by Pat Brown
The information was adding up and Orville was scoring all the points. The time line made no sense for anybody but Orville to have committed the crime. Everything pointed to him: his peculiar behaviors, his lack of interest in looking for his daughter, and the claim that she was already dead, so why bother looking? This guy was awfully confident that he knew what happened to Missy.
The family was blind to these behaviors; they wouldn’t and couldn’t believe it.
I MET WITH the police, studied all of their materials, and examined the crime scene. I believed that the police were absolutely correct, that Orville must have been involved in the sexual assault and murder of his daughter.
But I came to a slightly different theory about where it happened and how it went down.
The police did not have enough evidence at that point in time to go to court. They wanted the family’s cooperation, but they weren’t getting any because the police focused suspicion on Orville.
When I made my independent analysis, which pointed to Orville’s involvement, I told the police that I would sit down with the family and ask for their cooperation. We had a fascinating meeting outside the house. We all sat in chairs with a beer and relaxed. Miranda was there, as was Missy’s uncle, and it was quite a group. Orville was not living there at the time; he had already fled the family coop and was in prison serving time for an unrelated charge that occurred when his new girlfriend called the police on him. They had been arguing over a new man in her life and Orville said he was going to hurt the other boyfriend. When the police arrived on the scene, he shot at them, they shot back, and he went to prison.
I explained Orville’s entire history. I explained how his sexual experience with his sister demonstrated sexual deviancy before they ever met him. He was not an honest man and he was a major manipulator. I went through every detail of his background. I explained how they got wrapped up in this, why it was confusing, and how they might have difficulty recognizing the truth in all of this.
When I finished, they looked at me with sad, glazed-over expressions and I realized that this was one family that could handle the truth, even as ugly a truth as this one. Families often fight back against the truth, and they say, “No way,” no matter what I tell them. This family did not do that. Instead they said, “What do you need us to do? How can we help?”
I put in place a plan to try to draw a confession out of Orville, and I started by communicating with him. There were letters coming from him, so full of garbage it was just amusing. The family worked with me, so Missy’s uncle, Miranda’s brother, sent a letter saying, “Orville, we have this great private investigator working with us who believes Missy’s death was an accident.”
I wanted Orville to think I was on the family’s side in supporting him and that the family did not want this going to court. They believed it was an accident because the criminal profiler told them that. This was my ruse: I believed that Orville was drunk when he picked up Missy and, on the way back, they got into an argument, and he accidentally killed her, and he didn’t know what to do. I thought the police were wrong that it was murder and that the worst charge he faced would be manslaughter.
The uncle told Orville that I helped the family understand it was an accident, that the family was comfortable with that and wasn’t angry at Orville, that if he would plead guilty to that, he could get a manslaughter conviction and get a few years in prison and get out.
It was a pretty good setup. The sheriff liked it, too. I was playing the role of the dumb blond profiler doing the worst case of profiling you ever saw.
I thought Orville would buy this. I thought he would find it terribly amusing and make him think he was manipulating me. Plus, he would believe his family were chumps, too, and he would hardly serve any time if he confessed to accidentally killing Missy.
I wrote Orville a nice letter when I started working the case to get information from him, and he wrote me back all kinds of fanciful theories. Then, after the family meeting, Missy’s uncle wrote his letter and I wrote one to match. Finally, when the prosecution stopped the planned visit the sheriff and I were to make to Orville, I wrote him one last-ditch-attempt letter, hoping to spook him. Here are excerpts from it.
OCTOBER 18, 2001
Dear Mr. Jones,
Think carefully about what you are reading, Mr. Jones.
Missy may be dead but her body and her clothes can still speak volumes. Mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA) can link a suspect with a crime by a minute speck of saliva or hair fiber. This new methodology far exceeds the old testing and is being used across the country in getting convictions in cold cases. Expect the investigator on your case to be court ordering your DNA for comparison very shortly….
The family will have to hear all the horrible details and who knows what information will be made public to support the prosecution and what other witnesses will come forward to tell what they know. The person convicted of this crime will have to spend his remaining life among inmates labeled as a child rapist and killer.
The family wishes to believe that this was a crime of carelessness or drunken anger. This profiler believes this may well be true and would support this conclusion in cooperation with a plea bargain for manslaughter with the DA. Once the testing is complete and immunity is given, this case will then have to be prosecuted as a crime committed by a man who has no guilt over what happened. By refusing to plea this down to an unfortunate accident, this person admits to his family, this profiler, and the court that the crime was intentional.
Time is short, Mr. Jones. Use it wisely.
SINCERELY,
PAT BROWN
DIRECTOR/INVESTIGATIVE CRIMINAL PROFILER
Orville was in jail for another crime, so the sheriff and I could have gone down there to talk to him. In this last letter, I let Orville know that Missy’s body would be exhumed. I told Orville they were looking for more sexual evidence and some other things that would put him in a death penalty situation. But if he confessed, we wouldn’t have the body exhumed.
I added in scientific methodologies, hoping to make him fear that more might be found, so pleading out might be a better deal. Then we would have a confession that he committed the crime.
That’s what we were aiming for, but unfortunately the prosecution shut us down. One of the things I’ve learned over years of profiling and working with police departments is that often there are things that can and will be done, and everybody is on the same page until we get to some level of politics that throws a wrench in our plans. I never got an explanation in this case as to why the prosecution wouldn’t cooperate and I probably will never know. If it is frustrating to me, imagine how hard it is on the family to see an investigation suddenly come to a jarring halt with no reason given.
Prosecutors come and prosecutors go, and many are political appointees. If the sheriff and prosecutor aren’t buddy-buddy, we might not get any kind of cooperation from the prosecutor. The prosecutor may be looking at his win record. He might say, “This is too tough a case, I don’t even want to deal with it.”
Sometimes, they won’t tell you directly what the politics are, because they can’t admit to it, or they will get in trouble if they do. I can’t tell you how many cases are ruined by politics. The Anne Kelley case was one. People usually think that it’s underhanded, like the suspect in the case is really the police chief’s brother. That’s not usually what it is. It’s more likely something completely unrelated to the actual crime. It’s either a time factor, the possibility that they might lose the case, or it could be the specter of negative publicity for the town. Prosecutors may refuse to take a case because they don’t want to bring out the community’s dirty laundry, especially if that laundry is sitting in some bigwig’s basket. If it’s a tourist destination, they will especially resist tackling a prosecution that will scare tourists away from visiting their once quiet hamlet.
People think that when a person is murdered there is a requirement by our legal system that the person who committ
ed the crime be prosecuted. There is no such mandate in our country. The state is only required to prosecute crimes it feels like prosecuting, that are in the “interest of the state.” That’s it. The victim has no rights, the family has no rights, and citizens’ only rights are voting the people they favor into office. It is the state’s determination whether it chooses to proceed with a case or not. They don’t even have to investigate a case. They don’t have to prosecute a case.
If the prosecution becomes too expensive or unwieldy or it could possibly lose, it simply may not move ahead. Not even if the state knows who did it and there’s a solid pile of evidence, it just won’t do it. Prosecutors have so many cases on their plates that they decide which ones they’ll take and with which cases they won’t bother. If there are easy cases and hard cases, they’ll take the easy cases.
The police tend to be frustrated with this, too, and that’s why sometimes they develop a negative attitude. They will work hard on a case for two years, thinking they have ample evidence, and the prosecutor won’t take it to trial. And if that happens to them enough times, they get cynical, and they say, “Why bother next time? Am I really going to sit here and kill myself investigating this stupid case when nobody will ever take it to court?”
These days, if the police don’t have a bucket of DNA and a videotape of the crime going down, they may lose confidence their investigation is worth doing. If they get handed a difficult crime that requires confessions or huge amounts of legwork, or if they have five other cases pending, they’ll just dump the most complicated one and go with the other four.
WE OFTEN FIND that predators will wait until a child reaches prepubescence before abuse begins. They don’t like having sex with a six-year-old, but once she reaches nine or ten, she’s cute, having started to grow breasts and appearing more teenagerlike. That can be attractive to a sexual predator.
A lot of men who are considered child predators are not pedophiles. A pedophile is somebody who has an obsession with having sex with children, with childlike children, little children. A pedophile is not necessarily a sexual predator, because some pedophiles don’t do anything about it, they just think about it a lot.
A child sexual predator is someone who assaults children for sex or uses sex as a method of power and control over children. Sometimes a sexual predator would prefer to rape women but he is too chicken to go up against an adult so he picks on the most vulnerable of the population: kids.
I don’t believe Orville Jones was a pedophile. But he may have been a sexual predator who homed in on teenagers and prepubescent girls because they’re easy—first his sister, then his daughter.
A lot of sexual predators call themselves “teachers.” A person of interest in the sexual homicides of three girls in Virginia considered himself a professor of sex. I communicated with him on the Internet, posing as a fourteen-year-old girl named Veronica. He wanted me to do things to myself with various objects and hurt myself. That was what sexually excited him, and he called it teaching. He said, “I’m going to teach you the art of sex. Better me than some young boy who doesn’t know what he’s doing. I’ll teach you what pleases a man. I’ll teach you what feels good.”
In their own sick, twisted minds they become professors. And of course they want to start with a girl who’s a virgin, because they want her taught right. They will pick on a girl who’s nine to thirteen years old, just becoming a woman, and they love the idea that they will be her first. That’s part of the power trip—that nobody’s had that girl before. Once they start introducing her to these things, of course, she’s embarrassed, she’s humiliated, and sometimes, unfortunately, sexually stimulated. She becomes confused, and she doesn’t know how to tell anybody. And then, of course, there is the possibility that he threatens her. You tell anybody, I’ll hurt you, so she doesn’t.
Police told me that they believed Orville was sexually abusing Missy before her murder and that she was going to tell on him. It is possible that she could have fought back. He could have gone further than she was willing to accept, as she was already sick of being abused, and this particular time she was sleepy and not feeling well.
My hypothesis is that her father carried Missy, as she was tired, ill, and very lightweight. She was in her stocking feet—her shoes, tied together by their laces, grabbed up by Orville and carried along with his daughter. It was in the middle of the route through the woods that I believe Mr. Jones, under the influence of alcohol, did decide to sexually assault his daughter. I believe he did not intend to kill her, but when she resisted he became angry and his attempts at control ended in her death. She fought back and it got her killed. Perhaps she screamed; I believe that the sock was pushed into her mouth to stop her from making noise, because it was just a two-minute walk between houses and while it’s a wooded area, a scream can still carry in the dead of night. Missy’s shoes were not on her feet, making her sock easy to pull off her foot. Offenders often do what is easy and pulling off a sock and stuffing it in her mouth would be a quick and easy answer to shutting Missy up.
Whether or not I believe Orville killed his daughter, I don’t think he planned to kill her. The hyoid bone in the neck was not broken. Usually, when someone is strangled, that’s broken, but Missy’s was not. The autopsy report said she was asphyxiated, but if she wasn’t choked, then someone or something suffocated her. I believe it was the sock in her mouth that cut off her air supply. When he realized what he had done, he had two choices. Leave her there in the woods and have her found the very next day or place her in the trunk of an unused vehicle in the yard and have her become a missing person. The latter choice would buy time, and in his panicked state, Orville most likely felt this was the better idea. After placing her in the trunk of the vehicle, he slipped back into the house, his family never having realized he had left.
There is a theory that Missy actually arrived home and her father assaulted and killed her in her bedroom. I find this to be an unlikely scenario for two reasons. The likelihood of Missy arriving home with no one noticing, a brutal attack going unheard, and the removal of a body without being noted or heard in a small trailer with two boys asleep in the living room, which Orville would have to enter or exit, is unlikely. Also, Orville commented to Rhonda that if she went into the woods bad things could happen to her. I believe Orville was reliving the actual experience of the rape and murder of his daughter.
Orville had been drinking earlier that night, so it was possible he wasn’t careful, as he said. I believe he was indeed describing what he did to her, because I do not believe it was an intentional homicide. I believe he was sexually assaulting her and shut her up to control her, because Orville was quite a mean fellow—as he told the media the killer might be. It was an accident but it was still murder, because he killed her during the commission of a crime. When he realized she was no longer breathing, he knew he was in big trouble. I do believe, after studying his history, that he would have liked to have kept Missy around. She probably would have been a nice, useful sex partner for him for the next six years. That plan ended when she fought back.
I HOPED POLICE could use my profile to prosecute Orville, but sadly that did not happen. A profiler can go so far in a case and suddenly get the door slammed in her face. You’re so close to making a real difference, boom, and you can’t do any more, so you have to walk away.
The family will ask, “What now?”
I often find it is difficult to get justice for the family.
Once a case goes south, what do you do about it? Go talk with a reporter from the town newspaper? You might and you could get a story or two written about it. But what do you do then? All you can do is start fighting. You go to the town council and rail at the police, the prosecutor, the town itself. Usually nothing ever really amounts to anything. The family fights on and usually fights alone, and most of the time, they don’t win.
Sometimes, the family will come back to me and say, “Have you heard anything?” but eventually they give up contacting
me because they realize I can’t do anything more. My job is profiling. I did my job, and I left. I’m not part of a law enforcement organization and I am not a victim’s advocacy organization that does long-term support. My job is profiling, and that’s what I do. I prefer to have the cooperation of the police department and the prosecutor so we can do the best job together. If I don’t have that, I can do only so much.
I do my job, and whether a case gets prosecuted or not, that’s not my call.
Does a profiler solve cases? No. A profiler profiles. That’s it. The police department officially is charged with solving cases; the prosecutor chooses which cases to prosecute.
AND THERE THE case of Missy Jones sits. Nothing more has been done.
Orville was never charged with his daughter’s rape and murder. If the system puts Orville back out there, he will likely go after someone else’s twelve-year-old daughter.
CHAPTER 10
JIMMY
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THIS
The Crime: Homicide
The Victim: Jimmy Conway
Location: Home of his friend, Southwestern United States
Original Theory: Shot in self-defense
People often wonder whether profilers go to the actual crime scene or if they don’t always bother and, in truth, I always go if I can. I can learn a lot by being there, standing on the spot where the victim and perpetrator once stood, absorbing the environment.
For example, you might think that some guy could toss a fellow off a particular bridge because the pictures you are looking at make that seem plausible. This happened to me on a case in Minneapolis. One of the theories was that the victim, who had been drinking at a local bar on Halloween night and been thrown out for being too inebriated, was walking over that bridge when he ran into another young man his age who tried to rob him. When he resisted, the guy pushed him over the railing. Well, that could make sense, except when I actually stood on the Hennepin Bridge at the point where it crossed the Mississippi River, I wondered how this shorter, smaller, less muscled attacker could have accomplished this. The railing was so high that the robber would have had to pick him up off the ground and heave him over it. If I hadn’t gone to the scene, I might have erroneously believed that action was possible. When you go to the location, you can see the neighborhood. You can see possible escape routes. You can analyze why someone would go that way and not this way.