The Crime: Sexual assault, homicide
The Victim: Missy Jones
Location: Southwestern United States
Original Theory: Her father did it
As you’re driving into this small town in the Southwest, there are signs on the side of the road that say warning: hitchhikers may be escaping prisoners.
The town has only two industries: a prison and a mental institution. You either work at one or the other. And then there was the sheriff’s department, which put you either in the prison or the mental institution. It’s a pretty scary place.
The sheriff’s department did an excellent job of investigating Missy Jones’s murder, and they had the forensics, photos, and notes to prove it. They wanted my take, and if I came to the same conclusion, they wanted me to encourage the family to finally cooperate with the investigation. They wanted me to convince the family that Missy’s own daddy killed her.
Missy’s mom was incensed.
“The sheriff is crazy!” she insisted. “What father would rape and murder his own daughter?”
But by the time I finished profiling the crime and researching the background of Missy’s dad, Orville, they had come around and their anger wasn’t targeted at the sheriff’s department anymore. As we sat in a circle on the front lawn of the trailer home, Missy’s uncle spoke on behalf of the family.
“Hell, yeah, we’ll cooperate,” he said. “We’re ready to put a bullet in the bastard’s head ourselves.”
MISSY DIED ON April 25, 1992. The Jones family brought me into this case about nine years later.
They were upset because the police had focused on Missy’s father as the prime suspect. The family could not believe that her own father would do something like that to her when there were better choices out there:
Tommy Hime, the twenty-eight-year-old man down the street who befriended twelve-year-old Missy and was close to another teenage girl who disappeared six weeks after she had a baby and was never found;
Ron Lewis, who was at the house Missy visited that night. He grew pot and later escaped from a chain gang.
But Orville? Why would the sheriff be looking at him but not be interested in Tommy or Ron?
Instead, the sheriff insisted the only suspect in Missy’s murder was Orville Jones, her biological father.
Orville, who was a self-employed carpenter, earned an associate’s degree in criminal justice while attending community college, so he considered himself quite the junior investigator. He was always giving information to the police as to who they should be looking at and how the man down the street, Tommy, was trying to be Missy’s boyfriend but he was a lot older than her. He also noted how, in the house she was visiting, the boy living there, Ron Lewis’s brother, tried to have his way with her once before. I found that amusing. And you, her father, let her go back there to play anyway?
Orville was full of stories; he had an answer for everything. Orville, in the long run, comes off as a classic psychopath who likes to run the whole show, and yet his demeanor following his daughter’s death shows a total lack of understanding of what’s appropriate and what’s inappropriate. Or how people will view you. Psychopaths are so busy manipulating people and trying to control the game in their own mind, they don’t realize how they come off.
IN ORLANDO, FLORIDA, a girl named Caylee Anthony made national headlines in June 2008 when she disappeared. The story grew disproportionately large primarily because her single mother, Casey Anthony, gave a ridiculous story as to how the babysitter kidnapped her daughter. Meanwhile Casey spent her nights partying in bars.
The public was shocked when, on July 15, the press reported that Caylee’s grandparents-who couldn’t get a straight answer for weeks from Casey about her daughter’s whereabouts-picked up Casey’s car from a towing lot and were revolted by the smell emanating from the trunk.
“There’s something wrong,” Cindy Anthony said in an emergency call to 911. “I found my daughter’s car today and it smelled like there’s been a dead body in the damn car.” Later, apparently to protect her daughter, Cindy claimed the smell came from pizza that Casey had left in the trunk.
That seemed to parallel what happened in Missy Jones’s case sixteen years earlier.
There was definitely a nasty smell coming from the old sedan that Orville drove. It was something the police honed in on, investigating whether Missy had once been in the car trunk-and just as we later saw in the case of Caylee Anthony, her decomposing body was relocated to a wooded area after a period of time, leaving a smell far worse than rotting pizza.
We often wonder why people bother to put bodies in trunks, but the simple fact is they are convenient, enclosed locations you can lock and keep people from opening. They are also usefully attached to a motor vehicle that allows you to then transport a corpse out of sight of prying eyes. But trunks also keep a lot of good evidence, as well, so unless a killer really does a good job of making sure nothing escapes from the body into the trunk-a really good double or triple Hefty bag wrap for starters that keeps bodily fluids and gases contained-eagle-eyed investigators and the forensics team should easily detect clues there.
Investigators used the latest gas technology in the Caylee Anthony case, which they did not have available in the Missy Jones case.
Missy was missing for two weeks before the body was found. The family brought me in nine years later because, while the police suspected Missy’s dad, the family refused to buy into that theory. They were sure that somebody else killed her, but the time line in this case did not support that. Who was available to be involved in the crime? What things made sense in the time line? Who had the ability to commit the crime?
ON THE NIGHT she disappeared, Missy’s mother, Miranda, drove her to Rhonda Lewis’s home around six p.m. to hang out and sleep over with her friend. Missy was excited about a family trip planned for the next day. She was going to go home in the morning, pack, and take off with her parents and brothers.
Orville and his wife, Miranda, went out drinking that night, came home, and went to sleep.
At some point in the night, the phone rang twice. The first time Miranda heard the phone ring, she was in the shower. Miranda said Orville answered it and told her it was Missy wanting to come home. Miranda told him to tell her to wait until breakfast time.
Miranda thought the phone rang again. She recalled Orville telling her it was a hang-up. She didn’t remember anything more. The liquor knocked her out and all she remembered was waking up when the sun was already shining in the window.
Over at the Lewises’ house, Missy was watching television when Mrs. Lewis came down around 2:20 a.m. and said, “What are you doing down here?”
“I have a stomachache,” Missy said. “I’m going to go home. I already called home and asked them to come get me.”
“Okay,” Mrs. Lewis said, “but turn the television off, because we don’t watch television at this time of night.”
Missy, who was fully clothed, did as she was told and Mrs. Lewis went back to bed. When she woke up the next morning, Missy was gone. The Lewis family assumed Missy went home with whomever came to get her.
They assumed incorrectly.
“Between eight and nine a.m., I made a call to my sister’s house and decided not to make the trip,” Miranda Jones said. “Orville began to make coffee and fix breakfast. It was Sunday morning and no one was in a hurry. About ten a.m., Missy still hadn’t come home. I sent my youngest son over to Rhonda’s to tell Missy to come home. He came back saying she wasn’t there. I then went over to talk to Rhonda’s mother, Eva Lewis. Eva said that Missy was up in the living room sometime around two a.m., saying she wanted to go home, she was going to call her mother. Rhonda’s house was only about 150 yards through the small wooded area between [our] two houses. I think Eva stated that Missy was complaining about a stomachache. I never received a call or saw Missy that night.” (Miranda changed her story here about the phone call most likely because she didn’t want to admit she didn’t go get her daughter or that her husband actually might have.)
There were five people in the Lewis house at the time that Missy disappeared, and no one saw her leave.
“I went back home and searched the neighborhood,” Miranda continued. “Missy’s dad called the police and sometime around eleven a.m. to eleven thirty a.m. they arrived. (I can’t remember where Missy’s dad was at this time; I think he was at the house waiting for the police to arrive.)
“My oldest son was called at work to come home; I think I went to pick him up. When the police arrived they brought a search dog. The officer with the dog and I went through the wooded area between the two houses (the Lewises’ and mine) where the kids played. I had given some of Missy’s clothes for the dog to get her scent. When we arrived at the Lewis house (up to this point the dog had not picked up Missy’s scent) I was asked to stay outside, but I could see through the screen door.
“The dog went crazy when he came to the chair where Missy was last seen sitting. The dog followed her scent to the living room door and stopped. He could not pick up her scent outside the house. [It was said that maybe so many people walking around may have hindered the dogs’ ability to pick up her scent.] The dog was led around to the back of the house, where Missy and Rhonda had picked berries the day before. He was able to pick up her scent again there, but it led nowhere.”
EVA LEWIS CLAIMED Missy was waiting for someone to pick her up. Two phone calls came in to the Jones household just about the time Eva said Missy had contacted her family.
None of the Joneses-Orville, Miranda, or any of the kids-heard any car start up outside their trailer home. Nobody heard anybody drive away. But then again, there was only a two-minute walk between the two homes.
Missy was killed by somebody in the Lewises’ home or she was walked out of their home in the middle of the night and somebody else killed her; or someone from the Jones house came over to pick her up and they knew what happened to her. Something happened at that point in time, because she was at the Lewises’, and then she was not.
I agreed with the police that the witnesses and their statements eliminated all but one of the suspects. After Missy made her phone call, someone should have been coming to get her. Orville, the dad, said he never talked to Missy and she probably started walking home in the middle of the night, even though Missy was not the sort to do that and she wasn’t feeling well. “Tommy probably killed her.”
Tommy Hime managed a restaurant and he did live close by, but it would be pretty coincidental that Missy made a phone call home and Tommy showed up. Where did he come from? The Lewis place was not on the way from Tommy’s house to her house. It couldn’t be that Tommy was just strolling by at the time, although he would have finished work around midnight. He would have to make a specific journey over that way and run into her at the exact same time she gave up waiting for her dad to come. (Tommy, incidentally, passed the lie detector test.)
Back at Missy’s home, the time line produced the same result.
Orville never said, “I went to get her, and she wasn’t there.”
What happened to Missy after she told Mrs. Lewis that someone was coming for her? When did she vanish?
It was highly unlikely at that point that she would have left with anyone else, as she knew someone was coming to get her. It was also unlikely that someone in the household would at this exact moment attempt to abduct and rape Missy, as a parent was only possibly minutes away from arrival.
The most likely scenario was that the father walked over to the Lewises’ to get her and something happened on the way home. Orville had been drinking earlier in the evening and maybe he decided it was easier to walk rather than take the car. Maybe he already had the squirrelly idea in his head that he could bring Missy into the woods and have his way with her. It’s worth noting that later, the police dogs did not follow Missy’s scent from the door. It’s possible the father picked her up and carried her. She was a twelve-year-old girl, kind of small, certainly tired. It’s also possible the dogs just weren’t any good.
She disappeared, but according to police, the person who did the least to help find her was her dad. While everybody else was out searching for Missy, he didn’t even bother. He stayed home, hanging around the house.
Orville didn’t act appropriately. Just two days after Missy went missing he started making comments like, “You are looking for her body” and “She’s dead.”
These remarks indicated he believed his daughter was already dead. He knew what happened to her. He made a similar comment to a little girl who lived next door and another to a TV news show. He referred to his daughter as “the body.” He said that the search was a waste of time. Sitting in his recliner with a smirk on his face, he looked over at his son and said, “Chuck, you killed Missy, didn’t you?” What kind of father says things like that?
His daughter had gone missing and no one knew what had happened to her. She could be a runaway-that’s how the police initially classified her because she was twelve years old and her father didn’t think the police should waste their time looking for her. Real fatherly behavior, right?
After she was found murdered, Orville went on a local TV news show and said he didn’t know if Missy was killed out of “meanness or carelessness.” The girl was found partially clothed, her hands tied with a sock and another sock stuck in her mouth, the latter of which caused her death. That could be the mark of a serial killer, a rapist, a child predator. Where would Daddy come up with the notion that it was meanness or carelessness?
ALL THESE BEHAVIORS that Orville exhibited after the fact were peculiar, which is why the police said, “There’s something fishy about this guy.”
They already knew Orville pretty well. He lived in a small town, and Orville wasn’t terribly liked by the police there. He agreed to a polygraph, which was inconclusive. He said he contacted a psychic who told him Missy was in a dark place, probably the car trunk that he knew she was in. He spouted theories of Satanism.
Where was she for two weeks? Why couldn’t they find her?
Eventually, an anonymous 911 call came in-it was not recorded because of technical difficulties-telling the police that Missy could be found in one of three places. She was found in one of them, between the two houses, the Jones house and the Lewis house, underneath a honeysuckle bush. She wasn’t there before; the area had been carefully searched and searched again. Her hair was matted and stood out from her head. Her skin was black all over except for her legs, which were orangish above the knees. She was laid down in the bush with her body pitched downward and her feet up, wearing a T-shirt decorated with kittens. Her tennis shoes, the shoelaces tied in a knot to keep the shoes together, had been tossed onto the bush and were hanging from a branch. Missy was not known to tie her shoes in that manner.
Her hands were loosely tied with one of her socks. The other sock was stuffed in her mouth and had hardened there. Missy’s black jeans and underwear were wadded up and lying under her. Her shirt was on her torso but it, too, was rolled up. No bra, but she didn’t wear one. It appeared to be a sexual assault but there was no visible evidence of it.
If she were there for two weeks, searchers would have found her, because they clearly searched between the two houses.
“A few days before Missy’s body was found,” according to Miranda Jones, “Rhonda Lewis’s oldest sister picked berries at that spot and said she saw nothing. My mom and I searched that area, too; we stood next to the honeysuckle bush where her body was later found and we saw nothing.
“Everyone is in agreement that Missy was not there at that time, that she was killed somewhere else and her body was brought back.” It wasn’t until later that they brought in cadaver dogs and came across her body. Where did her body come from?
If she got tired of waiting to be picked up and walked home and somebody raped her on the way-like Tommy from down the street-he probably would have just left her there and run.
If somebody abducted her and dragged her off to a vehicle, she wouldn’t be there at all. So why did the body end up back by the house? Why wasn’t it there to begin with?
Earlier, Orville reportedly told Rhonda that she shouldn’t walk between the houses because bad things happen to little girls who walk in that area.
There was a theory that Orville may have actually brought Missy home and done something to her in the house, but I found that kind of unlikely. My theory is that he did something to her in those woods and then didn’t know what to do about his dead daughter lying in the middle of the patch. He had to do something with her body-after all, he might have left evidence on it-so he quickly carried her to his house and put her body in the trunk of the car; he would slip back inside and into bed and deal with “the problem” later. He hid the car keys to make sure no one else would borrow the vehicle and decide to put some groceries in the trunk.
Eventually, the car was moved. I think it was moved around quite a few times because he didn’t know what to do with it. One of the reasons her body may have ended up where it did, dumped back in the woods to be found two weeks later, was that he got tired of it all. We find this often happens with people who are involved with the killing of a family member. That’s one of the reasons we look back at the family when we see something like this. We look at the husband, the parents-whoever the victim had a close relationship with, because these people have to live day in and day out with the search, and at some point they get frustrated by it. They tire of the questioning and the wife or the husband or whoever constantly looking for the missing person and spending their entire lives doing this. They want to move on. That kid’s dead, I want to forget about it. I want to start doing stuff. I don’t want to sit here and dwell on this.
The killer will bring the body back and dump it in a location where it will be found and they can get that part over with. There’s the body. We found her. Now can we move on? Of course, they don’t think ahead to the next part, which is that the authorities will actually investigate the homicide. The perpetrator doesn’t think that far ahead.
Orville didn’t seem terribly surprised when he got the news that Missy’s body was found right near the house in the woods. He said, “Huh.” That someone might have brought her body back and dumped it in the bushes would not be a big surprise to Orville if he was the one who put it there. It is most likely that he kept Missy in the trunk until he had an opportunity to move her to another location for hiding. There was speculation that he hid the body in his mother’s barn. But, at some point, my theory continues, he wanted her to be found, and so he put her back in the trunk and brought her back to the woods by the house. He carried her body to the bush and dumped it. Then he went back to the car, looked in the trunk, and realized the shoes were still there. He grabbed them, tossed them into the bushes, and took off. The body was found, and by that time the police were looking at him.
One of the interesting things is that his wife told me that he kept spraying his car trunk with insecticide. He was apparently having a little bit of a fly problem. That’s why his wife noticed an odd smell and an insecticide odor as well.
The family, in spite of Orville’s squirrelly behavior, did not think he had anything to do with the crime. They just thought he was a quirky fellow.
I see this happen with many families. People around Missy, her teachers and her Girl Scout leader, thought she might have been sexually abused. They believed something was not right in her life long before she was murdered. Missy’s behavior had changed in recent months, she seemed sad and distant. Yet they had trouble believing that someone they knew was responsible for this horrific act.
I WENT BACK and looked at Orville’s history and there was no shortage of interesting details. He told his first wife that he had had a sexual relationship with his sister, and his sister was killed running in front of a car-away from him, perhaps.
We don’t know whether it’s true that he had sex with his sister, but he said that he did, which is an interesting admission.
I also learned that another family member had reported that she had been molested by him. When we get to Missy, it’s not terribly surprising to learn police suspected he had sexually assaulted her as well.
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 committed 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.