Facts of the Crime:
Larry Jones was convicted on three counts of capital murder for the deaths of his wife, Sandra Jones, and her two sons, Courtney Jones, 17, and Daron Davis, 10. For his wife's murder, Jones was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole; for the murders of the two boys, Jones received two sentences of death by lethal injection.
Sandra Jones spent the evening of April 10, 1998, at the house of her brother-in-law, Gary Jones, visiting and drinking with several friends. She left for home shortly after 10:30 that night. About two hours later, Larry Jones showed up at Gary's house; Larry told his brother he had "just killed all three of them." Larry asked his brother to comeback to his house with him and to provide him with an alibi. On the way back to Larry's house, he told Gary that Sandra had come home and taken a bath; while she was bathing, he claimed he inspected her underwear and found "some discharge" in them.
Larry Jones later gave the police a different story, stating Sandra came into the bedroom, woke him up, and told him that she wanted to break up with him. When he asked why, she allegedly said that she had been unfaithful to him and threw a pair of panties in his face. During their conversation, Jones had been "fixing on" a stack of videotapes with a butterfly knife. As Sandra continued to taunt him about her infidelity, Jones said, he hit her. "I thought I was hitting her with my right hand ... the hand I had my butterfly knife in. I hit her twice. I thought I was hitting her in the face area, but it turned out that I hit her twice in the neck." Sandra died of a single slicing stab wound that penetrated four and a half inches through her neck.
Jones further claimed that the two boys came in while he and Sandra were fighting and that he only swung at them to push them away from him. Courtney died in the kitchen, having been struck twice with the knife; his right carotid artery was severed with a blow that sliced approximately four and three-eighths inches through his neck. Daron, whose body was found on the floor next to his bed in the front bedroom, sustained four wounds; his jugularvein was cut, and the muscles that supported his larynx were severed. Gary Jones later testified that it looked like "his throat was almost cut off."
Larry Jones opened a window in a back bedroom, and then called the police to report that someone had broken into his house and murdered his family. When the police arrived, Gary Jones told them that his brother had confessed to the killings. Larry was arrested, given his Miranda warnings, and taken to the police station. Following a jury trial in February of 1999, Jones was convicted on all three counts of capital murder. The jury found that four aggravating circumstances existed and no mitigating factors were present; thus, they sentenced Jones to death for the murders of Courtney Jones and Daron Davis and to life in prison for the murder of Sandra Jones.
Bookmarks