up happening here, these children were down, Jackie, for almost nine days. So it's really, really difficult. Joe, what happened to this child? Explain it to me specifically. What does it actually mean? What does it do to your body to break it down?

Are we talking about lack of water? Are we talking about his heart stopped? What is it that actually killed him? Well, when you begin to think about it, our body is like a little engine, isn't it? And so it requires fuel. It requires lubrication, those sorts of things. And at a cellular level, our bodies require things like electrolytes. We hear about that electrolyte replacement in athletes.

You know, even high speed athletes have to have electrolytes. They drink all of these sports drinks in order to replace them. You can have a compromise of your sodium levels, for instance. And this goes to things that lead to things like cardiac arrest. So when you're being deprived of these basic elements, and also included in this is like potassium. These are being consumed by your body, this little engine in your body the entire time until you reach a point where you're going to have a rhythm event with your heart that's going to cause you to go into cardiac arrest. It's unsustainable.

And this child, Jackie, remember, this child's only six years old. And he is being forced by the one person that is in total control of his life at that moment, Tom, and each day, day in and day out. He knows no other master, if you will. So he is going to do specifically what he is told to do, because if he doesn't, he knows the price is going to be high. He'll be forced to sit against the wall or worse. Maybe he'll be beaten over and over again. You mentioned electrolytes. What exactly does that mean? Because you hear it all the time.

As a parent, your child gets sick, has diarrhea, has a stomach virus, has a cold. We worry about making sure their electrolyte levels are okay, but what does that actually mean? When you have an electrolyte deficiency, this goes to kind of the receptors in your body that are at a physiological level that are telling the mechanisms within your body, say for instance, your heart to beat. And so these become compromised to the point where your heart actually seizes after a period of time when they're deprived of them. So at an elemental level, all of these are being drained away. Everything, just like I mentioned, potassium, sodium, and of course, this complex of electrolytes. So everything kind of seizes up and compromises to the point where the child is

not going to have what is actually referred to as a classic heart attack, where we have a blockage in our heart because a child at six years old is not going to have blockage or atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, where they're going to have what's called a myocardial infarction. This is going to be a rhythm event where the heart actually begins to spasm. And in a moment, in just like a twinkling of the eye, suddenly the heart stops after it begins to kind of seize and the child collapses. And of course, oxygenated blood is not flowing through the body anymore. So the child's going to die. If the child had received immediate medical attention, could he have been saved?

Yeah, he could have been saved. And, you know, that's really the tragedy of all of this. I think that probably if Jones at some point in time had maybe just shown one scintilla of mercy to this little boy, he could have sat him down and given him a breather, maybe given him some something like a sports drink, maybe water, just water in and of itself, because the child's also becoming dehydrated at this point, just to give him a rest, maybe for 20 minutes, you know, that little window there where if he had been granted just a little bit of respite, he may have been able to endure. But just like my analogy with a motor vehicle, he ran this child to the point where the engine essentially blew and the child had had no chance of recovering from this. And what's really a shame is that as as this was going on, I can almost tell you what happened. This child visibly and I mean visibly went into a seizure a seizure in front of his father.

This man who was supposed to be taking care of him, this child seized right there. You can imagine the body goes rigid. The thumbs are tucked back. You'll see them begin gasp for air. They're kind of vibrating and shaking on the ground until there's nothing but just dead silence. How long would it have taken for this child to collapse? Are we talking an hour, two hours, or all day? I think that this is probably in totality. If you're going to run this child to death, I think that there has been mentioned in this case

that this may have gone on in excess of two hours at one point in time, and that would probably be sufficient to do this in. And again, when you have this lethal combination of this pumping of adrenaline, the deprivation of nutrients and the necessary elemental essentials that we require as human beings, it is a train wreck waiting to happen. And listen, there's also something else that you have to factor in here. And again, I don't know if they were able to assess this in Natan's body, but I'm thinking that there was probably ongoing what's referred to as deprivation along the way, where probably food and water for a protracted period of time, I mean, like days beforehand, were probably being withheld from him.

So you have this kind of event that's going on. And the father is just kind of sitting back, waiting, waiting for the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. And as it turned out, you know, he accused the child of short-circuiting, you know, the electrical system in the house and put that on this little six-year-old boy. Can you imagine? You know, he had actually claimed that the child had blown four sockets. You know, other than, you know, sticking a paperclip in a socket right now, I couldn't

even tell you how to blow a socket in a house. How much more so does that apply to a six-year-old child? And that is what the father was allegedly accusing the son of. And the father actually admitted to it. So I would have to imagine, too, that the size of a six-year-old played a large part in this, too. Because, you know, a six-year-old, how much do you weigh? Fifty pounds, if that? Yeah, it would be.

And again, you know, as adults, we have a certain level of energy stores. And, you know, that's considered to be like fats, for instance, that we carry on board in our body. And so we have sufficient energy that we can call upon. And if we keep balance and we're moving, we might be able to avoid, say, having some kind of cardiac problem as long as we don't get into extreme where essentially the needle is in the red, if you will. Well, this child, if he's deprived of nutrients, if he's deprived of the bare essentials, and this has been going on not just in the acute, that means sudden, but chronically where he's being denied food, all it's going to take is to push his little body closer and closer and closer to that red line. And it's at that point that he can't recover from that. And it would not, I think that it probably would not matter even if you had an ER physician there with a crash cart where they're trying to revive this child. I just don't see how they could have done it because the child had just literally been run ragged. Jackie, we've actually talked about just one of these precious little children and how that child, Natan, came to his death. But, you know, Jackie, there are four other children here,

four other children that this man had been gifted with. And they have a story to tell as well, don't they? They do, Joe. Eight-year-old Mara and seven-year-old Elias were strangled by Jones with his bare hands. That means most likely that he was looking the children in the face when he killed them. Yeah, and that's what makes this kind of manual. And this is, in fact, manual strangulation, where you're talking about the utilization of your bare hands to choke another human being to death. And there's many different types of manual strangulation,

but we have to assume that this was probably a throttling where you use both hands. You grab the neck on the anterior, which means the front, and you begin to squeeze, squeeze down until the child. And in these cases, as a matter of fact, with these two children, we're both completely deprived of oxygen. Now, there's two mechanisms at work here that can happen, Jackie. We have the mechanism of the squeezing that actually shuts down the blood flow to the brain. And it causes a condition with the brain that deprives it of oxygenated blood that rises up out of the carotid vessels. So you're clamping those vessels down. And absolutely, the brain begins to kind of almost strangulate as a result of lack of blood supply.

Then you have another thing that happens with manual strangulation, and that is when you have the trachea, the larynx, these structures that are kind of firm that are in our throat, you begin to think like the structure of the Adam's apple, for instance. And of course, the infamous hy this blood oxygen exchange takes place. And so that you've got these both of these mechanisms working at the same time. And so if one isn't effective, then the other might be. And then you wind up with a combination of both. And of course, the end is always lethal. How much pressure does it take to do this?

And how was he physically able to do this? It doesn't take much with these tender young necks of these children. Remember, these children are not very old. They're not very robust. This is a grown man. He's got large, probably muscled hands. And it's not going to take very much to overcome a child. And let me throw in one little aside here relative to Jones. Jones was interviewed. And one of the investigators actually asked this man, he said, did the kids struggle? Did they fight back?

And his response was chilling, absolutely chilling. And this is paraphrasing. He said, sure, wouldn't anybody? And just allow that to kind of seep down into your mind just for a second, that the dad could be that callous when he's describing squeezing, literally squeezing the life out of both of these children in those moments. And it really, you know, to your other question, it really doesn't, it doesn't take very long, if you will, to compromise or defeat the structures of the neck. You know, the way our bodies are put together, they're meant to function in kind of difficult circumstances,

when it's cold outside, when it's hot, when we're sick, all these sorts of things. But when you begin to compromise the structure, the muscles, all the supportive tissues, these airways, and certainly these vessels that supply oxygenated blood, it's not going to take much with a small child. And I would imagine that the whole event for both of these kids was probably took no more than four to five minutes with each child, if that. One thing that's kind of heartbreaking in this particular case is the fact that one of the kids, one of the kids actually is reported to have looked at his father as his dad is about to kill him. And he said,

Daddy, I love you. Can you imagine? That is heartbreaking, Joe, just chilling. Yes, it is, Jackie. And the fact that he would do this. And then, you know, you have to, you have to try to, and it's a scary thing to do. You kind of have to try to get into his mind. First off, why in the world would you want to make no bones about it?

This is a physical assault that results that stemming from the fact that he had essentially brought about the death of Natan simply through exhaustion and deprivation, he has purposed in his mind to begin to kill these children one by one. And it's a very rudimentary way to do it. It's not like he took the child out in some kind of complex event and ended their lives collectively. What he did here was at a very primal level. I mean, just think about it. This is very intimate. And you really said something key here.

When someone is choking another person, there's a high probability you're going to be face to face. And it's one of the most intimate things that you can do as far as the perpetration of murder. You're looking at them eye to eye. It's not like they're great extended arms length. More than likely, they're held close. The elbows are bent. They're being drawn into their body and just being squeezed. They're trying to apply, the perpetrator's trying to apply as much pressure as possible. And this is another thing that he would have borne witness to, Jackie. It wasn't just kind of looking into the eyes of these children as life left them. You're going to see physiological changes in the appearance of your children, okay?

So what happens here is that as you're beginning to squeeze the head, the head, because as I always say, the head is the most vascular area of the body. The blood is backing up in the head. And so the head turns, actually it turns this kind of lavacious to purple color. The eyes begin to protrude about. Sometimes the tongue will protrude. Many times people that are being choked will actually bite their tongue and the tongue protrudes out, is clenched between the teeth. And it's all of this is just this response that your body is struggling for air. And so he

would have literally borne witness to this as he hovered over each child. And this is flesh upon flesh. He is taking his hands, these hands that were supposed to have been there to protect these kids over the years, these hands that were supposed to provide love and care. And he uses them to literally constrict the life out of each one of these kids. Other than that infamous hyoid bone that we have talked about at great length in other cases that can be easily broken with pressure on it. Given the size difference between this man's hands and the necks of these children, would we have seen other broken bones in their spine, in their neck region? Yeah, not necessarily broken bones. And I want our listeners to understand this.

It's not necessarily, you know, I think that a lot of us have this idea that the snapping of necks, if you will, and that's kind of something that Hollywood does. What's really critical here is not so much the hyoid, but if you remember when I was talking about the larynx itself, the area where our oxygen travels through. This is what's referred to as a cartilaginous body. If folks at home will kind of touch your nose, you have a cartilaginous area to your nose that's below the bony structure. And it's comprised of cartilaginous bodies in there. And did you know with cartilage, cartilage fractures as well. Okay. And so just if you've ever had a friend that's had like an injured meniscus in their knee, that's something that's kind of common. That's a cartilaginous body. It's not actually ossified like a bony structure. So these will

actually fracture. And when they do fracture, this essentially breaks down the windpipe to the point where it doesn't function any longer. So at autopsy, when we go into these structures, what we're looking for are little focal areas of hemorrhage because you have what covers the larynx right here. You have what are called strap muscles, and they're these kind of crisscross muscles that lie across this area. And as pressure is applied to them, they develop little areas or focal areas of hemorrhage. Now, this is different than petechiae. We hear about petechiae a lot, and I'll get to that in just a second. But you'll see hemorrhage in the strap muscles that overlie these structures in the neck.

Now, going to petechiae, what happens with them? Well, this occurs when, do you remember when I talked about the congestion in the head? There's no blood return here. So the blood is seeking areas where it can kind of seep out, for instance, because of the intense pressure. In the eyes, it's most noticeable because the vessels in the eyes are very dainty. They're very fragile. And remember, they're called vessels. They're not storage units, okay? They're meant to move blood, not store blood. So more pressure is built up on

the inner walls of these little capillary beds, and they explode. And we get these little pinprick hemorrhages that are called petechial hemorrhages. And so that's something else that we're going to look for, particularly in the eyes. Sometimes you'll see them along the gum line as well. And sometimes they will actually appear on the lungs, depending upon how much pressure is being exerted and how much the individual is struggling. We have two other children to talk about, two-year-old Gabriel and one-year-old Abigail. They were choked with a belt because Timothy Jones' hands were too big for him to be able to do a manual strangulation. What would have been the difference in their deaths? This is an important delineation to make between a manual strangulation and what's referred to as a ligature strangulation. Now,

ligature can be made out of any number of things. I've seen them made with wire. I've seen them made with baling rope, like you see with bales of hay tied up. Electrical cord is very common. And then you've got woven rope. But you know, one of the most common things that we see utilized as a weapon and also as a means for people to take their own lives, are actually belts. You know why? Because most people possess a belt of some kind. And so it's something that has utility. It's something that's within reach. So, yeah, his hands probably, these are very tiny children.

I mean, you know, if I remember correctly, Abigail, Elaine, she was only one. And of course, Gabriel was only two. Just think about how diminutive they are in comparison to a grown man. So yeah, he probably couldn't get both of his hands wrapped around their neck. So he's going to use what is at his disposal. He may have even taken this belt off of his own waist to facilitate this. Now, this is going to be a ligature strangulation. So this is going to look, when we do the examination from a forensic standpoint, this is going to look completely different than the presentation that you'll have when someone is actually throttled or choked with bare hands or strangled with bare hands. You'll have widespread hemorrhage in the soft tissues, underlying skin, and the muscles with the hands. But with ligature, it's very, very specific.

And let's just think about a belt. Let's think that maybe this is a two-inch width belt. Well, you're going to have what are called margins, which will be those areas that define the outside of the belt. So just imagine a belt overlying a surface. So as it's squeezed down on an area, the outer boundaries, it almost looks like if you're looking at it from an aerial shot, it almost looks like a road when you're looking down at it. You'll see the outer boundaries of that road or the belt overlying the neck and you'll have hemorrhage there. And sometimes it'll be abraded, you know, like you have an abraded knee, you get an abrasion. Well, that'll happen on the neck with a ligature because the

person's struggling, all right? You have this friction between the surface of the skin and actually just contacting area with the ligature that's being utilized. And so you'll have this kind of rubbed area there as well. Now, how does this work? Well, there's a couple of ways that a ligature can work. You can use two hands with it where you essentially put it around the neck, kind of reverse order, if you will, and then tighten it really quick and strangle the person from the rear. with a belt because it's got a buckle. The individual can wrap the belt around an individual's neck and then run the end of the belt through the buckle and essentially cinch it down. And it makes almost like a noose where you're standing above them. And, you know, in a case like this, where you've got these two very tiny, tiny little children, that is not beyond reason there that this is a way that this would have been done.

You should just kind of cinch the belt down on there. Now, are you going to see the same things physiologically? Yeah, you'll see a lot of the same things that you see with a manual strangulation. There'll still be petechiae. You'll have underlying hemorrhage and soft tissue, but it's going to be very uniform. When you have bare hands, it'll be spread everywhere. But with a belt, in this case, it'll be very uniform. It'll be defined. And even when you, what we call reflect the skin of the neck, you'll be able to make out that outline many times on the surface of the muscles as well. And so you're also going to have associated

petechiae, where the little vessels, again, just like with a manual strangulation, are going to burst in the eyes. And in addition to that, you're going to see potentially, if he did, in fact, cinch this, this is kind of horrific to think about. Not that this isn't already, but you will many times see a buckle mark on the back of the most intimate ways that you can possibly do. In the house that you sheltered them in. What do you do with their bodies then? Jackie, this story just gets more bizarre as it goes along it does joe timothy jones jr at this point after killing his five children ages one through eight wraps their bodies in plastic places them in his car and drives across the South for nine days before he dumps their bodies in the trunk of his vehicle for nine days with five bodies.

Yeah. And, you know, I'm thinking, you know, what in the world are you doing? And Jackie, let me correct you about something. You had mentioned that he wrapped them in plastic. He didn't wrap them in plastic. He put these little bodies in garbage bags. And I think that's emblematic of the way he kind of viewed them. He viewed them as nothing more than refuse, if you will. And he spent this protracted period of time running up and down the road in a mad fear of trying to figure out

what in the world am I going to do with these bodies? How am I not going to draw attention to myself? And all the while, you can't stop nature, can you? All the while as he's driving down the road in this Escalade that he's driving, those bodies are riding with him, these precious little angels, what's left of them, sweating inside of these bags, because that's what happens to bodies like this when they're actually encased in plastic. It's speeding up the process of decomposition. So let's just think about that just for a second. All the while, every single day, every moment, every second that ticks off of that clock, these bodies are progressing further and further and further down the post-mortem timeline.

And that means that changes are going on at a molecular level. The bodies are essentially going through what's referred to as autolytic changes. And kind of let me explain to you what that is. Auto meaning self. The body is kind of in a state of self-digestion is what's happening. Remember, at a cellular level, cellular respiration has ceased. So the body begins to break down. It's literally beginning to consume itself after this period of time. And with that, all of these gases are created. And you get this horrible odor that rises up out of each one of these children. It's not just one child.

You've got five children that you're conveying. And each of them are unique in their own structure. And they're decomposing probably at different rates, but still all the while decomposing as dad is driving down the road with their remains in the back. And it's August in the South, Joe. The deep South. You're right. It's not just the South. It's the deep South.

I've lived here my entire life, Jackie. And let me tell you something I know about the deep South in August. It's hot. It's hot. Even if you've got the air on, when you get out of the car, every time you go to refuel, hot air seeps in. And that's going to promote this process. We talked about the autolytic change that's going on within the body. Then you've got this kind of putrefaction that's going on. That's an external force on the body.

And this is sped up by heat. It's like he's driving down the road in the car. It almost becomes like a convection oven where heat is kind of swirling and circulating around him and the remains of his children as he's going down the road. These children are now breaking down, not just at a molecular level, at a cellular level, rather. They're breaking down not just at a molecular level, at a cellular level rather, they're breaking down now externally. The bodies are beginning to swell. You've got this foul odor that's rising up, and it permeates everything. I've actually worked cases in the past, Jackie, where bodies were left in cars, decomposed, and then people came and retrieved the bodies,

removed them from the cars. And I'm talking about a year down range from when the perpetrator came back to the scene and removed the body. And you could still smell the decomposition in the fabric of the car. It's almost impossible to get that smell out. So everywhere he goes, everything he does, if he's stopping to get a candy bar, if he's stopping to get a soda pop, if he's stopping to top off his car with gas, everywhere he would go, his body would just be infused with this smell, with this aroma of his decomposing children. into a convenience store and just walking in unbathed, unshowered and walking past people and them smelling him and thinking, what in the world is going on with this guy?

Because this is not something that you just normally associate with everyday life. This is something, and I think that it goes to something in our primal being. It's almost like an indication of fear, I think, if you will. There's something about it that when people smell this smell, they know something horrible has happened at this point in time. And people will alert. Now, somebody might not say anything to you about it, but people would have taken notice of him. And still to this day, if you could track down his car, that car would still have that odor of death in it. The smell of decomposition, Joe, that you're talking about is one of the reasons that Timothy Jones got caught.

He was stopped on a routine sobriety check, a roadblock, if you will, and an officer was paying attention to exactly what you just described. Yes, he was, Jackie. That officer, can you imagine it's at night, you've got a flashlight, you're standing out there and you've got all of your colleagues. This is a sobriety checkpoint. They're checking to see if, you know, just randomly if people are DUI that are going through there, you know, on this county road. And all of a sudden this, this escalates, slowly pulls up. And you can imagine the guy in the front seat is probably nervous. He's got the cops there. They got their flashlights. They're checking. They don't know. He doesn't know if they're looking for him or this is just, they're just randomly checking

people. But when that window comes down in that August heat in Mississippi, because that's where this was, that smell would have rolled out of that window. And something I can tell you about cops, and I've heard this over and over and over again from all of my friends that are in law enforcement, this sort of thing. And I know it anyway, because I'm a death investigator, but they always say, they say, once you smell the smell of death, you never forget it, as long as you live. And when that cop approached that window and he stuck his head in there to ask this fellow, Mr. Jones, how's it going this evening? That smell rolled out and it hit that cop right in the nose. And he knew instantaneously that something was

afoot, something horrible. And it's at that point in time, they pulled Jones out of the vehicle and they were asking him, who are you and why does your vehicle smell like this? Where were the children, Joe? You know, where he was found was just into Mississippi, out of Alabama. Jackie, there's any number of roads that, you know, that connect. These two states are adjoining. You can go down I-20 corridor and you go from Alabama directly into Mississippi. But Jones, turns out, he had gone down what has been previously described as a logging road. And if you don't know what a logging road is,

it's very, very rough. It's generally more or less like a path where big trucks go in and they pull out pine trees that are being harvested for pulpwood. And he had found one of these roads. And he decided, while he was still in Alabama, that he was going to go down one of these logging roads. There's a lot of brush on either side. And he deposited these poor little precious children, their bodies. And, you know, I've seen the crime scene images of these, Jackie. He didn't just simply take the bags and bury them. He didn't, you know, lay them out in some respect, respectable way.

He took these kids and he just created a pile. Remember what I said earlier, these children wearing garbage bags. And that's what it looked like. It looked like piles of garbage that someone had just deposited in a rural area and then driven off. And what's very sad is that with Mira, the oldest child, I hate to even say this, wild animals had gotten into her bag and had begun to feast on her, feast on her remains. And that's the horror of this because his children, not only did he not protect them in life, not only did he destroy them in life and take their lives away from them,

he failed miserably protecting them in death because they are subject to all of the elements surrounding them, everything. And when a decomposing body is in the wild like this, just one, now we've got five. This is sending off signals to every bit of the wildlife around there. Everything from foxes to raccoons to possum, anything or wild dogs, anything that is going to feast on flesh is going to be out there. And that's what happened to these children's bodies. To this day, to this day, Jackie, there are still police officers and prosecutors that are having a very, very difficult time

getting these cases out of their minds. I can certainly understand why that would be, Joe. While the only true justice would be for these children to still be alive, Jones was arrested and tried, found guilty, and has been sentenced to death in South Carolina. Jackie, what sets this case apart from every other case that I've covered is the fact that these homicides, let me rephrase that, these murders, because this is what this is. These are murders, brutal murders. These took place in South Carolina. I've never seen a case where you had such what's called interagency cooperation. Did you know that when those with the state police in Alabama found and located these bodies, they had the courtesy

to contact the authorities in South Carolina and request their crime scene unit all the way in South Carolina? This is a good 500 or 600 miles away. They blocked traffic on I-20, and they held it. They held that crime scene until CSI from South Carolina could drive all the way from there to the far western part in this rural, isolated area of Alabama in order to process this scene. And when the police arrived there, the sun was going down. It was getting dark and they couldn't process the scene immediately. They had to wait till the next morning.

But during that time, they began to make plans. And all of these agencies got together and worked and wound up getting a conviction in this case. And Mr. Jones right now, he sits on death row in South Carolina. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.