By Jeff Lehr
jlehr@joplinglobe.com
Convicted killer Jeremy Jones is slowly running out of options.
Alabama’s appeals courts have upheld Jones’ conviction and death sentence for the 2004 murder of Lisa Marie Nichols, 45, of rural Turnerville, Ala.
The Alabama Supreme Court now has declined to hear the former Miami, Okla., resident’s appeal, and the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals has issued a final certificate of judgment.
Jones, 36, has been on death row in Alabama for more than four years. An execution date has not been set and may not be for several more years. He still has federal appeal options.
“Jeremy Jones was a murdering killer when we sent him to death row,” Alabama Attorney General Troy King said in a news release Tuesday.
“He earned the sentence he got,” he said. “I am pleased that the appeals court will not interfere with carrying this sentence out. Today, justice was protected.”
Nichols was raped and shot to death, and her home was set on fire. A jury in Mobile County Circuit Court convicted Jones of the killing in 2005. Two years later, he pleaded guilty to arson in connection with the crime.
Before his trial in Alabama, Jones made a series of jailhouse confessions to more than a dozen murders, including four cases in Oklahoma and Kansas that involve as many as eight possible victims, according to authorities. He has been investigated extensively as a suspected serial killer.
But, other than the Nichols murder, Jones has been charged with just two other slayings. Authorities in Georgia charged him with the 2004 killing of 16-year-old Amanda Greenwell in Douglasville. He also was charged at one time with the rape and stabbing death of a 47-year-old prostitute in the Garden District in New Orleans, La. Neither of those cases has been prosecuted.
Area case
Jeremy Jones’ purported confession to the unsolved murders in 1999 of Kathy and Danny Freeman, of Welch, Okla., and their daughter, Ashley, and her friend Lauria Bible, both 16, occasioned a massive search for the missing girls’ remains at some mining pit sites near Galena, Kan. The search, conducted before Jones’ trial in Alabama, came up empty.
