Who Killed Jennifer Judd? - Ep.7: Redneck Bundy
Episode Date: September 25, 2024Investigator Sarah Cailean narrows her list of suspects in the murder of Jennifer Judd. While in Missouri, she meets with the family of another potential victim of Jeremy Jones, to see if there are co...nsistencies in the two crimes or the confessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Previously on Who Killed Jennifer Judd.
I kind of blamed myself that she got killed.
Because we could have went to the mall that morning.
And she could have been gone.
Those guys all run together in a group,
so there were always five to seven of them together all the time.
He's just been trouble. He's just a lot of trouble.
You know, mentally he's not right.
And I don't know if it's, like, from a lot of drug use
or just mental illness.
I have tried everything to find out who it is. From IED and Arc Media, I'm Sarah Kalin,
and this is Who Killed Jennifer Judd?
In the three months since I gained access to the case files
in the murder of Jennifer Judd,
I've narrowed the suspect list quite considerably.
I've ruled out any suspicion of Jennifer's husband, Justin Judd,
as well as several of Justin's friends,
including his best friend, Tommy Davis.
I have been investigating three main suspects,
Jeremy Jones, Chuck Chance, and Alan Redden. Tommy Davis. I have been investigating three main suspects,
Jeremy Jones, Chuck Chance, and Alan Redden.
That list changed one morning in late May 2024 when I heard my cell phone ringing.
I got to it just in time.
Hi, this is Sarah.
Hi, Mr. Redden.
Hi, Mr. Redden.
Thank you so much for calling me back.
We've been playing phone tag for a couple of weeks now.
Alan Redden finally called me back.
Well, to his credit, he'd been calling me back, but we kept missing each other.
Now that he's moved ahead of Chuck Chance on my suspect list,
I'm so happy to finally connect with him.
He tells me he's had a few health problems lately.
Something bit him and it
got infected.
He asks if I can meet on Thursday
morning. Right now I thought
you know, maybe we can just move through
this and I can just check you off the list
and be done with it just on a phone call.
Allen says in 1999
he was in prison
serving time for first-degree robbery,
and the guards came to him and said KBI wanted to talk to him about the Judd case.
He says someone went to KBI and reported him.
Allen barely knew the man reporting him.
He thinks the man knew Jennifer's parents and the state were offering a $10,000 reward
to anyone who could help solve the case,
and this guy wanted to collect the reward. I did see something about a tip, but it was unclear if
that was the origin of their interest in Redden or if they had been asking around about him first.
Learning the order of events helps me make sense of the tip and whether it was worth pursuing.
I ask Alan what year they came to talk to him.
He doesn't quite remember.
I think he was 99.
Okay.
Or 2000, maybe.
He tells me about growing up in Pitcher
with Justin Judd's dad, Bobby, and Bobby's sisters.
We talk about the report that states he harassed Jennifer at the Pitcher Express.
I ask if they ever asked him to submit to a polygraph test.
He says they didn't, but he'll sit for one now if I want to set it up.
If I were to ask you to submit to a DNA swab, would you do it?
Yeah.
Okay.
That's what I'd like.
Okay.
Like I said, I don't have anything to hide.
He says he doesn't have anything to hide.
And as awful as his record is, I believe him in this instance.
He doesn't seem skittish.
Nothing indicates to me he's lying.
If the DNA test results don't match any other known suspects,
I'll see if his DNA profile is in the system.
If it's not, I tell him,
I'll call him back and set up a time
to get a DNA swab.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, no, I appreciate that.
And I am optimistic that the truth will come out.
We're just trying to kind of finally see if we can close this one
and let the Judds have a little bit of peace.
We've already sent several pieces of evidence to a lab for DNA testing.
With a little luck, we'll have DNA results back within a week.
When we do, I'm pretty sure we'll be able to rule out Alan Redden.
Okay. All right. Great. Thank you, Mr. Redden.
You have a good day, and I hope you're back on the mend.
Thank you.
Okay. Thank you. Bye.
I don't think he did it.
That leaves me with two primary suspects,
Chuck Chance and Jeremy Jones.
At least, it did.
A few days after talking to Alan Redden,
I got another piece of information
that helped me whittle this list down even farther.
I now have information that proves
Chuck Chance is not the perpetrator.
Astonishingly, infuriatingly, KBI has known this since 2015.
They just never told anyone.
In mid-May, Cherokee County Sheriff's Detective Joel Tabor called me with incredible news.
Someone at the KBI sent him screenshots of
DNA tests run in 2015. The person said, I can only send screenshots because I don't want a paper
trail. I can glean a lot from the screenshots, mainly that KBI ran DNA testing on the evidence in 2015, and it returned a complete suspect profile.
They compared the profile to Chuck Chance and two other suspects.
None matched. None.
That means they have a complete profile of someone who is not Chuck Chance,
and still, they named Chuck as the primary suspect.
We asked KBI for official copies.
They sent a CD-ROM, in this day and age,
with more than 500 files.
This is a shitty tactic,
and Joel and I both clock it immediately.
I can only imagine that they're stalling
as they try to solve the case themselves.
Maybe they're finally running the they try to solve the case themselves. Maybe they're finally
running the profile through CODIS and specifically against that of Jeremy Jones. I don't know.
That's certainly what I'd do if I had a complete profile to compare. There's something fishy about
KBI's handling of this case and in how they're treating me and the officers from the Cherokee
County Sheriff's Office. I'm still trying to figure out what's going on there. I'm also trying to figure
out how I can get closer to an answer on Jeremy Jones. I think right now the best way is to dig
into his other confessions. To get started, I reach out to a woman who has even more
questions about Jeremy Jones.
The main one being,
why did Jeremy Jones confess
to killing her sister?
Nature
is a dangerous place.
On I Was Prey, the podcast,
listen to the life or death experiences of people who have Was Prey, the podcast, listen to the life-or-death experiences
of people who have survived animal attacks,
natural disasters, and deadly parasites alike.
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Science Channel, and Animal Planet.
From hit shows like This Came Out of Me,
Nature's Deadliest, Still Alive,
and Monsters Inside Me.
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Speak to them with ACAST. Visit go.acast.com slash ads to get started today. She's sitting with a friend, a large binder on the table in front of them. It's everything she's gathered in the 28 years since losing her sister, Doris Harris.
The day that they were killed, my mom had heard on the news that there had been a trailer fire and they had found two bodies in it.
And my mom said that she just had this sick feeling
that it was my sister. Paula's mom was right. On February 21st, 1996, the bodies of Paula's
sister Doris and Doris's boyfriend, Danny Oakley, were found in Danny's trailer. Both had been shot once, Danny in the back of the head,
Doris in the face.
She was still in bed.
Before fleeing the scene,
the shooter set the trailer on fire.
There was neighbors nearby,
and so when it was, smoke started coming out,
a neighbor noticed and the fire department was called,
and the fire was extinguished,
and when the firemen got inside,
they realized that there were bodies in there
and backed out and called for law enforcement.
Danny and Dorse were in a waterbed.
The rest of the house didn't burn.
It was pretty much contained to the bedroom area and mainly to the bed.
And in the floor, you could still see where a container shaped like a gas can had set.
The crime scene is eerily similar to that of another case from three years later, which occurred in Welch, Oklahoma,
just 20 miles from where Doris and Danny were killed.
In both cases, a person entered a trailer home
in the early hours of the morning,
shot two adults, and set the trailer on fire.
Both cases went cold until the end of 2004
when Jeremy Jones started talking a lot.
Jones said he killed Doris and Danny.
He even offered a motive,
that Danny owed money to a bigger drug dealer
and that he'd grown tired of listening to everyone in their circle
bitch about Danny owing money.
He said they were all jawing about how they'd kill Danny Oakley
if he didn't pay up,
so Jones just took it upon himself to take care of it once and for all.
But the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation,
OSBI for short,
dismissed his claims.
He confessed to the similar case too,
the murders of Danny and Kathy Freeman,
as well as the abduction of the Freeman's daughter, Ashley,
and her best friend, Laura Bible.
The OSBI dismissed those claims, too.
I asked Paula to speak with me
because if I can decipher the truth of Jones' claims
in her sister's case,
I may get closer to understanding his claims
in the Jennifer Judd case.
I don't even have the words to express how grateful I am that you would speak to us about
this because I can't imagine. I guess I would love it if you could walk us through from
your viewpoint what the early days of the investigation looked like.
My niece saw them at 10.30.
The fire was noticed at 7.30.
My sister still had food in her stomach.
So less than five hours.
My sister's identification was taken out of her purse and found in a toilet down in the water in the bathroom.
Did they ever tell you what the accelerant was?
They never did.
Do they know what the accelerant was?
I don't know.
Based on the shape of that can, I mean, I assumed gasoline, easy obtainable in that
kind of container.
Do you have any idea of the path of the fire?
Obviously, if it was put out pretty quickly, but you can usually see kind of like where the intended. So you said it was mostly in the
bedroom. Was it just like poured around the bed? Like that was the intention was to just burn the
bodies because this is also something Jeremy Jones did in the Lisa Nichols case. That's what it
appeared to me just because of the rest of the house standing. There obviously wasn't a lot of
fumes or it would have gone up much quicker if it's gas.
I mean, fumes catch on fire.
And there wasn't any gas strewed
in any other part of the house.
So it appeared that that was the goal for sure
to get rid of the bedroom.
So who knows what could have happened from then
had it not been seen so quick.
Okay, I have a question. And if it's difficult at any point,
if you're just like, I prefer not to talk about that,
it's too upsetting or whatever, completely understandable.
That being said, do you know where on their bodies they were shot?
Yes.
They were both shot in the head.
Okay.
It's believed that because of the way the bodies were found,
that Danny was shot first,
and then that my sister had kind of raised up and was shot.
Do you know what kind of gun was used?
We were told that it was a high-caliber gun, but never what kind.
I don't think that there was a true effort made to solve this.
There was such little investigation,
so many leads not followed through,
I think because they pinned it as drugs involved.
Police have told Paula different versions of events over the years.
They've posited that Danny owed money for methamphetamine
and conversely, that he was owed money.
Paula leans towards the latter, that Danny was dealing.
It's also worth noting that Jeremy Jones is a firearms enthusiast, to say the least.
He had a vast collection, one he still boasts
about to this day. And in at least one incident, he was stopped by cops with a whole pickup bed
full of guns, including high-powered rifles, only to be let go after a few phone calls. Danny Oakley did not have a job.
Okay, I mean, you know, an eight to five kind of job.
So if he were strictly a user,
how would he fund his gas, his electric, his groceries?
How would he fund that?
So he had to have had some source of money coming in.
Danny also had a small fleet of vehicles.
He had repossessed someone's boat shortly before he was murdered,
likely because the person was behind on payments to him
or someone in his immediate ring.
Doris never discussed any of this with Paula,
but Paula saw her sister change in her six months with Danny. The last
two months, things just weren't right with her. Her personality was, it just wasn't my sister.
I mean, it was awful. Her responsibility level, her presence level, you know, just, she was always, I mean, we were always about the family.
She was always present if there was anything going on.
Christmas had happened.
She wasn't the normal Christmas type situation.
It just, it was just different. Paula found another clue, she believes,
when she went through the remains of Danny Oakley's trailer
a few days after the murders.
This was February in Missouri.
It's cold.
When a few days after,
I went to the residence to see it, to look,
and as I walked in the door,
there were two bags packed. One of them
was obviously my sister's stuff, because one of them was a bathing suit that she came to my house
months before and helped herself to. I mean, we did that to each other. But I mean, I know for a
fact that it was hers. I mean, from like the deodorant that was in it, we can only use one brand.
That was in there, this swimsuit.
So obviously, in my mind,
they were packed ready to go somewhere warm.
Two or three days worth of clothes.
And they were sitting right by the back door.
Doris never mentioned an upcoming trip to Paula
or anyone as far as Paula knows.
She did not mention that to my niece. However, she did tell her that things would be getting better soon. In my mind,
that would mean financially. This all tracks with my analysis of the case. The impression I had been under was that Danny Oakley
was just sort of a low-level user
and that there was money owed
and that this was sort of the impetus for the attack.
When you're talking about owning a business,
owning multiple vehicles and stuff,
this is not a run-of-the-mill meth head,
which then makes me suspect that he was in fact moving product,
in which case this is a territorial dispute.
And again, that's, I mean, maybe it's a distinction without a difference,
but I don't think so.
I think it's a much more important target.
This idea reminds me of a detail in the Freeman case. In the parallels between Danny
Oakley's case and Danny Freeman's case, kind of word on the street was that Danny Freeman had
just escalated from selling weed to potentially selling or moving in some way as like a middleman or something, meth. There are several families in the area who would absolutely take out rival dealers,
especially if they're upstarts.
None of these families have been tied to the Oakley Harris case,
to the Bible Freeman case, or to the Jennifer Judd case, for that matter.
In the initial investigation, police focused on an associate of Danny's, a man named
Denny Ray Honeycutt. Honeycutt later told police he was sleeping on the couch at Danny's trailer
the night of the murders. He heard the shootings but didn't know who did it because he had run into
the bathroom and was hiding in the tub. It's tough to buy this story, though, because Doris' license was found floating in the
toilet.
So if he was hiding in the bathroom, surely he and the killer would have seen each other.
When Honeycutt said that he was in the trailer and heard the shootings and was in the bathroom,
does that, yeah, the look on your face
says that you don't believe that that was true?
No, I don't believe that for a second.
She doesn't think he told the truth,
but she also doesn't think he killed Doris and Danny.
You couldn't just walk into the door.
You couldn't just have a key, the door to the trailer.
You kind of had to have been let in from outside.
Okay.
And in the past, Danny had allowed Denny Honeycutt to couch surf there.
So, you know, you go over a lot of scenarios in 28 years.
I think that there's a possibility Denny Honeycutt showed up,
needed a place to stay.
He was let in.
Knowing what was going to happen in later,
he let somebody in to do the deed.
This makes sense to me.
I can easily see a scenario in which Denny Ray didn't pull the trigger,
but that it's possible he let the killer in that night.
If a certain confession is to be believed,
it's possible that Doris and Danny were about to leave town to avoid Jeremy Jones,
or someone who hired Jeremy Jones to carry out a hit.
It's possible that Denny Ray Honeycutt opened the door that night to let Jones in.
It would have been a swift attack,
perhaps because it's not his first.
A first-time killer often hesitates,
but if he killed Jennifer Judd four years earlier,
this was not something new to him.
New weapon, better preparation,
but psychologically not something new.
Determining if Jeremy Jones killed Doris and Danny does not tell us if he killed Jennifer Judd.
But if he killed Jennifer,
it's slightly easier to understand the comfort and ease
with which he was able to kill Doris Harris and Danny Oakley.
If Jones is telling the truth in his many confessions,
it seems that Jennifer Judd is the first person he killed.
Doris and Danny were next.
Then Sarah Palmer and Harmon Fenton.
Justin Hutchings next.
And then finally, the Bible Freeman murders.
Again, all of this is if his confessions are true. If so, it means he started
with someone he knew, if tangentially. This is frequently the case with killers who will go on
to become serials, and is part of the reason I think it's important to really explore him as a
suspect in Jennifer's murder. Murdering Doris and Danny is the first time he murders for hire,
if his claims are accurate.
Paul Birch contacted me because Jeremy Jones had confessed
to the murder of them,
and it kind of took me off my feet or whatever.
And, of course, I had a million questions
and was also speechless at the same time.
Had you been aware,
so in 1996 you would have never probably
had any cause to know about Jeremy Jones,
even though he was a criminal menace
in the area already with sexual assaults,
you wouldn't have heard of him.
By the time he confessed,
had you heard of him?
Because by then he was on the run from the area.
When Paul said to you, this guy's confessed, were you like, oh, I've heard of that guy.
That's exactly it.
I had heard of him because his name was coming up in other cases.
And I guess I have no proof of this, but since, I mean, in all the talks, I've heard that his mom, Jeremy Jones' mother,
did favors to some of the officers to help keep her baby boy out of jail.
That could not surprise me less.
It's difficult to address this issue responsibly,
but it is part of something that has been humming along in the background
for many, many years in this
community. Of course, it could be extremely ugly gossip that has been around long enough
that it's just become accepted as fact at this point. But there are also certain rumors,
including but not limited to the one Paula described, for which there are some pretty significant red flags
of credibility and documentation.
Sadly, it's never a huge surprise
to find dysfunctional sexual behavior
in the family history
when one is discussing a violent predator
like Jeremy Jones.
At first, Paula wasn't sure what to make of Jones' claim.
She was skeptical of Jones, for good reason.
When the whole Jeremy thing came about,
obviously it wasn't like the normal things that he has a history of doing.
But he has a history of hits as well, and they look different.
They tend to be with a gun where his sexual assaults are raped.
And it was earlier on. of hits as well. And they look different. They tend to be with a gun where his sexual assaults are raped, like.
And it was earlier on.
You know, it was 96.
Not that he hadn't been doing things before that.
But, I mean,
was this a new high for him?
Was this, you know, money?
Was this drugs?
Was, you know,
was this trying to make a name
for himself in the whole drug world?
Yeah, you know. Paula is spot on here. Was this trying to make a name for himself in the whole drug world? Yeah.
Paula is spot on here.
I think that's exactly what it could have been.
He was acting as an enforcer, essentially.
Again, all of these are done with the, like, if Jeremy in fact did it, this is what we're looking at.
In that case, it would have been just a hit, like, this is just business.
And one of the reasons, like, academicallyones is is considered quite fascinating to criminologists because he is one of the rare examples of somebody
who killed for work and for fun and you know he has these hits that look a certain way the stuff
that he has confessed to kathy and danny and doris and dann, you know, a couple of others as well.
And then he has the ones that appear to be sexual homicides.
And those look very different.
And in this case, at least what he said was that it was something to do with drug money
that Danny either owed or wasn't cooperating in a way he was supposed to or something.
And that was, so he was told to go there, basically.
As Paula reviewed Jones' statement,
she noticed that he seemed to know the exact layout of Danny Oakley's property,
which was not a cookie-cutter design.
What is your speculation on what would have ever,
even once, put Jeremy Jones in that house?
Drugs.
In what capacity?
Buying or selling drugs.
I personally think because of the no job and the cars and the cell phones and all that,
I think that Danny was, I mean, he obviously used some because of his toxicology and his autopsy report. But I think that Jeremy Jones was probably there buying or, you know,
giving information, whatever.
In the beginning, I really thought, oh, this is the guy from the information
we were being fed, and he still could be.
If he was not there, I think that he definitely,
I mean, the druggies kind of, you know, know the threats and this kind of thing. I think that it's
a good possibility that he at least has information about what happened. At the time, Paul Birch said
Paula was welcome to visit Jones to ask as many questions as she wanted.
He just very sensitively conveyed to me some information and told me that if I wanted to come
and visit with him, that that was okay, that I would be able to do that. My husband said absolutely not. He is law enforcement and we had a young
daughter and he said that that would be putting our daughter at risk. She stayed home but desperately
wanted to go. This man had confessed to killing my sister. I wanted to sit across the table from him and make him look at me.
Not that he obviously has any kind of empathy for anyone.
So probably more for my own feelings, but to look him in the eye.
To ask him why, number one, he's done what he's done.
Chances of him being honest or slim, but I would still have that opportunity.
And there was a couple of things that I wanted to ask him
because my husband said, you don't need to go.
He'll just lie to you.
That's what those criminals do.
But there were two questions that I wanted to ask him
that had not been publicized or anything
that had he told me the right answer,
I would have known that he was at least there.
One of those questions has since been publicized.
One never has.
That will be a question that will help me believe
that they did or did not do this.
Right now, she won't share with us the nature of that question.
After all these years and all the dashed hopes and botched attempts to solve this case,
I can't blame her for keeping some things close to the vest.
I also can't blame her for continuing to consider other suspects, even after Jones confessed.
Paula is a phenomenal investigator.
Her binder overflows with phone records, autopsy reports,
newspaper articles, and anything else she has tracked down in the 28 years since losing her sister.
Flipping through, she brings up a name I've heard associated with this case,
but never with any clear understanding as to why. A man named
Ken Bowles. Ken Bowles was a banker. My niece met him, I mean, very minimal exchange of words.
She explains that her niece was at Danny Oakley's trailer the night before the murders.
As she was leaving, Bowles was standing outside talking to
Danny. Doris introduced her daughter, Paula's niece, to Ken Bowles, and then her daughter got
into one of Danny Oakley's cars and drove home. Her mom stayed with Danny. The next day, the day
of the murders, Bowles does something weird. My niece got out of school the next day at like 3.30.
There was the bag phone in Danny Oakley's vehicle
that my niece was driving was ringing.
And it was Kenneth Bowles telling my niece
that her mom and Danny were dead, that they had been shot.
The bodies hadn't even been removed from the trailer at that point.
So my niece immediately was trying to call me and I wasn't home. And so she was calling my mom,
where's Aunt Paula? Where's Aunt Paula? And she was going to go straight there. This banker
wanted her to meet him and he would tell her more details. And she said, just meet me there. And he said, no, I can't because there's
cops all over there. And so she finally agreed to meet him at this convenience store. And I mean,
he really didn't tell her much more than they had been shot and the house had set on fire.
And he wanted her to get in his vehicle and go with him to his house.
Needless to say, and thankfully, she did not.
She refused because she was going to the location and didn't get in with him.
So who is he then to them?
He was a loan officer.
Bowles said someone had come into the bank where he worked
and he'd overheard them talking about it.
Paula doesn't buy this story
because the police hadn't announced the shootings.
People only knew about the fire at that point.
Why was this man calling a 16-year-old,
notifying her of her mother's murder,
and attempting to get her to meet him somewhere.
It still doesn't sit right with Paula.
It doesn't sit right with me either.
From what Paula's gathered so far,
it sounds like Bowles was somehow involved
with Danny's meth trade.
Paula wonders if Bowles, then in his early 30s
and working as a loan officer at a local bank,
helped Danny launder money. Or
if he's somehow connected
with Jeremy Jones.
I do believe that
physically or financially
the banker had something to do with this.
I don't think the banker
probably had the nerve
to pull the trigger, you know.
But that doesn't mean that he didn't pay
someone like Jeremy to do it. And I mean, I think at that timeframe that Jeremy was again, probably
trying to look manly and look able to do these kinds of things. And that would have been the perfect opportunity to sleeping people.
So I think that it's a very good possibility.
As Paula tells me this, I'm thinking of the things Michelle McCorkle said about Chuck Chance, Justin Judd,
and some of their friends being loosely involved in what she called the Quapaw Mafia.
Justin says he didn't touch drugs or have anything to do with anyone selling or taking them,
but I need to consider all angles.
Maybe Ken Bowles can tell me more
about Jeremy Jones' involvement in the local drug trade.
Maybe he can tell me whether he ever met Justin Judd or Chuck Chance.
I'm not quite sure what he'll know about Jennifer's case,
but if he can shed light on any of these questions,
it's worth a conversation.
I ask if she has any idea where he is these days.
Paula believes he works about two hours away.
We find an address for his workplace,
and the next morning, we go for a drive.
I'm well, how are you? Absolutely. I'm looking for a Ken Bowles. Do you know if he's?
He's literally a... Hello. Hello. He's like, who are you? Are you law enforcement? What's that? Ken Bowles wasn't hard to find.
I walked into the store where he works, and there he was.
I am working on a couple different cases that
may or may not be connected in the region,
and I'm hoping to speak with
some potential witnesses.
And that's why I was hoping I might be able to speak with you.
Ken is a late
middle-aged guy now, thinning gray
hair, glasses, average
height and build. He's dressed
in business casual, but with a Harley
Davidson jacket on.
Remnants of the wilder days, I suppose.
I'm recording this
on my phone because Oklahoma
is a one-party recording state.
TVs are playing
cable news overhead.
About the Danny Oakley and Doris
Harris case from 1996.
That's an old one.
Yes, it is a very old one. That's
what I specialize in.
You know, it kind of depends on who you talk to.
And there's still
a lot of questions up in the air, and there's
still some possible
connections with an inmate
in Alabama.
Jeremy Jones?
Yeah.
Ken Bowles knows exactly who I'm talking about.
I say we don't need to talk right here, right now,
but that I would like to talk to him at some point.
It's not the ideal place, but it's hard to catch me after work.
I guess we're going to talk right here.
I don't know if I'm going to be able to remember much.
He agrees to try.
He doesn't seem to struggle with his memories,
though. Right away, he tells me he remembers his last conversation with Danny Oakley.
He said it'd either be in really good shape or dead.
He says he was dead the next morning. It's tough to hear, but he adds that a month or so before Danny was murdered,
Danny told him he was a, quote, walking dead man.
Bowles seems comfortable talking to me in a way I recognize.
Some people are generally comfortable with this kind of questioning
if they've dealt with law enforcement more than once.
And Bowles has.
So there was some sort of plan in place for them.
I'm conscious of bombarding him at his job,
and I don't want to make things messy for anyone in their workplace.
I try to get through my questions quickly.
Mainly, could Jeremy Jones be connected to the reason Oakley would either be in good shape or dead?
Did you know Jeremy Jones before all this?
I know he got very famous in the region after he was apprehended in Alabama.
If I'd have been there, he'd have happily killed me. I don't know that.
Do you know if he and Danny Oakley had any business connections?
They knew each other.
They did know each other.
They did know each other because he asked me about it.
Jones asked you about Oakley or Oakley asked you about Jones?
What did he ask you?
Bowles is nodding his head.
Do you know if Jones ever did any work for him,
like in terms of like the math distribution or anything like that?
Do you know what degree of involvement in that world Danny had?
Like, was he manufacturing? Was he selling?
Was he simply a user? He was selling.
Standing in a busy workplace is not the best place for an interview.
Ken says Danny was, quote, moving large amounts.
He says Danny never mentioned that he and Doris were planning to go away.
I asked what he was doing at Danny's place that night.
He tells me he was a user.
I'm a user.
Oh, okay.
Okay, and so you were buying from him?
Sometimes.
But I was also collecting from him, too.
He had some loans I was collecting.
I had to go remind him to make a statement every now and then.
Oh, I gotcha.
I'm still trying to piece together this relationship
between Bowles and Oakley,
where banks and loans and repos were concerned.
I don't think Bowles is going to explain
the real nuts and bolts of it.
I can't say I blame him.
But it seems that there was some sort of light embezzlement or money laundering going on.
Whatever it was, Bowles would send Oakley to repossess vehicles on behalf of the bank.
And Jeremy Jones, for his part, was responsible for repossessing in his own way,
getting money from people who owed the dealers he worked for,
by force if necessary.
Or, knowing what I know about Jones,
by force even when it might not have been necessary.
I ask about Denny Ray Honeycutt.
Bowles claims he doesn't remember him very well.
I ask about Doris's daughter.
Bowles said he had met her a few times at Danny's
and he called her as soon as he found out about the murders.
How did you hear about it?
Oh, I had people come by the bank.
Like Paula Barnett, I struggle to believe this is true.
If the firefighters hadn't even discovered the bodies yet,
how was anyone talking about it in the bank?
Unless those people knew before the firefighters.
And there's only one way that could be the case.
I'll get out of your hair.
Last thing I'll ask you right now.
Is there anybody
who you've always thought, I bet you that
person had something to do with it?
No. As a matter of fact, when I was
coated with urine, I was kind of surprised on that
because I didn't really know
the connection on that part.
But they definitely did know each other
because I'm definitely trying to hammer that out.
From what Danny told me, yes, they did know each other.
So, like, currently...
And he let me know that Jeremy did not like me.
I watched his confession videos, all of them.
I have a feeling he took credit for some things he didn't like.
I do, too. I do, too.
But I also think that he's been dismissed in cases that he probably didn't do.
And I, you know, and that's kind of what I'm trying to kind of like sort through the difference between the two, if that makes sense.
No, Danny gets kind of a tight lip on his own names and stuff like that.
He says Danny was tight lipped on his dealings with Jones. In Jones' confession videos about that case,
what he claims is that he was there to collect on a debt
that Danny owed money to somebody
who had basically hired Jones to go in
and either collect the money or kill him.
Okay.
He says, wow, okay, and smiles.
I would really love to know the thought process
behind the wow, okay, and the smile.
What are you thinking?
Well, no, it's just my little one-time around him.
I mean, you can see it in his eyes.
He didn't give a shit if I pulled the trigger on him.
Bowles tells me he dated an ex-girlfriend of Jeremy Jones.
Bowles and the woman were in bed one night,
and Jeremy Jones broke in.
He stood in their bedroom, ranting, threatening them.
Bowles pulled a gun on him.
Jones got right up close,
putting his face right in front of the barrel.
In that moment, he didn't seem to give a shit
if he lived or died.
Does that mean you think he could have done that?
I think he could have done that? I think he could have done anything.
Everyone I talk to seems to think Jeremy Jones is capable of anything.
Ken Bowles seems to think Jeremy Jones
could have killed Doris and Danny.
Lisa Bible Broderick, whose cousin Laura
was killed in the Bible Freeman case,
tells me that even
though someone else was convicted in that case, she still has questions about Jones's confessions
and whether he might have been involved. So far, none of Jennifer Judd's family or friends tell me
they suspect Jeremy Jones was involved. But when they say this, they say it's because her crime scene didn't show any
signs of a sexually motivated killing. There are details in the case files that indicate otherwise,
that Jennifer might have fought off a sexual assault, or that the killer was at least
sexually motivated. I cannot share these details, but they leave me wondering if Jennifer's family and friends would be more suspicious of Jones if they knew two things.
One, that Chuck Chance's prints do not match those found on the murder weapon.
And two, that this crime could fit Jones' profile based on the violent rapes he committed prior
and the murders we know he committed after.
Even among people who become serial killers,
a first murder is rarely as smooth as later killings.
What if the Doris Danny case and the Bible Freeman case
went fairly smoothly
because Jones already knew how to get away with murder.
What if getting away with Jennifer's murder helped him understand how to kill again?
My conversations with Lisa Bible Broderick, Paula Barnett, and Ken Bowles bring all of
these questions to the forefront of my mind. Everyone thinks Jones is capable of anything.
Everyone, that is,
except the police officers
who so quickly dismissed his confessions.
When Jones confessed to killing Jennifer Judd,
the KBI gave a bunch of interviews saying,
we think Jones is lying, we think he's lying.
Well, the easiest way to confirm he's lying
is to run his fingerprints and DNA
and see if they match the evidence.
Why didn't KBI do that?
Further, KBI agent Larry Thomas went down to Alabama
and interviewed Jones multiple times.
We have the recordings of the initial interview in 2005.
Thomas went back in 2006 and again in 2007.
In both of those follow-up interviews,
the reason he was in Alabama interviewing Jones
was because he felt that Jones could be a witness against Chuck Chance. Even Jones picked
up on this and called him out on it. You don't believe me because you want to pin this on Chuck,
he told Thomas. In his interviews, Jeremy Jones tells Thomas, I knew Chuck didn't do this. I'm not
saying he didn't kill people, but he didn't do this.
Could it be that Jeremy Jones knew this
because, as Jones told Thomas,
Jones is the one who killed Jennifer?
OSBI agents did the same as KBI agents.
They went to Alabama to talk to Jones
and quickly dismissed his claims to the murders
of Doris and Danny, the Freemans and Laura Bible,
and several others in Oklahoma.
Why?
It brings me back to the question I've been asking since day one.
Why did the KBI and OSBI dismiss Jones so quickly?
And why do they continue to dismiss him?
Next time on Who Killed Jennifer Judd. And to be honest, the worst of it was finding her. You know, not knowing all these years, you know,
it's been hard and stuff like that,
but none of it's as hard as that moment.
I will never, ever forget that feeling, ever.
Who Killed Jennifer Judd is produced by Arc Media for ID.
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