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

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A man moves into a stranger's trailer the night before a hurricane hits.

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Nine days later, a woman down the road is dead, and it takes federal investigators four

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years to figure out that man isn't even using his real name.

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Today, I'm telling you about Jeremy Bryan Jones, the man who bought someone else's identity

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for $50, and then couldn't stop confessing once he got caught.

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[Music]

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Jeremy Bryan Jones was born in 1973 in Miami, Oklahoma.

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A little mining town tucked up near the Kansas border.

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And the thing that threw me off when I started digging into this one is that his childhood

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wasn't rough.

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His stepfather was a carpenter.

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The family had a little bit of money.

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Crime library actually caused it a middle-class home that he lived in.

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That's not the story that you usually get with guys like this, where you can point to

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poverty or abuse and go, "Yeah, well that explains it."

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It doesn't explain this one.

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What you can point to is how people reacted to him.

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Neighbors actively avoided him.

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Not after something happened before.

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As a little kid, there was just something about him that made grown adults want distance,

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and nobody could really articulate why it was.

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They just knew to keep their kids away from him.

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The vibes were off, or something.

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By high school, he checked out completely.

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From Miami High in 1989, transferred to another school, expelled again in 1991.

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A few months shy of graduating.

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The reason on record is basically that he preferred the streets to the classroom, which,

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fair enough, a lot of teenagers feel that way, most of them just don't quite act on it,

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like Jeremy did.

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That's also when the drinking kicked in.

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Then drugs, and eventually meth, which is going to be the engine running underneath

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basically everything that happens for the rest of the story.

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In January of 1990, 16 years old, he got into it with another boy.

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His own mother tried to break it up, and he hit her too.

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Two counts of assault.

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The charges got dropped later because, and I want you to hang on to this detail, everybody

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forgave him.

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His victims reconciled with him and moved on.

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That's going to become a pattern with Jeremy Bryan Jones.

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People kept forgiving him right up until they couldn't anymore.

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And here's the piece that I think unlocks the rest of this.

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He was charming.

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People who knew him decades later still bring this up, unprompted.

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He reportedly used to brag that he could talk to panties often done.

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And by every account, he wasn't exaggerating by much.

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He was a natural, and he figured out early that charm gets you further than fists ever

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will.

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So he used it that way, like a tool instead of a personality trait.

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In 1992, he moved to Kansas with a girlfriend and started beating her regularly.

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That enough that neighbors called the police multiple times.

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And every single time officers would show up, ask if everything was okay, and then she would

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say nothing's wrong.

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So they'd leave.

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His friend Justin Judd remembered it exactly like that years later, practically word for

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word.

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That's what domestic violence enforcement looked like in a lot of places in the early

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'90s.

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If the victim wouldn't cooperate, officers had almost no tools to intervene without her

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saying the word.

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So the cycle just kept going, call after call with nothing changing.

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And sometimes even if you do say something, you still end up in a bad situation.

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I.e.

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Nicole Brown Simpson.

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But by 2000, Jones had a rape warrant out on him back in Oklahoma.

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So he ran to Joplin, Missouri.

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In a bar there, he met a woman whose son was locked up, a guy named John Paul Chapman.

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Jones got close to her, sympathetic, attentive, the whole act.

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And then he asked her for her son's Social Security card in identifying paperwork.

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And she sold it to him for 50 bucks.

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$50 bought this man four years as somebody else.

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So during the next four years, John Paul Chapman, the fake one, bounced through Alabama, Georgia,

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and Louisiana doing day labor and cycling through relationships.

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And he got arrested three separate times in Georgia between October 2003 and June 2004.

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This orderly conduct criminal trespassing drug possession.

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Every time his fingerprints got run through the FBI's brand new automated matching system.

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And every time it came back clean.

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Here's why.

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And this is one of the wilder pieces of institutional failure of crumacross while doing this show.

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The system launched in 1999 and it was built to be fully automated, meaning that no human

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actually reviewed the initial match.

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The forensic expert explained the mechanism to NPR like this.

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If the quality of a stored print is bad enough, the computer just assumes it's never seen

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this person before and hands out a brand new ID number.

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That's the whole failure.

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One bad scan in October 2003 and the system quietly built Jeremy Bryan Jones in entirely new

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identity backed up by his own fingerprints confirming the lie every single time he got

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picked up again after that.

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The FBI later said on the record that nobody did anything wrong.

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No laps, no inattention.

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The system just missed it.

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Which might be true and somehow it makes it kind of worse because it means this could have

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happened with literally anyone the algorithm decided to overlook that day.

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In September 2004, Hurricane Ivan slammed into Mobile, Alabama as a category three doing

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close to $20 billion in damage and leaving around 18,000 people without homes.

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And in that chaos, right as the storm was bearing down, Jones still going by Chapman, a name

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a local family already trusted from some work he had done from them years before, showed

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up at Mark and Kim Bentley's home in Turnerville asking for work and somewhere to stay.

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Mark let him move in for the storm.

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Kim didn't trust him and she was right not to.

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When Jones called during the hurricane asking where to find radio and batteries, she specifically

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told him to send somebody else to look not him.

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He searched the closet himself anyway and found her handgun.

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Told everyone it was for protection against looters, which in fairness is exactly the kind

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of thing you'd want a gun for in a hurricane.

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He just had other plans for it.

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That night he overheard a neighbor named Lisa Nichols mentioned to the Bentley's that

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she lived alone.

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She was 43.

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Two days later, once the house had emptied out for the evening, Jones took that stolen

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gun and walked over to her home.

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He raped her and shot her three times in the head.

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Then he set the scene on fire and came back to the Bentley house like nothing had ever happened.

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When Mark Bentley found him outside later on with four cans of gasoline, Jones said he

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needed it for four wheelers, a late night ride.

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In the middle of Hurricane cleanup, the next morning when the Nichols family discovered

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her remains, court records specifically note that while everyone else ran to help, Jones

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stayed back and showed almost no reaction at all.

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It was a beer can that ultimately did it.

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His prints were on the scene and Kim Bentley remembered that he and her husband had been

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drinking that exact same brand together on the day of the murder.

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Once Mobile Police started circulating the name John Paul Chapman, Missouri authorities

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flagged something else strange.

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The real John Paul Chapman was already sitting in prison in Missouri, same birth date, same

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social security number as their suspect.

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His mother admitted that she'd sold his identity.

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Investigators pulled Jones's old prints from a 1990 arrest back in Oklahoma and they matched.

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He was arrested on September 21, 2004.

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When he was told he was being charged, he reportedly said he'd had every intention of making

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them kill him.

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His trial that October lasted about a week.

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The jury convicted him of Capitol murder and recommended death, 10-2.

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He was formally sentenced that December.

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And then the story takes a turn.

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Because once he was locked up, Jones started confessing to everything.

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Upwards of 20 murders across five states and the number kept shifting depending on which

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interview you're looking at.

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Some of the alleged victims he couldn't even remember names for.

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The clearest example is a 1999 quadruple case out of Welch, Oklahoma, where a couple

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was murdered and their two teenage daughters disappeared entirely.

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Jones confessed to that one too, with details specific enough to sound convincing, right

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down to where the mailbox sat outside the house.

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Investigators searched exactly where he told them to look.

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They found nothing.

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And then in 2018, the real killers were identified through a completely separate investigation,

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which proved one of his most detailed, most convincing confessions had been made up the

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entire time.

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His own defense attorney eventually laid out the whole motive, plainly.

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Confess, and you'll get longer phone calls with your mother and girlfriend.

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Better food, softer treatment and jail.

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That was it.

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That was the entire calculation behind years of false confessions that sent grieving

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families chasing answers that were never real.

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Jeremy Bryan Jones is provably responsible for one murder.

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But the trail of confessions he left behind kept investigators and heartbroken families

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spinning for years.

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For no reason beyond his own comfort.

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He's still on death row in Alabama today.

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Appeals are still working their way through the courts, decades later.

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And by most accounts, still talking.

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, Bingeable True Crime Stories.

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Hi, I'm Joe, I'm the host.

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Here's an email, subject this has never happened before.

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Hey Joe.

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I actually finished cleaning the garage because I kept telling myself one more episode.

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Usually I quit halfway through and claim it was too hot out there.

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So thanks, I guess.

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Chris in Norman, Oklahoma.

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Chris?

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Glad I could help.

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Indirectly.

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Also, you missed a spot.

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Hey, if you're a new listener to the podcast, welcome.

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Put your feet up, get comfortable because there are hundreds of back catalog episodes where

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For instance, send me an email like Chris did at 10minuteMurder.com.

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Keep doing what you're doing, sharing the podcast with friends and family, letting everyone

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know about it, interacting with the social media content that I put out there.

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Suggesting cases, which is a huge one.

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99% of the cases that I talk about here in the podcast come from you that listen.

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I do the research and boom, here we are.

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So keep doing that.

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Keep it up.

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I really do appreciate every single one of you.

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And that's going to do it.

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That's your episode for today.

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Thank you again for listening to 10minuteMurder.

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See you next time.