Robert Gene Jones (10 of Diamonds, Louisiana)

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Our card this week is Robert Gene Jones, the 10 of Diamonds from Louisiana.

Robert was known as a quiet man who stayed out of trouble.

So when he was found shot to death in his home one morning in the winter of 2002, police were initially stumped when it came to both motive and culprit.

And that might have been because Robert was never the intended target in what has now become a mystery that investigators hope one of you may hold the key to solving.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck.

Before dawn on December 11, 2002, a man named Darren Moore was driving back to Louisiana after spending the night in Texas, about a half hour or so across the state line with his girlfriend.

Darren's plan was to stop by this local Walmart where his daughter worked for a quick visit before heading home.

But as he drove through the dark and heavy fog, past the mobile home that he shared with his roommate Robert Jones in Caddo Parish, something grabbed his attention.

The porchlight, the one they normally kept off, had been left on.

It was a small detail, but 48-year-old Robert was a frugal, routine man who wouldn't have just forgotten.

So Darren thought it was alarming enough for him to pull over and check in.

Almost as soon as Darren entered the trailer through the unlocked front door, he saw his roommate lying on his chest in his bed in the front room, covered in blood.

Darren immediately called 911 and police were on the scene before sunrise.

They found that Robert had been shot once in the upper back and likely died almost instantly.

It was later determined by the coroner that he hadn't been dead in the home for too long though, likely being killed sometime between 10.30 p.m.

on December 10th and 2.30 a.m.

on December 11th.

Framed pictures of Robert's family looked on from the dresser while CSI dusted for prints, photographed the scene, and collected evidence for DNA testing.

Things like a single spent shell casing from a 9mm bullet found near his head.

We talked to one of the first responders who was at the scene that day, Lieutenant Jay Morgan with the Caddo Parish Sheriff's Office.

He actually took two of our reporters out to the property where Robert was discovered.

To the left on Bunkham, where we're on Bunkham Road now.

Robert's mobile home is still there and nearly unrecognizable from how it was in 2002.

The property is now so overgrown that the mobile home's roofline is barely visible from the road.

All right, right here, pull in.

This is actually, it's grown up now, but this is the actual,

this is where it happened.

Lieutenant Morgan had been to Robert's home during the early investigation, and he remembered how much it's changed.

So just think about it.

There was none of these trees.

Everything was landscape.

You would have had the big trees, nothing else.

So it was kind of wide open.

So you could see the house.

It's not often that we get to step back in time and walk a crime scene that's been virtually unchanged in two decades.

Actually, I don't think it's ever happened.

But that is exactly what our reporting team got to do as Lieutenant Morgan pointed out where police had bagged evidence like the shell casing, bullet fragments, and the bed sheets.

So when you open this door, you're walking into the limb room, his bedroom would have been right here.

Detectives also searched other parts of the home for clues, including the second bedroom where Darren had stayed.

So you had the kitchen, the hallway would have been on that back side.

As you walked down the hallway, Darren's room would have been right there.

And that's where you could just smell it.

He's talking about the smell of marijuana.

Lieutenant Morgan remembers the trailer being full of it.

We walked in, that's where we could smell the weed.

The smell was pervasive, but detectives weren't able to actually find any of it.

And by the way, toxicology tests would later show that there was no drugs or alcohol in Robert's system.

If there had been drugs in the home, then it's possible they had been taken out of the trailer.

Maybe that was the motive for all of this.

But even that didn't quite add up.

I mean, the home didn't look ransacked.

There were no signs of a struggle or forced entry.

And even Robert's wallet was there, money still inside.

No one expects something like this to happen to their loved one.

But it was especially shocking to Robert's older brother, Willie, who worked with his younger brother for 14 years years at a local steel mill.

Willie remembers his brother as a shy guy.

He wasn't a violent person.

He didn't like fights.

He kind of was scary.

And he didn't like to get in no fights or nothing like that.

And kept to himself.

Very neat, very clean.

Always lay his clothes out and all that.

He just kept everything in line.

Lieutenant Morgan said other interviews with Robert's friends and family confirmed that reputation.

And he worked, maybe went to the boats, casinos, and would come home.

Kind of like, you know, he would talk to family and stuff, but he did his own thing.

Nothing bad.

Detectives considered that Robert could have maybe won big gambling and was followed home by someone who wanted to rob him.

But that theory, too, was quickly ruled out when investigators learned that Robert hadn't recently won any large sums of money.

Therefore, the prevailing theory, at least for the moment, was that robbery wasn't the likely motive.

Eventually, police learned from Robert's family that something was in fact missing.

A small safe where he kept things like money and jewelry.

But even then, they still weren't convinced that this was the primary reason behind the crime.

And something else at the scene still bothered detectives.

When Robert was found, he'd been in just a t-shirt, his underwear, and a do-rag-type sleeping cap.

So did Robert just willingly let this person into his home in the middle of the night, hardly dressed?

Or was it possible that he left the light on and the door unlocked for someone he expected to show up?

Now, wait a minute, did the roommate call and say, hey, I'll be there.

Just leave the door unlocked.

You know?

For me, I'm thinking he knows who did it, right?

He knows who killed him because of how he's dressed and everything.

He felt comfortable enough to leave the door unlocked.

But then we go back to phone calls.

I checked the phone records, house phone, cell phone.

There was no missed calls or anything from Darren at the time, the roommate.

So

there was, as it turned out, potential motive, though.

Lieutenant Morgan and one of our reporters spoke about the possibility that Darren was behind on rent.

Apparently, Robert had told one of his brothers that Darren owed him money and that he'd considered evicting him.

Robert was getting payment from Darren to live there.

I don't know if he kept records of how much did Darren still owe him money or not, but we felt at this time Darren is our number one suspect, you know?

So no one was suspecting anything was wrong until the roommate was driving by and noticed that the light was on.

Exactly.

Yep.

And that's why he decided to stop.

Now you're going, okay, okay, just by chance, you're just driving through.

We thought, you know, this son of a has something to do with it.

Our number one suspect is the roommate.

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Lieutenant Morgan said Darren was interviewed multiple times, and each time he maintained that he had nothing to do with his roommate's murder.

However, his alibi was tough to verify.

This place is in the middle of nowhere.

On Bunk'em rope, there's traffic, but you know, it's dark there.

There is no cameras and there's no stores with video.

And the cell phones, I mean, there's a couple towers, but we couldn't at that time even get phone dumps.

We didn't have that luxury.

There was nothing.

Darren told police he spent the night at a girlfriend's house the night of Robert's murder.

The girlfriend and her stepdad, who was also there, backed that up.

But Lieutenant Morgan still wasn't totally convinced that Darren had zero involvement.

Investigators spoke to Darren quite a few times over the ensuing months as the investigation went on.

Darren told police that he didn't owe Robert money.

According to him, they didn't even have a formal agreement where he paid Robert rent.

Instead, when the end of the month rolled around, Robert would tell Darren how much money he needed, and then Darren would just give him that money in cash.

Detectives asked Darren directly if he had killed Robert, to which he said, hell no.

Lieutenant Morgan also remembered that Darren seemed genuinely shaken up by the whole affair.

Now, Darren continued to cooperate with authorities.

He ended up taking two polygraphs.

There was nothing in either test that indicated he was being deceptive.

And listen, I have strong feelings about polygraphs, as you might know.

But maybe there's something to be said for them if you are the only suspect in your roommate's murder and you're trying to prove to police that they should look somewhere else.

And so, police did.

Though that didn't didn't mean that Darren wasn't somehow still connected to what happened.

And over the following months, investigators found out some additional information about Darren.

It turned out that Darren was what Lieutenant Morgan calls a weed guy.

He sold and used marijuana, which could certainly account for that scent that investigators remembered from their search of the crime scene.

But there is no record in the case file about them going back to Darren and straight up asking him about the smell in the house and if he could account for it.

But all of this, it gave them an idea.

What if investigators just had it backwards?

What if Darren wasn't the killer, but instead the intended target?

I'm thinking, I can smell weed in the house, but there is no weed there.

To me, it was there at one point, so where'd it go?

Robbery.

Robert wasn't selling dope, and we don't have any indication saying that he was the drug dealer, you know?

Then we go to Darren.

There's no doubt he was slinging dope.

So did someone show up thinking that that was Darren and killed him?

Now all of a sudden, a tip that they had gotten from Crime Stoppers that came in the past January was starting to make a lot more sense.

Someone had called and claimed that a man named Isaac Rambo III was responsible for Robert's death.

They said this Isaac guy had gone to Greenwood, which is an area near where Robert and Darren live, and he went there to rob someone.

The tipsters said that the wrong person was killed because the main target wasn't home.

Detectives looked into Isaac and they ultimately learned that he did have a connection to Darren.

Isaac was friends or associates with someone that Darren sold to.

And so police began to build a case before they ever even thought about approaching him.

When I interview you or interrogate you, I'm going to have something where I'll be able to put you in jail when you lie to me, no matter what I got you.

So we're trying to build our case and then extra credit is just we go in and you confess.

That's always the ultimate goal.

But build a case, then you don't need their confession.

I mean, even though it's cool to have, but you got evidence to really get them.

As they laid the groundwork over the next couple of months, a good lead came right to them in late March of 2003.

A man in jail who we're going to call Mike supposedly had information about Robert's murder.

Mike claimed that he was with Isaac when Robert was killed.

So we get that information.

We're going, bullshit.

There's no way.

There's no way.

The Crime Stopper tip was just, he did it.

Then we get a call from this person.

So we asked, were you the Crime Stopper guy?

He's like, no.

Now I'm telling you because I saw it on the news and it's time to talk.

Lieutenant Morgan and his partner went to the jail to talk to Mike directly.

And he told them that the night of the murder, Isaac picked him up and they drove to a mobile home near Greenwood so that Isaac could collect some money.

Mike said that Isaac drove up to the house, knocked on the front door and went inside.

Now Mike couldn't see who opened the door because he stayed in the car.

But a few minutes later, Mike said that he heard what he thought was a gunshot and then another and then possibly two more that followed shortly after.

And then Mike said Isaac came running out of the trailer, got back in the driver's seat, and started pulling away from the house.

They were backing out of the driveway.

He said, what happened?

And, you know, he says, I'm a beast.

I got three under my belt.

He picked up the gun between his legs and placed a barrel against the witness's neck.

And it's still hot, ain't it?

So that's what he said.

Driving away, continued to hold the pistol on the left side of his neck.

What did you see?

What do you know?

And he said, I didn't see nothing.

The tip had enough detail to be plausible, and Lieutenant Morgan wanted to see if he could verify it somehow.

He asked Mike if he could remap the route that he'd taken with Isaac that night, and he said he was at least willing to try.

So Lieutenant Morgan, his partner, and Mike hopped in a car, and Mike directed them.

road by road along the path that he remembered driving with Isaac.

And to detectives' amazement, they pulled up in front of that same mobile home that had been an active crime scene just a few months before.

This field trip made detectives take Mike's account seriously.

The route he took them on was specific and rarely taken.

And Robert's trailer was out in the middle of nowhere, not just easy to stumble across.

And to back it up even more, the detectives were able to verify from other sources that Isaac and Mike were together that day.

However, there were still hiccups, a few things that didn't totally add up.

For one, Mike said that he had heard multiple shots, but detectives only found one bullet casing at the scene.

This new lead was enough, though, that Lieutenant Morgan and his partner searched Robert's house a second time, just to be sure.

We're looking for more rounds.

Nothing.

So now we're going, uh...

What did you hear?

Now, it's not uncommon for a gunshot to echo, or people hear one and go, it just scares the shit out of them.

And it's like you hear multiple.

Another thing that didn't quite add up was Mike's memory of someone letting Isaac into the house.

But let's go back to how he was.

Are you going to answer the door in your underwear?

Nope.

I'm not, especially if I don't know who the hell it is.

If you're saying this this late at night, no.

To take that one step further, There is no indication that Robert would have known these guys.

So would he have let them in in his underwear and then gone back to his bedroom to lay down?

I don't know.

But Darren might have.

So, police went back to him.

Now, he still denied ever being at the house before finding Robert.

He was sticking to his story, the one that he passed multiple polygraphs with.

But this time around, he was willing to open up a bit more about selling drugs.

Now, detectives already knew this from talking with other people who knew him, but this was the first time that Darren had admitted it.

He said that he'd withheld it early on because he was embarrassed.

But Darren went on to explain that people knew he carried at least $1,200 in cash at all times.

And everybody knew that he had gotten a lump sum of money in a workers' comp settlement that past fall.

And he said this became a problem for him.

Darren said that people regularly came to him for money.

for everything from paying off traffic tickets to buying a new lawnmower.

And eventually he stopped answering phone calls because on the other end of the line, it was always someone asking him for money.

All of this sure made it sound like Darren could have been the true target here.

And Darren told them that Isaac had actually been to the mobile home in the past with their mutual friends to borrow Darren's truck, like to move something.

So at least according to Darren, Isaac would have been familiar with Robert's place.

As much as we would have liked to talk to Darren about this directly ourselves, he passed away in a car crash sometime in the years after Robert's death.

But at this point in our story, detectives were almost ready to go to Isaac directly.

They tried one more time to get those around him to cooperate, reaching out to family members, including his wife.

And they were able to squeeze a little bit more information out of people.

They learned that Isaac had been driving someone else's car at the time of the murder, a black Lexus that was owned by his wife's brother.

Now, unfortunately, that car was sold shortly after Robert died.

And even when detectives managed to track it down and search it, they didn't find anything.

But along with confirming that he'd been driving her brother's car, Isaac's wife also gave police even more proof that they were on the right track.

She said that Isaac once told her how he had killed someone during a robbery in Greenwood.

So now it was time to go to the source.

And when they found Isaac, he didn't even seem surprised that they wanted to talk.

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He knew, said he knew it involved a homicide, but you remember we talked to so many people, we knew that it was going to get back to him.

That was kind of the whole thing.

Everybody we talk to, we tell them don't say anything.

We know you're going to tell them everything.

So we knew that we we wouldn't go into specifics on anything we did.

We just base what do you know about this homicide.

Isaac claimed that he had never seen Robert before in his life, but he did admit that he knew Darren, although he said they'd only met a few times.

When police asked Isaac what he was doing on December 10th, Isaac said that he didn't remember where he was that day some five months ago.

And he also outright denied any knowledge of Robert's murder.

But for someone who didn't know Robert, he had an interesting reaction to the photo of Robert that police showed him.

He started to cry.

He just felt bad for the man and his family because he knows they are hurting, even though he did not know the man.

As investigators continued to press Isaac, he finally revealed something important.

Lieutenant Morgan said that while the early conversation with Isaac was frustrating, his story started to change when they told him what they'd learned from other sources.

And he finally confirmed some information, like the fact that he had been with Mike at some point the day Robert was killed.

He was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I was with this guy who's our witness on this date, and they saw us leaving together in the black Lexus that belonged to his brother-in-law.

So he verified out that the Lexus belonged to his brother-in-law.

And yes, we were in it together.

He remembered a lot of stuff then, but he would kind of stop to pouring about Greenwood.

but isaac's story was still inconsistent at first he said he had someone in the car with him then later he said that he was alone at times although there were a few details to his story that didn't change

so his story was just kind of you couldn't believe a lot of what he was actually saying he knew certain stuff but when it got time for the actual going to greenwood oh no so

no never but what he did do was place himself in that Lexus.

Now police had multiple people pointing the finger at Isaac and placing him in that Lexus and in the Greenwood area at the time of Robert's murder.

It was at this point, May 15th, 2003, that investigators felt like they had enough probable cause to arrest Isaac for Robert's murder.

The working theory of the case was that Isaac went to Robert's home to collect money from or potentially rob Darren.

And for some unknown reason, with Darren Darren away, Isaac ended up killing Robert.

Mistaken identity.

There's no doubt mistaken identity.

Our team spoke with Robert's older brother, Willie, about Isaac's arrest and how much hope it gave him.

I don't know that man, and it took so long for them to arrest somebody or do anything.

And I thought they weren't going to never do nothing.

And, you know, you arrest somebody for first degree murder, put them in jail.

You know, they say, well, call and tell us we got somebody we got the man took us a while we got him and two weeks later he out of jail that's how that happened

a preliminary hearing was scheduled around isaac's case but then that was the end of the line in the days after that hearing prosecutors threw out the case citing a lack of physical evidence tying isaac to the scene They said, well, the DA said that we didn't have enough evidence.

I said, well, what y'all said?

Y'all arrested him for first-degree murder.

How did he get out of jail?

Well, it's up to the DA.

And I wanted him to explain to me how you can arrest somebody.

You know, you can downgrade the charges or something like that, but they arrested the guy for first-degree murder and then let him go.

So he said, well, something about

if they went to trial and they lost, they could never try him again.

Lieutenant Morgan told us, the district attorney said that they were close to having what prosecutors needed to close the case.

But there just wasn't enough.

And the evidence they did have was crumbling.

Isaac's wife approached police and told them that she had lied when she said Isaac told her he'd killed someone in Greenwood.

Then the only other witness they had was Mike.

And at the time, he was incarcerated.

So prosecutors worried that a jury would see him as an unreliable source.

I said, what do we need?

And that's when I said, this is chicken shit.

This is bullshit.

I said, we don't have a nun or a priest as our witnesses, but we have to use what we got.

Nowadays, a nun and priest ain't worth a damn either.

Since Isaac's initial arrest, more than 20 years ago, he hasn't faced any charges in connection with Robert's murder.

And Robert's case has languished.

That said, though, Isaac is in jail.

In 2021, he was convicted of indecent behavior with a juvenile.

He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

When we reached out to him and asked him about Robert's murder, he responded and told us that he was, quote, wrongly arrested and has no connection with the murder of Robert Jones, end quote.

Lieutenant Morgan hasn't given up.

He is confident that the case can still be closed.

Hell yeah, could be solved.

I think, yeah, we had some more.

An eyewitness that would step up and said, yeah, I remember that day, this and this, the the person told me this.

Hell yeah.

Something that the DA's office would go with would be helpful.

If you or anyone you know has information that can help bring closure to Robert Gene Jones's case, you can make an anonymous call to the Caddo Shreeport Crime Stoppers at 318-673-7373.

You can also submit a tip by visiting their website, c-scrimestoppers.org.

The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis.

To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.

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