Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  About a month after Baxter left, in May of 2002, Chapman wiped the blood from his face in his motel room, lit by the jaundiced glow from the outside lights spilling through the roller shades. He used a sewing needle and thread to stitch shut a gash over his eye. “He said he’d gotten in a fight with one of those guys on the streets who sells newspapers to cars,” says Baxter. Chapman called his new friend, who wired him forty dollars for gas, and the next day he showed up on Baxter’s doorstep, about five-and-a-half hours northeast of Mobile and over the state line in Georgia. From that night, Chapman took up residence in Baxter’s basement.

  Chapman began to couch surf through Georgia, taking up a job at the local oil refinery, where fellow workers described him as “your guy next door.” Despite this, however, he always overstayed his welcome by way of his drug use being discovered, his comings and goings at all odd hours, sometimes bringing strangers home … One woman even once claimed rape. Chapman had an air of seduction about him when it was necessary, everyone agreed, but he was a provocateur and a misogynist and tended to alienate the people who’d taken a chance on him.

  “Not everyone gets the same version of me. One person might say I’m a beautiful soul. Another might tell you I’m a coldhearted asshole. Believe them both,” he once told me. “I don’t treat people badly. I treat them accordingly.”

  Sometime in all of his moving around Douglasville, he met his girlfriend Vicki Freeman (no relation to the Freemans of Welch) at Gipson’s, a popular dive bar later closed for offering lap dances without an adult entertainment license and various tax and alcohol violations, including serving to minors. “He caught my eye right away, he was so handsome,” Vicki says to me.

  Together, in August 2003, Chapman and Vicki moved into an apartment in Villa Rica, near Douglasville, Georgia. “I loved her back then,” Chapman will admit, but he also admits this of most of the many women he’s been with. The relationship was defined by crystal meth, and police were often responding to one domestic incident or another at their property. Chapman found himself in and out of psychiatric hospitals as a result of meth-induced bouts of psychosis, with one even leading to an attempted suicide in 2004. Though the police ran his fingerprints once he came from the psychiatric hospital to the jail, no red flags were raised.

  One month after Chapman moved to Villa Rica, a local neighbor’s teenage daughter claimed that Chapman “creeped her out,” learning that he knew a lot about her while at a neighborhood barbecue. She and her mother noted that he always knocked on their door, both the front and back, and that when they didn’t answer, he’d try to jimmy the doorknob and break in. At one point, they called the police. Some mornings, according to reports, he would sit out in the complex and drink beer while talking to himself. On October 27, 2003, Chapman was arrested for indecent exposure. “I was taking a leak by my truck when I heard someone start yelling at me because my piss is running down the driveway, and boom, I’m exposed,” he tells me in eye-roll fashion. Once again, a background check was submitted, and once again, he was fingerprinted. But there were no alerts on the FBI’s system. Chapman was arrested a third time in January 2004, this time for criminal trespassing after the neighbor found a box outside her teenage daughter’s window that contained a pair of binoculars, tape, and rope. Once again, the fingerprint analysis yielded no match. Soon, after several disturbances, management asked John and Vicki to leave. Today, Vicki claims that she was not aware of John’s harassment of the neighbor until after the fact.

  According to the Los Angeles Times, “[Chapman] was arrested and freed three times in the last several years because the FBI’s computerized fingerprint system failed to correctly identify him.”

  “Once I learned the first time that that system didn’t work, that was it,” Chapman will say. In fact, Chapman was pulled over by police a recorded fifteen times after leaving Missouri, was approved for several bank loans, and even submitted numerous applications related to jobs, housing, the DMV, identification, and bank accounts without any incident.

  Feeling the Georgian heat after his legal troubles, after using up all his favors regarding employment around Douglasville and Villa Rica, Chapman left. He knew Hurricane Ivan was expected to batter the Gulf Coast, surely destructive enough to bring some blue-collar work with it. With what little he had, Chapman returned to Mobile, Alabama, on September 15, 2004, leaving Vicki with a million promises that he’d send for her once he planted roots. Ivan was a Category 5 storm, gaining massive strength in the Caribbean and reaching winds of 165 miles per hour (270 km/h). Lasting twenty-three days, the hurricane killed 124 people and caused $26.1 billion in damage.

  Chapman sought out Mark and Kim Bentley in the outskirts of Turnerville, surprising them, knowing full well he’d be able to sweet-talk his way into staying with them. While the couple opted to find higher and drier ground in northern Mobile in light of Ivan, Chapman stayed with the Bentleys’ cousin Scooter Coleman, and they kept up with the repairs necessitated by the storm—they put x’s made of masking tape on the windows and waited for the power to run out. At this point in time, after searching the bedroom for flashlights and batteries, Chapman stole the Bentleys’ .25 handgun. The next day, the Bentleys returned home after the worst of the storm had passed. Their next-door neighbor, forty-four-year-old Mobile-born Lisa Nichols, had also just returned after seeking shelter elsewhere. At some point, she inadvertently caught John’s eye.

  The next evening, on September 17, 2004, Chapman attempted to rape Nichols “under the threat of violence” and shot her three times in the head. “They couldn’t determine how far he got in raping her,” says Captain Burch. “But we believe he shot her when she tried fighting him off.” In the bathroom of her trailer home, where Lisa Nichols’s body lay on the floor, Chapman doused her and the room in gasoline, then lit her on fire.

  The evening of the next day, the storm clouds dissolved and the navy blue of night looked glossy overhead, the way it does after hurricane winds strip the heavens of color. Lisa Nichols didn’t answer her phone, not for her daughters and not for her fellow employees, who noticed she never came to work that day at the local supermarket. Lisa’s two daughters went to her house, only to make the grisly discovery. In hysterics, screaming, the two young women raced over to the Bentleys’. Mark Bentley and cousin Scooter ran over to help while Chapman stayed behind, “showing little or no emotion or willingness to help,” according to the Alabama Court of Appeals. Later records showed that Chapman called his girlfriend, Vicki Freeman, from Lisa’s home phone the evening Lisa was murdered, and they discussed their future and his wanting to move her out there from Georgia.

  DNA evidence, Chapman’s confessions, and ballistics proved overwhelmingly that John Paul Chapman committed the murder.

  “There was zero doubt in my mind that John Paul Chapman murdered Lisa Nichols,” says Captain Burch. “He enjoyed raping and killing.” Once more, Chapman’s fingerprints were submitted to the FBI’s database, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS). Still, no alarms were raised.

  Had it not been for Chapman’s missing his mother, authorities might have never found out his real identity.

  “After John Paul Chapman confessed to murdering Nichols, we let him call his mother. My partner back then, Mitch McRae, and I traced the number back to a Jeanne Beard in Miami, Oklahoma,” Paul Burch continues. “So we called Miami PD, asked if they knew her, and sure enough, they informed us that her son was a fugitive.”

  Oklahoma sent over a picture of Jeanne Beard’s son, along with his record and fingerprints. They’d long known who Jeanne was, and her son was infamous in the area.

  In a Los Angeles Times story, which claimed that the Nichols murder, and possibly others, could have been avoided if not for the system’s major errors, the FBI said they “regretted the incident” and announced their plans to conduct an internal investigation into the errors. FBI supervisory special agent Joe Parris stated that the IAFIS was proven to be 95 percent accura
te, resulting in the arrests of thousands of criminals per month.

  “It turned out John Paul Chapman wasn’t John Paul Chapman at all,” said Paul Burch.

  It was soon discovered that the real John Paul Chapman was serving a twenty-five-year stint in a Missouri prison for armed robbery, and that his mother, the bartender in Joplin, readily gave her son’s information away when writing it on a bar napkin. “She figured, ‘What the hell?’” said Chapman. “Her son wasn’t getting out anyway.”

  This man was facing charges for Nichols’s murder, which bore a striking resemblance to the crimes in Welch from five years before: the shots to the head, the arson, crimes that Alabama detectives were then unaware of. As Burch and his partner led the criminal with an alias from the interrogation room back to his cell, the suspected murderer stopped detectives. “I have another thing,” he said.

  The man who’d just confessed to killing Lisa Nichols was Miami’s own Jeremy Jones, who had been arrested near the Frontier Motel in Dotyville after a near-naked meth cook named Cowboy chased him up an unlit section of Route 66 on the morning of the fire at the Freeman home, just fourteen miles east of Welch. He faced detectives. “There’s something you need to know about some girls in Oklahoma.”

  21

  * * *

  THE CONFESSIONS

  * * *

  Police Captain Burch had met me in the lobby of the hotel I was staying at down in Mobile, Alabama, where he handed me the confession tapes of Jeremy Jones. He was kind, and he certainly didn’t owe me anything, so I was grateful that he gave me exclusive access. After he handed me the tapes, I raced upstairs to upload the confessions before hitting the road. It is a two-day drive of Mississippi splendor and floating tufts of fog, like driving through sky and heat. Then the pulsating terrain of emerald green Arkansas. Then I’m welcomed back by prairie and autumn, fear and the imaginary taunting of murderers. Then I spend weeks and months in darkness, holing up in my office. Self-inflicted isolation to where I need daily reminders to eat, to shower, to brush my hair. I obsess to the point where I memorize more than twenty-four hours of footage surrounding numerous murders, as disclosed by Jeremy Jones.

  When I come to the case eleven years after his arrest in the murder of Lisa Nichols, Jeremy Jones is still the most high-profile suspect in the murders of Kathy and Danny, as well as their daughter, Ashley, and her best friend, Lauria Bible. Jeremy’s good looks have gained him fans, despite the horror of the crimes he has confessed to. Some say it’s infamy that he wants, though I come to disagree. Every recent update on the case bears his name, and the victims of Welch are small on a long list of people he cops to killing. I spend the next three years watching his confessions, his details of one murder, then another, then another, until he is suspected in up to twenty-one brutal slayings across America’s Deep South. I spend days examining crime scene photos of Lisa Nichols’s burned body and the mug shots of Jones with scratches across his face from where Lisa tried to defend herself. And I spend three years trying to contact him, only for his lawyer to write me back and politely tell me to fuck off. We don’t swear like that in Alabama. So I turn my attention instead to his wife, an attractive German woman turned prison pen pal.

  It is shortly after a breakfast at Clanton’s Cafe (famous, if you ever find yourself in this part of Oklahoma), and I’m due to meet Mrs. Jones in an hour. I’ve squeezed a lemon slice to death and fingered little drawings in my gravy on account of my nerves. My senses are still adjusting from the darkness of isolation and the darkness of my mind—the hypersensitivity brought on by this curse. The Oklahoma sun turns everything white-hot, and the sound of a truck rolling by physically hurts my body.

  I’ve spent months corresponding with Mrs. Jones through Facebook, and now she’s in town visiting her in-laws, Jeremy’s family in Miami. We made plans to meet at a closed wedding chapel that the owner was going to “specially open for us.” I take my biscuits and get in the car and ready myself to leave. It is a particularly hot day in autumn, when the temperatures stay north of ninety from one end of the day to the other, keeping my anxiety levels at permanent high tide.

  Across the street is a large billboard with Lauria’s and Ashley’s faces, with bold letters that spell the word MISSING. A moment later, just as I’m getting ready to put the car in reverse and disappear onto Route 66, my phone rings. A private number.

  “Is this Jax?” A female voice.

  “Who is this?” I ask.

  “Are you meeting Jeremy’s wife?” But I don’t answer. I make sure she can hear me breathing so she knows the call wasn’t cut. Just before I hang up, the voice continues. “That’s not Jeremy’s wife.” The call ends.

  I sit in the hot car and tremble with an indiscernible emotion that squirms between fear and rage. I’m hit with a sudden wave of second-guessing: did I ever say something in our correspondence that I’d now regret? Did I give this person a way into my personal life? Most of all, if that wasn’t Mrs. Jones I was speaking to, then who was it? After I do some digging with nervous electricity, two other sources I reached out to proceed to confirm that the recipient of all this communication wasn’t Jeremy’s wife at all: it was Jeremy himself.

  To this day, I have no idea who was going to meet me at the chapel.

  Despite the revelation, I stayed in touch with “Mrs. Jones” and kept up with the pretense for three years. I believe Jeremy Jones wanted to see how persistent I’d be, as I’d continually write “his wife” to speak to him (he was, in actuality, married to the attractive blond German; I just don’t believe that’s whom I was talking to). It was the little things I noticed: the way they both spell “our” as “are,” how when Mrs. Jones tells me that she bought a copy of a fiction book I wrote, she sends a picture that shows neither the US nor the German version but the UK version, of which I’d just mailed Jeremy a copy from Ireland. But as it goes, I let truth tellers tell their truths and liars tell their lies.

  It was one day in particular when I was just tired of his bullshit that I wrote “Mrs. Jones”: “Let’s stop the bullshit, Jeremy.” I also gave him my phone number.

  That day, Mrs. Jones blocked me on Facebook … and I got a call from an Alabama prison. And we’d go on to speak hundreds of times after.

  “Stranger danger!” he greets me countless times, though I’m still not entirely sure why he nicknamed me this. When we end our conversations, he’ll ask for my Irish husband. “Where’s my Lucky Charms?”

  Not terribly long after his 2004 murder confessions, Jones recanted his admission about killing Nichols. More than once he’ll bring up Scooter, the Bentleys’ cousin who stayed behind with Jones to keep up with the damage of Hurricane Ivan at the Bentley home. When Scooter was called in as a witness for the state at the murder trial of Lisa Nichols, those following waited eagerly to hear what the witness had to say. But during the course of the trial, right before he was set to appear on the stand, thirty-nine-year-old Scooter was electrocuted to death.

  No foul play was suspected.

  “Now, there’s something you should be looking into,” Jones tells me. “It don’t seem right, does it?”

  Incidentally, the first confession tape, on which Jones confesses to murdering Lauria and Ashley (though he never refers to either one of them by name), was dated five years to the day after their disappearance. Dressed in prison-issue navy blue scrubs, Jeremy Jones casually began confessing to the murders in Welch. He spoke fast for an Oklahoman, enough that I’d have to stop and rewind most of the taped confessions, his accent twangy. He confessed to Mobile County Sheriff’s Office detectives Paul Burch and Mitch McRae, men not one bit familiar with the Freeman-Bible case, with no point of reference. Alabama detectives notified then sheriff of Craig County Jimmie L. Sooter and OSBI agent Steve Nutter, who proceeded to travel down south to assist in the interrogations.

  “You could look into his eyes, and it was just black, just evil,” says Craig County sheriff Sooter the first time we speak in his office in Vinita. At
the time of Jones’s 2004–05 confessions, Sooter was sheriff, and he was sheriff still during my first couple of years in Oklahoma. “Like evil was just coming out of those eyes, just black.”

  This would closely echo the statement I’d heard previously from Cowboy when we discussed Jones’s arrest near the Frontier Motel: Everything about him was black. His eyes, his hair, all of it. His soul was black.

  Jeremy spent most hours of the interrogation displaying visible signs of agitation, but he didn’t seem nervous. His shaking knees and tapping fingers appear to be part of his disposition. “Get in, get out, light it, and go,” said Jeremy in reference to the Welch fire. Every time Alabama interviewers wanted to extract more information from him, he was keen to barter: phone privileges, a marriage license for him and Vicki Freeman, better food. “He always wants something—that’s just par for the course,” said one investigator. Jones’s admissions came with the constant reminder that meth had destroyed most of his memory, leaving bits and pieces that couldn’t quite fit back together. Because of this, his numerous inaccuracies concerning the murders of Danny and Kathy were often overlooked. “I think he [Danny] was still alive after I shot him. Maybe he wasn’t. I think he was. But he might not have been. Meth’s keeping me from remembering, you know?”

  Jones tells me later that it was “made up,” that there were no such instances where he blacked out. “That’s what they [the authorities] wanted to hear.”