Who Killed Jennifer Judd? - Ep.1: Serial Killer or Serial Liar?

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

In 1992, 20-year-old Jennifer Judd is murdered in her own home. Her husband of just nine days, Justin Judd, comes home from work to find his high school sweetheart lying on the kitchen floor with more than a dozen stab wounds. The murder shocks the small communities of Baxter Springs, Kansas, where the couple lived, and nearby Picher, Oklahoma, where Jennifer grew up. Despite a few early leads, the case went cold for nearly a decade. Then, a man confessed.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Nature's Deadliest, Still Alive, and Monsters Inside Me. There are countless organisms that make a living off of us. On May 11th, 1992, a 20-year-old woman named Jennifer Judd is found brutally murdered in her apartment in Kansas. Jennifer's body is discovered by her new husband, Justin Judd. Investigations reveal that Jennifer died from multiple stab wounds. Suspects are investigated, but for years the case goes cold

until 2004 when a man confesses to Jennifer's murder. Suspects are investigated, but for years the case goes cold, until 2004, when a man confesses to Jennifer's murder. But his confession raises more questions than it answers. From ID and ARC Media, I'm Sarah Kalin, and this is Who Killed Jennifer Judd? The morning of Monday, May 11th, 1992, started like any other in the rural community of Baxter Springs, Kansas. 20-year-old Justin Judd wakes in the pre-dawn hours. He gets himself ready for work as quietly as he can, hoping not to wake his wife, Jennifer.

Justin's a big guy. A former high school football and basketball star, he's about 6'2", and he's solid, a regular at the local gym. As he gets ready for work, his wife, Jennifer, sleeps in. She works a late shift as a cashier at a local convenience store. Jennifer is a petite woman with sandy brown curly hair in that classic late 80s style. Like Justin, Jennifer was a standout athlete, having starred on the high school softball and basketball teams. She has bright brown eyes and a very easy smile. This morning routine is new. It's Justin's first day back at work since the sweethearts got married

just over a week earlier in a big wedding full of family and friends. At around 6.30 that morning, Justin climbs into his blue pickup truck. He pulls out of the driveway of their duplex apartment to start the nine-mile drive to the chemical plant where he works as a security guard. He makes a left and then another left, turning onto historic Route 66. About 10 minutes later, he makes a right onto a dusty gravel farm road. The sun starts to peek over the long, flat horizon as he pulls up to the chemical plant a few minutes late for his 6.30 shift. An hour or so later, he realizes he's forgotten his lunch.

He calls their apartment. Jennifer says she'll bring it over before his lunch break, which starts at 10.30 a.m. Justin and Jennifer met almost five years earlier, when she was a freshman and he was a sophomore at neighboring high schools. After graduation, they stayed together, even as Justin took jobs out of state for a few months at a time. On May 2, 1992, in a morning service at the Baptist Church Jennifer attended her entire life, they exchanged their vows.

The couple then went off to Branson, Missouri for a quick honeymoon and were home in time to spend Saturday playing pickup softball with a group of friends. On Sunday, the newlyweds attended a Mother's Day church service with Jennifer's parents and then met Justin's parents for a backyard barbecue. They imagined long lives full of these moments with family and friends and had no idea how this dream would be shattered less than 24 hours later. That Monday morning, Justin's lunch hour comes and goes with no sign of Jennifer. Initially just hungry and annoyed, Justin calls the apartment again. There's no

answer. Ten minutes later, he calls again. Still no answer. Less annoyed and growing increasingly concerned, he calls her parents. They haven't heard from her. Landlines are his only option. He couldn't check Life 360. He couldn't track a cell phone. Maybe she's gone out and forgotten his lunch. It would be out of character, but he hopes it is that simple. At 11.45, Justin's friend and groomsman Chuck Chance shows up at the chemical plant. Chuck lives about 10 minutes away from Justin and Jennifer, and he says he'd stopped by their apartment earlier that morning

He'd seen only Jennifer's car was in the driveway and he assumed that meant Justin wasn't home so he figured he was at work Chuck decided to head there He asks if Justin wants to go to the gym after work Justin says yes and Chuck decides to hang out until they can go. Justin's distracted, though.

He's wondering why Jennifer hasn't shown up or called. As a pretty young guy who's fairly new on the job, he can't leave in the middle of his shift. When his shift ends at 2.30, he drives straight home, kicking up dirt and dust as he speeds along the unpaved farm roads, leading him back to Route 66. Chuck follows in his little white Geostorm. Justin feels uneasy as he pulls up and sees Jennifer's car in the driveway. He sees his lunch on the passenger seat, the banana showing signs of browning from sitting in the heat.

He reaches the front door. It's unlocked. Now he knows something is wrong. Justin rushes into the apartment. Chuck follows. It's very dark inside, and after coming in from the bright light outside, it's hard to see at first. Justin goes down the hall to look in the bedroom.

He doesn't see Jennifer. The bed is made, but it looks a bit must, like someone has been sitting on it. There's a can of soda spilled over on the floor. He almost runs towards the kitchen. His eyes have adjusted to the light inside now, and he can see that he's walked into a nightmare. The body of 20-year-old Jennifer Judd was found in her Baxter Springs home.

Judd had been stabbed a total of nine times. I was in my dorm room at NEO, and Jen's driver's license come up on the TV. That's how I found out. I didn't believe it. I thought, oh, she's been in a car wreck. She's done something because she's, you know, everybody had cassettes back then. We made mixtapes. She had them all over the car and everything else. I thought, oh, she's changed something and crashed or done something. I still, I just couldn't believe it when they said she was gone.

This is Jennifer's close friend, Chris Hausch. Her uncle, David, was our elementary, junior high basketball coach. We all had the same friends. We all grew up. You know, I went to church with her on Sunday. If you stayed the night at Debbie's house on Saturday night, you had to get up and go to church Sunday morning regardless. Even though Jen may be in the bathroom putting her makeup on at church for the first 20 minutes, we were still at church. Chris still lights up as she talks about Jennifer more than 30 years later.

In the summers, she liked to go to the creek. She'd go out and put your old plastic lawn chair that folded in like that in the water and lay out. She was a sun worshiper. She liked to buy clothes. She liked to shop. Everything had to match. Well, you know, back then we had big hair and big bangs and Aquanet hairspray and the blow dryer and the wings. And Jen, I don't know how many times she fried herself underneath the sun tanning lamp.

She'd get under that thing and fall asleep. And then she'd blister up. She was outgoing. She had a great laugh. She was always smiling in a good mood. Very family oriented. Jennifer was the oldest of three girls. Her youngest sister was born when Jen was in high school.

She saw him by and picked me up. After Kay was born, I went to the hospital and seen Debbie and Kay. She absolutely worshipped the ground the little girl walked on. I spent a lot of time with her, probably my freshman and sophomore year, at the Express at Pitcher. Just sitting, not doing anything. I'd get out of basketball practice and go over there. By then, Jen was really coming into herself.

A star athlete, yet girly as can be. She never would leave the house without any makeup on. I mean, you've never seen her not fix that. Not even on the basketball court. She had a sweatband thing she wore around her head. But her bangs were still big hair. She was a lot of fun. We'd go drag main.

Living on her prayer. I can see us driving down the road singing. That part, yeah. It was the 80s. Chris wanted to get out of the area. But Jen felt at home. She planned to build her life here. Her whole goal through everything else was to get married

and live happily ever after and have a family. That dream was starting to come true. Nine days later, when news of Jennifer's murder came across Chris's dorm room TV, Chris drove straight home. She kept hoping to wake up, to find out this wasn't true. It just didn't make sense. There wasn't anything out of the ordinary with her or her family. Just good people.

No, nothing odd in their family at all. Uncles were all good. Grandma was good. Debbie and Dale were good. You know, they'd give you the shirt off their back to help you. When Chris got home, her hopes of learning there'd been some awful mistake were dashed. It was very real indeed. The line was out the funeral home, kind of curved around where the,

underneath the canopy carport thing. I was probably in line for an hour and a half trying to get to Debbie and Dale. Of course, the casket was closed, which was a blessing. And there was everybody from our community there, all age ranges. I mean just everyone. I was walking up the stairs to the funeral home at Pitcher and Jen's grandma, Garrett, was coming down the stairs, and she grabbed ahold of me and hugged me, and she whispered in my ear, Chris, she wasn't raped.

And I was so thankful, you know, even though we had lost her, that she didn't go through that trauma. You know, she was scrappy. We got into it even though we were very good friends. We got into it two or three times on the basketball floor and be wrestling for the ball in a clock ball versus pitcher game. I'd foul her, she'd elbow me, play point guard. So she wasn't one to go down lightly for anything. What happened to Jennifer left the entire community in shock. And what's worse, everyone knew it was probably someone in their midst. Someone they knew and trusted.

It was the 14th, I guess, was her funeral. We lived out in the middle of nowhere, west of Welch, on a 700-acre farm in the middle of nowhere. And so I made my dad follow me home, check the house. And I grew up learning how to shoot. Shoot skied as a kid. And I was like, if you're going to leave, we're going to lock up the house and you give me a gun. I'm not staying in the house by myself. And he gave me a.38 revolver with six hollow points.

And I slept with it under my pillow for probably five years and then moved it to the bedside table. It's a very small community. You don't know for sure what happened. What we know for sure is that someone came into Jennifer's home that morning, stabbed her three times in the back, and stabbed her six times in the chest. When Justin and Chuck walked into the house, they were far too late to save her. Justin found her with her shirt pulled up partially,

as though the attacker had intended to cover her wounds. Justin panicked. He initially didn't even see that she'd been stabbed. He didn't see blood, as most of it was underneath her. Thinking maybe she'd collapsed from some unknown medical issue, he checked for a pulse and told Chuck to call 911. Chuck dialed, but couldn't seem to get any words out. Justin grabbed the phone from him and told the dispatcher what was happening as best as he understood in

those first moments. As he hung up, he punched the wall. His fist went straight through. Only after hanging up did he look again and actually notice the small pool of blood next to his bride. The nightmare was getting much, much worse. Baxter Springs police arrived within minutes. Justin and Chuck were separated for questioning. The police collected evidence, but within hours, the case was turned over to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, the KBI. The coroner determined Jennifer died at 10.17 a.m. Neighbors reported seeing a woman walking near the apartment building that morning. Others said they saw Chuck's wife's car, the white Dodge Neon, in the area, and still more thought they saw Justin's mom at the apartment. Local booster clubs began hanging

posters and billboards with the slogan, Justice for Jennifer, quickly popped up all over the region. Chuck Chance was the prime suspect before the sun rose on May 12th. Police questioned him. They collected hair and blood samples from him. They collected these from Justin, too, as well as another half dozen or so men in the area. This is a tight-knit community. Jennifer graduated high school less than 10 miles away in a class of 34 students. Everyone wanted this case solved. And yet the case quickly went cold. It stayed cold for more than 12 years until December 2004 when someone started talking.

We had a lady that was murdered named Lisa Nichols. It was during Hurricane Ivan. This is Sheriff Paul Birch of Mobile County, Alabama. In 2004, as authorities dug the city and county out from under the rubble of Hurricane Ivan, they learned a woman had been murdered during the storm's immediate aftermath. The victim's daughter and son-in-law

found her remains in the bathtub. She had been sexually assaulted, shot, and then burned. A beer can found at the scene did not match the only brand of beer Lisa was known to drink, indicating that she had welcomed another person, potentially her killer, into the house. So, first thing you do is canvass the area.

We were at a little bit of a disadvantage because of the hurricane. There are a lot of residents who still have not returned home. So, for a couple of days, we reached out to the ones that we could, made contact, and one in particular, toward the end of Van Parten Road, the opposite end of where Lisa lived, said, now that y'all asked, there was a guy in a red Jeep Cherokee

that stopped by here. He was acting very, very strange. He said he was almost out of gas, wanted some gas. And he goes, you know, my family was home. We just got home. I wanted to get him out of here. I gave him a five-gallon can of gas. And he poured like one or two gallons and brought it back. And he's like, and just kept acting weird. And I just ushered him on and said, you can take all the gas they can with you, whatever. He remembered that it was an Alabama tag

and that the first two digits were 11. So he felt concerned enough that he made a mental note of that. And so obviously one of the first things we did was asking if anybody knew anybody who read Jeep Cherokee. And then we also called and had NCIC try to run all Jeep Cherokees beginning with 11, you know, red in color. While the search was run through a national database, Paul and a handful of officers continued investigating the scene.

At some point, a neighbor came home from where he'd been riding out the storm. We asked him, and he goes, Oklahoma has a Red Sheep charity. Who's Oklahoma? And he said, John Paul Chapman. John Paul Chapman, nickname Oklahoma. The neighbor, Mark Bentley, and his wife often hosted short-term boarders, guys who were doing manual labor work in the area,

guys like John Paul Chapman, who said he was in town working on the dogs. He's worked for him before, and he goes, but I don't think he would do anything like that. And that's when I said, well, how do we get in touch with him? And he said, well, he's been staying here. He'll probably be back at some time. And around that time, we were able to narrow down. I want to say there were five or six red Cherokees that began with 11.

And John Paul Chapman was one of them. Now we need to find out about him. And at the time, you know, we ran it, and there was a, on an NCIC arrest, there was a previous robbery, and that was all we really knew about him, and that he wasn't from here. But yet he had an Alabama driver's license, which was strange.

And as the investigation progressed, we got a tip on him being involved in an altercation with some other drug dealers, meth dealers and users, and that he had abandoned his Jeep in a wooded area not too far from the scene. So we went there, looked for him, didn't find him, recovered the vehicle. So I reached out to him.

I talked to him a couple times on the phone, real casual, said, hey, we're just trying to exclude people so we can focus more on who was responsible. And I think it was the following day, we got word that he was trying to get a ride to the bus station. So I was able to reach him by phone, I said, look, you know, he said you were gonna meet with us

and do this so we can exclude you. Yeah, I'm working on my vehicle that's got some problems you know i need to get it fixed and i'll come meet y'all well i knew right then he was lying because we had the vehicle he didn't know we had a big problem so he hung up and then he called right back and blocked the number well i'd already had my partner document the number that was on the phone. And I said, call dispatch, have that number traced, and we'll see where it is. It was a block over from the scene, so we proceeded in that direction in a hurry. So we get to the address where he is in the passenger side of the vehicle.

I don't remember if it was a car or truck. And you could see him pointing and yelling, you know, and we now know he was telling the driver, go, go, go, or I'm going to kill you. And so we blocked him in and put them both at a gunpoint. We didn't know what the involvement was of the other person. And the very first words out of his mouth was, I had every intention of making you kill me. And so that's not something that, you know, someone hadn't been involved in something bad since. On September 21st, 2004,

Paul Birch arrested John Paul Chapman. When we first arrested him, he was real insistent about calling his mama. You know, he was clearly a mama's boy. And, you know, we made note of the, he was real insistent about calling his mom. He was clearly a mama's boy. And, you know, we made note of the number he was calling. Chapman called a number in Miami, Oklahoma, around 700 miles away. Given what he knew about John Paul Chapman, this didn't make sense to Paul. He filed this away and began the interview process

with the suspect. Day after day, he sat in a small room at the sheriff's office going over every little detail. He kept lying about ever being in the house. We finally got him to where he said, yeah, I met her and talked to her on the back porch, but, you know, never went inside. And then we knew that somebody had been because of the two different cans. At the scene, police found a can of Bud Light, a brand that Lisa never drank. Her family was adamant that she drank only natural light. They found a natural light can upside down in her sink as she always left them when she finished a can. This second can, found on a dresser in the bedroom, indicated that a second person had been in the house.

Paul suspected Lisa had seen Chapman around her neighbor's house while he was staying there and that they were friendly enough to share a beer. And he just would not put himself inside. So while we took a quick break, I went down to Crime Scene, had them fingerprint me on some of those cards, index cards. I said, well, John, you say you never went in, but we know Lisa only drank this. We know that the Bentley's bought you these beers. I think it was Bud Light. And I said, but these are your prints on this beer.

And he changed it. Well, I went in, but I didn't go. I went into the kitchen. So once you get them to change their story, especially more than once, I mean, you've got them. Paul had him. Chapman confessed. Still, something didn't seem right, especially considering Chapman's record

didn't include anything that might reflect a crime of this nature. The way the crime scene was set and all that, it was not something that somebody who had committed the first murder would do. Everything at the scene where Lisa Nichols was killed looked like the work of a seasoned killer. Setting a localized fire to conceal physical evidence, the obvious comfort with spending a significant amount of time with the body afterwards, the way it appeared to have been at least a little bit planned out

ahead. So we sent out a nationwide teletype with his name and details of the crime and trying to find out if there were any other similar crimes to bring in touch with us. So the following day, we received a teletype from Missouri State Prison and said, look, I don't know who y'all have, but you know, we have John Paul Chapman, same social security number, same date of birth. He's been here for 10 years on a robbery. And we physically went and looked, he's still here. So we called my M.A.P.D. and said, hey, do y'all know Jeannie Beard. Jeannie Beard was the name of the woman assigned the phone number the suspect had insisted on calling when he was arrested.

They were like, yes, we're very familiar with her. She's, you know, a thorn in this community. And she has one son who's a fugitive, you know, who's raped several women in and around the area. And he was a serial rapist in the area and had raped and sexually tortured a woman before fleeing you know that last time his name is Jeremy Brian Jones so I went over to the jail had him brought to the front had a folder in my hand and said you know how you been doing Jeremy and just you could see the facial expression change and you know, how you been doing, Jeremy? And just, you could see the facial expression change,

and, you know, he kind of, almost like a sigh of relief, and his words were, you know, that's the first time I've heard my name in about five years. Paul Birch had only an inkling of who he had just caught. He had no way of knowing what would happen when Jeremy Jones started confessing. We continued to talk to him about the Lisa Nichols case, and then throughout several weeks' time,

he began to talk about other crimes. Nature is a dangerous place. On I Was Prey, the podcast podcast listen to the life or death experiences of people who have survived animal attacks natural disasters and deadly parasites alike featuring audio from discovery channel science channel and animal planet from hit shows like this came out of me nature's deadliest, Still Alive, and Monsters Inside Me. There are countless organisms that make a living off of us. Listen to I Was Prey wherever you get your podcasts.

Jeremy Jones is an average-sized guy, about 5'8", with brown hair, that he dyed blonde for most of his late teens and 20s. He grew up in Miami, Oklahoma. He began getting into trouble with the law when he was still in high school, and his first serious arrest came in 1995, in connection with a rape in the area. Jones raped at least two more women with increasing degrees of brutality. Those women went to the police.

They filed charges. Yet Jeremy Jones never served time. He got probation, and in late 2000, another woman reported Jones for rape. This violated his probation. Authorities filed a warrant for his arrest. Jones went on the run. In nearby Joplin, Missouri, he met a woman at a bar and charmed her into selling him her son's identification. That man was serving a lengthy prison sentence himself and wouldn't be needing his driver's license or birth certificate anytime

soon. For the bargain basement price of $50, Jeremy Brian Jones became John Paul Chapman. Over the next three and a half years, while living mostly in Georgia, Jones was pulled over on traffic stops. He was arrested for exposing himself, he was repeatedly arrested for domestic violence, all while being a fugitive, wanted for violent felonies in Oklahoma. But with each of these arrests, when police ran fingerprints, nothing came back.

Everyone somehow completely failed to notice that these were not John Paul Chapman's fingerprints. There was a glitch somewhere in the system, and it seemed that no one was smart enough to piece together that this man simply was not who he said he was. Until he ran up against Paul Burge. And once Jones confessed to killing Lisa Nichols... He started talking about murders and rapes in other jurisdictions, out of state.

He'll sit here and just BSing and talking about football hunting, whatever. But the minute he starts to talk about a case, he sits up straight, his expression changes on his face, and then he starts talking about it. They made it consistently. He had no problem discussing his methods of killing women, the horrible things he would do to them that only he would know because forensics would have details about the injuries that were not released to the public. That's a former FBI agent named Michelle. When Jones started confessing to cases in other states, Birch called in the FBI.

So, you know, at the time, Michelle was assigned. Nobody knew how he would act bringing in someone else, especially a female. And he would open up a lot more of an issue with her there because obviously he was attracted to her. And he just, you know, in his mind thinks, you know, hey, I'm God's gift to women. So, you know, we use that to our advantage. It's almost like he was bragging or showing off. This is pretty standard with predators like Jones.

They also tend to think they're always the smartest person in the room. Jones knew that she was an FBI agent, but he made the assumption that she was my wife. She wasn't. He made that assumption, and he was excited about it, so we decided to roll with it. In these interviews, Jones demonstrated clearly the way the rules of right and wrong are just different for a remorseless killer. And the ways in which they mostly engage in a sort of mimicry of human behavior. Manners and etiquette drilled into him at an early age. He can act accordingly after decades of practice.

But darkly detailed descriptions of his violence? It doesn't naturally click in his mind that this is far more offensive or upsetting to his audience than any four-letter word might be. So he would make these, I guess, confessions about tool marks and not look at me, not look at anybody particularly, just look around and speak about this incident. And then he would use the F word or something like that and catch himself and look at me and say, oh, I'm sorry, Michelle, I forgot you were in the room, which just told me his sense of what's right and wrong was completely twisted compared to what a normal individual would feel. It was somewhere toward the end of December of 04.

The first time he mentioned Jennifer Judd, he alluded that he had known Jennifer from school and that they had a relationship of some type and that they maintained a relationship even after she got married and that her husband was abusive and jealous. And he got to know kind of her husband's pattern of going to work that the morning that she was killed, he waited and watched the husband drive off to work and then went to the apartment and then you know the husband called and said he was coming home

and she's telling him to leave because you know husband's on the way home they get into an argument and turns physical and he accidentally killed her and he was typical in the way he did this. He wouldn't tell everything at one time. You know, he may tell a little bit this time. You may go a couple of more meetings and he not say anything about it and then he'll bring it up again, you know, and give a little more details. Okay, this is where things begin to get complicated

when trying to piece together the truth. Confessions from serial offenders can take many shapes, and the way Jones does this is not uncommon. This doling out of the information, the truth peppered with lies and vice versa. There is a game-like quality to it for this breed of offender, and he knows exactly what he's doing as he engages in it. Well, that evolved into the fact that he went over there,

and same kind of beginnings where he watched the husband leave. He wanted to have sex. She didn't want to. They began fighting, and she tries to leave, and that's when he stabs her with knives that were at the house. And what caught my attention was that he said there were two knives involved, and that one, the handle broke,

and the blade was still in her. And so he grabbed a second knife and then finished killing her. And then he took the knife with him and left. And, you know, so he discarded them shortly after leaving. Paul didn't know the details of Jennifer's case or anything about the investigation. He'd never even heard of Miami, Oklahoma,

never mind been there or talked to the local police. But now he knew they needed each other's help in making sense out of Jeremy Jones. Well, when we finally get a hold of someone to, you know, try to verify that, they're like, yeah, that's absolutely true. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation was handling Jennifer's case

because she had died in Baxter Springs, Kansas, just over the Oklahoma state line. KBI said they'd send a couple of agents to speak with Jones and determine if he was telling the truth. A week later, agents Larry Thomas and Ray London walked into the Mobile County Sheriff's Office to sit down with Jones. Birch sat in. A camera recorded the conversation. Hi, Jeremy. This is Larry Thomas. Hi, Jeremy. Birch sat in. A camera recorded the conversation. Hi, Jeremy.

This is Larry Thomas. Hi, Jeremy. London, KBO. Hi. Good to see you. Just so you know, it's official. We're with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. The footage is a bit grainy.

They're in a conference room, all sitting around one end of a long wooden table. Jones' hands are free. his ankles are shackled. The main reason we're here is there's one case in particular that we picked up as a cold case squad. In 1998, our director formed a cold case squad. He took three or four agents and put together a group that all we do is look at unsolved cases and reviewing cases. One of those cases that we picked up was the Jennifer Judd case in Baxter Springs. I don't know what to talk to you about on Jennifer Judd. We're just trying to put the story together,

and it's probably uncommon for two cops to come in here and try to talk you out of something. Over the next six hours, Jones tells these men his version of events. For whatever reason... I know that I was there that day. You know, I've had bad dreams about it. I know that me and her had a fight that day. And I know I stabbed her.

I might not remember, you know, for whatever reason. I know that she's not here right now. These tapes are a fraction of the 16 hours he spent with the KBI agents. And as I watch them, I'm doing as those agents did that day. I'm attempting to sort truth from fiction. I thought I was going to wait on Justin to come home, and I was going to kill Justin. You know? Justin wasn't a small dude. to sort truth from fiction. I would need to leave. I don't know, I'd sit down in the chair, on the couch, and tell her I was leaving, I was gonna stay right there. And she came over, down on her knees,

begged me, you know what I'm saying, told me to please leave, you know what I'm saying, and just wanted to tell me that what me and her had was sex, and what her and him had was love. You know, it didn't matter how much I cried, how much I, it didn't matter what I said, What me and her had was things, what her and him had was love. You know, it didn't matter how much I cried, how much I, it didn't matter what I said, she wasn't gonna change her mind, okay? If you go through whatever type of work

that was in the room before, you went through that door of the apartment, what happened? And now that you've thought about it more and we've been asking you questions about it, can you in more detail tell us the sequence of events yeah the speaker was arguing uh saying we kissed and vote around okay we messed around we met around before the couch this is jones's description of the morning of May 11, 1992. Earlier in the interview, he told investigators he and Jennifer were having an affair.

He references this throughout his detailed account of the morning. He also refers to Jennifer's husband, Justin Judd. She told me that he was going to be home in a couple hours, okay? And that's where I come up with the timeline. That's why I come up with 12, okay? She told me he was coming home in a couple hours okay and that's where i come up with the timeline that's why i come up with 12. okay she told me he was coming home in a couple hours okay you know uh i can't remember there was a bruise on her somewhere on her thigh or leg or something i'm playing like they're like under her knee there's a there was a bruise on her somewhere and i asked her about the bruise where

did it come from and she told me it came from him. He had hit her or something, and that's when I snapped. That's why I went crazy and fell, and went on him, and I killed him. I'm gay. She told me that was all, you know, it was when we got to the fight, and I accidentally cut her.

You know, and that's where we ended up, in the bathroom or something, trying to wipe it off. In the bathroom. Bathroom or kitchen sink, one of those things, one of the same ones. I remember having as a towel and water fair thing and So clean it up Yeah Every now and then I went sit on the couch and she said I gotta go I gotta go You know, it's on the kids on the look on looking outside, telling me I gotta go. You know, and I told her we could.

One thing led to another, and I told her if I couldn't have her, no one was gonna have her. Detective Burgess said you thought there might be more than one knife involved. Yeah. What happened the other night? Well, one night, I grabbed another knife, and I told her either you're gonna have to kill me

to protect him, or I'm gonna kill him, you know what I'm saying? I put the knife in her hand, you know what I'm saying? Where'd you get it? In the kitchen. What part of the kitchen? I don't know, I got it out of the drawer. I don't, there was some knives in the, like you lay in the sink, you know,

that they'd used the knife for or something. Okay. And I put the knife in her hand and I felt like she had to stab me and I tried to, I forced her hand, squeezed her out of her hand, you know what I'm saying, tried to get her to stab me. And I just told her, you know, you got to protect me. Did you, how big was this knife?

Six, eight inches on the blade. It was bigger than a steak knife. Right, multiplication knife. Right. The other. Yeah. Right. The other night, I knew that last night, I knew that last night, I could feel the carpet on the other side.

Okay? I could feel it. It was all I could. In six hours of conversation with the KBI agents, Jones shares essentially the same story he'd told Birch a few weeks earlier. And yet these men reached an entirely different conclusion. The KBI declared that Jeremy Jones did not kill Jennifer Judd. I don't understand why.

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From hit shows like This Came Out of Me, Nature's Deadliest, Still Alive, and Monsters Inside Me. There are countless organisms that make a living off of us. Listen to I Was Prey wherever you get your podcasts. Jones eventually confessed to more than 20 heinous crimes in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Kansas,

and his home state, Oklahoma. He claimed to have kidnapped, raped, and murdered teenage girls. He said he executed drug kingpins for hire and set houses on fire to eliminate any trace of himself. People nicknamed him Redneck Bundy. He's currently on death row in Alabama, awaiting the decision in a final appeal. Police departments in Georgia and Louisiana

have charged him with murders too and are just waiting their turn for a bite at the apple should Jones ever end up a free man. All the other cases are considered cold cases, some because local authorities dismissed the claims, others because Jones told media reporters he never confessed. He claimed the cops were lying. It's a strange lie, at least to me, because the confessions are taped.

And yet, in one jurisdiction or another, law enforcement accepted that he had recanted. There are, of course, plenty of well-known cases of men confessing to crimes they didn't commit. The most notorious and ridiculous false confessor was Henry Lee Lucas. Lucas claimed responsibility for more than 600 murders. Police all over the country made complete fools of themselves as they accepted his baseless claims, at times closing cases that would have to have taken place at the exact same time, thousands of miles apart.

No responsible investigator wants to repeat that mistake. I understand why the KBI wouldn't want to take Jones at his word and close the case just so they could say they did. And yet, there is reason to believe enough of what Jones is saying to warrant exploring his claims more rigorously. Instead, they said straight to his face, I don't believe you, and said to the rest of the world,

there's no way he could have done it. He might not have committed every murder he claims to have, but can we really say with certainty that he didn't do any of them? He lies about details, but he tells the truth about just as many of them. He was in the area for each and every one of these cases, unlike previous killers who seemed to confess just for attention. Henry Lee Lucas, Tommy Lynn Sells,

men like this. Many of their claims can be dismissed out of hand because they simply weren't there. Could Jones have cataloged case details for so many murders that happened near him for years and years just to pull them out of his memory and confess when he was finally caught? Maybe.

Maybe not. At some point, I have to wonder if it makes more sense that it's all coincidence and lies or if maybe he really was in the room for some of them. Yeah, I spent pretty much every day of one year with him, to include holidays. And so I feel like I got to know his personality and got a pretty good read on when he was lying and when he wasn't. There are some that I don't believe he did.

I think he embellished a lot of the cases, you know, for what at that time he thought would be some notoriety, the attention of people visiting with him. But I feel confident, you know, there's a half a dozen that he did do. Jennifer Judd's case is on this list. I have many good reasons to trust Paul Birch and his instincts, but

his word is not enough. I'm determined to get justice for Jennifer Judd. I want to know what happened to her and why police have never solved this case. I've never met Jeremy Jones, and while he awaits a decision on a final appeal, his lawyers have cautioned me that I can't approach him.

As I attempt to determine the truth of his statements in this case, and perhaps others, I'll be in close contact with two people who have spent more time with him than perhaps anyone outside of his family. Paul and Michelle Birch. That's right, Michelle Birch. Despite what Jones thought, these two weren't married back when the FBI assigned Michelle to the case. But they are now.

They've been together 20 years. I'm sure they can think of better ways to celebrate an anniversary than revisiting the case that brought them together. But like all of us, they want this closed. He may have bragged a little bit about things he didn't do. I think he enjoyed the attention. He enjoyed the treatment that everybody's coming

to see him. But I do feel like the agencies, sometimes they're, I hate to say it, but lazy. They don't want to do the footwork to put the pieces together. Michelle might hate to say it, but I don't. I think lazy is the kindest way to describe the work of the investigators in Northeast Oklahoma. I can think of a few other choice words. Michelle is more diplomatic than I am, but everyone seems to agree. I definitely feel like he's responsible

for a lot more than he's been charged with. After Kansas and Oklahoma investigators dismissed Jones's confessions, the Mobile County Sheriff hosted a press conference. That he was able to lie without remorse, that he was able to kill without remorse. The only person I ever saw Jeremy Jones express any sorrow for was himself. And I think that speaks a lot about the kind of man that Jeremy Jones is. All I can do is provide what he said. I can't go to that county or any other county in another state and investigate it.

Police in Mobile can't cross into Kansas to investigate Jeremy Jones' claims, but I can. I'm a criminal behaviorist and homicide investigator. Jennifer's case has been living in a corner of my mind for almost eight years now. Though I've had access to one side of the investigation, Jeremy Jones' confession tapes, for most of that time,

I have never really been sure I could trust what I knew. Many of the blanks had to be filled by press coverage through the years, and I knew for certain I couldn't trust that. Not because the intentions weren't good. I have no doubt that everyone in the region, including the press, did want to see a resolution. But the longer a case is cold, the more it becomes like a game of telephone. Suspicions become rumors. Rumors become facts.

Facts get cemented into every account of the case going forward. I have not seen the Jennifer Judd case files. So for all these years, all I have known for certain is that Jennifer was killed in her home sometime in the morning, that she had been stabbed nine times with two different knives from her own kitchen. But I have never been able to shake the feeling that if I could learn more of the actual facts, the real case details, then I could at least determine whether Jeremy Jones was a viable suspect or nothing more than a skilled bullshit artist. I need to see the case files. So I'm heading to the intersection of Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma

to a community tormented by the acts of a pure psychopath born and raised in their midst. If there is truth to his claims, I think he committed his first murder in 1992 when he killed 20-year-old Jennifer Judd. He claims to have killed two more people in 1996, two in 1997, and five more in 1999. I've looked into several of these cases. I've talked to the families of victims, and we agree. I do think he's been dismissed from a lot of things that he probably shouldn't have been.

And I just will never be convinced that Jeremy Jones was not part of many of those. I'm going to take a closer look at the murder of Jennifer Judd in hopes of deciphering fact from fiction in the many tales told by a man named Jeremy Jones. There's been times that I'm like, I really think we need to look at Jeremy. Well, they tell us not to.

They tell us that there's no way it was possible, and I'm just like, something inside me says otherwise. There's so much closure there that could help so many people. And people deserve it. You know, our families deserve closure. The work I did in the Miami, Oklahoma region six years ago took a toll on me. I swore I'd never go back. But this case calls to me. I want to get justice for Jennifer Judd. I want to know what to make of Jeremy Jones. And so, in March 2024, I'm heading back to Oklahoma.

Next time, on Who Killed Jennifer Judd. I did not know that Chuck Chance was even a suspect. Next time on Who Killed Jennifer Judd. I did not know that Chuck Chance was even a suspect. That whole side of the street was just batshit crazy. I really don't want her to know that we don't go out there. Do you think Jones could have done it? Who Killed Jennifer Judd is produced by Arc Media for ID. You can follow our show wherever you get your podcasts.

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