November 24, 2021 • 39 mins
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 6-year-old boy named Nahtahn, is forced to exercise until he dies. The dad uses the activity as punishment after he accuses Nahtahn 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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. There's an old Bible
verse that talks about a man whose quiver is full,
it is truly blessed. Now, I've always taken that to
(00:29):
mean that a man that's been blessed with children as
a man that throughout his days will be happy and whole.
In this case, we have a man that took those
errors out of the quiver and literally snapped them into
discarding them like they were nothing more than rubbish. I'm
(00:50):
Joseph Scott Morgan, and this his body Backs. I'm joined
today with my good friend Jackie Howard, executive producer of
Crime Stories. Wouldn't answer, grace, Jackie, what can you tell
us about this case? Joe, This is a particularly difficult
(01:11):
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, thirty seven years old, exercised his six
(01:32):
year old boy, Natant, until he died. It began with
a broken electrical outlet in the home. The father again, Jones,
thirty seven made the boy run around their home until
he collapsed. The oldest child eight year old Mara, and
then there was seven year old Alliance strangled to death
(01:53):
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,
(02:17):
let alone their five children. Give me an idea. This
poor child, a six year old brand was made to exercise.
Tell me what was going on with his body? You know, Jackie,
we've 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
(02:39):
think of the physiology of say a young child, you
you think that they can, you know, kind of go
on forever and ever. That there I'm not gonna 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 there's a potential for terminal event with
any child whatsoever, And so when you begin to press
(03:01):
a child into this constant state of movement. And he
he actually did this. He uh Jones actually described how
he would make this child run in place, run around
the exterior other mobile home, and then do something called
wall sits, which is where he makes the child sit
(03:22):
with his back like he's sitting in an imaginary chair
with his back placed against the wall. And it puts
incredible strain upon 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
(03:45):
him how worthless he is, how 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
(04:08):
down physically and then emotionally and mentally. He's being driven
to exhaustion just by this 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 of of
total exhaustion. Not to mention, there's also been a hint
that there was some type of striking that was going
(04:29):
on with this little boy. But like you had said,
and it's kind of gives a hint as to what
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 you down? Are we talking about
(04:53):
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 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
at a a cellular level, our bodies require things like
(05:15):
electro lights. We hear about that electro light replacement, and athletes,
you know, even high high speed athletes, have to have
electro lights. 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 these basic elements and also included
(05:37):
this is like potass um 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 it's unsustainable.
And this child, Jackie, remember it's child's only six years old,
and he is being forced by the one person that
(05:59):
is in total troll of his life at that moment
time and each day, day in and day out. He
knows no other master if you will, so he's going
to do specifically what he's 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
(06:20):
electro lights. What exactly does that mean? Because you hear
it all the time you as a parent, your child
gets sick, has diarrhea, has a stomach virus, has a cold,
we worry about making sure their electrolyts levels are okay.
But what does that actually mean, when you have an
electrolt deficiency. This goes to kind of the receptors in
your body that are uh that at a physiological level,
(06:44):
that are telling, uh, telling the mechanisms within your body, say,
for instance, uh your heart uh 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 le double all of these are
being drained away everything just like I mentioned potassium, uh, sodium,
(07:06):
and of course uh this complex of electrolytes. So everything
kind of seizes up and compromises to the point where
the child is not gonna have what is actually referred
to as a classic heart attack where we have a
blockage in our heart, because the child is six years old,
is not going to have have blockage or atheroscrotic cardiovascular
disease where they're gonna have what's called a myo cardial infarction.
(07:30):
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 eyes, suddenly the heart
stops after it begins to kind of seize, and the
child collapses, and of course oxygen and blood's not flowing
through the through the body anymore, so the child's gonna die.
If the child had received immediate medical attention, could he
(07:53):
have been saved. Yeah, he could have been saved. And
you know, that's really the tragedy of all of this.
I think it probably if Jones, at some point in
time had maybe just shown one sintilla of mercy to
this little boy. He could have set him down and
given him a breather, maybe given him some something like
(08:13):
a sports drink, maybe water, just water in and of itself,
because the child is also becoming dehydrated at this point,
just to give him a rest, maybe for twenty minutes,
you know that that little window there where if he
had been granted just a little bit of rest, but
he may have been able to endure. But just like
my analogy with a motor vehicle, he ran this child
(08:36):
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
in front in in front of his father, this man
(08:57):
who was supposed to be taking care of him. This
child ease right there. You can imagine, the body goes rigid,
the thumbs are tucked back. Uh. You'll you'll see them
begin gas 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?
(09:17):
And there were talking an hour, two hours or all day?
I think that this is probably in totality, um, 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
(09:38):
uh 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, Um, it is a train wreck waiting
to happen. And and listen, there's also something else that
(09:59):
you have to factor in here. Uh. And again, I
don't know if they were able to assess this in
the Ton'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 protracted period of time, I mean,
like days beforehand, we're probably being withheld from him. So
(10:20):
you have this kind of event that's going on, and
the father is just kind of sitting back waiting, waiting
for the roverbial straw that broke the candle's back. And
as it turned out, you know, he accused the child
of short circuiting you know, the electrical system in the house. Uh,
and 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
(10:44):
you know, sticking a paper clip 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's 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
(11:04):
old played a large part in this too, because you know,
six year old, how much do you weigh? Fifty pounds?
If that yeah, it would be And again you know,
uh as as adults, we have a certain a certain
level of energy stores, and you know that's considered be
like fats for instance, that we carry on board in
our body, and so we have we have sufficient energy
(11:27):
that we can call upon. And if we keep balancing,
we're moving, we might be able to avoid saving to 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,
(11:48):
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 e er physician
(12:10):
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.
(12:42):
We've we've actually talked about just one of these precious
little children and uh, and how that child, Naton came
to his death. But you know, Jackie, therefore their children
here for other children that this man had been gifted with,
and they have a story to tell as well, don't
they do? Joe, eight year old Mara and seven year
(13:04):
old Alliance 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
that's what makes this kind of manual. And this is
in fact manual strangulation where you're talking about the utilization
(13:24):
of your bare hands, uh to choke, 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 antire which means the front, and
you begin to squeeze, squeeze down until the child in
(13:47):
In these cases, as a matter of fact, where these
two children were both completely deprived of oxygen, there's two
mechanisms at work here that can happen. Jackie. We have
the mechanism of the squeez using that actually shuts down
the blood flow to the brain and it it it
causes a condition with the brain, uh that that deprives
(14:11):
it of oxygen eated blood that rises up out of
the corroated vessels. So you're clamping those vessels down and
and absolutely the brain begins to kind of almost strangulate
as a result of of lack of blood supply. Then
you have another thing that happens with manual strangulation, and
that is when you have the trachea, the layern x,
(14:34):
the structures that are kind of firm that are in
in our throat. You begin to think like the structure
of the Adam's apple, for instance, and of course the
infamous highoid bone that's it's very high. What happens with
this is that in addition to the blood vessels being
clamped off, you're actually closing down or clamping down the
(14:55):
the the airflow that's coming in through the nose, through
the mouth and is is going to DeLonge where 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
(15:18):
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 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. Uh,
(15:40):
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 said, did the kids?
Did the kids struggle? Did they fight back? And his
mounts was chilling, absolutely chilling. He in this is paraphrasing,
(16:05):
he said, sure, wouldn't anybody, And just allow that to
kind of seat down into your mind just for a second,
that the dead could be that callous when he's describing
squeezing literally squeezing the life out of both of these children, um,
in those moments, and it really, you know, to your
other question, it really doesn't. It doesn't take very long
(16:27):
if you will, to uh compromise or defeat the structures
of the neck. You know, the way our bodies are
are put together. Uh, they're meant to function in in
kind of difficult circumstances, when it's cold outside, when it's hot,
when we when we're sick, all these sorts of things.
But when you begin to compromise the structure, the muscles,
(16:48):
all the supportive tissues, these airways and certainly these vessels
that supply oxygen and blood, it's not going to take
much with a small child, and I would imagine that
the whole event, uh, for both of these kids was
probably took no more than four to five minutes with
each child. If that one thing that's that's kind of uh,
(17:09):
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? Job
just chilling, Yes, it is, Jackie. And the fact that
(17:32):
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 you kind of have to try
to get into his mind. First off, why in the
world would you want to And make no bones about
this is a physical assault that results that stemming from
the fact that he had essentially brought about the death
(17:54):
of Natan simply through exhaustion and deprivation. He is purposed.
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 and
and and ended their lives collectively. What what he did
(18:17):
here was at a very primal level. I mean, just
think about it. This is very intimate, and you really
set something key here. When someone is choking another person,
there's a high probability you're gonna be face to face,
and it's one of the most intimate things that you
can do as far as the perpetration of a murder.
You're looking at them eye to eye. It's not like
(18:39):
they're great extended arms length. More than likely they're held close,
the elbows are vent. They're being drawn into their body
and just being squeezed. They're trying to apply the perpetrators
trying to apply as much pressure as possible. And this
is another thing that that he would have born witness
to Jackie. It wasn't just kind of looking into the
(19:00):
eyes of these children as life left them, You're gonna
see physiological changes in 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,
(19:21):
the blood is backing up in the head, and so
the head turns, actually it turns this kind of lovacious
to purple color. The eyes begin to protrude about sometimes
the tongue will protrude. Many times people that are being choked, uh,
will actually bite their tongue and the tongue protrudes out
is clinched between the teeth, and it's all of this
(19:44):
is just this response that your body is struggling for
for air. And so he would have literally born 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 in there to protect these
kids over the years, these hands that we're supposed to
provide love and care, and he uses them to literally
(20:08):
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,
(20:28):
in their net 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 that's kind of something that Hollywood does. Um,
what's really critical here is not so much the hioid.
But if you remember when I was talking, uh, talking
(20:50):
about the layern nex itself, the area where where our
oxygen travels through. This is a what's referred to as
a cardilaginous body. If if folks at home will kind
of touch your nose, you have a cartilaginous area to
your nose. It's below the bony structure and it's it's
comprised of cardilaginous bodies in there. And did you know
(21:10):
with cartilage cartilage fractures as well. Okay, uh, And 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
(21:32):
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 our little focal areas of hemorrhage. Because
you have what covers the laynix right here. You have
what are called strap muscles, and they're these kind of
criss cross muscles that lie across this area and its
pressure is applied to them, they developed little areas or
(21:54):
focal areas of hemorrhage. Now this is different than PATIKII.
We hear about Patiki I 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 particularly what happens with them, well, this is
this occurs when do you remember when I talked about
the congestion in the head. There's no blood return here,
(22:17):
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 they're not storage units. Okay,
They're meant to move blood, not store blood. So more
(22:38):
pressure is built up on the inner walls of these
little these little capitlaier beds, and they explode and we
get these little pen prick hemorrhages. They are called particular 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 UH and sometimes they will
actually appear on the lungs, depend upon how much pressure
(23:00):
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
(23:22):
is an important UH delineation to make between a manual
strangulation and what's referred to as a literature strangulation. Now,
literature can be made out of any number of things,
and I've seen them made with wire. I've seen them
made with with baling rope like you see with bales
of hay tied up. Electrical cord is very common, and
(23:43):
then you've got woven woven rope. But you know, one
of the most common things that we see utilized as
a weapon, uh 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
(24:04):
within reach. So yeah, his hands probably these are very
tiny children. I mean, you know, if if I remember correctly,
uh Abigail Elane, she she was only one, and of
course Gabriel was only to just think about how diminutive
they are in comparison to a grown man, and so yeah,
he probably couldn't get both of his hands or wrapped
(24:27):
around their necks. So he's going to use what is
at his disposal. He may have even taken this belt
off of his own waste to facilitate this. Now, this
is gonna be a ligature strangulation. So this is gonna
look when we do the examination. From a forensic standpoint,
it's gonna look completely different than the presentation that you'll
have when someone is actually throttled or choked with with
(24:48):
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 literature, it's very very specif effect.
And let's say, let's just think about a belt. Let's
think that maybe this is a two inch width belt. Well,
you're gonna have what are called margins, which will be
(25:09):
those areas that define the out the outside of the belt.
So just imagine a belt overlying a surface, so as
it 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
(25:31):
have hemorrhage there. And sometimes it will be abraided, you know,
like we you have an abraided uh, an abraided knee.
You can an abrasion, Well, that will happen on the
neck with the ligature because the person is struggling. All right,
you had 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
(25:52):
as well. Now, how does this work, Well, there's a
couple of ways of the ligature can work. You can
use two hands with it where you essentially put it
around the neck kind of uh reverse order, if you will,
and then tighten it really quick and strangle the person
from the rear. Or with a belt, because it's got
a buckle, the individual can wrap the belt around an
(26:16):
individual's neck and then run the end of the belt
through the buckle and essentially sent 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, uh little children, that
is not beyond uh reason there that that this is
a way that this would have been done, you should
(26:37):
just kind of sentch the belt down on there. Now,
are you're gonna see the same things uh physiologically, Yeah,
you'll see a lot of the same things, uh that
you see with a manual strangulation. There'll still be patiti
you'll have underlying hemorrhage and soft tissue. But it's gonna
be very uniformed. When you have bare hands, it will
be spread everywhere, but with a belt in this case,
(26:58):
it'll be very uniform. It will 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. Um. And
so you're also going to have associated patitii where the
little vessels again just like with a manual strangulation, are
gonna burst in the eyes. And in addition to that, um,
(27:21):
you're you're going to see potentially if he did in fact,
since 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 on the back of
the neck as well. So you kill your five children,
(28:02):
and one 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? In Jackie, the
story just gets more bizaars 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,
(28:28):
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
(28:51):
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 this protracted period of time running up and
(29:13):
down the road in a mad fear, trying to figure out,
what in the world am I gonna 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
(29:37):
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
(29:59):
to post mortem timeline. And that means that changes are
going on at 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
(30:23):
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.
(30:43):
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,
(31:06):
and it's not just the South, it's the Deep South.
I've lived here in my entire life, Jack, 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 steeps in
and and that's going to promote this process. We talked
about the autolytic change that's going on within the body.
(31:27):
Then you've got this kind of puture faction that's going
on that's an external force on the body. And this
is this is sped up by heat. It's like it's
like he's driving down the road in the car almost
becomes like a convection of and 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
(31:48):
are now 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 got this foul
odor that's rising up and it permeates everything. Um. I've
I've actually worked cases in the past, Jackie, where bodies
(32:09):
were left in cars decomposed and the 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
(32:30):
to get a candy bar, if he's stopping to get
a soda pop, if he's stopping to to get a
UH to top off his car with gas, everywhere he
would go, his body would just be infused with the
smell with this aroma of his decomposing children. I cannot
I can only imagine him going into into a convenience
(32:52):
store and just walking in unbathed, unshowered, and walking past
people and them smelling him. And what in the world
is going on with this guy? Because this is not
something that you just normally associate with with everyday life.
This is something and I think that it goes to
something in our promal, our primal being. It's almost like
(33:15):
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 if 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
(33:38):
that odor of deafinity. 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 imaginagine you're it's at night,
(34:02):
You've got a flashlight, your stand 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 d u I that are going through there,
you know, on this 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've got their flashlights,
they're checking. They don't know. He doesn't know if they're
(34:23):
looking for him or if this is just they're just
randomly checking people. But when that wind that 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 are in law enforcement, this sort of thing.
(34:44):
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'll 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.
(35:09):
And it's at that point in time they pulled Jones
out of the vehicle and they were asking, who are
you and why is your vehicle smell like this? Where
were the children, Joe? You know, where where he was
found was just into Mississippi out of Alabama. Uh, Jackie,
there's any number of roads that you know that connect
these two states are adjoining. You can go down the
corridor and you you go from Alabama directly into Mississippi.
(35:33):
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 it's very
very rough. It's 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 pulp wood. And
(35:55):
he had found one of these roads, and he decided
while he was still in our Obama 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 these poor little precious children, their their bodies. And
you know, I've seen the crime scene images of these, Jackie.
He he didn't just simply take the bags and bury them.
(36:19):
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 were
in 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 Mirra, the oldest child, I
(36:44):
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 shouldren 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
(37:04):
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,
you're 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
(37:27):
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
(37:49):
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 that I've covered is
the fact that this these homicides. Let me rephrase that
these murders, because this is what this is. These are murders,
(38:12):
brutal murders. These took place in South Carolina. I've never
seen a case where you had such what's called the
inter agency 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
(38:33):
in South Carolina, this is a good five or six
hundred miles away, They blocked traffic on I twenty and
they held it. They held that crime scene until c. S.
I 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
(38:55):
when the police arrived there, the sun was going down.
It was getting dark and they couldn't process us 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 Road in South Carolina.
(39:18):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Backs.
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. There's an old Bible
verse that talks about a man whose quiver is full,
it is truly blessed. Now, I've always taken that to
(00:29):
mean that a man that's been blessed with children as
a man that throughout his days will be happy and whole.
In this case, we have a man that took those
errors out of the quiver and literally snapped them into
discarding them like they were nothing more than rubbish. I'm
(00:50):
Joseph Scott Morgan, and this his body Backs. I'm joined
today with my good friend Jackie Howard, executive producer of
Crime Stories. Wouldn't answer, grace, Jackie, what can you tell
us about this case? Joe, This is a particularly difficult
(01:11):
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, thirty seven years old, exercised his six
(01:32):
year old boy, Natant, until he died. It began with
a broken electrical outlet in the home. The father again, Jones,
thirty seven made the boy run around their home until
he collapsed. The oldest child eight year old Mara, and
then there was seven year old Alliance strangled to death
(01:53):
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,
(02:17):
let alone their five children. Give me an idea. This
poor child, a six year old brand was made to exercise.
Tell me what was going on with his body? You know, Jackie,
we've 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
(02:39):
think of the physiology of say a young child, you
you think that they can, you know, kind of go
on forever and ever. That there I'm not gonna 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 there's a potential for terminal event with
any child whatsoever, And so when you begin to press
(03:01):
a child into this constant state of movement. And he
he actually did this. He uh Jones actually described how
he would make this child run in place, run around
the exterior other mobile home, and then do something called
wall sits, which is where he makes the child sit
(03:22):
with his back like he's sitting in an imaginary chair
with his back placed against the wall. And it puts
incredible strain upon 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
(03:45):
him how worthless he is, how 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
(04:08):
down physically and then emotionally and mentally. He's being driven
to exhaustion just by this 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 of of
total exhaustion. Not to mention, there's also been a hint
that there was some type of striking that was going
(04:29):
on with this little boy. But like you had said,
and it's kind of gives a hint as to what
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 you down? Are we talking about
(04:53):
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 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
at a a cellular level, our bodies require things like
(05:15):
electro lights. We hear about that electro light replacement, and athletes,
you know, even high high speed athletes, have to have
electro lights. 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 these basic elements and also included
(05:37):
this is like potass um 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 it's unsustainable.
And this child, Jackie, remember it's child's only six years old,
and he is being forced by the one person that
(05:59):
is in total troll of his life at that moment
time and each day, day in and day out. He
knows no other master if you will, so he's going
to do specifically what he's 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
(06:20):
electro lights. What exactly does that mean? Because you hear
it all the time you as a parent, your child
gets sick, has diarrhea, has a stomach virus, has a cold,
we worry about making sure their electrolyts levels are okay.
But what does that actually mean, when you have an
electrolt deficiency. This goes to kind of the receptors in
your body that are uh that at a physiological level,
(06:44):
that are telling, uh, telling the mechanisms within your body, say,
for instance, uh your heart uh 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 le double all of these are
being drained away everything just like I mentioned potassium, uh, sodium,
(07:06):
and of course uh this complex of electrolytes. So everything
kind of seizes up and compromises to the point where
the child is not gonna have what is actually referred
to as a classic heart attack where we have a
blockage in our heart, because the child is six years old,
is not going to have have blockage or atheroscrotic cardiovascular
disease where they're gonna have what's called a myo cardial infarction.
(07:30):
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 eyes, suddenly the heart
stops after it begins to kind of seize, and the
child collapses, and of course oxygen and blood's not flowing
through the through the body anymore, so the child's gonna die.
If the child had received immediate medical attention, could he
(07:53):
have been saved. Yeah, he could have been saved. And
you know, that's really the tragedy of all of this.
I think it probably if Jones, at some point in
time had maybe just shown one sintilla of mercy to
this little boy. He could have set him down and
given him a breather, maybe given him some something like
(08:13):
a sports drink, maybe water, just water in and of itself,
because the child is also becoming dehydrated at this point,
just to give him a rest, maybe for twenty minutes,
you know that that little window there where if he
had been granted just a little bit of rest, but
he may have been able to endure. But just like
my analogy with a motor vehicle, he ran this child
(08:36):
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
in front in in front of his father, this man
(08:57):
who was supposed to be taking care of him. This
child ease right there. You can imagine, the body goes rigid,
the thumbs are tucked back. Uh. You'll you'll see them
begin gas 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?
(09:17):
And there were talking an hour, two hours or all day?
I think that this is probably in totality, um, 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
(09:38):
uh 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, Um, it is a train wreck waiting
to happen. And and listen, there's also something else that
(09:59):
you have to factor in here. Uh. And again, I
don't know if they were able to assess this in
the Ton'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 protracted period of time, I mean,
like days beforehand, we're probably being withheld from him. So
(10:20):
you have this kind of event that's going on, and
the father is just kind of sitting back waiting, waiting
for the roverbial straw that broke the candle's back. And
as it turned out, you know, he accused the child
of short circuiting you know, the electrical system in the house. Uh,
and 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
(10:44):
you know, sticking a paper clip 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's 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
(11:04):
old played a large part in this too, because you know,
six year old, how much do you weigh? Fifty pounds?
If that yeah, it would be And again you know,
uh as as adults, we have a certain a certain
level of energy stores, and you know that's considered be
like fats for instance, that we carry on board in
our body, and so we have we have sufficient energy
(11:27):
that we can call upon. And if we keep balancing,
we're moving, we might be able to avoid saving to 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,
(11:48):
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 e er physician
(12:10):
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.
(12:42):
We've we've actually talked about just one of these precious
little children and uh, and how that child, Naton came
to his death. But you know, Jackie, therefore their children
here for other children that this man had been gifted with,
and they have a story to tell as well, don't
they do? Joe, eight year old Mara and seven year
(13:04):
old Alliance 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
that's what makes this kind of manual. And this is
in fact manual strangulation where you're talking about the utilization
(13:24):
of your bare hands, uh to choke, 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 antire which means the front, and
you begin to squeeze, squeeze down until the child in
(13:47):
In these cases, as a matter of fact, where these
two children were both completely deprived of oxygen, there's two
mechanisms at work here that can happen. Jackie. We have
the mechanism of the squeez using that actually shuts down
the blood flow to the brain and it it it
causes a condition with the brain, uh that that deprives
(14:11):
it of oxygen eated blood that rises up out of
the corroated vessels. So you're clamping those vessels down and
and absolutely the brain begins to kind of almost strangulate
as a result of of lack of blood supply. Then
you have another thing that happens with manual strangulation, and
that is when you have the trachea, the layern x,
(14:34):
the structures that are kind of firm that are in
in our throat. You begin to think like the structure
of the Adam's apple, for instance, and of course the
infamous highoid bone that's it's very high. What happens with
this is that in addition to the blood vessels being
clamped off, you're actually closing down or clamping down the
(14:55):
the the airflow that's coming in through the nose, through
the mouth and is is going to DeLonge where 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
(15:18):
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 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. Uh,
(15:40):
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 said, did the kids?
Did the kids struggle? Did they fight back? And his
mounts was chilling, absolutely chilling. He in this is paraphrasing,
(16:05):
he said, sure, wouldn't anybody, And just allow that to
kind of seat down into your mind just for a second,
that the dead could be that callous when he's describing
squeezing literally squeezing the life out of both of these children, um,
in those moments, and it really, you know, to your
other question, it really doesn't. It doesn't take very long
(16:27):
if you will, to uh compromise or defeat the structures
of the neck. You know, the way our bodies are
are put together. Uh, they're meant to function in in
kind of difficult circumstances, when it's cold outside, when it's hot,
when we when we're sick, all these sorts of things.
But when you begin to compromise the structure, the muscles,
(16:48):
all the supportive tissues, these airways and certainly these vessels
that supply oxygen and blood, it's not going to take
much with a small child, and I would imagine that
the whole event, uh, for both of these kids was
probably took no more than four to five minutes with
each child. If that one thing that's that's kind of uh,
(17:09):
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? Job
just chilling, Yes, it is, Jackie. And the fact that
(17:32):
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 you kind of have to try
to get into his mind. First off, why in the
world would you want to And make no bones about
this is a physical assault that results that stemming from
the fact that he had essentially brought about the death
(17:54):
of Natan simply through exhaustion and deprivation. He is purposed.
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 and
and and ended their lives collectively. What what he did
(18:17):
here was at a very primal level. I mean, just
think about it. This is very intimate, and you really
set something key here. When someone is choking another person,
there's a high probability you're gonna be face to face,
and it's one of the most intimate things that you
can do as far as the perpetration of a murder.
You're looking at them eye to eye. It's not like
(18:39):
they're great extended arms length. More than likely they're held close,
the elbows are vent. They're being drawn into their body
and just being squeezed. They're trying to apply the perpetrators
trying to apply as much pressure as possible. And this
is another thing that that he would have born witness
to Jackie. It wasn't just kind of looking into the
(19:00):
eyes of these children as life left them, You're gonna
see physiological changes in 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,
(19:21):
the blood is backing up in the head, and so
the head turns, actually it turns this kind of lovacious
to purple color. The eyes begin to protrude about sometimes
the tongue will protrude. Many times people that are being choked, uh,
will actually bite their tongue and the tongue protrudes out
is clinched between the teeth, and it's all of this
(19:44):
is just this response that your body is struggling for
for air. And so he would have literally born 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 in there to protect these
kids over the years, these hands that we're supposed to
provide love and care, and he uses them to literally
(20:08):
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,
(20:28):
in their net 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 that's kind of something that Hollywood does. Um,
what's really critical here is not so much the hioid.
But if you remember when I was talking, uh, talking
(20:50):
about the layern nex itself, the area where where our
oxygen travels through. This is a what's referred to as
a cardilaginous body. If if folks at home will kind
of touch your nose, you have a cartilaginous area to
your nose. It's below the bony structure and it's it's
comprised of cardilaginous bodies in there. And did you know
(21:10):
with cartilage cartilage fractures as well. Okay, uh, And 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
(21:32):
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 our little focal areas of hemorrhage. Because
you have what covers the laynix right here. You have
what are called strap muscles, and they're these kind of
criss cross muscles that lie across this area and its
pressure is applied to them, they developed little areas or
(21:54):
focal areas of hemorrhage. Now this is different than PATIKII.
We hear about Patiki I 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 particularly what happens with them, well, this is
this occurs when do you remember when I talked about
the congestion in the head. There's no blood return here,
(22:17):
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 they're not storage units. Okay,
They're meant to move blood, not store blood. So more
(22:38):
pressure is built up on the inner walls of these
little these little capitlaier beds, and they explode and we
get these little pen prick hemorrhages. They are called particular 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 UH and sometimes they will
actually appear on the lungs, depend upon how much pressure
(23:00):
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
(23:22):
is an important UH delineation to make between a manual
strangulation and what's referred to as a literature strangulation. Now,
literature can be made out of any number of things,
and I've seen them made with wire. I've seen them
made with with baling rope like you see with bales
of hay tied up. Electrical cord is very common, and
(23:43):
then you've got woven woven rope. But you know, one
of the most common things that we see utilized as
a weapon, uh 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
(24:04):
within reach. So yeah, his hands probably these are very
tiny children. I mean, you know, if if I remember correctly,
uh Abigail Elane, she she was only one, and of
course Gabriel was only to just think about how diminutive
they are in comparison to a grown man, and so yeah,
he probably couldn't get both of his hands or wrapped
(24:27):
around their necks. So he's going to use what is
at his disposal. He may have even taken this belt
off of his own waste to facilitate this. Now, this
is gonna be a ligature strangulation. So this is gonna
look when we do the examination. From a forensic standpoint,
it's gonna look completely different than the presentation that you'll
have when someone is actually throttled or choked with with
(24:48):
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 literature, it's very very specif effect.
And let's say, let's just think about a belt. Let's
think that maybe this is a two inch width belt. Well,
you're gonna have what are called margins, which will be
(25:09):
those areas that define the out the outside of the belt.
So just imagine a belt overlying a surface, so as
it 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
(25:31):
have hemorrhage there. And sometimes it will be abraided, you know,
like we you have an abraided uh, an abraided knee.
You can an abrasion, Well, that will happen on the
neck with the ligature because the person is struggling. All right,
you had 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
(25:52):
as well. Now, how does this work, Well, there's a
couple of ways of the ligature can work. You can
use two hands with it where you essentially put it
around the neck kind of uh reverse order, if you will,
and then tighten it really quick and strangle the person
from the rear. Or with a belt, because it's got
a buckle, the individual can wrap the belt around an
(26:16):
individual's neck and then run the end of the belt
through the buckle and essentially sent 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, uh little children, that
is not beyond uh reason there that that this is
a way that this would have been done, you should
(26:37):
just kind of sentch the belt down on there. Now,
are you're gonna see the same things uh physiologically, Yeah,
you'll see a lot of the same things, uh that
you see with a manual strangulation. There'll still be patiti
you'll have underlying hemorrhage and soft tissue. But it's gonna
be very uniformed. When you have bare hands, it will
be spread everywhere, but with a belt in this case,
(26:58):
it'll be very uniform. It will 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. Um. And
so you're also going to have associated patitii where the
little vessels again just like with a manual strangulation, are
gonna burst in the eyes. And in addition to that, um,
(27:21):
you're you're going to see potentially if he did in fact,
since 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 on the back of
the neck as well. So you kill your five children,
(28:02):
and one 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? In Jackie, the
story just gets more bizaars 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,
(28:28):
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
(28:51):
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 this protracted period of time running up and
(29:13):
down the road in a mad fear, trying to figure out,
what in the world am I gonna 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
(29:37):
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
(29:59):
to post mortem timeline. And that means that changes are
going on at 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
(30:23):
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.
(30:43):
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,
(31:06):
and it's not just the South, it's the Deep South.
I've lived here in my entire life, Jack, 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 steeps in
and and that's going to promote this process. We talked
about the autolytic change that's going on within the body.
(31:27):
Then you've got this kind of puture faction that's going
on that's an external force on the body. And this
is this is sped up by heat. It's like it's
like he's driving down the road in the car almost
becomes like a convection of and 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
(31:48):
are now 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 got this foul
odor that's rising up and it permeates everything. Um. I've
I've actually worked cases in the past, Jackie, where bodies
(32:09):
were left in cars decomposed and the 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
(32:30):
to get a candy bar, if he's stopping to get
a soda pop, if he's stopping to to get a
UH to top off his car with gas, everywhere he
would go, his body would just be infused with the
smell with this aroma of his decomposing children. I cannot
I can only imagine him going into into a convenience
(32:52):
store and just walking in unbathed, unshowered, and walking past
people and them smelling him. And what in the world
is going on with this guy? Because this is not
something that you just normally associate with with everyday life.
This is something and I think that it goes to
something in our promal, our primal being. It's almost like
(33:15):
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 if 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
(33:38):
that odor of deafinity. 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 imaginagine you're it's at night,
(34:02):
You've got a flashlight, your stand 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 d u I that are going through there,
you know, on this 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've got their flashlights,
they're checking. They don't know. He doesn't know if they're
(34:23):
looking for him or if this is just they're just
randomly checking people. But when that wind that 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 are in law enforcement, this sort of thing.
(34:44):
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'll 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.
(35:09):
And it's at that point in time they pulled Jones
out of the vehicle and they were asking, who are
you and why is your vehicle smell like this? Where
were the children, Joe? You know, where where he was
found was just into Mississippi out of Alabama. Uh, Jackie,
there's any number of roads that you know that connect
these two states are adjoining. You can go down the
corridor and you you go from Alabama directly into Mississippi.
(35:33):
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 it's very
very rough. It's 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 pulp wood. And
(35:55):
he had found one of these roads, and he decided
while he was still in our Obama 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 these poor little precious children, their their bodies. And
you know, I've seen the crime scene images of these, Jackie.
He he didn't just simply take the bags and bury them.
(36:19):
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 were
in 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 Mirra, the oldest child, I
(36:44):
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 shouldren 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
(37:04):
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,
you're 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
(37:27):
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
(37:49):
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 that I've covered is
the fact that this these homicides. Let me rephrase that
these murders, because this is what this is. These are murders,
(38:12):
brutal murders. These took place in South Carolina. I've never
seen a case where you had such what's called the
inter agency 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
(38:33):
in South Carolina, this is a good five or six
hundred miles away, They blocked traffic on I twenty and
they held it. They held that crime scene until c. S.
I 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
(38:55):
when the police arrived there, the sun was going down.
It was getting dark and they couldn't process us 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 Road in South Carolina.
(39:18):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Backs.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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