50 Dollars and a New Name: The Jeremy Bryan Jones Story

0:00 A man moves into a stranger's trailer the night before a hurricane hits. Nine days later, a woman down the road is dead, and it takes federal investigators four years to figure out that man isn't even using his real name. Today, I'm telling you about Jeremy Bryan Jones, the man who bought someone else's identity for $50, and then couldn't stop confessing once he got caught. [Music] Jeremy Bryan Jones was born in 1973 in Miami, Oklahoma.

0:51 A little mining town tucked up near the Kansas border. And the thing that threw me off when I started digging into this one is that his childhood wasn't rough. His stepfather was a carpenter. The family had a little bit of money. Crime library actually caused it a middle-class home that he lived in. That's not the story that you usually get with guys like this, where you can point to poverty or abuse and go, "Yeah, well that explains it." It doesn't explain this one. What you can point to is how people reacted to him. Neighbors actively avoided him. Not after something happened before. As a little kid, there was just something about him that made grown adults want distance, and nobody could really articulate why it was.

1:34 They just knew to keep their kids away from him. The vibes were off, or something. By high school, he checked out completely. From Miami High in 1989, transferred to another school, expelled again in 1991. A few months shy of graduating. The reason on record is basically that he preferred the streets to the classroom, which, fair enough, a lot of teenagers feel that way, most of them just don't quite act on it, like Jeremy did. That's also when the drinking kicked in. Then drugs, and eventually meth, which is going to be the engine running underneath basically everything that happens for the rest of the story. In January of 1990, 16 years old, he got into it with another boy.

2:15 His own mother tried to break it up, and he hit her too. Two counts of assault. The charges got dropped later because, and I want you to hang on to this detail, everybody forgave him. His victims reconciled with him and moved on. That's going to become a pattern with Jeremy Bryan Jones. People kept forgiving him right up until they couldn't anymore. And here's the piece that I think unlocks the rest of this. He was charming. People who knew him decades later still bring this up, unprompted. He reportedly used to brag that he could talk to panties often done. And by every account, he wasn't exaggerating by much. He was a natural, and he figured out early that charm gets you further than fists ever will.

2:58 So he used it that way, like a tool instead of a personality trait. In 1992, he moved to Kansas with a girlfriend and started beating her regularly. That enough that neighbors called the police multiple times. And every single time officers would show up, ask if everything was okay, and then she would say nothing's wrong. So they'd leave. His friend Justin Judd remembered it exactly like that years later, practically word for word. That's what domestic violence enforcement looked like in a lot of places in the early '90s. If the victim wouldn't cooperate, officers had almost no tools to intervene without her saying the word. So the cycle just kept going, call after call with nothing changing.

3:40 And sometimes even if you do say something, you still end up in a bad situation. I.e. Nicole Brown Simpson. But by 2000, Jones had a rape warrant out on him back in Oklahoma. So he ran to Joplin, Missouri. In a bar there, he met a woman whose son was locked up, a guy named John Paul Chapman. Jones got close to her, sympathetic, attentive, the whole act. And then he asked her for her son's Social Security card in identifying paperwork. And she sold it to him for 50 bucks. $50 bought this man four years as somebody else. So during the next four years, John Paul Chapman, the fake one, bounced through Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana doing day labor and cycling through relationships.

4:26 And he got arrested three separate times in Georgia between October 2003 and June 2004. This orderly conduct criminal trespassing drug possession. Every time his fingerprints got run through the FBI's brand new automated matching system. And every time it came back clean. Here's why. And this is one of the wilder pieces of institutional failure of crumacross while doing this show. The system launched in 1999 and it was built to be fully automated, meaning that no human actually reviewed the initial match. The forensic expert explained the mechanism to NPR like this. If the quality of a stored print is bad enough, the computer just assumes it's never seen this person before and hands out a brand new ID number.

5:11 That's the whole failure. One bad scan in October 2003 and the system quietly built Jeremy Bryan Jones in entirely new identity backed up by his own fingerprints confirming the lie every single time he got picked up again after that. The FBI later said on the record that nobody did anything wrong. No laps, no inattention. The system just missed it. Which might be true and somehow it makes it kind of worse because it means this could have happened with literally anyone the algorithm decided to overlook that day. In September 2004, Hurricane Ivan slammed into Mobile, Alabama as a category three doing close to $20 billion in damage and leaving around 18,000 people without homes.

5:57 And in that chaos, right as the storm was bearing down, Jones still going by Chapman, a name a local family already trusted from some work he had done from them years before, showed up at Mark and Kim Bentley's home in Turnerville asking for work and somewhere to stay. Mark let him move in for the storm. Kim didn't trust him and she was right not to. When Jones called during the hurricane asking where to find radio and batteries, she specifically told him to send somebody else to look not him. He searched the closet himself anyway and found her handgun. Told everyone it was for protection against looters, which in fairness is exactly the kind of thing you'd want a gun for in a hurricane.

6:40 He just had other plans for it. That night he overheard a neighbor named Lisa Nichols mentioned to the Bentley's that she lived alone. She was 43. Two days later, once the house had emptied out for the evening, Jones took that stolen gun and walked over to her home. He raped her and shot her three times in the head. Then he set the scene on fire and came back to the Bentley house like nothing had ever happened. When Mark Bentley found him outside later on with four cans of gasoline, Jones said he needed it for four wheelers, a late night ride. In the middle of Hurricane cleanup, the next morning when the Nichols family discovered her remains, court records specifically note that while everyone else ran to help, Jones stayed back and showed almost no reaction at all.

7:27 It was a beer can that ultimately did it. His prints were on the scene and Kim Bentley remembered that he and her husband had been drinking that exact same brand together on the day of the murder. Once Mobile Police started circulating the name John Paul Chapman, Missouri authorities flagged something else strange. The real John Paul Chapman was already sitting in prison in Missouri, same birth date, same social security number as their suspect. His mother admitted that she'd sold his identity. Investigators pulled Jones's old prints from a 1990 arrest back in Oklahoma and they matched. He was arrested on September 21, 2004. When he was told he was being charged, he reportedly said he'd had every intention of making them kill him.

8:12 His trial that October lasted about a week. The jury convicted him of Capitol murder and recommended death, 10-2. He was formally sentenced that December. And then the story takes a turn. Because once he was locked up, Jones started confessing to everything. Upwards of 20 murders across five states and the number kept shifting depending on which interview you're looking at. Some of the alleged victims he couldn't even remember names for. The clearest example is a 1999 quadruple case out of Welch, Oklahoma, where a couple was murdered and their two teenage daughters disappeared entirely. Jones confessed to that one too, with details specific enough to sound convincing, right down to where the mailbox sat outside the house.

8:56 Investigators searched exactly where he told them to look. They found nothing. And then in 2018, the real killers were identified through a completely separate investigation, which proved one of his most detailed, most convincing confessions had been made up the entire time. His own defense attorney eventually laid out the whole motive, plainly. Confess, and you'll get longer phone calls with your mother and girlfriend. Better food, softer treatment and jail. That was it. That was the entire calculation behind years of false confessions that sent grieving families chasing answers that were never real. Jeremy Bryan Jones is provably responsible for one murder. But the trail of confessions he left behind kept investigators and heartbroken families spinning for years.

9:41 For no reason beyond his own comfort. He's still on death row in Alabama today. Appeals are still working their way through the courts, decades later. And by most accounts, still talking. Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, Bingeable True Crime Stories. Hi, I'm Joe, I'm the host. Here's an email, subject this has never happened before. Hey Joe. I actually finished cleaning the garage because I kept telling myself one more episode. Usually I quit halfway through and claim it was too hot out there. So thanks, I guess.

10:21 Chris in Norman, Oklahoma. Chris? Glad I could help. Indirectly. Also, you missed a spot. Hey, if you're a new listener to the podcast, welcome. Put your feet up, get comfortable because there are hundreds of back catalog episodes where you to listen to. You can also go to 10minuteMurder.com, all kinds of things to see and do there. For instance, send me an email like Chris did at 10minuteMurder.com. OG listeners, you know I love you. Keep doing what you're doing, sharing the podcast with friends and family, letting everyone know about it, interacting with the social media content that I put out there. Suggesting cases, which is a huge one. 99% of the cases that I talk about here in the podcast come from you that listen.

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