On the afternoon of June 6, 1995, an eleven-year-old girl lay in the bathroom of a small accounting office in Bald Knob, Arkansas, with her skull broken in several places. The police officers who found her thought she was dead and had begun to photograph her. She woke up while they were doing it. Her mother, Mary Phillips, was dead in the next room. The girl, Lacy Phillips, was able to tell investigators what the man who did it looked like, including a teardrop tattooed on his face, and that description led an Arkansas State Police investigator to the door of Jack Harold Jones Jr.
Jones confessed, was tried within a year and spent almost twenty-one years on Arkansas's death row. He was executed on April 24, 2017, one of four men put to death in eight days after Gov. Asa Hutchinson scheduled eight executions before the state's supply of a sedative expired. By then he had also pleaded guilty to raping and strangling a Pennsylvania woman in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1991. And he had left something behind: a sealed letter, given to his sister, to be opened a year after his death. In it he confessed to a third killing, in 1983, for which another man had been convicted and had died in prison.
Jack Harold Jones Jr. was born on August 10, 1964, in Toledo, Ohio, according to an account written by Etta Blankenship, a North Carolina capital defense investigator who became a close friend of his younger sister, Lynn. His mother already had three children from earlier relationships when he was born; Lynn, born in February 1966, was his full sister. Blankenship's account, which draws on Lynn's memories and on the defense's view of the case, says that as a teenager Jones was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder and bipolar disorder, that he drank and used drugs to medicate himself, that he was committed involuntarily to a psychiatric facility at one point and that he twice tried to kill himself. In early 1995 he was admitted to a mental hospital again and discharged six days later.
Lynn, then known as Lynn Scott, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in April 2017 that her brother had been "a very loving, caring little boy" who liked to draw and to tell stories, and that "sexual and physical abuse, mental illness, alcohol and drug use changed him." His lawyer later told the Arkansas Parole Board that Jones had bipolar disorder and was using methamphetamine to medicate himself when he committed his crimes. These are the defense's and the family's accounts; the court record from his trial confirms that his jury unanimously found he had "a turbulent and troubled childhood," and that some jurors accepted that he had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and had been repeatedly misdiagnosed and given the wrong medication.
He was married and had a son, Chris, according to the 1997 Arkansas Supreme Court opinion in his case. By 1991 he was living in the Fort Lauderdale area of South Florida, according to the Fort Lauderdale detective who later solved one of his killings.
Regina Harrison was twenty and a student at Palm Beach Atlantic College. Her brother, Richard Harrison, described her to the Associated Press in 2019 as "a really sweet kid" and "deeply religious." On May 2, 1983, shortly after her twentieth birthday, she left her parents' home in Hollywood, Florida, for a ride on her bicycle at dinnertime and did not come back. She had last been seen on the Hollywood Broadwalk with a man who was also riding a bicycle. Her body was found in West Lake Park in Hollywood. She had been raped and strangled.
In June 1983 police arrested Ronald Henry Stewart, then twenty-three, who was suspected in a long series of rapes in Broward County and Mississippi. A witness picked him out of a photo lineup in the Harrison case. Stewart admitted a number of rapes but denied killing Harrison. On January 28, 1985, facing a possible death sentence, he pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and was given fifty years, to run alongside the long sentences he was already serving for rape. He never appealed and never claimed innocence, and he died of cancer in prison in 2008.
Jones's link to Harrison's death would not be known for thirty-five years. WPLG Local 10 reported in 2019 that he left South Florida shortly after the killing and went back to Ohio. Everything about his part in it comes from a letter he wrote on death row and from DNA testing done in 2019; it was never tested in a court, because by then he had been executed. It is set out in full below, under "The letter."
Lorraine Anne Barrett, called Lori by some who knew her, was thirty-two in May 1991. She had graduated from South Fayette High School, near Pittsburgh, in 1977 and worked as a customer service representative for Bell of Pennsylvania in Washington, Pennsylvania. That May she flew to Fort Lauderdale to visit friends. According to New Times Broward-Palm Beach, witnesses saw her talking with a man at the Elbo Room on Fort Lauderdale Beach, and another witness saw her and a man get into an elevator at the Days Inn on Seabreeze Boulevard. She was raped and strangled in a hotel room less than twelve hours after she arrived, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported. A maid found her body. It was her mother's fifty-fifth birthday.
The case stayed open for more than a decade. In 2002 a Fort Lauderdale police detective, John Curcio, took it over. DNA from the scene was run through the national DNA index and matched Jones, who by then had been on Arkansas's death row for six years. The Tribune-Review reported that Jones's tattoos and features also matched a police sketch made in 1991, and that he had been living in the Fort Lauderdale area at the time. Associated Press accounts date the DNA link to 2003 and say Jones confessed to the Barrett killing that year and cooperated with investigators.
Mary Elizabeth Phillips lived in Bradford, Arkansas, with her husband, James Phillips. They had three children. She worked as the bookkeeper at Automated Tax and Accounting Service in Bald Knob, a town in White County northeast of Little Rock. Court records give her age as thirty-four; the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's profile of the case gives thirty-five.
On the afternoon of June 6, 1995, her daughter Darla, seventeen, dropped off her sister Lacy, eleven, at the office so that their mother could take Lacy to a dentist appointment at 3 p.m. They never came home.
The account that follows is the one the Arkansas Supreme Court set out in 1997, drawn largely from Lacy Phillips's testimony and from Jones's confession.
A man had come into the office earlier that day to borrow some books, and he came back to complain that he had been given the wrong one. Prosecutors later said Jones first came in looking for work and returned carrying a BB pistol, latex gloves and wire; later hearings described him as painting a sign nearby when he noticed Phillips. On his return he told Mary and Lacy that he was sorry, but that he was "going to have to rob" them. He made Mary lie on her stomach and Lacy lie on top of her, and he took the cash from the register. Then he moved them to a break room and tied Lacy to a chair in a bathroom off it.
Lacy begged him not to hurt her mother. "I'm not," he told her. "I'm going to hurt you." He choked her until she lost consciousness and hit her at least eight times in the head with the barrel of the BB gun, leaving deep cuts and multiple skull fractures. She came to briefly, saw blood and vomited, then lost consciousness again. When the police arrived they found Mary Phillips nude from the waist down, with her hands wired behind her back and the cord of a Mr. Coffee coffee maker around her neck. Bruises on her arms and back showed she had fought. The autopsy found that she had been raped and that she died of strangulation and blunt-force injuries to her head.
Lacy Phillips survived and described the man to investigators: black hair, a teardrop tattoo on his face and more tattoos on his arm. Arkansas State Police Investigator Jerry Brogdon went to Jones's home on the strength of that description and asked him to come to the White County Sheriff's Office. Jones went voluntarily. He was read his rights, signed a waiver and admitted the crimes.
According to a state police investigator's account reported by the Democrat-Gazette, Jones said he tied the victims' hands with wire, tied Lacy to the chair, raped, beat and choked Mary and then wrapped the cord around her neck, and struck Lacy with the BB pistol. He gave a reason. His wife had been raped, he told investigators, and the police had "done nothing about it"; what he did in Bald Knob, as he described it, was revenge on the police. The court record states that motive as his own account and does not say whether the rape of his wife was ever reported or investigated.
At his arraignment in June 1995, Jones told Judge Robert Edwards of White County Circuit Court, "Just go ahead and kill me."
The case moved fast. Blankenship, writing from the defense side years later, said only nine months passed between arrest and conviction, that there was no plea offer, that the defense team had little experience with a case of this size, and that almost no investigation into Jones's background was done. She wrote that Jones's father told the family not to speak to the defense or testify.
The trial was held in White County Circuit Court before Judge Edwards. The state wanted to show the jury ninety-nine photographs; the judge excluded those as cumulative and admitted a second set of thirty-nine. The defense objected to one of them, a photograph of Lacy's skull taken before surgery with the scalp drawn back. A neurosurgeon, Dr. Harold Smith, testified that it was the only image that showed the bone fragments driven into her brain, and the judge let it in.
On April 17, 1996, the jury convicted Jones of capital murder and rape in the death of Mary Phillips and of attempted capital murder of Lacy. In the penalty phase the defense called nine witnesses. Before he was sentenced, Jones told the court, "I'm deeply sorry." The jury found five aggravating circumstances unanimously: that he had previously committed a felony involving violence or the threat of it, that he created a great risk of death to another person, that he killed to avoid arrest, that he killed for money, and that the murder was especially cruel or depraved. It found three mitigating circumstances unanimously: that he went to the police station voluntarily, that he gave a full confession and accepted responsibility, and that he had a turbulent and troubled childhood. Some jurors, though not all, found others, including his attention deficit disorder and the fact that his son depended on him.
The jury sentenced him to death for capital murder, to life in prison for rape and to thirty years and a $15,000 fine for the attempted capital murder of Lacy.
One detail of that sentencing paperwork followed Jones for twenty-one years. On the form for mitigating circumstances, the jurors marked three factors (the attention deficit disorder, the misdiagnosis and medication, and inconsistent discipline from his parents) both as factors that some jurors found and as factors for which there was not enough evidence. They had been told not to mark the same factor in both places.
On appeal Jones argued that the contradiction meant he needed a new sentencing trial, citing two earlier Arkansas cases, Camargo v. State and Willett v. State, in which the court had ordered resentencing over problems with mitigation forms. In an opinion by Chief Justice W.H. "Dub" Arnold, decided June 16, 1997, the Arkansas Supreme Court disagreed. It said those cases were different, held that any inconsistency was harmless because the jury had found unanimously that the five aggravating circumstances outweighed any mitigating circumstance found by any juror, and said Willett and Camargo had read a U.S. Supreme Court precedent too broadly. It upheld the photograph ruling and affirmed all three convictions and sentences. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case later in 1997.
Blankenship wrote that Jones told his lawyers at first that he did not want to appeal, because he felt he deserved to die. The appeals went on regardless, as is usual in capital cases. According to a 2010 federal court order summarizing the history, the state courts denied him post-conviction relief, and the Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed that denial in 2000. A federal district court denied his petition for habeas corpus, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to let him appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined review in 2006. He also joined a lawsuit brought by another death row prisoner, Terrick Nooner, challenging Arkansas's lethal injection procedure; the courts ruled for the state, and the Eighth Circuit affirmed in 2010.
At a clemency hearing in 2007 his lawyer, Jeff Rosenzweig, argued that the jury forms contained conflicting findings and that Jones's bipolar disorder had never been properly put before the jury. "None of which excuses what he did," Rosenzweig said, "but it does explain it."
The governor set his execution for March 16, 2010. Five days before it, U.S. District Judge J. Leon Holmes stayed it so that Jones could pursue a claim that Arkansas's new Method of Execution Act, which had taken effect in 2009, kept the actual execution procedure secret from him and so violated his rights. "Failure to consider Jones's allegations would ignore the equally important public interest in the humane and constitutional application of the State's lethal injection statute," the judge wrote. The Arkansas Supreme Court dismissed Jones's own motion for a stay as moot the next day. Arkansas's executions then stopped for years amid litigation over its drugs and its secrecy laws. Blankenship wrote that several dates were set for Jones over two decades and each was stayed.
While those appeals ran, the Barrett case caught up with him. On March 1, 2005, Jones was flown from the maximum security prison at Tucker, Arkansas, to Florida and charged with first-degree murder in Broward County. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that prosecutors had offered to waive the death penalty if he pleaded guilty, and that he was expected to do so at his arraignment on April 1, 2005. Barrett's father, John Barrett, said the family was "ecstatic" that her killer would be punished. He said the family was glad that Jones would get a life sentence in Florida on top of his death sentence in Arkansas. Curcio said of Jones, "He's fully accepted the fact that he is going to die in Arkansas' death row."
Jones pleaded guilty. The Democrat-Gazette's profile of the case dates the plea to 2005, and a 2019 report by the Little Rock television station THV11 says he pleaded guilty at his arraignment in 2005 and was sentenced to life without parole. He was then returned to Arkansas. Some reports date the plea to 2003, the year of the DNA match and his confession.
In February 2017 Gov. Asa Hutchinson set eight executions over eleven days in April, two on each of four nights. Arkansas had not executed anyone since 2005. The state said the executions had to happen before its supply of midazolam, the sedative that is the first of three drugs in its lethal injection protocol, expired at the end of April. No state had tried to carry out so many executions in so short a time in the modern era. Jones's turn was set for Monday, April 24, together with Marcel Williams, who had been sentenced to death for the 1994 kidnapping, rape and murder of Stacy Errickson, twenty-two.
The schedule drew litigation from every direction. On April 15 a federal judge, Kristine Baker, blocked all the executions over the use of midazolam; the Eighth Circuit vacated her order on April 17, with Judge Jane Kelly dissenting. A drug distributor, McKesson, sued to stop the state from using vecuronium bromide, the second drug, which it said the state had bought under false pretenses; the Arkansas Supreme Court cleared the way for its use. On April 20 the U.S. Supreme Court, by a vote of five to four, refused to stop the executions. The new justice, Neil Gorsuch, who had been sworn in ten days earlier, was in the majority. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wrote that the Court had "swept aside the District Court's well-supported finding that midazolam creates a substantial risk of severe pain." Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, wrote that the drug's expiration date, "when considered as a determining factor separating those who live from those who die, is close to random."
Four of the eight did not die that month. Bruce Ward and Don Davis were stayed by the Arkansas Supreme Court before April 17, Stacey Johnson was stayed on April 19 so that DNA evidence could be tested, and the Parole Board voted six to one to recommend clemency for Jason McGehee, whose execution was blocked by a federal court pending that process. Ledell Lee, convicted of a 1993 murder and maintaining his innocence, was executed shortly before midnight on April 20, the first execution in Arkansas in nearly twelve years.
Jones's clemency hearing was held on April 7, 2017. He declined to attend and had Rosenzweig read a handwritten letter to the Parole Board. "I'm sorry, not only for what I did but for you having to come here," he wrote. He said he would refuse clemency if it were offered. In a letter quoted by the Associated Press, he wrote, "I shall not ask to be forgiven, for I haven't the right." Lacy Phillips, by then married and known as Lacey Seal, told the board she did not want to live knowing that Jones was alive.
He told reporters he was ready to die, but his lawyers kept filing. On April 17 he sued in federal court, arguing that his diabetes and sleep apnea, and the medicines he took for them, could keep midazolam from working and make his execution cruel and unusual. He was by then an amputee who used a wheelchair; complications of diabetes had cost him most of one leg. Rosenzweig said Jones's doctor was worried the protocol might not work on him. The district court refused to stop the execution on April 21, and on April 24 the Eighth Circuit affirmed, holding that Jones had not acted with diligence and had not proposed another method of execution.
In state court, on April 23, Jones asked the Arkansas Supreme Court to recall its 1997 mandate and reopen the verdict form issue. Rosenzweig argued that the court's own decisions on inconsistent mitigation forms had gone one way before and after Jones and the other way only in his case. "There is a chain of a number of cases, I think seven altogether," he told Arkansas Public Media. "It's win, win, win, Jones loses, win, win, win, and we think that's improper." The court denied his request at 12:32 p.m. on April 24.
The U.S. Supreme Court turned down his two remaining applications that evening, one from the state case and one from the federal lethal injection case. Justice Sotomayor noted that she would have granted a stay, for the reasons she had given in the midazolam case.
The family of Mary Phillips spent the day waiting. Lacy, thirty-two by then, told the Democrat-Gazette she would be at the Cummins Unit but would wait in another room rather than watch. "I don't care if he claimed to be on drugs," she said. "He made a choice. He has to pay for what he did." The wait, she said, had been "exhausting, mentally exhausting," and it had been "22 years." Her father, James Phillips, planned to witness the execution. Her sister Darla, by then Darla Jones, said, "We don't want our babies to hear any of this."
Jones's sister Lynn had asked the Department of Correction to let her witness the execution, and the department refused. Arkansas allowed up to thirty witnesses, among them law enforcement, reporters and victims' relatives, but not the condemned man's family. "I'm losing someone too," she told the Democrat-Gazette. According to Blankenship, who accompanied her, she was allowed afternoon visits with him from April 20 through April 23 and was offered a room at the prison on the day of the execution if she would not try to see him, which she declined. She waited in a car outside the neighboring Varner Unit with two prison chaplains.
His last meal, according to CNN, was fried chicken, potato logs with tartar sauce, beef jerky bites, Butterfinger candy bars and a chocolate milkshake. The original order had Williams first; that afternoon the order was switched and Jones went first.
According to the Associated Press reporters Andrew DeMillo and Kelly Kissel, Jones spoke for about two minutes from the gurney. Most of what he said was addressed to Lacy, who was not in the room. "I hope over time you can learn who I really am," he said. His final words were "I'm sorry." The drugs began at 7:06 p.m. The AP reporter who witnessed it said Jones moved his lips briefly after the midazolam was given, that officials placed a tongue depressor in his mouth from time to time during the first few minutes, and that his chest stopped moving two minutes after the consciousness check. He was pronounced dead at 7:20 p.m. He was fifty-two. Tracy Whitaker of the Searcy Daily Citizen, another media witness, said of Lacy, "It's a good thing that it's done, for her."
Minutes after Jones's execution began, lawyers for Marcel Williams filed an emergency motion in federal court to stop Williams's execution, set for the same night on the same gurney. They said that prison medical staff had spent forty-five minutes trying and failing to place a central line in Jones's neck before placing one elsewhere on his body, that officials had not waited the required five minutes for a consciousness check, and that Jones had been seen moving his lips and gulping for air after the midazolam. "Mr. Jones's execution appeared to be torturous and inhumane," they wrote. IV lines are placed before witnesses enter the chamber, so no outside witness saw the attempts.
The state called the claims "utterly baseless," and Attorney General Leslie Rutledge's office denied that Jones had gulped for air. Judge Baker stayed Williams's execution at 8:15 p.m., held a short hearing and lifted the stay at 9:22 p.m. Williams, who had already been taken into the chamber, was led out and later brought back. He was pronounced dead at 10:33 p.m. It was the first double execution in the United States since 2000.
Lynn learned of the claims from a reporter who called her phone that night. Blankenship's account records two answers she was given afterward. A television reporter who had witnessed the execution said on air that, in her opinion, Jones had not suffered. And the Cummins chaplain, who was in the chamber, told Lynn the next day that the microphone had been turned off just before Jones apologized to the medical staff who were about to inject him, and that witnesses had mistaken his speaking for struggling. That is the chaplain's account as Lynn's friend later wrote it down; no official finding about the forty-five minutes before witnesses were admitted has been found in the sources consulted.
Hutchinson said after the execution that he hoped it would bring the Phillips family closure. "A governor never asks for this responsibility, but I accept it as part of the solemn pledge I made to uphold the law," he said. Rutledge said, "The Phillips family has waited far too long to see justice carried out, and I pray they find peace tonight." Kenneth Williams was executed three nights later, on April 27, and the state's midazolam expired at the end of the month. Four executions had been carried out.
In about 2006 or 2007 Jones wrote a letter, sealed it and gave it to his sister with instructions not to open it until a year after he had been executed. He asked that it be sent to Detective John Curcio, the Fort Lauderdale officer who had solved the Barrett case. Lynn did as he asked, and Curcio received it in November 2018. He passed it to the Hollywood Police Department.
In the letter Jones confessed to the 1983 murder of a young woman who matched Regina Harrison's description, with details that prosecutors said made the confession credible. He wrote that he had been haunted by her ghost for three years. "She forgave me. I never forgave myself," he wrote. He asked that her family be told "that I am deeply sorry, that I couldn't rest easy until they knew the truth."
The Broward Sheriff's Office crime laboratory tested DNA preserved from Harrison's body and, in February 2019, entered the profile in the national database. "The DNA tests revealed that the DNA collected from the body of Regina Harrison in 1983 originated from Jack Harold Jones," prosecutors wrote. On March 21, 2019, the Broward State Attorney's Office asked a judge to throw out Ronald Stewart's conviction. "Ronald Stewart was not responsible for the murder of Regina Harrison," it said, adding that he "would not have been charged with murder if DNA testing had been available at the time." The State Attorney's Office and the Hollywood Police Department expressed regret "for the roles our agencies played in Stewart's conviction." The National Registry of Exonerations, which records the case as an exoneration, says the motion was granted and the charge dismissed.
Chris Raff, the former prosecutor in the Phillips case, told the Democrat-Gazette in 2019 that from the facts of that murder he had known Jones was "evil, dangerous and likely to kill again." Police said at the time that they were testing Jones's DNA against other killings in Florida and elsewhere.
Proven in court: the capital murder and rape of Mary Phillips and the attempted capital murder of Lacy Phillips, by a jury in White County, Arkansas, in 1996, affirmed on appeal; and the murder of Lorraine Barrett in Fort Lauderdale in 1991, by his own guilty plea in Broward County in 2005 after a DNA match.
Confessed and supported by DNA, but never tried: the rape and murder of Regina Harrison in Hollywood, Florida, in 1983. Jones was dead when his confession was read, so there was no trial and no conviction. Prosecutors stated publicly that DNA from her body was his, and they moved to clear the man who had been convicted.
Not established: any other killing. Police in 2019 said they were checking whether he had other victims; no further case has been found in the sources consulted. His stated motive in Bald Knob, revenge on police for the rape of his wife, is his own account. The defense and family accounts of his childhood and mental illness are their accounts, though his jury accepted some of them. The claims about the forty-five minutes before witnesses were admitted to his execution were made by another prisoner's lawyers and denied by the state; the courts that night let the second execution proceed.
Jones was executed on April 24, 2017. Ronald Stewart's conviction for the Harrison killing was the subject of a motion to vacate filed on March 21, 2019, which the National Registry of Exonerations, in an entry last updated May 2, 2022, records as granted. Lacy Phillips survived her injuries and spoke publicly in 2017 as an adult.
August 10, 1964: Jack Harold Jones Jr. is born in Toledo, Ohio (per a family friend's account).
May 2, 1983: Regina Harrison, 20, disappears on a bicycle ride in Hollywood, Florida; her body is found in West Lake Park.
January 28, 1985: Ronald Stewart pleads no contest to second-degree murder in Harrison's death.
May 1991: Lorraine Barrett, 32, of Pennsylvania, is raped and strangled at a Fort Lauderdale beach hotel.
June 6, 1995: Mary Phillips, 34, is raped and killed in Bald Knob, Arkansas; her daughter Lacy, 11, is beaten and left for dead. Jones is arrested and confesses.
April 17, 1996: A White County jury convicts Jones and sentences him to death.
June 16, 1997: The Arkansas Supreme Court affirms.
2000: The Arkansas Supreme Court affirms the denial of post-conviction relief.
2002-2003: Detective John Curcio reopens the Barrett case; DNA matches Jones, who confesses.
March 1 and April 1, 2005: Jones is charged in Broward County and is due to plead guilty at arraignment; he receives a life sentence and is returned to Arkansas.
2006: The U.S. Supreme Court declines to review the denial of federal habeas relief.
About 2006-2007: Jones writes a sealed letter for his sister to open a year after his death.
2007: First clemency hearing.
March 11, 2010: A federal judge stays his March 16, 2010, execution.
February 2017: Gov. Hutchinson sets eight executions for April 17-27.
April 7, 2017: Clemency hearing; Jones's letter is read for him.
April 20, 2017: Ledell Lee is executed, the first execution in Arkansas since 2005.
April 24, 2017: Jones is executed at 7:20 p.m.; Marcel Williams is executed at 10:33 p.m. after a brief stay.
April 27, 2017: Kenneth Williams is executed.
November 2018: Curcio receives Jones's letter from his sister.
February 2019: DNA from Regina Harrison's body is matched to Jones.
March 21, 2019: Broward prosecutors move to vacate Ronald Stewart's conviction.