July 9, 2025 • 63 mins
He was charming. He was convincing. And for more than a decade, Jeremy Bryan Jones was a shapeshifter moving through the Deep South—stealing names, slipping past suspicion, and leaving behind only victims and lies.In this week’s ReWired episode, Dani pulls back the curtain on the illusion, dismantling the mythology of a drifter who turned murder into a method of survival.
This isn’t just a retelling of Jones’s crimes—it’s a confrontation with the systems, the psychology, and the societal blind spots that allowed a predator to keep moving, even as bodies piled up in his wake.We begin with a woman whose story was nearly erased—until a single moment of defiance broke the silence. Then we explore nine gripping speculative arcs, each one rewiring what we think we know:
his episode will leave you disturbed, questioning, and unable to look away.👁️🗨️ Stay until the end—we’re pulling every thread and asking every hard question.
💥 Don’t miss Friday’s explosive co-hosted episode of The Guilty Files: ReVisited, where Brian and Dani take one final swing at this case from opposite sides of the badge.
🔎 For early access, ad-free listening, and exclusive bonus content, become a Guilty Files Detective on Patreon or subscribe via Apple Podcasts.
This isn’t just a retelling of Jones’s crimes—it’s a confrontation with the systems, the psychology, and the societal blind spots that allowed a predator to keep moving, even as bodies piled up in his wake.We begin with a woman whose story was nearly erased—until a single moment of defiance broke the silence. Then we explore nine gripping speculative arcs, each one rewiring what we think we know:
- What if someone escaped?
- What if we could decode the mind of the monster before the damage was done?
- What if AI, deepfakes, and modern forensics could expose what the justice system missed?
his episode will leave you disturbed, questioning, and unable to look away.👁️🗨️ Stay until the end—we’re pulling every thread and asking every hard question.
💥 Don’t miss Friday’s explosive co-hosted episode of The Guilty Files: ReVisited, where Brian and Dani take one final swing at this case from opposite sides of the badge.
🔎 For early access, ad-free listening, and exclusive bonus content, become a Guilty Files Detective on Patreon or subscribe via Apple Podcasts.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hello, true crime lovers, Welcome back to the Guilty Files
True Crime Rewired, the podcast where we take one crime,
two perspectives, and create endless intrigue. I'm Danny, your guide
for the second act of this case, where we take
the hard facts from earlier this week and twist them
into something unexpected, daring, and just a little wicked. Think
(00:30):
of me as your pilot through the tangled web of
true crime, with the side of sass and a dash
of drama to keep you hooked. At the Guilty Files,
True Crime Rewritten, we believe every crime has two sides
to the story, and every listener deserves the thrill of both.
So sit back, lean in, and let's rewrite the narrative.
(00:52):
Because true crime isn't just meant to be solved, It's
meant to be explored. Let's get started. Welcome to the
Guilty Files. True Crime Rewired, the show where we don't
(01:15):
just revisit true crime stories, we flip them inside out.
I'm your host, Danny, former law enforcement officer with the
City of Atlanta, turned sociologist, psychologist, and your personal tour
guide through the dark corners of human behavior. Now, if
you caught Monday's episode, of the guilty files uncovered, My
(01:35):
co host Brian laid out the harrowing facts behind the
case of Jeremy Brian Jones, also known as the Oklahoma Drifter. Brian,
as always gave us a meticulous, professional and factual account
of a killer who charmed his way across the American South,
(01:55):
leaving death and devastation in his wake. But today, today
we're going to do something different. We're going to rewire
the story, not change the facts, but peel them open
and ask what if? What did we miss? What might
have gone differently? What could a modern lens revel about
(02:16):
a system that let this monster roam free for more
than a decade. This isn't about fantasies. This is about
educated speculation, dramatized exploration, and some serious psychological and sociological reframing.
So put on your thinking caps and maybe pour a
(02:36):
glass of something strong. Tonight's ride will take us through
nine acts. Each act will explore one hypothetical or fictionalized possibility,
grounded in real facts but tilted just enough to ask
what if. Let's begin now, before we go diving into
alternate timelines, identity theft scandals, tech conspiracies, and all the
(02:59):
what if wereld wins I've got planned for you tonight.
Let's just anchor ourselves in the real raw facts, because
while this is rewired, we're not throwing out the blueprints.
Brian already walked you through the case in his Uncovered episode,
and you know that man doesn't miss a beat. I
mean he served you legal timelines, confessions, ballistics, and psychopathy
(03:22):
on a silver platter. But in case your memory's a
little boggy, or you just enjoy hearing it with a
little more edge, let me set the scene one more time,
Danny style. Jeremy Brian Jones born nineteen seventy three, Oklahoma
boy with a pretty face, a nasty streak, and a
twisted talent for playing people like a violin. On the surface, charming, friendly,
(03:47):
the guy who will help you carry groceries to your car,
underneath a violent, manipulative predator who bragged he could charm
the panties off a nun classy. He started young, were
talking high school aged assaults, drug use, and a general
vibe of do not trust this man, And by his
(04:07):
early twenties he wasn't just troubled, he was dangerous. Jones
allegedly committed his first murder in nineteen ninety two, Jennifer Judd,
the wife of his high school friend. Brutal, personal, and,
like so many early crimes in these stories, unsolved for
years because the forensic tech just wasn't there and nobody
(04:29):
wanted to believe the charming guy next door was capable
of that level of evil. Over the next decade, Jones
lived like a ghost with a meth habit, floating from
Kansas to Georgia to Alabama under fake names, burning bridges,
abusing women, and leaving behind bodies, suspicions and confusion. By
(04:50):
two thousand and four, he was in Alabama riding out
Hurricane Ivan with the Bentley family, a couple who took
him in thinking he was just their old hand plot twist.
He was living under a stolen identity, John Paul Chapman
and was already wanted in multiple states, but that didn't
stop them from letting him stay the night, and it
(05:13):
definitely didn't stop him from murdering their neighbor, Lisa Nichols.
He raped her, shot her three times in the head,
and then burned her body in her bathroom like he
was taking out the trash. And if that wasn't bad enough.
He stayed in the area, ate a cheeseburger, smiled at people,
watched the Bentley's cry. He fled the scene eventually, and then,
(05:38):
in a twist worthy of every detective show ever, called
the police himself from a bus station, chatted about the weather,
then confessed to the murder. Cool as a cucumber, But baby,
he didn't stop there. He started confessing to everything. Twenty murders,
maybe more, sex workers, teenage girls, strangers, acquaintances, you name
(06:03):
it the problem. Some of it was real, some of
it was fantasy, and some of it was just six
storytelling to keep himself in control. He was convicted of
Lisa Nichols as murder and sentenced to death in Alabama,
but the rest of his confessions a big old mess,
some true, some not. Some Maybe it's like trying to
(06:26):
solve a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces swapped from
monopoly money. So what we know for sure is that
Jeremy Bryan Jones is a manipulative killer who weaponized his charm,
evaded detection for years, and created chaos across multiple states,
all while the justice system played a game of catchup
(06:48):
that cost lives. Now that we're grounded in those facts.
Let's blow the doors open, because while the truth is
horrifying enough, what happens when we turn the lights on
in the rooms The case never explored. Act one is
coming up, and we're rewinding the clock, rewiring the crime scene,
and asking what might have happened if Lisa Nichols had
(07:12):
a smart home, a drone overhead, and a tech savvy
justice system on standby. Let's flip the switch. All right,
let's crack open this first act. It's the early morning
of September seventeenth, two thousand and four. Lisa Nichols has
just returned home after fleeing Hurricane Ivan. The powers out,
phones are spotty, roads are flooded, Emergency services overwhelmed. This
(07:37):
is the perfect hunting ground for a predator like Jeremy
Bryan Jones. But let's hit rewind and reimagine this moment
in our world two decades later. Think solar powered ring
cameras on the front porch, a floodlight with motion sensors.
Lisa's smart door lock pings her app when it us.
(08:01):
Her neighbor's car has a dash cam that captures movement
across the property line. Jeremy walks up with that same
disarming smile and that same intent to kill. But what
he doesn't realize is that Lisa's home is wired like
Fort Knox. Psychological insight, predators thrive in isolation, not just
(08:23):
physical but social. The fewer eyes watching, the easier the hunt.
Jeremy banked on that, on the power being out, on
neighbors being gone, on the chaos. But in twenty twenty four,
the isolation Jeremy needed is harder to come by. Smart homes, surveillance, culture,
and digital footprints close the gap. Sociological insight. Here's the paradox.
(08:48):
The same surveillance tools that feel invasive in daily life,
you know, Alexa eavesdropping on your arguments and Siri randomly
lighting up during dinner, might have saved Lisa Nichols's life.
Why because when communities are digitally connected, predators lose their camouflage.
(09:08):
Even Lisa's routine leaving for work at dawn, coming home
alone becomes traceable. Her GPS, her fitness tracker, her FaceTime called,
or her daughter. All of that creates a digital alibi
and a digital witness. Let's say Lisa had a panic
button on her phone. Let's say she pressed it. Police
(09:28):
might have arrived before the fire was set. Jeremy might
have been arrested in the hallway, guns still hot, Lisa
might have lived. And here's the bigger societal reflection. How
many women like Lisa never got that chance because they
were failed by the technology gap, the digital divide that
(09:50):
still exists today. Lower income areas often lack access to
smart security, Marginalized communities have historically faced longer police response times.
Jeremy didn't just pray on women, He preyed on the
conditions that keep them vulnerable. Let's be real, this isn't
(10:10):
just about smart locks and hidden cameras. It's about access protection, visibility,
and in the early two thousands, Lisa Nichols wasn't invisible,
but to Jeremy, she was unprotected, alone, isolated by circumstance
and by a justice system that didn't know a predator
(10:31):
was living next door. Our act one psych take home
is this Jeremy wasn't just opportunistic. He was calculating. He
read the room, he scanned for chaos. Psychologically, he was
a classic situational offender, driven by impulse but enabled by
vulnerability and the hurricane that was his trigger, not his excuse,
(10:57):
his cover. Our Act one sociology take home is this
crime doesn't exist in a vacuum. It thrives in environments
where the infrastructure breaks down during natural disasters, blackouts, even pandemics.
That's when the cracks in the system become highways for
(11:18):
evil to move undetected. So the question is what happens
when we shrink those cracks, when we build communities that
are not just digitally connected, but digitally empowered. Because when
we start imagining that world, the one where Jeremy's face
gets caught on a neighbour's cloud cam, where his burner
(11:39):
phone is triangulated by tower pings, where Lisa's smartwatch picks
up her elevated heart rate and alerts someone. Well, we're
not just fantasizing about sci fi crime fighting. We're asking
what justice could look like if we were ready for it. Okay,
that's the tech powered rabbit hole you with me. Let's
(12:00):
climb out, because things are about to get even weirder
coming up in Act two, confession doesn't always mean truth.
We're introducing a fictional AI profiler that can decode Jeremy's
real murders from his made up ones and oh boy,
it's about to get psychological stick around. Welcome to Act two,
(12:20):
Cracking the Confessor. An AI LII detector gets involved. All right,
let's talk about Jeremy Brian Jones and his obsession with confession.
This man didn't just admit to one murder. He confessed
to twenty one twenty one. Then, like your most chaotic
ex he started backpedaling, Oh, that one, never mind, I
(12:44):
made it up that one too, and that one I
was bored high, or maybe I just wanted a cheeseburger.
I mean, we've all wanted a cheeseburger, Jeremy. But this
ain't that. Some of his confessions matched open cases, some
were straight fiction, and others suspiciously detailed in a way
that makes your stomach turn. The challenge we still don't
(13:07):
know how many of those murders he actually committed, and that,
my friends, is a justice system nightmare, because when a
predator like this starts talking, law enforcement can get real
comfortable listening, and that's where things get dangerous. So let's
imagine a different version of events, a better one picture
(13:29):
this Jeremy's been transferred to a secure federal facility, not jail,
a research wing, one of those cold white rooms where
the ac hums like it's judging you. The coffee's stale,
the cameras are rolling, and Jeremy is waiting, smug. He
thinks this is just another chance to put on a show,
(13:50):
only this time no one's playing along. Sitting across from him,
or rather, built into the table is a sleek interface,
think dark glass, subtle glows. A disembodied intelligence with one
job detect deception. It's a fictional tool, sure, but rooted
in the real science of behavioral forensics, linguistics, and biometric analysis.
(14:16):
We'll call it Veritas. Jeremy leans back in his chair
and the monologue begins. He's charming, confident, that snake oil cadence.
He's perfected, low and syrupy, designed to pull people in.
He starts with Lisa Nichols. He says, Yeah, she was sweet,
(14:38):
real sweet, lived next door. Didn't deserve what happened. I
was out of my mind that night. The storm, the drugs,
the gun, it just all came together. I didn't plan it,
but once it started, I couldn't stop. And let me
tell you, Veritus would be purring because that story, that
(14:58):
story has shape, sense, detail, emotional texture. There's a spike
in vocal cadence when he says storm. He shifts when
he says her name. There's tension in his recall, grief
masquerading as detachment. This is memory, not performance. Now Jeremy
moves on to Amanda Greenwell. He softens, his voice slows down.
(15:23):
Suddenly the remorse ramps up. He says, Amanda, I found
her in the woods. She was already gone. I just
didn't want to leave her like that. And veritas would
go cold because that story it's missing everything. There's no
(15:43):
sensory information, no verifiable reference points. His tone flat, emotionally
disconnected in all the wrong ways. In my experience, both
as a beat cop and someone who's read more criminal
psychology than is probably healthy, liars over explain and underfeel.
(16:04):
The ones telling the truth their bodies betray them, and
the ones lying they don't even know what their bodies
are doing. Jeremy starts throwing out confessions like they're candy.
He talks about the Freeman girls next, he says them
two they were already gone when I got there. I
just helped end the pain. And listen, that right there,
(16:29):
that's not a confession. That's a story. You don't help
end the pain unless you're playing God and sociopaths. Oh,
they love that role. But verit Us would flag that too,
because the truth doesn't hide behind euphemisms. It lands hard,
It stings, and Jeremy's version of truth starts sounding more
(16:53):
and more like fan fiction the longer he talks. Now,
obviously this interrogation scene didn't happen. Veritas is fictional, but
let's be honest, it's not far fetched. The Department of
Defense already uses AI to analyze micro expressions. Law enforcement
is experimenting with speech pattern biometrics. Some agencies even use
(17:18):
linguistic fingerprinting to vet anonymous threats. So ask yourself, if
we had something like Veritas in two thousand and four,
how many lives could have been saved, how many families
might have found peace? And how many false confessions could
we have cut through before they wasted years of court time,
(17:38):
media frenzy, and raw human emotion. Because here's what the
system doesn't teach you when you put on the badge.
People lie for all kinds of reasons, but not all
lies are created equal. Some are defensive, some are compulsive,
and some like Jeremies are performative. They're about power, attention.
(18:03):
He wasn't trying to clear his conscience. He was trying
to own the narrative to become the main character in
a multi state horror story, and too often it worked.
Psychologically speaking, Jeremy showed classic antisocial tendencies. He weaponized charm,
lied strategically, confessed not out of guilt but out of narcissism.
(18:26):
Each confession a new performance, a way to stay relevant.
He didn't want to be forgotten, He wanted to be feared.
Sociologically speaking, our systems are not designed to filter that
kind of manipulation. We reward the confession, not the investigation
behind it. We don't always question why someone admits guilt.
(18:48):
We just ask how fast we can close the case.
And that's a huge problem because when we put too
much stock in the story and not enough in the signals,
we give predators life Jeremy the exact thing they crave,
the spotlight. Jeremy Brian Jones played law enforcement like a fiddle,
(19:08):
lied through his teeth, and when that stopped working, he
played the public, the media, the victim's families. If we'd
had technology that could strip away the performance and get
to the raw data underneath. We might have seen him
and the truth much much sooner we've heard from Jeremy.
(19:30):
Now we hear from someone who never got the chance
to speak. Next up, I'm opening a fictional diary, the
imagined inner voice of Jennifer Judd, Jeremy's suspected first victim,
a woman who may have seen the warning signs before
anyone else and had no idea how close the threat
(19:51):
really was. Stay tuned for more of the guilty files.
We'll be right back after these messages. Act three, Jennifer
Judd speaks coming up, don't miss it. Let's pause the
monster parade for a moment. So far, we followed Jeremy
(20:11):
Bryan Jones as he manipulated the system, confessed to crimes
like he was reading from a menu, and thrived in
the shadows of chaos. But now we're going to shift perspectives,
because for all his boasting and all his lies, there
was one voice that was never heard in the courtroom,
never heard in the press conferences, never heard on the
(20:33):
police reports. That voice belonged to Jennifer Judd. She was
a newlywed, vibrant, the kind of person who lit up
a room without needing to say a word. Two days
after marrying her high school sweetheart, she was brutally murdered
in her own home, stabbed repeatedly in what appeared to
(20:54):
be a frenzied personal attack. And who just so happened
to be living next door. Jeremy, her husband's old friend,
the guy no one trusted but no one pushed out,
the guy who smiled too long, drank too much, and
always seemed to be watching. Now, let me be clear,
(21:15):
what you're about to hear is fictional. This is a
dramatized imagining of Jennifer's voice, her perspective, her fear, but
it's grounded in the real dynamics. So many women live
through the gut feeling, the social pressure to stay quiet,
the uneasy glance that gets dismissed. So imagine for a
(21:36):
moment that Jennifer kept a diary. Not the pink, fluffy
kind with heart stickers, but the kind of journal you
write in when something doesn't feel right, when your gut
is screaming and you have nowhere to send the signal.
Here's what might have been on those pages. April thirtieth,
(21:57):
nineteen ninety two. He was staring again, not the oh
you look nice kind of stare, the kind that makes
your skin crawl. I told Justin. He just laughed and said,
Jeremy's been through a lot that he doesn't mean anything
by it. Maybe, but I swear he only watches when
he thinks no one's paying attention. May fourth, nineteen ninety two.
(22:22):
Last night I heard someone on the porch. At first
I thought it was a stray cat, but then I
saw a shadow, just standing there, not moving. I didn't
tell Justin. I don't want to ruin anything. We just
got married, but I double locked the doors and I
slept with the lamp. On May seventh, nineteen ninety two,
(22:45):
he made a comment today, said I looked prettier than
I should be allowed to. I laughed it off, but
something about his smile made me want a shower for hours.
I don't know why I'm writing this. It's probably nothing,
but if anything ever happens, I want someone to know.
I felt it coming that entry right there. I felt
(23:07):
it coming. How many women write that same sentence, whisper
it to themselves in locked bathrooms, think it while walking
to their car with their keys between their fingers Psychologically,
this is what we call pre conscious fear recognition, the
gut level sense that something's off, even when your rational
(23:29):
brain hasn't caught up yet. Women are socialized to suppress it,
to smile, to be nice, to second guess their instincts.
And let's not ignore the role that marriage plays here.
Jennifer had just become a wife. She wanted to protect
her home, her husband, her peace, But her instincts they
(23:53):
were screaming. And sociologically we have a name for this too,
the trusted proximity bias. It's the idea that if someone's
in your circle, your friend, your roommate, your neighbor, they're
less likely to be a threat. Statistically, that's dead wrong.
Most violence against women is committed by someone they know,
(24:17):
someone they once trusted. Jennifer lived with that risk, slept
next to it, hosted it for dinner, and in the end,
she died because of it. Now, in the real case,
Jeremy wasn't charged for Jennifer's murder until years later. There
was suspicion, of course there was, but no hard evidence,
(24:38):
and Jeremy he played the part of the grieving friend perfectly.
He even went to her funeral wrapped his arms around
her family, said the right things, offered to help around
the house. That's not remorse, that's rehearsal. And the system,
bless its overworked, underfunded heart, took him at face value,
(25:00):
because back then, if you could pretend to be sad,
if you could look the part, people believed you. We
didn't have trauma informed policing, we didn't have advanced DNA testing,
and we sure didn't have a justice system trained to
spot the kind of predator who could cry on command
and still smell like gasoline. Let's imagine Jennifer's journal had
(25:24):
been found after her death, tucked into a drawer or
hidden under a mattress, a final breadcrumb trail from a
woman who knew she was being hunted. Would the police
have believed it? Maybe? Maybe not, Because here's the hard truth.
Victims leave us clues all the time. We just don't
(25:47):
always recognize them as evidence. We dismiss them as paranoia,
emotion hormones. She was just nervous, he's just awkward. It's
probably nothing. But what if we believed women the first time?
What if Jennifer's fear had been enough to raise red
flags to trigger intervention to keep her alive. This act
(26:13):
was about giving Jennifer the voice she was denied. It's
about imagining what it feels like to sense a monster
hiding in plain sight and not be able to say
it out loud. It's about trusting your instincts even when
the world tells you to smile and be polite. Because
sometimes the scariest villains aren't the ones in masks. They're
(26:35):
the ones you let sleep on your couch, the ones
who joke at your dinner table, the ones you convince
yourself would never hurt you until it's too late. We've
seen what might have happened if Jennifer had been heard.
Now let's flip the script entirely. In our next act,
Jeremy doesn't get caught. He boards that greyhound bus, disappears
(26:55):
into the storm, and vanishes into America's back roads like
he always did before, but this time he's being hunted.
Act for the escape that almost was up next, and
trust me, it's going to get intense all right. Time
to put your seat belts on, because this act moves fast.
Let's rewind back to September twenty first, two thousand and four.
(27:19):
In real life, Jeremy Brian Jones made a strange, unsettling
call to the Mobile County Sheriff's Department, talked about the
hurricane like he was calling an old buddy, then casually
slid into a confession about murdering Lisa Nichols. Now we
all know how that ended. They tracked him down to
the bus station, still on the line, almost as if
(27:42):
he wanted to be caught. But what if he didn't.
What if Jeremy had done what he always did best,
slipped through the cracks. Let's imagine a different timeline. Jeremy
makes the call, starts his weather chat, drops hints about
a murder, but then he hangs up abruptly before they
(28:02):
can trace it. He throws his prepaid phone in a
trash can, boards a Greyhound bus heading north, and vanishes again.
The system, already reeling from a post hurricane communications disaster,
scrambles no name, no photo, no solid description. He's just
(28:22):
another drifter on a crowded bus headed anywhere. But what
he doesn't know? This time, someone's paying attention. Enter Simone Keller.
Now Simone is fictional, but let me tell you, I
wish she was real. Former military, current FBI, and sharp
enough to cut glass with her glare. She's not your
(28:44):
buy the book type. She's the kind of agent who'll
chase a hunch across five states because her gut hasn't
failed her yet. Simone hears about the dropped call, the
mention of a murder, the abandoned burner phone, and something clicks.
She's been tracking a pattern for over a year, a
cluster of unsolved murders along Interstate twenty and Interstate ten,
(29:08):
stretching from Alabama to Oklahoma, mostly women, mostly during high chaos, windows, hurricanes, festivals, blackouts.
The suspect descriptions never match except for one detail. They
always called him charming, and just like that, Simone knows
she's got her guy. Now she just has to find him.
(29:30):
No warrants, no public alert. This isn't some dramatic bolo
bulletin flashing across TVs. Simone plays it quiet. She pulls
traffic cam footage, runs, bus manifests, contacts, motel clerks, gas
station owners, pawnshop operators, anywhere a man like Jeremy might
stop for a beer, a bed, or a burner. She
(29:53):
builds a profile not just of where Jeremy's going, but
how he thinks what he looks for for what he avoids.
It's part behavioral analysis, part psychological warfare. She knows he
won't head home, he's too smart for that. But he
will circle back to old hunting grounds, towns that remind
(30:15):
him of past kills, places where no one's watching. Jeremy
gets off in Memphis, checks into a roadside motel using
a fake name and a borrowed ID. He pays in cash,
but the clerk snaps a photo for security. That photo
ends up in Simone's inbox. She stares at it. The
(30:35):
haircut's different, the beard is new, but the eyes same predator.
She's close. Now here's where it all comes to a head.
Three weeks later, she gets a tip. A woman in
a Reno truck stop claims a man calling himself Brad
offered to buy her coffee, said something off about storms,
and gave her the chills. Simone flies out that night,
(30:59):
walked into the truck stop diner in a gray hoodie
in jeans, sits three booths down, orders black coffee, and
waits there. He is Jeremy, clean, shaven glasses, acting like
he's invisible, but Simone, she can see right through him.
She walks over cool as ice and says, ever been
(31:21):
to Alabama? He smirks, not in this life, and she
says funny, because Alabama remembers you. Q arrest, Q headlines que.
The sigh of relief heard across five states. Now again,
none of that happened, but it could have, because in
the real world, Jeremy almost got away. He had the tools,
(31:43):
the charisma, the chaos, and most importantly, the time time
to disappear to keep killing. Sociologically speaking, this is what
we call systemic delay, the time it takes for law
enforcement systems to communicate across jurisdictions, states, and agencies, especially
(32:04):
when the suspect has no clear identity. Psychologically, Jeremy was
the perfect storm, charming, transient, and addicted to control. He
used natural disasters, social disorder, and institutional cracks like weapons.
And if he'd left that bus station without confessing. I'm
(32:24):
not being dramatic here, he could have doubled his victim
count easy. This act was a dramatization, sure, but it
underscores something real. Jeremy Brian Jones wasn't caught because the
system worked. He was caught because he made a mistake.
The scary part, he almost didn't, and next time the
predator might not make that mistake. That's why we need
(32:46):
more simones, more trauma informed training, faster data sharing, and frankly,
fewer assumptions that monsters always get sloppy in the end,
because some don't, some get smarter, and some just keep
riding the bus. What happens when someone tasked with defending
a killer starts wondering if they're doing the right thing.
(33:10):
In the next act, we meet a fictional public defender
who takes Jeremy's case and finds herself torn between the
law and her gut Act five defense at a crossroads.
Up next, let's shift gears again. You're a public defender.
You didn't get into this job for glory, definitely not
(33:32):
for the paycheck. You believe in due process, constitutional rights,
and the simple but radical idea that everyone deserves a defense,
and then you get assigned him Jeremy Brian Jones. Now,
let's be clear, this character I'm about to introduce is fictional,
(33:53):
but she's based on real people I've known, worked with respected.
We'll call her Alyssa. Marsh's fresh off a string of
petty theft cases, a couple of domestic battery clients. She's
built for nuance, the gray areas of justice. And now
she's sitting across from a man who may have confessed
(34:13):
to twenty one murders. He's smiling, calm, grateful for representation,
and Alyssa she wants to vomit. Here's where things get interesting,
because the question isn't can she defend him legally? She
has to? The question is should she? And what happens
(34:34):
to someone's psyche when they're forced to fight for the
freedom of a man who admits to setting women on fire,
throwing them in wells, stabbing them in their homes, and
then winking at the press like it's a joke. This
isn't a legal argument. This is an existential crisis. The
internal war happening inside someone like Alyssa is rooted in
(34:58):
cognitive dissonance, the psychological tension that erupts when your actions
betray your values. Defending Jeremy means reinforcing the very system
he's manipulated. It means staying silent while he dehumanizes his
victims again in court. It means reading his file at
two am, highlighting technicalities that might keep his confessions from
(35:22):
being admissible. It means asking the jury to find reasonable
doubt when in your gut you feel no doubt at all.
But it's her job. The law says he's entitled to counsel.
The law says every man gets a fair shot. And
here's where sociology and psychology collide. We created a legal
(35:43):
system that prides itself on objectivity, on fairness, neutrality, the
scales of justice, but we staff it with humans, flawed, emotional,
intuitive humans. We ask public defenders to suppress empathy, to
complet mentalized, to serve justice even when it feels like
(36:03):
they're serving the devil. Let's talk about the difference between
lawful and just, because they're not the same. They never
have been. Slavery was once legal, Marital rape wasn't criminalized
nationwide until the nineteen nineties. Jeremy's constitutional rights ironclad, his
victim's peace optional. Morality asks what's right, legality asks what's allowed.
(36:31):
And sometimes they're on opposite ends of the courtroom. So
maybe Alyssa doesn't quit, Maybe she shows up, files the motions,
argues the points, but something inside her breaks just a
little because there's no psychological training for defending a man
who looks at women like prey and smiles when you
(36:54):
say death penalty. There's just grit and bourbon and sleepless nights.
This act isn't about demonizing defense attorneys. It's about recognizing
the unbearable burden we sometimes ask them to carry. It's
about the toll of principle, the cost of conscience. We
(37:18):
just walked through what it might feel like to stand
next to the devil in a courtroom, forced to defend
him with everything you've got while your conscience begs you
to run. But here's the twist. While the defense was unraveling, Jeremy,
he wasn't sweating. No, he was doing what he always
did best, watching, calculating, performing, Because for someone like Jeremy
(37:43):
Brian Jones, the courtroom wasn't a battleground. It was a stage,
and he had the spotlight. So now let's dim the lights,
close the door, and step inside the mind of a
man who confessed to more than twenty murders and still
managed to walk around like he'd done the world a favor.
(38:06):
Welcome to Act six inside the mind of Jeremy. You're
not gonna want to miss this, all right, folks, It's
time we go inside. We've seen the aftermath, we've studied
the victims, we've imagined what could have happened if the
system had done better. But now we're taking a walk
through the maze of his mind. Jeremy Brian Jones, charming, deadly, inconsistent,
(38:33):
a walking contradiction, with a mouth full of confessions and
a soul full of rot. This man isn't just a killer.
He's a performance artist of evil, and today we're decoding
the script. Let's start with the obvious, Jeremy's need for attention.
We're not talking about your run of the mill look
(38:54):
at me syndrome. This is malignant narcissism, the kind that
feeds on fear, applause, and power. He confessed to twenty
one murders, and then he started pulling back, cherry picking, denying,
gaslighting entire investigations. This wasn't panic, this wasn't regret. It
(39:16):
was control. He dangled the truth like bait, watched law
enforcement jump for it. Every confession a leash, every retraction
a punishment. He was the narrator, the protagonist, and the
director of his own twisted little horror show. Psychologically speaking,
(39:38):
Jeremy didn't just manipulate the system, he manipulated himself. He
presented different versions of himself to different people depending on
what he wanted. The handyman next door harmless, friendly, useful,
the hitchhiker on the highway quiet, untraceable, the barfly at
(39:59):
closing time. I'm charming, maybe a little dangerous. The murder
suspect conflicted, regretful, cooperative until he wasn't. Stay tuned for
more of the guilty files. We'll be right back after
these messages. This is classic identity fragmentation, often seen in
(40:20):
antisocial personalities. He wasn't a man with a moral code.
He was a man with a mirror. He gave you
the reflection you needed until he was close enough to strike.
Let's talk delusion, because while Jeremy was a manipulator, I
also believe and hear me out. He started believing his
own lies. That's not uncommon with pathological offenders. The fantasy
(40:45):
becomes safer than the truth. When he said I found
her dead and just moved the body, he wasn't just
lying to law enforcement, he was lying to himself. It
was easier to rewrite the story than to face the
horror of what he did. On this isn't insanity. It's
moral cowardice weaponized by ego, the kind of man who
(41:08):
stabs a woman thirty times and still calls it an accident.
Let's pull back for a second. People always ask was
he born evil? And I always say that's the wrong question.
Jeremy's past is muddy, abusive childhood, alcohol, drugs, possible head trauma,
(41:28):
But lots of people grow up hard and don't become
serial predators. What matters more is the system of reinforcement.
Jeremy learned early on that he could get away with things,
small things than bigger ones, that violence could be hidden
behind charm, that pain could be disguised as passion. Over time,
(41:49):
his sense of consequence disappeared. What was left was a
man who believed the world owed him, and if it
didn't deliver, he'd take what he wanted anyway. This is
where nihilism creeps, in the belief that nothing matters, not you,
not me, not life. A killer like Jeremy isn't driven
(42:13):
by rage. He's driven by emptiness, and that's what makes
him so dangerous. If I were writing Jeremy up for
a psych profile, it would include antisocial personality disorder, deceitfulness, impulsivity,
lack of remorse check check check, narcissistic personality traits, grandiosity,
(42:35):
need for admiration, exploitation of others, absolutely sadistic features. Evidence
suggests he derived pleasure from not just the kill, but
the fear leading up to it. That's a hard pill
to swallow, but it matters. Sexual deviance indicators. Several alleged
(42:58):
crimes involved rape or mutilation. Control and humiliation were often intertwined.
This wasn't a man who snapped. This was a man
who refined his cruelty over time. The most dangerous thing
Jeremy Bryan Jones ever did wasn't murder. It was pretend
to be normal. He learned how to blend in, how
(43:21):
to act concerned, how to confess just enough to be believed,
then vanish into doubt. And the scariest part, he's not
the only one. Because the real monsters, they don't hide
under your bed. They show up smiling at your front door.
They fix your sink, offer you a drink, ask to
borrow your phone. And when they say you can trust me,
(43:45):
they're not lying to you, they're lying to themselves. So
we've been inside the mind of a man who weaponized charm,
thrived on chaos, and rewrote his reality one lie at
a time. It's a terrifying place, cold, calculated, empty, but
never quiet. And yet somewhere at the very start of
(44:08):
all this, there was a child, a blank slate, a
name waiting to be written. Because monsters, they aren't born
fully formed. They're raised, named, fed by silence, shaped by trauma,
and sometimes overlooked by the very people who were supposed
to protect the rest of us from what they saw coming.
(44:32):
In this next act, we're turning our attention not to
the killer, but to the woman who gave him his name,
not to assign blame, but to ask the harder questions
about legacy, denial and the cost of looking away. Welcome
to Act seven, The mother who sold a monster a name.
(44:53):
Let's start with something that always sticks in my throat
when people say it out loud. He was such a
sweet boy, quiet, polite, never heard a fly. Now, sometimes
that's true, but other times it's a script, a cover,
a defense mechanism wrapped in maternal instinct and generational silence.
(45:14):
So in this act we meet someone fictional but hauntingly plausible,
Loretta Jones Jeremy's mother. Now listen, We're not here to
prosecute a grieving woman. We're here to explore the one
character who rarely gets examined in a case like this,
the mother who gave a monster his name and maybe
(45:37):
gave him permission to become one. Let's imagine Loretta growing
up in rural Oklahoma, poverty, religion, reputation, the kind of
life where appearances matter more than reality. She marries young,
starts a family, learns to keep her head down and
hold her tongue. Then comes Jeremy, a difficult baby, a
(45:59):
violent to toddler, a teenager who starts setting fires and
lying with conviction. She tells herself it's just a phase.
Boys will be boys. He'll grow out of it. Then
she finds a box full of disturbing drawings, photos of
neighborhood girls, journals describing violence that hasn't happened yet, and
(46:21):
instead of calling a therapist or the cops, she burns
the box and prays harder. Because in Loretta's world, scandal
is worse than danger, and if no one knows something's wrong,
then maybe it's not. What Loretta did or didn't do
is textbook protective denial. It's not always malicious, but it's dangerous.
(46:47):
When a parent sees signs of deep dysfunction, violence, cruelty,
sociopathy and chooses silence, that silence becomes complicity. It's a
trauma response, sure, but it also becomes a moral fracture,
a line crossed in slow, deliberate steps. And let's be honest,
(47:08):
women in traditional patriarchal households are often taught to protect
their sons at all costs, even from the truth, even
from themselves. We love to paint mothers as saints, martyrs, victims,
but sometimes they're enablers. Now, I'm not saying Loretta taught
(47:28):
Jeremy how to kill, but maybe she taught him that
consequences were optional, that secrets were sacred, that a smile
could fix anything if you kept your voice sweet and
your sins private. And maybe that's the scariest part, because
sometimes monsters aren't born from evil. They're grown in homes
(47:50):
full of silence, fed by shame, watered by fear. Let's
say Loretta's still alive, and every day she watches reporters
replay his confessions, she hears the names of his victims,
whispered on the news. She walks past neighbors who won't
look her in the eye. She doesn't defend Jeremy anymore,
(48:12):
not publicly, But she doesn't condemn him either, because what
would that make her. The woman who raised him, named him,
ignored the signs, burned the box. This isn't just a
story about what Jeremy became. It's a story about what
his mother couldn't face. This act isn't about blaming mothers.
(48:34):
It's about accountability, about the terrifying reality that sometimes the
people who raise us know exactly what we're capable of
and still choose silent. Loretta Jones gave Jeremy Brian Jones
a name, but when it mattered most, she didn't give
him a mirror. And sometimes that's all it would have
(48:56):
taken to stop the next body from falling. Are We've
looked backward, We've traced the roots, the ruptures, the silence,
the shame. We've stepped into the mind of the man
and the woman who may have helped build it. But
now let's fast forward, because this next act isn't about
(49:19):
how Jeremy Bryan Jones became a monster. It's about how,
in another time another courtroom, he might have convinced the
world he wasn't one at all, And how the future
of justice might not be about finding the truth, but
figuring out if the truth we're looking at is even real.
Welcome to the age of artificial innocence. This is Act eight,
(49:43):
the deep fake defense. We've all heard the phrase don't
believe everything you see. Cute, right, But what if the
thing you saw was a crime. What if the proof,
the security cam footage, the confession tape, the victim's last
video was digitally altered. What if Jeremy Brian Jones didn't
(50:06):
just lie to the cops. What if he deep faked
his way to reasonable doubt? Because in this act, we're
not just playing with facts, we're playing with reality and
who gets to define it. Let's imagine this case in
a modern courtroom. We've already got Jeremy manipulative, charismatic, and
(50:26):
camera aware, but this time he's got a defense team
that isn't just aggressive, they're tech fluent. They introduce a
bombshell motion, a motion to suppress video evidence due to
the rising prevalence of AI generated deep fakes. They present
three examples. A manipulated video of Jeremy supposedly at the scene,
(50:47):
except this one glitches when analyzed by forensic tools. A
faked confession where audio distortion might suggest AI synthesis, and
a witness statement that, under scrutiny, was spliced together using
voice cloning tech from past interviews. Suddenly the court doesn't
know what's real. And that's exactly the point. This isn't
(51:10):
about truth, This is about disorientation. Jeremy's game has always
been psychological, and now he's found the perfect weapon for chaos,
a world where the appearance of evidence is no longer
evidence itself. This is psychological warfare, folks, because reasonable doubt
(51:31):
doesn't require proving innocence. It just requires muddying the waters
enough that the jury flinches. And Jeremy he's not just
a liar, he's a storyteller, and now he's armed with
tech that can make his fantasies look like fact. Let's
zoom out. Our justice system is built on the idea
(51:51):
that evidence, physical, testimonial, digital, can be tested and trusted,
but the rise of deep fakes punching a hole through
that foundation. What happens when any piece of footage can
be labeled fake? When victims' voices are dismissed as edited
when perpetrators like Jeremy claim they're the real victims of
(52:14):
technological tampering. We're entering an era where truth isn't just subjective,
it's unstable, and for someone like Jeremy Brian Jones, that's
a dream come true. Now let's take it one step further.
In this imagined scenario, Jeremy uses AI to recreate his
victim's voices. Yeah you heard that right. He uploads their
(52:39):
social media posts, old voicemails, Facebook lives, tiktoks, then he
uses an AI voice clone to make them speak. They apologize,
they flirt, they say it was consensual, and suddenly Jeremy's
not just muddying the facts, he's rewriting them. This is
beyond manipulation. This is synthetic gaslighting on a legal scale.
(53:03):
Right now, there are almost no federal laws explicitly outlawing
the use of deep fake evidence in criminal trials. We're
catching up slowly, but the tech it's sprinting ahead. Defense
attorneys are already training to challenge audio and video evidence
as potentially manipulated. Prosecutors are scrambling to verify digital files
(53:24):
against forensic signatures. Juries are growing more skeptical even of
real footage, because they've seen how good the fake stuff looks.
Jeremy doesn't need to prove he didn't kill anyone. He
just needs to convince the jury that maybe the tape lied.
We always ask what if the wrong person goes to prison,
(53:45):
and that's a valid fear, But what we rarely ask
is what if the right person walks free? Because we
can no longer prove what's real. In this fictional lens,
Jeremy becomes the perfect predator for the digital age. He
controls the story, he undermines the evidence, he destabilizes the courtroom,
(54:08):
and worst of all, he looks the jury dead in
the eye and asks them to believe nothing. We've just
watched a killer manipulate the future, twisting truth, blurring reality,
and hiding behind a digital mask. But what happens when
the person being fooled doesn't want the truth? What if
(54:29):
the lies weren't just strategic but seductive. Because sometimes the
scariest part of a monster like Jeremy Bryan Jones isn't
what he did. It's the fact that someone somewhere looked
at all that carnage and still said I love you.
In this final act, we turn our gaze to one
(54:50):
woman fictional, yes, but based on far too many real
life stories. She saw the headlines, watched the trial, read
every every gory detail, and fell for him anyway. Welcome
to Act nine, The Woman who loved a monster. It
(55:10):
always starts the same way. A letter, a glance, a
headline that lingers longer than it should. Jeremy Brian Jones,
convicted killer, accused of dozens of murders across the South.
You read it once, then twice, and somehow, something inside
you whispers, there's more to him than that, and just
(55:32):
like that, you're gone. Let's meet Alicia, fictional, of course,
but she could be anyone. Mid thirties, a nurse, divorced,
emotionally bruised, but still searching for connection. She first saw
Jeremy on a true crime doc. Something about his eyes
caught her off guard, not the coldness, but the hurt
(55:52):
behind it. She didn't see a killer, she saw a
man who had been abandoned. And Alicia, she knows what
it means to feel unwanted, overlooked, misunderstood, So she writes him,
not out of lust, but out of rescue because this
isn't just about Jeremy, this is about her. We call
(56:14):
it highbristophilia, an attraction to people who commit outrageous crimes.
But for Alicia, it's more nuanced than that. She doesn't
love what Jeremy did. She loves what he could have been.
This is what psychologists call idealization under trauma. It's when
you take a fractured person and imagine a whole version
(56:37):
of them, a version you get to build. Alicia believes
her love can fix him. She thinks her goodness can
redeem his evil. And Jeremy, oh, he plays along beautifully,
he writes back, tells her she's different, special, the only
one who's ever really seen him. Because let's be Clearjemy
(57:00):
doesn't love her. He loves the control. He loves the
power of still being able to ruin someone from a
prison cell. Alicia starts losing friends. They warn her, show
her news clips, crime scene photos, beg her to stop
writing him. But Alicia's in too deep now. She doesn't
(57:21):
see Jeremy the way they do. She sees the man
inside the monster. And that's where things get truly dark.
Because when Jeremy stops responding, just to watch her unravel.
She spirals, She gets his name tattooed on her wrist,
starts dressing like the women he killed, posts grainy black
(57:42):
and white photos with captions like he was broken before
I found him. I'm his safe place. Now. This isn't love.
It's self a rasure masquerading as intimacy. Here's the bigger problem.
Alicia's not alone. There are thousands of women and men
who fall for killers behind bars. Why because we live
(58:05):
in a culture that romanticizes the damaged man, the brooding loner,
the tragic anti hero, the misunderstood outlaw. We sell danger
as desire. We teach people, especially women, that their love
can fix broken things. And that's a lie. Jeremy doesn't
(58:25):
need redemption, He needs a cage. But Alicia doesn't want
to be a spectator. She wants to be the main character,
and in her fantasy, love is enough. Eventually, Alicia fades
from public view. She loses her job, moves out of state,
starts a YouTube channel about prison reform, peppered with poems
(58:46):
she wrote for Jeremy. But deep down she knows he
never loved her. She was just a stage hand in
his final performance. An applause track to his chaos, and
she chose it. That's what makes this story so terrifying,
not just that a killer like Jeremy exists, but that
someone willingly loved him. We tell ourselves we'd never fall
(59:13):
for someone like Jeremy. We're too smart, too self aware,
too good. But obsession doesn't wear a warning label. It
sneaks in through loneliness, It grows in silence, It feeds
off fantasy, and in the end, it turns survivors into believers,
believers into devotees, and truth into tragedy. So here we are.
(59:39):
We've rewound the tape, reimagined the players, rewired the narrative.
And what have we uncovered Not just a killer, not
just victims, but a society that makes room for monsters
when it's too uncomfortable to name them. A justice system
that can be manipulated, a culture that romanticizes danger, and
(01:00:03):
individuals real and fictional, who lose themselves trying to love
the unlovable or save what cannot be saved. Jeremy Brian
Jones may be behind bars, but the systems that allowed
him to move across states slip through cracks, charm jurors,
and traumatize women. Those systems are still working, still failing,
(01:00:29):
And maybe that's what makes this story so horrifying. That
a man like Jeremy doesn't need supernatural powers to be dangerous.
He just needed a society distracted enough not to notice him,
and a system disorganized enough not to stop him. In
exploring these dramatized acts, we didn't try to change the truth.
(01:00:52):
We tried to contextualize it to ask harder questions. What
if the law bends further then justice can stretch. What
if silence from mothers, from institutions, from ourselves is the
soil where evil grows. And what if technology meant to
(01:01:12):
bring us closer to truth becomes the next accomplice to deception.
What I love about this series, what I love about
You the Listener, is that we don't settle for the surface.
We go deeper. We ask what shaped the killer? Who
looked away? And what did we choose not to see?
(01:01:36):
True crime is often painted as cold, procedural, factual, But
the truth, it's horror. It's the loss of control, the
distortion of reality, the fear that no matter how smart
or safe or good you are, someone like Jeremy can
still find you. And unlike in horror films, the final
(01:01:58):
girl doesn't always make it out, the monster isn't always vanquished,
and the audience doesn't always get closure. But here's what
we do get awareness, perspective, the courage to interrogate the
stories we've been told and the ones we've told ourselves.
(01:02:19):
This has been the rewired case of Jeremy Brian Jones,
a story of brutality, manipulation, silence, and the myths we
wrap around evil to make it easier to bear. I'm Danny,
a student of behavior, a challenger of narratives, and a
firm believer that even in the darkest stories, there's value
(01:02:43):
in asking better questions, because maybe that's the only way
we ever get better answers. Until next time, stay suspicious,
keep it guilty. Just be sure to keep your alibis airtight,
and maybe delete your browser history. The story's done, but
the intrigue never ends. See you next time week for
more guilt and glory. I'm Danny, signing off.
Hello, true crime lovers, Welcome back to the Guilty Files
True Crime Rewired, the podcast where we take one crime,
two perspectives, and create endless intrigue. I'm Danny, your guide
for the second act of this case, where we take
the hard facts from earlier this week and twist them
into something unexpected, daring, and just a little wicked. Think
(00:30):
of me as your pilot through the tangled web of
true crime, with the side of sass and a dash
of drama to keep you hooked. At the Guilty Files,
True Crime Rewritten, we believe every crime has two sides
to the story, and every listener deserves the thrill of both.
So sit back, lean in, and let's rewrite the narrative.
(00:52):
Because true crime isn't just meant to be solved, It's
meant to be explored. Let's get started. Welcome to the
Guilty Files. True Crime Rewired, the show where we don't
(01:15):
just revisit true crime stories, we flip them inside out.
I'm your host, Danny, former law enforcement officer with the
City of Atlanta, turned sociologist, psychologist, and your personal tour
guide through the dark corners of human behavior. Now, if
you caught Monday's episode, of the guilty files uncovered, My
(01:35):
co host Brian laid out the harrowing facts behind the
case of Jeremy Brian Jones, also known as the Oklahoma Drifter. Brian,
as always gave us a meticulous, professional and factual account
of a killer who charmed his way across the American South,
(01:55):
leaving death and devastation in his wake. But today, today
we're going to do something different. We're going to rewire
the story, not change the facts, but peel them open
and ask what if? What did we miss? What might
have gone differently? What could a modern lens revel about
(02:16):
a system that let this monster roam free for more
than a decade. This isn't about fantasies. This is about
educated speculation, dramatized exploration, and some serious psychological and sociological reframing.
So put on your thinking caps and maybe pour a
(02:36):
glass of something strong. Tonight's ride will take us through
nine acts. Each act will explore one hypothetical or fictionalized possibility,
grounded in real facts but tilted just enough to ask
what if. Let's begin now, before we go diving into
alternate timelines, identity theft scandals, tech conspiracies, and all the
(02:59):
what if wereld wins I've got planned for you tonight.
Let's just anchor ourselves in the real raw facts, because
while this is rewired, we're not throwing out the blueprints.
Brian already walked you through the case in his Uncovered episode,
and you know that man doesn't miss a beat. I
mean he served you legal timelines, confessions, ballistics, and psychopathy
(03:22):
on a silver platter. But in case your memory's a
little boggy, or you just enjoy hearing it with a
little more edge, let me set the scene one more time,
Danny style. Jeremy Brian Jones born nineteen seventy three, Oklahoma
boy with a pretty face, a nasty streak, and a
twisted talent for playing people like a violin. On the surface, charming, friendly,
(03:47):
the guy who will help you carry groceries to your car,
underneath a violent, manipulative predator who bragged he could charm
the panties off a nun classy. He started young, were
talking high school aged assaults, drug use, and a general
vibe of do not trust this man, And by his
(04:07):
early twenties he wasn't just troubled, he was dangerous. Jones
allegedly committed his first murder in nineteen ninety two, Jennifer Judd,
the wife of his high school friend. Brutal, personal, and,
like so many early crimes in these stories, unsolved for
years because the forensic tech just wasn't there and nobody
(04:29):
wanted to believe the charming guy next door was capable
of that level of evil. Over the next decade, Jones
lived like a ghost with a meth habit, floating from
Kansas to Georgia to Alabama under fake names, burning bridges,
abusing women, and leaving behind bodies, suspicions and confusion. By
(04:50):
two thousand and four, he was in Alabama riding out
Hurricane Ivan with the Bentley family, a couple who took
him in thinking he was just their old hand plot twist.
He was living under a stolen identity, John Paul Chapman
and was already wanted in multiple states, but that didn't
stop them from letting him stay the night, and it
(05:13):
definitely didn't stop him from murdering their neighbor, Lisa Nichols.
He raped her, shot her three times in the head,
and then burned her body in her bathroom like he
was taking out the trash. And if that wasn't bad enough.
He stayed in the area, ate a cheeseburger, smiled at people,
watched the Bentley's cry. He fled the scene eventually, and then,
(05:38):
in a twist worthy of every detective show ever, called
the police himself from a bus station, chatted about the weather,
then confessed to the murder. Cool as a cucumber, But baby,
he didn't stop there. He started confessing to everything. Twenty murders,
maybe more, sex workers, teenage girls, strangers, acquaintances, you name
(06:03):
it the problem. Some of it was real, some of
it was fantasy, and some of it was just six
storytelling to keep himself in control. He was convicted of
Lisa Nichols as murder and sentenced to death in Alabama,
but the rest of his confessions a big old mess,
some true, some not. Some Maybe it's like trying to
(06:26):
solve a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces swapped from
monopoly money. So what we know for sure is that
Jeremy Bryan Jones is a manipulative killer who weaponized his charm,
evaded detection for years, and created chaos across multiple states,
all while the justice system played a game of catchup
(06:48):
that cost lives. Now that we're grounded in those facts.
Let's blow the doors open, because while the truth is
horrifying enough, what happens when we turn the lights on
in the rooms The case never explored. Act one is
coming up, and we're rewinding the clock, rewiring the crime scene,
and asking what might have happened if Lisa Nichols had
(07:12):
a smart home, a drone overhead, and a tech savvy
justice system on standby. Let's flip the switch. All right,
let's crack open this first act. It's the early morning
of September seventeenth, two thousand and four. Lisa Nichols has
just returned home after fleeing Hurricane Ivan. The powers out,
phones are spotty, roads are flooded, Emergency services overwhelmed. This
(07:37):
is the perfect hunting ground for a predator like Jeremy
Bryan Jones. But let's hit rewind and reimagine this moment
in our world two decades later. Think solar powered ring
cameras on the front porch, a floodlight with motion sensors.
Lisa's smart door lock pings her app when it us.
(08:01):
Her neighbor's car has a dash cam that captures movement
across the property line. Jeremy walks up with that same
disarming smile and that same intent to kill. But what
he doesn't realize is that Lisa's home is wired like
Fort Knox. Psychological insight, predators thrive in isolation, not just
(08:23):
physical but social. The fewer eyes watching, the easier the hunt.
Jeremy banked on that, on the power being out, on
neighbors being gone, on the chaos. But in twenty twenty four,
the isolation Jeremy needed is harder to come by. Smart homes, surveillance, culture,
and digital footprints close the gap. Sociological insight. Here's the paradox.
(08:48):
The same surveillance tools that feel invasive in daily life,
you know, Alexa eavesdropping on your arguments and Siri randomly
lighting up during dinner, might have saved Lisa Nichols's life.
Why because when communities are digitally connected, predators lose their camouflage.
(09:08):
Even Lisa's routine leaving for work at dawn, coming home
alone becomes traceable. Her GPS, her fitness tracker, her FaceTime called,
or her daughter. All of that creates a digital alibi
and a digital witness. Let's say Lisa had a panic
button on her phone. Let's say she pressed it. Police
(09:28):
might have arrived before the fire was set. Jeremy might
have been arrested in the hallway, guns still hot, Lisa
might have lived. And here's the bigger societal reflection. How
many women like Lisa never got that chance because they
were failed by the technology gap, the digital divide that
(09:50):
still exists today. Lower income areas often lack access to
smart security, Marginalized communities have historically faced longer police response times.
Jeremy didn't just pray on women, He preyed on the
conditions that keep them vulnerable. Let's be real, this isn't
(10:10):
just about smart locks and hidden cameras. It's about access protection, visibility,
and in the early two thousands, Lisa Nichols wasn't invisible,
but to Jeremy, she was unprotected, alone, isolated by circumstance
and by a justice system that didn't know a predator
(10:31):
was living next door. Our act one psych take home
is this Jeremy wasn't just opportunistic. He was calculating. He
read the room, he scanned for chaos. Psychologically, he was
a classic situational offender, driven by impulse but enabled by
vulnerability and the hurricane that was his trigger, not his excuse,
(10:57):
his cover. Our Act one sociology take home is this
crime doesn't exist in a vacuum. It thrives in environments
where the infrastructure breaks down during natural disasters, blackouts, even pandemics.
That's when the cracks in the system become highways for
(11:18):
evil to move undetected. So the question is what happens
when we shrink those cracks, when we build communities that
are not just digitally connected, but digitally empowered. Because when
we start imagining that world, the one where Jeremy's face
gets caught on a neighbour's cloud cam, where his burner
(11:39):
phone is triangulated by tower pings, where Lisa's smartwatch picks
up her elevated heart rate and alerts someone. Well, we're
not just fantasizing about sci fi crime fighting. We're asking
what justice could look like if we were ready for it. Okay,
that's the tech powered rabbit hole you with me. Let's
(12:00):
climb out, because things are about to get even weirder
coming up in Act two, confession doesn't always mean truth.
We're introducing a fictional AI profiler that can decode Jeremy's
real murders from his made up ones and oh boy,
it's about to get psychological stick around. Welcome to Act two,
(12:20):
Cracking the Confessor. An AI LII detector gets involved. All right,
let's talk about Jeremy Brian Jones and his obsession with confession.
This man didn't just admit to one murder. He confessed
to twenty one twenty one. Then, like your most chaotic
ex he started backpedaling, Oh, that one, never mind, I
(12:44):
made it up that one too, and that one I
was bored high, or maybe I just wanted a cheeseburger.
I mean, we've all wanted a cheeseburger, Jeremy. But this
ain't that. Some of his confessions matched open cases, some
were straight fiction, and others suspiciously detailed in a way
that makes your stomach turn. The challenge we still don't
(13:07):
know how many of those murders he actually committed, and that,
my friends, is a justice system nightmare, because when a
predator like this starts talking, law enforcement can get real
comfortable listening, and that's where things get dangerous. So let's
imagine a different version of events, a better one picture
(13:29):
this Jeremy's been transferred to a secure federal facility, not jail,
a research wing, one of those cold white rooms where
the ac hums like it's judging you. The coffee's stale,
the cameras are rolling, and Jeremy is waiting, smug. He
thinks this is just another chance to put on a show,
(13:50):
only this time no one's playing along. Sitting across from him,
or rather, built into the table is a sleek interface,
think dark glass, subtle glows. A disembodied intelligence with one
job detect deception. It's a fictional tool, sure, but rooted
in the real science of behavioral forensics, linguistics, and biometric analysis.
(14:16):
We'll call it Veritas. Jeremy leans back in his chair
and the monologue begins. He's charming, confident, that snake oil cadence.
He's perfected, low and syrupy, designed to pull people in.
He starts with Lisa Nichols. He says, Yeah, she was sweet,
(14:38):
real sweet, lived next door. Didn't deserve what happened. I
was out of my mind that night. The storm, the drugs,
the gun, it just all came together. I didn't plan it,
but once it started, I couldn't stop. And let me
tell you, Veritus would be purring because that story, that
(14:58):
story has shape, sense, detail, emotional texture. There's a spike
in vocal cadence when he says storm. He shifts when
he says her name. There's tension in his recall, grief
masquerading as detachment. This is memory, not performance. Now Jeremy
moves on to Amanda Greenwell. He softens, his voice slows down.
(15:23):
Suddenly the remorse ramps up. He says, Amanda, I found
her in the woods. She was already gone. I just
didn't want to leave her like that. And veritas would
go cold because that story it's missing everything. There's no
(15:43):
sensory information, no verifiable reference points. His tone flat, emotionally
disconnected in all the wrong ways. In my experience, both
as a beat cop and someone who's read more criminal
psychology than is probably healthy, liars over explain and underfeel.
(16:04):
The ones telling the truth their bodies betray them, and
the ones lying they don't even know what their bodies
are doing. Jeremy starts throwing out confessions like they're candy.
He talks about the Freeman girls next, he says them
two they were already gone when I got there. I
just helped end the pain. And listen, that right there,
(16:29):
that's not a confession. That's a story. You don't help
end the pain unless you're playing God and sociopaths. Oh,
they love that role. But verit Us would flag that too,
because the truth doesn't hide behind euphemisms. It lands hard,
It stings, and Jeremy's version of truth starts sounding more
(16:53):
and more like fan fiction the longer he talks. Now,
obviously this interrogation scene didn't happen. Veritas is fictional, but
let's be honest, it's not far fetched. The Department of
Defense already uses AI to analyze micro expressions. Law enforcement
is experimenting with speech pattern biometrics. Some agencies even use
(17:18):
linguistic fingerprinting to vet anonymous threats. So ask yourself, if
we had something like Veritas in two thousand and four,
how many lives could have been saved, how many families
might have found peace? And how many false confessions could
we have cut through before they wasted years of court time,
(17:38):
media frenzy, and raw human emotion. Because here's what the
system doesn't teach you when you put on the badge.
People lie for all kinds of reasons, but not all
lies are created equal. Some are defensive, some are compulsive,
and some like Jeremies are performative. They're about power, attention.
(18:03):
He wasn't trying to clear his conscience. He was trying
to own the narrative to become the main character in
a multi state horror story, and too often it worked.
Psychologically speaking, Jeremy showed classic antisocial tendencies. He weaponized charm,
lied strategically, confessed not out of guilt but out of narcissism.
(18:26):
Each confession a new performance, a way to stay relevant.
He didn't want to be forgotten, He wanted to be feared.
Sociologically speaking, our systems are not designed to filter that
kind of manipulation. We reward the confession, not the investigation
behind it. We don't always question why someone admits guilt.
(18:48):
We just ask how fast we can close the case.
And that's a huge problem because when we put too
much stock in the story and not enough in the signals,
we give predators life Jeremy the exact thing they crave,
the spotlight. Jeremy Brian Jones played law enforcement like a fiddle,
(19:08):
lied through his teeth, and when that stopped working, he
played the public, the media, the victim's families. If we'd
had technology that could strip away the performance and get
to the raw data underneath. We might have seen him
and the truth much much sooner we've heard from Jeremy.
(19:30):
Now we hear from someone who never got the chance
to speak. Next up, I'm opening a fictional diary, the
imagined inner voice of Jennifer Judd, Jeremy's suspected first victim,
a woman who may have seen the warning signs before
anyone else and had no idea how close the threat
(19:51):
really was. Stay tuned for more of the guilty files.
We'll be right back after these messages. Act three, Jennifer
Judd speaks coming up, don't miss it. Let's pause the
monster parade for a moment. So far, we followed Jeremy
(20:11):
Bryan Jones as he manipulated the system, confessed to crimes
like he was reading from a menu, and thrived in
the shadows of chaos. But now we're going to shift perspectives,
because for all his boasting and all his lies, there
was one voice that was never heard in the courtroom,
never heard in the press conferences, never heard on the
(20:33):
police reports. That voice belonged to Jennifer Judd. She was
a newlywed, vibrant, the kind of person who lit up
a room without needing to say a word. Two days
after marrying her high school sweetheart, she was brutally murdered
in her own home, stabbed repeatedly in what appeared to
(20:54):
be a frenzied personal attack. And who just so happened
to be living next door. Jeremy, her husband's old friend,
the guy no one trusted but no one pushed out,
the guy who smiled too long, drank too much, and
always seemed to be watching. Now, let me be clear,
(21:15):
what you're about to hear is fictional. This is a
dramatized imagining of Jennifer's voice, her perspective, her fear, but
it's grounded in the real dynamics. So many women live
through the gut feeling, the social pressure to stay quiet,
the uneasy glance that gets dismissed. So imagine for a
(21:36):
moment that Jennifer kept a diary. Not the pink, fluffy
kind with heart stickers, but the kind of journal you
write in when something doesn't feel right, when your gut
is screaming and you have nowhere to send the signal.
Here's what might have been on those pages. April thirtieth,
(21:57):
nineteen ninety two. He was staring again, not the oh
you look nice kind of stare, the kind that makes
your skin crawl. I told Justin. He just laughed and said,
Jeremy's been through a lot that he doesn't mean anything
by it. Maybe, but I swear he only watches when
he thinks no one's paying attention. May fourth, nineteen ninety two.
(22:22):
Last night I heard someone on the porch. At first
I thought it was a stray cat, but then I
saw a shadow, just standing there, not moving. I didn't
tell Justin. I don't want to ruin anything. We just
got married, but I double locked the doors and I
slept with the lamp. On May seventh, nineteen ninety two,
(22:45):
he made a comment today, said I looked prettier than
I should be allowed to. I laughed it off, but
something about his smile made me want a shower for hours.
I don't know why I'm writing this. It's probably nothing,
but if anything ever happens, I want someone to know.
I felt it coming that entry right there. I felt
(23:07):
it coming. How many women write that same sentence, whisper
it to themselves in locked bathrooms, think it while walking
to their car with their keys between their fingers Psychologically,
this is what we call pre conscious fear recognition, the
gut level sense that something's off, even when your rational
(23:29):
brain hasn't caught up yet. Women are socialized to suppress it,
to smile, to be nice, to second guess their instincts.
And let's not ignore the role that marriage plays here.
Jennifer had just become a wife. She wanted to protect
her home, her husband, her peace, But her instincts they
(23:53):
were screaming. And sociologically we have a name for this too,
the trusted proximity bias. It's the idea that if someone's
in your circle, your friend, your roommate, your neighbor, they're
less likely to be a threat. Statistically, that's dead wrong.
Most violence against women is committed by someone they know,
(24:17):
someone they once trusted. Jennifer lived with that risk, slept
next to it, hosted it for dinner, and in the end,
she died because of it. Now, in the real case,
Jeremy wasn't charged for Jennifer's murder until years later. There
was suspicion, of course there was, but no hard evidence,
(24:38):
and Jeremy he played the part of the grieving friend perfectly.
He even went to her funeral wrapped his arms around
her family, said the right things, offered to help around
the house. That's not remorse, that's rehearsal. And the system,
bless its overworked, underfunded heart, took him at face value,
(25:00):
because back then, if you could pretend to be sad,
if you could look the part, people believed you. We
didn't have trauma informed policing, we didn't have advanced DNA testing,
and we sure didn't have a justice system trained to
spot the kind of predator who could cry on command
and still smell like gasoline. Let's imagine Jennifer's journal had
(25:24):
been found after her death, tucked into a drawer or
hidden under a mattress, a final breadcrumb trail from a
woman who knew she was being hunted. Would the police
have believed it? Maybe? Maybe not, Because here's the hard truth.
Victims leave us clues all the time. We just don't
(25:47):
always recognize them as evidence. We dismiss them as paranoia,
emotion hormones. She was just nervous, he's just awkward. It's
probably nothing. But what if we believed women the first time?
What if Jennifer's fear had been enough to raise red
flags to trigger intervention to keep her alive. This act
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was about giving Jennifer the voice she was denied. It's
about imagining what it feels like to sense a monster
hiding in plain sight and not be able to say
it out loud. It's about trusting your instincts even when
the world tells you to smile and be polite. Because
sometimes the scariest villains aren't the ones in masks. They're
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the ones you let sleep on your couch, the ones
who joke at your dinner table, the ones you convince
yourself would never hurt you until it's too late. We've
seen what might have happened if Jennifer had been heard.
Now let's flip the script entirely. In our next act,
Jeremy doesn't get caught. He boards that greyhound bus, disappears
(26:55):
into the storm, and vanishes into America's back roads like
he always did before, but this time he's being hunted.
Act for the escape that almost was up next, and
trust me, it's going to get intense all right. Time
to put your seat belts on, because this act moves fast.
Let's rewind back to September twenty first, two thousand and four.
(27:19):
In real life, Jeremy Brian Jones made a strange, unsettling
call to the Mobile County Sheriff's Department, talked about the
hurricane like he was calling an old buddy, then casually
slid into a confession about murdering Lisa Nichols. Now we
all know how that ended. They tracked him down to
the bus station, still on the line, almost as if
(27:42):
he wanted to be caught. But what if he didn't.
What if Jeremy had done what he always did best,
slipped through the cracks. Let's imagine a different timeline. Jeremy
makes the call, starts his weather chat, drops hints about
a murder, but then he hangs up abruptly before they
(28:02):
can trace it. He throws his prepaid phone in a
trash can, boards a Greyhound bus heading north, and vanishes again.
The system, already reeling from a post hurricane communications disaster,
scrambles no name, no photo, no solid description. He's just
(28:22):
another drifter on a crowded bus headed anywhere. But what
he doesn't know? This time, someone's paying attention. Enter Simone Keller.
Now Simone is fictional, but let me tell you, I
wish she was real. Former military, current FBI, and sharp
enough to cut glass with her glare. She's not your
(28:44):
buy the book type. She's the kind of agent who'll
chase a hunch across five states because her gut hasn't
failed her yet. Simone hears about the dropped call, the
mention of a murder, the abandoned burner phone, and something clicks.
She's been tracking a pattern for over a year, a
cluster of unsolved murders along Interstate twenty and Interstate ten,
(29:08):
stretching from Alabama to Oklahoma, mostly women, mostly during high chaos, windows, hurricanes, festivals, blackouts.
The suspect descriptions never match except for one detail. They
always called him charming, and just like that, Simone knows
she's got her guy. Now she just has to find him.
(29:30):
No warrants, no public alert. This isn't some dramatic bolo
bulletin flashing across TVs. Simone plays it quiet. She pulls
traffic cam footage, runs, bus manifests, contacts, motel clerks, gas
station owners, pawnshop operators, anywhere a man like Jeremy might
stop for a beer, a bed, or a burner. She
(29:53):
builds a profile not just of where Jeremy's going, but
how he thinks what he looks for for what he avoids.
It's part behavioral analysis, part psychological warfare. She knows he
won't head home, he's too smart for that. But he
will circle back to old hunting grounds, towns that remind
(30:15):
him of past kills, places where no one's watching. Jeremy
gets off in Memphis, checks into a roadside motel using
a fake name and a borrowed ID. He pays in cash,
but the clerk snaps a photo for security. That photo
ends up in Simone's inbox. She stares at it. The
(30:35):
haircut's different, the beard is new, but the eyes same predator.
She's close. Now here's where it all comes to a head.
Three weeks later, she gets a tip. A woman in
a Reno truck stop claims a man calling himself Brad
offered to buy her coffee, said something off about storms,
and gave her the chills. Simone flies out that night,
(30:59):
walked into the truck stop diner in a gray hoodie
in jeans, sits three booths down, orders black coffee, and
waits there. He is Jeremy, clean, shaven glasses, acting like
he's invisible, but Simone, she can see right through him.
She walks over cool as ice and says, ever been
(31:21):
to Alabama? He smirks, not in this life, and she
says funny, because Alabama remembers you. Q arrest, Q headlines que.
The sigh of relief heard across five states. Now again,
none of that happened, but it could have, because in
the real world, Jeremy almost got away. He had the tools,
(31:43):
the charisma, the chaos, and most importantly, the time time
to disappear to keep killing. Sociologically speaking, this is what
we call systemic delay, the time it takes for law
enforcement systems to communicate across jurisdictions, states, and agencies, especially
(32:04):
when the suspect has no clear identity. Psychologically, Jeremy was
the perfect storm, charming, transient, and addicted to control. He
used natural disasters, social disorder, and institutional cracks like weapons.
And if he'd left that bus station without confessing. I'm
(32:24):
not being dramatic here, he could have doubled his victim
count easy. This act was a dramatization, sure, but it
underscores something real. Jeremy Brian Jones wasn't caught because the
system worked. He was caught because he made a mistake.
The scary part, he almost didn't, and next time the
predator might not make that mistake. That's why we need
(32:46):
more simones, more trauma informed training, faster data sharing, and frankly,
fewer assumptions that monsters always get sloppy in the end,
because some don't, some get smarter, and some just keep
riding the bus. What happens when someone tasked with defending
a killer starts wondering if they're doing the right thing.
(33:10):
In the next act, we meet a fictional public defender
who takes Jeremy's case and finds herself torn between the
law and her gut Act five defense at a crossroads.
Up next, let's shift gears again. You're a public defender.
You didn't get into this job for glory, definitely not
(33:32):
for the paycheck. You believe in due process, constitutional rights,
and the simple but radical idea that everyone deserves a defense,
and then you get assigned him Jeremy Brian Jones. Now,
let's be clear, this character I'm about to introduce is fictional,
(33:53):
but she's based on real people I've known, worked with respected.
We'll call her Alyssa. Marsh's fresh off a string of
petty theft cases, a couple of domestic battery clients. She's
built for nuance, the gray areas of justice. And now
she's sitting across from a man who may have confessed
(34:13):
to twenty one murders. He's smiling, calm, grateful for representation,
and Alyssa she wants to vomit. Here's where things get interesting,
because the question isn't can she defend him legally? She
has to? The question is should she? And what happens
(34:34):
to someone's psyche when they're forced to fight for the
freedom of a man who admits to setting women on fire,
throwing them in wells, stabbing them in their homes, and
then winking at the press like it's a joke. This
isn't a legal argument. This is an existential crisis. The
internal war happening inside someone like Alyssa is rooted in
(34:58):
cognitive dissonance, the psychological tension that erupts when your actions
betray your values. Defending Jeremy means reinforcing the very system
he's manipulated. It means staying silent while he dehumanizes his
victims again in court. It means reading his file at
two am, highlighting technicalities that might keep his confessions from
(35:22):
being admissible. It means asking the jury to find reasonable
doubt when in your gut you feel no doubt at all.
But it's her job. The law says he's entitled to counsel.
The law says every man gets a fair shot. And
here's where sociology and psychology collide. We created a legal
(35:43):
system that prides itself on objectivity, on fairness, neutrality, the
scales of justice, but we staff it with humans, flawed, emotional,
intuitive humans. We ask public defenders to suppress empathy, to
complet mentalized, to serve justice even when it feels like
(36:03):
they're serving the devil. Let's talk about the difference between
lawful and just, because they're not the same. They never
have been. Slavery was once legal, Marital rape wasn't criminalized
nationwide until the nineteen nineties. Jeremy's constitutional rights ironclad, his
victim's peace optional. Morality asks what's right, legality asks what's allowed.
(36:31):
And sometimes they're on opposite ends of the courtroom. So
maybe Alyssa doesn't quit, Maybe she shows up, files the motions,
argues the points, but something inside her breaks just a
little because there's no psychological training for defending a man
who looks at women like prey and smiles when you
(36:54):
say death penalty. There's just grit and bourbon and sleepless nights.
This act isn't about demonizing defense attorneys. It's about recognizing
the unbearable burden we sometimes ask them to carry. It's
about the toll of principle, the cost of conscience. We
(37:18):
just walked through what it might feel like to stand
next to the devil in a courtroom, forced to defend
him with everything you've got while your conscience begs you
to run. But here's the twist. While the defense was unraveling, Jeremy,
he wasn't sweating. No, he was doing what he always
did best, watching, calculating, performing, Because for someone like Jeremy
(37:43):
Brian Jones, the courtroom wasn't a battleground. It was a stage,
and he had the spotlight. So now let's dim the lights,
close the door, and step inside the mind of a
man who confessed to more than twenty murders and still
managed to walk around like he'd done the world a favor.
(38:06):
Welcome to Act six inside the mind of Jeremy. You're
not gonna want to miss this, all right, folks, It's
time we go inside. We've seen the aftermath, we've studied
the victims, we've imagined what could have happened if the
system had done better. But now we're taking a walk
through the maze of his mind. Jeremy Brian Jones, charming, deadly, inconsistent,
(38:33):
a walking contradiction, with a mouth full of confessions and
a soul full of rot. This man isn't just a killer.
He's a performance artist of evil, and today we're decoding
the script. Let's start with the obvious, Jeremy's need for attention.
We're not talking about your run of the mill look
(38:54):
at me syndrome. This is malignant narcissism, the kind that
feeds on fear, applause, and power. He confessed to twenty
one murders, and then he started pulling back, cherry picking, denying,
gaslighting entire investigations. This wasn't panic, this wasn't regret. It
(39:16):
was control. He dangled the truth like bait, watched law
enforcement jump for it. Every confession a leash, every retraction
a punishment. He was the narrator, the protagonist, and the
director of his own twisted little horror show. Psychologically speaking,
(39:38):
Jeremy didn't just manipulate the system, he manipulated himself. He
presented different versions of himself to different people depending on
what he wanted. The handyman next door harmless, friendly, useful,
the hitchhiker on the highway quiet, untraceable, the barfly at
(39:59):
closing time. I'm charming, maybe a little dangerous. The murder
suspect conflicted, regretful, cooperative until he wasn't. Stay tuned for
more of the guilty files. We'll be right back after
these messages. This is classic identity fragmentation, often seen in
(40:20):
antisocial personalities. He wasn't a man with a moral code.
He was a man with a mirror. He gave you
the reflection you needed until he was close enough to strike.
Let's talk delusion, because while Jeremy was a manipulator, I
also believe and hear me out. He started believing his
own lies. That's not uncommon with pathological offenders. The fantasy
(40:45):
becomes safer than the truth. When he said I found
her dead and just moved the body, he wasn't just
lying to law enforcement, he was lying to himself. It
was easier to rewrite the story than to face the
horror of what he did. On this isn't insanity. It's
moral cowardice weaponized by ego, the kind of man who
(41:08):
stabs a woman thirty times and still calls it an accident.
Let's pull back for a second. People always ask was
he born evil? And I always say that's the wrong question.
Jeremy's past is muddy, abusive childhood, alcohol, drugs, possible head trauma,
(41:28):
But lots of people grow up hard and don't become
serial predators. What matters more is the system of reinforcement.
Jeremy learned early on that he could get away with things,
small things than bigger ones, that violence could be hidden
behind charm, that pain could be disguised as passion. Over time,
(41:49):
his sense of consequence disappeared. What was left was a
man who believed the world owed him, and if it
didn't deliver, he'd take what he wanted anyway. This is
where nihilism creeps, in the belief that nothing matters, not you,
not me, not life. A killer like Jeremy isn't driven
(42:13):
by rage. He's driven by emptiness, and that's what makes
him so dangerous. If I were writing Jeremy up for
a psych profile, it would include antisocial personality disorder, deceitfulness, impulsivity,
lack of remorse check check check, narcissistic personality traits, grandiosity,
(42:35):
need for admiration, exploitation of others, absolutely sadistic features. Evidence
suggests he derived pleasure from not just the kill, but
the fear leading up to it. That's a hard pill
to swallow, but it matters. Sexual deviance indicators. Several alleged
(42:58):
crimes involved rape or mutilation. Control and humiliation were often intertwined.
This wasn't a man who snapped. This was a man
who refined his cruelty over time. The most dangerous thing
Jeremy Bryan Jones ever did wasn't murder. It was pretend
to be normal. He learned how to blend in, how
(43:21):
to act concerned, how to confess just enough to be believed,
then vanish into doubt. And the scariest part, he's not
the only one. Because the real monsters, they don't hide
under your bed. They show up smiling at your front door.
They fix your sink, offer you a drink, ask to
borrow your phone. And when they say you can trust me,
(43:45):
they're not lying to you, they're lying to themselves. So
we've been inside the mind of a man who weaponized charm,
thrived on chaos, and rewrote his reality one lie at
a time. It's a terrifying place, cold, calculated, empty, but
never quiet. And yet somewhere at the very start of
(44:08):
all this, there was a child, a blank slate, a
name waiting to be written. Because monsters, they aren't born
fully formed. They're raised, named, fed by silence, shaped by trauma,
and sometimes overlooked by the very people who were supposed
to protect the rest of us from what they saw coming.
(44:32):
In this next act, we're turning our attention not to
the killer, but to the woman who gave him his name,
not to assign blame, but to ask the harder questions
about legacy, denial and the cost of looking away. Welcome
to Act seven, The mother who sold a monster a name.
(44:53):
Let's start with something that always sticks in my throat
when people say it out loud. He was such a
sweet boy, quiet, polite, never heard a fly. Now, sometimes
that's true, but other times it's a script, a cover,
a defense mechanism wrapped in maternal instinct and generational silence.
(45:14):
So in this act we meet someone fictional but hauntingly plausible,
Loretta Jones Jeremy's mother. Now listen, We're not here to
prosecute a grieving woman. We're here to explore the one
character who rarely gets examined in a case like this,
the mother who gave a monster his name and maybe
(45:37):
gave him permission to become one. Let's imagine Loretta growing
up in rural Oklahoma, poverty, religion, reputation, the kind of
life where appearances matter more than reality. She marries young,
starts a family, learns to keep her head down and
hold her tongue. Then comes Jeremy, a difficult baby, a
(45:59):
violent to toddler, a teenager who starts setting fires and
lying with conviction. She tells herself it's just a phase.
Boys will be boys. He'll grow out of it. Then
she finds a box full of disturbing drawings, photos of
neighborhood girls, journals describing violence that hasn't happened yet, and
(46:21):
instead of calling a therapist or the cops, she burns
the box and prays harder. Because in Loretta's world, scandal
is worse than danger, and if no one knows something's wrong,
then maybe it's not. What Loretta did or didn't do
is textbook protective denial. It's not always malicious, but it's dangerous.
(46:47):
When a parent sees signs of deep dysfunction, violence, cruelty,
sociopathy and chooses silence, that silence becomes complicity. It's a
trauma response, sure, but it also becomes a moral fracture,
a line crossed in slow, deliberate steps. And let's be honest,
(47:08):
women in traditional patriarchal households are often taught to protect
their sons at all costs, even from the truth, even
from themselves. We love to paint mothers as saints, martyrs, victims,
but sometimes they're enablers. Now, I'm not saying Loretta taught
(47:28):
Jeremy how to kill, but maybe she taught him that
consequences were optional, that secrets were sacred, that a smile
could fix anything if you kept your voice sweet and
your sins private. And maybe that's the scariest part, because
sometimes monsters aren't born from evil. They're grown in homes
(47:50):
full of silence, fed by shame, watered by fear. Let's
say Loretta's still alive, and every day she watches reporters
replay his confessions, she hears the names of his victims,
whispered on the news. She walks past neighbors who won't
look her in the eye. She doesn't defend Jeremy anymore,
(48:12):
not publicly, But she doesn't condemn him either, because what
would that make her. The woman who raised him, named him,
ignored the signs, burned the box. This isn't just a
story about what Jeremy became. It's a story about what
his mother couldn't face. This act isn't about blaming mothers.
(48:34):
It's about accountability, about the terrifying reality that sometimes the
people who raise us know exactly what we're capable of
and still choose silent. Loretta Jones gave Jeremy Brian Jones
a name, but when it mattered most, she didn't give
him a mirror. And sometimes that's all it would have
(48:56):
taken to stop the next body from falling. Are We've
looked backward, We've traced the roots, the ruptures, the silence,
the shame. We've stepped into the mind of the man
and the woman who may have helped build it. But
now let's fast forward, because this next act isn't about
(49:19):
how Jeremy Bryan Jones became a monster. It's about how,
in another time another courtroom, he might have convinced the
world he wasn't one at all, And how the future
of justice might not be about finding the truth, but
figuring out if the truth we're looking at is even real.
Welcome to the age of artificial innocence. This is Act eight,
(49:43):
the deep fake defense. We've all heard the phrase don't
believe everything you see. Cute, right, But what if the
thing you saw was a crime. What if the proof,
the security cam footage, the confession tape, the victim's last
video was digitally altered. What if Jeremy Brian Jones didn't
(50:06):
just lie to the cops. What if he deep faked
his way to reasonable doubt? Because in this act, we're
not just playing with facts, we're playing with reality and
who gets to define it. Let's imagine this case in
a modern courtroom. We've already got Jeremy manipulative, charismatic, and
(50:26):
camera aware, but this time he's got a defense team
that isn't just aggressive, they're tech fluent. They introduce a
bombshell motion, a motion to suppress video evidence due to
the rising prevalence of AI generated deep fakes. They present
three examples. A manipulated video of Jeremy supposedly at the scene,
(50:47):
except this one glitches when analyzed by forensic tools. A
faked confession where audio distortion might suggest AI synthesis, and
a witness statement that, under scrutiny, was spliced together using
voice cloning tech from past interviews. Suddenly the court doesn't
know what's real. And that's exactly the point. This isn't
(51:10):
about truth, This is about disorientation. Jeremy's game has always
been psychological, and now he's found the perfect weapon for chaos,
a world where the appearance of evidence is no longer
evidence itself. This is psychological warfare, folks, because reasonable doubt
(51:31):
doesn't require proving innocence. It just requires muddying the waters
enough that the jury flinches. And Jeremy he's not just
a liar, he's a storyteller, and now he's armed with
tech that can make his fantasies look like fact. Let's
zoom out. Our justice system is built on the idea
(51:51):
that evidence, physical, testimonial, digital, can be tested and trusted,
but the rise of deep fakes punching a hole through
that foundation. What happens when any piece of footage can
be labeled fake? When victims' voices are dismissed as edited
when perpetrators like Jeremy claim they're the real victims of
(52:14):
technological tampering. We're entering an era where truth isn't just subjective,
it's unstable, and for someone like Jeremy Brian Jones, that's
a dream come true. Now let's take it one step further.
In this imagined scenario, Jeremy uses AI to recreate his
victim's voices. Yeah you heard that right. He uploads their
(52:39):
social media posts, old voicemails, Facebook lives, tiktoks, then he
uses an AI voice clone to make them speak. They apologize,
they flirt, they say it was consensual, and suddenly Jeremy's
not just muddying the facts, he's rewriting them. This is
beyond manipulation. This is synthetic gaslighting on a legal scale.
(53:03):
Right now, there are almost no federal laws explicitly outlawing
the use of deep fake evidence in criminal trials. We're
catching up slowly, but the tech it's sprinting ahead. Defense
attorneys are already training to challenge audio and video evidence
as potentially manipulated. Prosecutors are scrambling to verify digital files
(53:24):
against forensic signatures. Juries are growing more skeptical even of
real footage, because they've seen how good the fake stuff looks.
Jeremy doesn't need to prove he didn't kill anyone. He
just needs to convince the jury that maybe the tape lied.
We always ask what if the wrong person goes to prison,
(53:45):
and that's a valid fear, But what we rarely ask
is what if the right person walks free? Because we
can no longer prove what's real. In this fictional lens,
Jeremy becomes the perfect predator for the digital age. He
controls the story, he undermines the evidence, he destabilizes the courtroom,
(54:08):
and worst of all, he looks the jury dead in
the eye and asks them to believe nothing. We've just
watched a killer manipulate the future, twisting truth, blurring reality,
and hiding behind a digital mask. But what happens when
the person being fooled doesn't want the truth? What if
(54:29):
the lies weren't just strategic but seductive. Because sometimes the
scariest part of a monster like Jeremy Bryan Jones isn't
what he did. It's the fact that someone somewhere looked
at all that carnage and still said I love you.
In this final act, we turn our gaze to one
(54:50):
woman fictional, yes, but based on far too many real
life stories. She saw the headlines, watched the trial, read
every every gory detail, and fell for him anyway. Welcome
to Act nine, The Woman who loved a monster. It
(55:10):
always starts the same way. A letter, a glance, a
headline that lingers longer than it should. Jeremy Brian Jones,
convicted killer, accused of dozens of murders across the South.
You read it once, then twice, and somehow, something inside
you whispers, there's more to him than that, and just
(55:32):
like that, you're gone. Let's meet Alicia, fictional, of course,
but she could be anyone. Mid thirties, a nurse, divorced,
emotionally bruised, but still searching for connection. She first saw
Jeremy on a true crime doc. Something about his eyes
caught her off guard, not the coldness, but the hurt
(55:52):
behind it. She didn't see a killer, she saw a
man who had been abandoned. And Alicia, she knows what
it means to feel unwanted, overlooked, misunderstood, So she writes him,
not out of lust, but out of rescue because this
isn't just about Jeremy, this is about her. We call
(56:14):
it highbristophilia, an attraction to people who commit outrageous crimes.
But for Alicia, it's more nuanced than that. She doesn't
love what Jeremy did. She loves what he could have been.
This is what psychologists call idealization under trauma. It's when
you take a fractured person and imagine a whole version
(56:37):
of them, a version you get to build. Alicia believes
her love can fix him. She thinks her goodness can
redeem his evil. And Jeremy, oh, he plays along beautifully,
he writes back, tells her she's different, special, the only
one who's ever really seen him. Because let's be Clearjemy
(57:00):
doesn't love her. He loves the control. He loves the
power of still being able to ruin someone from a
prison cell. Alicia starts losing friends. They warn her, show
her news clips, crime scene photos, beg her to stop
writing him. But Alicia's in too deep now. She doesn't
(57:21):
see Jeremy the way they do. She sees the man
inside the monster. And that's where things get truly dark.
Because when Jeremy stops responding, just to watch her unravel.
She spirals, She gets his name tattooed on her wrist,
starts dressing like the women he killed, posts grainy black
(57:42):
and white photos with captions like he was broken before
I found him. I'm his safe place. Now. This isn't love.
It's self a rasure masquerading as intimacy. Here's the bigger problem.
Alicia's not alone. There are thousands of women and men
who fall for killers behind bars. Why because we live
(58:05):
in a culture that romanticizes the damaged man, the brooding loner,
the tragic anti hero, the misunderstood outlaw. We sell danger
as desire. We teach people, especially women, that their love
can fix broken things. And that's a lie. Jeremy doesn't
(58:25):
need redemption, He needs a cage. But Alicia doesn't want
to be a spectator. She wants to be the main character,
and in her fantasy, love is enough. Eventually, Alicia fades
from public view. She loses her job, moves out of state,
starts a YouTube channel about prison reform, peppered with poems
(58:46):
she wrote for Jeremy. But deep down she knows he
never loved her. She was just a stage hand in
his final performance. An applause track to his chaos, and
she chose it. That's what makes this story so terrifying,
not just that a killer like Jeremy exists, but that
someone willingly loved him. We tell ourselves we'd never fall
(59:13):
for someone like Jeremy. We're too smart, too self aware,
too good. But obsession doesn't wear a warning label. It
sneaks in through loneliness, It grows in silence, It feeds
off fantasy, and in the end, it turns survivors into believers,
believers into devotees, and truth into tragedy. So here we are.
(59:39):
We've rewound the tape, reimagined the players, rewired the narrative.
And what have we uncovered Not just a killer, not
just victims, but a society that makes room for monsters
when it's too uncomfortable to name them. A justice system
that can be manipulated, a culture that romanticizes danger, and
(01:00:03):
individuals real and fictional, who lose themselves trying to love
the unlovable or save what cannot be saved. Jeremy Brian
Jones may be behind bars, but the systems that allowed
him to move across states slip through cracks, charm jurors,
and traumatize women. Those systems are still working, still failing,
(01:00:29):
And maybe that's what makes this story so horrifying. That
a man like Jeremy doesn't need supernatural powers to be dangerous.
He just needed a society distracted enough not to notice him,
and a system disorganized enough not to stop him. In
exploring these dramatized acts, we didn't try to change the truth.
(01:00:52):
We tried to contextualize it to ask harder questions. What
if the law bends further then justice can stretch. What
if silence from mothers, from institutions, from ourselves is the
soil where evil grows. And what if technology meant to
(01:01:12):
bring us closer to truth becomes the next accomplice to deception.
What I love about this series, what I love about
You the Listener, is that we don't settle for the surface.
We go deeper. We ask what shaped the killer? Who
looked away? And what did we choose not to see?
(01:01:36):
True crime is often painted as cold, procedural, factual, But
the truth, it's horror. It's the loss of control, the
distortion of reality, the fear that no matter how smart
or safe or good you are, someone like Jeremy can
still find you. And unlike in horror films, the final
(01:01:58):
girl doesn't always make it out, the monster isn't always vanquished,
and the audience doesn't always get closure. But here's what
we do get awareness, perspective, the courage to interrogate the
stories we've been told and the ones we've told ourselves.
(01:02:19):
This has been the rewired case of Jeremy Brian Jones,
a story of brutality, manipulation, silence, and the myths we
wrap around evil to make it easier to bear. I'm Danny,
a student of behavior, a challenger of narratives, and a
firm believer that even in the darkest stories, there's value
(01:02:43):
in asking better questions, because maybe that's the only way
we ever get better answers. Until next time, stay suspicious,
keep it guilty. Just be sure to keep your alibis airtight,
and maybe delete your browser history. The story's done, but
the intrigue never ends. See you next time week for
more guilt and glory. I'm Danny, signing off.
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