Three of the four women were left in dumpsters within two blocks of each other in East San Diego, and two of those dumpsters were set on fire. That is where the name came from. The local press called him the Dumpster Killer.
Tara Mia Simpson was eighteen or nineteen. She was found on August 29, 1985, in a dumpster in an alley off the 5100 block of El Cajon Boulevard, the street where she worked. The dumpster had been doused with an accelerant and lit, and she was burned nearly beyond recognition. The autopsy found a broken nose the fire had not caused, a stab wound to the abdomen, and signs of asphyxiation. Whether any of that killed her was never settled: the pathologist thought she might have died of alcohol and cocaine poisoning.
Trina Carpenter was twenty-two or twenty-three. On February 11, 1986 she was found beaten and strangled in a dumpster in the 4500 block of 51st Street, in the alley behind Bryan Jones's own apartment, and that dumpster had been burned too.
JoAnn Sweets was found on May 9, 1986, strangled and beaten, in an alley a block away in the 4400 block of 51st.
Sophia Glover was thirty-seven, and she was the one left somewhere else. Her body turned up on August 15, 1986 in an alley in the 2200 block of Madison Avenue, in Normal Heights, with severe blunt-force injuries to her head, neck and chest. Her clothes were found in a nearby alley.
All four were Black. All four were working as prostitutes on or near El Cajon Boulevard.
Three other women lived, and without them there would have been no case at all. The courts identify two of them only by initial. Maria R., a homeless heroin user, went to his apartment on August 15, 1985 after he offered her twenty dollars for sex; he assaulted her, strangled her with a rope until she passed out, raped her again, took back his money and threatened to kill her. He was arrested the next day and released within days when she stopped cooperating, two weeks before Tara Mia Simpson was found. Karen M. was raped, sodomized, orally copulated and left for dead. Both testified.
The third was Bertha R., a cook. On October 16, 1986 he found her in a phone booth on El Cajon Boulevard looking for a check-cashing office, offered her a ride in his Datsun 280Z, and when the office's computers were down suggested they wait at his house on Mississippi Street. There he took sixty-five dollars from her, put her in his car, drove her to the edge of the city, forced her to perform oral sex and strangled her. She survived, and what he said to her while he was doing it was striking enough that the California Supreme Court described it as chilling decades later. The prosecution's theory was that by then he had decided to stop leaving bodies in dumpsters behind his own building.
He was arrested for that attack in October 1986, convicted of sexual assault, and sent to Corcoran State Prison to serve twenty-two years. The dumpster killings stopped.
Nearly six years later, on June 24, 1992, representatives of the San Diego County District Attorney's Office came to Corcoran and told him they were charging him with four murders. Fingerprints tied him to two of the bodies. There was DNA, which the defense fought at trial under California's Kelly standard and again on appeal. And there were three women who could describe what he had done to them.
Bryan Maurice Jones was born in San Diego County in 1962, on March 14 or May 14 by different accounts, the older of two children. His father was a Marine who spent much of the 1960s stationed in Okinawa while the family lived in a poor part of Barstow, and when he left the Corps in the early 1970s he drank, gambled away the family's savings and turned violent. He broke his son's arm. Jones drifted out of school in his early teens. After his parents divorced in the mid-1970s his mother moved the children to a housing complex on 51st Street near El Cajon Boulevard, then the city's red-light strip. He was locked up as a juvenile for a theft in 1975, trained as a welder through the San Diego Job Corps, and at seventeen fathered a son with Tracy Davison, fifteen. She left him in 1983 and later said he had tried to strangle her.
The 1994 trial produced a split result that has been misread ever since.
The jury convicted him of the first-degree murders of JoAnn Sweets and Sophia Glover, the attempted murders of Maria R. and Karen M., and the forcible rape, sodomy and oral copulation of Karen M. It found three special circumstances true, making him eligible for execution: the murder of Sweets in the course of sodomy, the murder of Glover in the course of sodomy, and multiple murder.
On the other two counts it could not agree. The jurors split eleven to one for guilt on Trina Carpenter and eight to four for guilt on Tara Mia Simpson. Both charges were dismissed. Four women, two convictions, and two cases that no verdict has ever covered.
He was sentenced to death on September 19, 1994.
The California Supreme Court affirmed on August 26, 2013, unanimously, in an opinion by Justice Kathryn Werdegar, nineteen years after the sentence, which is unremarkable for a California capital appeal and says something about the system all by itself. The central question was whether the four murders should have been tried together, and whether the uncharged attack on Bertha R. could be put before the jury to prove identity. The court held that the pattern was distinctive enough to function as a signature and found no abuse of discretion.
That would ordinarily be where a case like this ends. It is not where this one ends.
During jury selection in 1994, the prosecutor used peremptory challenges to strike Black prospective jurors. The defense objected under Batson v. Kentucky and People v. Wheeler, and the trial judge found a prima facie showing of discrimination as to three of them, a substantial finding, because the Wheeler standard then in force required a strong likelihood of discrimination rather than a mere inference. The prosecutor offered race-neutral explanations and the trial went on.
Decades later, his conviction affirmed, Jones filed a habeas petition arguing those strikes had been discriminatory and the explanations pretextual. He asked for the prosecutor's own jury selection notes. The District Attorney refused, calling them core attorney work product.
The trial court ordered them handed over. The Court of Appeal agreed. And on December 2, 2021, in People v. Superior Court (Jones), the California Supreme Court agreed unanimously: a district attorney cannot use work product privilege to withhold material needed to fairly decide a Batson/Wheeler claim. Justice Leondra Kruger wrote the opinion, and it pointed to Miller-El v. Dretke, where the United States Supreme Court granted relief partly on the strength of prosecutors' notes marking the race of jurors.
So a man convicted in a San Diego courtroom in 1994 is now the named party in a rule binding every prosecutor in California. His own claim was sent back down and, so far as the public record shows, has never been finally decided. He is represented by the Habeas Corpus Resource Center.
None of it disturbs the verdicts. Jones remains on California's death row for the murders of JoAnn Sweets and Sophia Glover, and no court has questioned that he committed them. What is still open is whether the jury that said so was lawfully chosen.
California has executed nobody since 2006, and the governor imposed a formal moratorium in 2019.