On December 11, 1972, a prisoner in the Hillsborough County jail in Tampa wrote a note: tell Detective Marchetta that I am ready to talk. Julian Eugene Kennedy had been held there for about two months, since his arrest as an escapee from the Florida state prison at Raiford on October 4. When Marchetta came, Kennedy first tried to trade a statement for drugs, and was refused. Then he asked the detective to check two things before he said anything: whether the police in Valdosta, Georgia, had a report of a woman missing since September 11, and whether her car had been found abandoned in Pasco County, Florida.
Both were true. Elva Lee Jones had disappeared from Valdosta on September 11, 1972, and her car had been recovered in Pasco County the next day. With that confirmed, Kennedy signed a consent-to-interview form and told the story. He had escaped from the prisoner reception center at Lake Butler and worked his way north into Georgia, stealing or trying to steal one vehicle after another. Looking for another car, he came across a woman alone in a cemetery and forced her to drive him in her own car back into Florida. On a dirt road in Pasco County he told her he would have to put her in the trunk. She struggled, and he killed her. He hid her body and left the car.
Her skeletal remains were found at the end of that dirt road. On the strength of his statement a Florida court tried and convicted him of her murder. In August 1973, while serving his Florida sentence, he agreed to an interview with an FBI agent, signed a waiver and told substantially the same story again, and a federal grand jury in Georgia indicted him for kidnapping her across a state line.
His defense in the federal case was that the first confession had been squeezed out of him. He testified that during the two months in the Hillsborough jail he had been kept in solitary confinement on half rations, questioned every day about any other crimes he might clear up, promised that sentences for anything else he admitted would run concurrently, and allowed to take amphetamines from a deputy's desk as an inducement to talk, while going through drug withdrawal. He said his repeated requests for a lawyer had been ignored, and that the FBI agent never read him his rights. The district judge heard all of it outside the jury's presence and did not believe him.
The jury convicted him of kidnapping. On appeal he argued that the confessions were involuntary and that the government had never proved the bones on that road were Elva Lee Jones's; under Florida law, he said, identity had to be shown beyond a reasonable doubt. The Fifth Circuit rejected both points on July 5, 1974. The trial judge's findings were not clearly erroneous, the court held, and federal law required only extrinsic evidence that the offense had likely been committed, of which there was ample: she had been kidnapped, carried into Florida, and it was her body at the end of the road.
Everything else attributed to him rests on what he is reported to have said in custody in 1973. By those accounts he described killings in Florida, Arkansas, Georgia, New Mexico and Texas going back to 1958, when he would have been fifteen, involving beatings, strangling and shooting in the course of holdups, jail breaks, drug deals and quarrels, and detectives from several states came to interview him. The Fifth Circuit's opinion says nothing about any of them; it records only that the Tampa detectives questioned him daily about other crimes he might be able to clear up and offered concurrent sentences for anything he admitted. None of the other killings was charged, and no record has come to light of how far any of the accounts was tested.
Elva Lee Jones is the one person the courts established he killed. Of her life before that day in the cemetery, the published record says nothing beyond her name and her town.