Ep.7: Redneck Bundy - Who Killed Jennifer Judd?

46m
Investigator Sarah Cailean narrows her list of suspects in the murder of Jennifer Judd. While in Missouri, she meets with the family of another potential victim of Jeremy Jones, to see if there are consistencies in the two crimes or the confessions.

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Previously, on who killed Jennifer Judd.

I kind of blame myself that she got killed because we could have went to the mall that morning

and she could have been gone.

Those guys all run together in a group, so there were always five to seven of them together all the time.

He's just been in trouble.

He's just a lot of trouble.

You know, mentally, he's not right.

And I don't know if it's like from a lot of drug use or just mental illness.

I have tried everything

to find out who it is.

From ID and ARC Media, I'm Sarah Kalen, and this is is Who Killed Jennifer Judd.

In the three months since I gained access to the case files in the murder of Jennifer Judd, I've narrowed the suspect list quite considerably.

I've ruled out any suspicion of Jennifer's husband, Justin Judd, as well as several of Justin's friends, including his best friend, Tommy Davis.

I have been investigating three main suspects, Jeremy Jones, Chuck Chance, and Alan Redden.

That list changed one morning in late May 2024 when I heard my cell phone ringing.

I got to it just in time.

Hi, Mrs.

Sarah.

Hi, Mr.

Redden.

Thank you so much for calling me back.

We've been playing phone tag for a couple of weeks now.

Alan Redden finally called me back.

Well, to his credit, credit, he'd been calling me back, but we kept missing each other.

Now that he's moved ahead of Chuck Chance on my suspect list, I'm so happy to finally connect with him.

He tells me he's had a few health problems lately.

Something bit him and it got infected.

He asks if I can meet on Thursday morning.

Right now, I thought, you know, maybe we can just move through this and I can just check you off the list and be done with it just on a phone call.

Alan says in 1999, he was in prison serving time for first-degree robbery, and the guards came to him and said KBI wanted to talk to him about the Judd case.

He says someone went to KBI and reported him.

Alan barely knew the man reporting him.

He thinks the man knew Jennifer's parents and the state were offering a $10,000 reward to anyone who could help solve the case, and this guy wanted to collect the reward.

I did see something about a tip, but it was unclear if that was the origin of their interest in Redden or if they had been asking around about him first.

Learning the order of events helps me make sense of the tip and whether it was worth pursuing.

I ask Alan what year they came to talk to him.

He doesn't quite remember.

Okay.

He tells me about growing up in Pitcher with Justin Judd's dad, Bobby, and Bobby's sisters.

We talk about the report that states he harassed Jennifer at the Pitcher Express.

I never remember harassing anybody or any family never.

I've never heard any girl I ain't asked to know anything about that incident.

You know what I mean?

I ask if they ever asked him to submit to a polygraph test.

He says they didn't, but he'll sit for one now if I want to set it up.

If I were to ask you to submit to a DNA swab, would you do it?

Yeah, okay.

That's fine, but

I said I'll have anything.

He says he doesn't have anything to hide, and as awful as his record is, I believe him in this instance.

He doesn't seem skittish.

Nothing indicates to me he's lying.

If the DNA test results don't match any other known suspects, I'll see if his DNA profile is in the system.

If it's not, I tell him, I'll call him back and set up a time to get a DNA swab.

Yeah, okay,

I know that, so I know.

Yeah, no, I appreciate that, and I am

optimistic that the truth will come out.

We're just trying to kind of finally see if

we can close this one and let the judge have a little bit of peace.

We've already sent several pieces of evidence to a lab for DNA testing.

With a little luck, we'll have DNA results back within a week.

When we do, I'm pretty sure we'll be able to rule out Alan Redden.

Okay, all right.

Great.

Thank you, Mr.

Redden.

You have a good day, and I hope you're back on the mend.

Okay, thank you.

Bye.

I don't think he did it.

That leaves me with two primary suspects, Chuck Chance and Jeremy Jones.

At least, it did.

A few days after talking to Alan Redden, I got another piece of information that helped me whittle this list down even farther.

I now have information that proves Chuck Chance is not the perpetrator.

Astonishingly, infuriatingly, KBI has known this since 2015.

They just never told anyone.

In mid-May, Cherokee County Sheriff's Detective Joel Tabor called me with incredible news.

Someone at the KBI sent him screenshots of DNA tests run in 2015.

The person said, I can only send screenshots because I don't want a paper trail.

I can glean a lot from the screenshots, mainly that KBI ran DNA testing on the evidence in 2015 and it returned a complete suspect profile.

They compared the profile to Chuck Chance and two other suspects.

None matched.

None.

That means they have a complete profile of someone who is not Chuck Chance, and still they named Chuck as the primary suspect.

We asked KBI for official copies.

They sent a CD-ROM, in this day and age, with more than 500 files.

This is a shitty tactic, and Joel and I both clock it immediately.

I can only imagine that they're stalling as they try to solve the case themselves.

Maybe they're finally running the profile through CODIS, and specifically against that of Jeremy Jones.

I don't know.

That's certainly what I'd do if I had a complete profile to compare.

There's something fishy about KBI's handling of this case and in how they're treating me and the officers from the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office.

I'm still trying to figure out what's going on there.

I'm also trying to figure out how I can get closer to an answer on Jeremy Jones.

I think right now, the best way is to dig into his other confessions.

To get started, I reach out to a woman who has even more questions about Jeremy Jones.

The main one being, why did Jeremy Jones confess to killing her sister?

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Paula Barnett suggests we meet at a coffee shop in downtown Joplin.

She's in her early 60s with curly white hair down to her shoulders.

She's sitting with a friend, a large binder on the table in front of them.

It's everything she's gathered in the 28 years since losing her sister, Doris Harris.

The day that they were killed,

my mom had heard on the news that there had been a trailer fire and they had found two bodies in it.

And my mom said that she just had this sick feeling that it was my sister.

Paula's mom was right.

On February 21st, 1996, the bodies of Paula's sister Doris and Doris' boyfriend, Danny Oakley, were found in Danny's trailer.

Both had been shot once.

Danny in the back of the head, Doris in the face.

She was still in bed.

Before fleeing the scene, the shooter set the trailer on fire.

There were neighbors nearby, and so when it was smoke started coming out, a neighbor noticed, and the fire department was called and the fire was extinguished.

And when the firemen got inside, they realized that there were bodies in there and backed out and called for law enforcement.

Danny and Doris were in a water bed.

The rest of the house didn't burn.

It's just,

It was pretty much contained to the bedroom area and

mainly like to the bed.

And in the floor, you could still see like where a container shaped like a gas can had sit.

The crime scene is eerily similar to that of another case from three years later, which occurred in Welch, Oklahoma, just 20 miles from where Doris and Danny were killed.

In both cases, a person entered a trailer home in the early hours of the morning, shot two adults, and set the trailer on fire.

Both cases went cold until the end of 2004 when Jeremy Jones started talking a lot.

Jones said he killed Doris and Danny.

He even offered a motive, that Danny owed money to a bigger drug dealer, and that he'd grown tired of listening to everyone in their circle bitch about Danny owing money.

He said they were all jawing about how they'd kill Danny Oakley if he didn't pay up, so Jones just took it upon himself to take care of it once and for all.

But the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, OSBI for short, dismissed his claims.

He confessed to the similar case, too: the murders of Danny and Kathy Freeman, as well as the abduction of the Freeman's daughter, Ashley, and her best friend, Laura Bible.

The OSBI dismissed those claims, too.

I asked Paula to speak with me because if I can decipher the truth of Jones's claims in her sister's case, I may get closer to understanding his claims in the Jennifer Judd case.

I don't even have the words to express how grateful I am that you would speak to us about this because I can't imagine.

I guess I would love it if you could walk us through,

from your viewpoint,

what the the early days of the investigation looked like.

My niece saw them at 10.30.

The fire was noticed at 7.30.

My sister still had

food in her stomach.

So less than five hours.

My sister's identification was taken out of her purse and found in a toilet down in the water in the bathroom.

Did they ever tell you what the accelerant was?

They never did.

Do they know what the accelerant was?

I don't know.

Based on the shape of that can, I mean, I assumed gasoline.

Easy obtainable in that kind of container.

Do you have any idea of the path of the fire?

Obviously, if it was put out pretty quickly, but you can usually see kind of like where the intended.

So you said it was mostly in the bedroom.

Was it just like poured around the bed?

Like that was the intention was to just burn the bodies?

Because this is also something Jeremy Jones did in the Lisa Nichols case.

That's what it appeared to me just because of the rest of the house standing.

There obviously wasn't a lot of fumes or it would have gone up much quicker if it's gas.

I mean, fumes catch on fire and

there wasn't any gas strewed in any other part of the house.

So it appeared that that was the goal for sure to get rid of the bedroom.

So who knows what could have happened from then had it not been seen so quick.

Okay, I have a question.

And if it's difficult at any point, if you're just like, I prefer not to talk about that, it's too upsetting or whatever, completely understandable.

That being said, do you know where on their bodies they were shot?

Yes.

They were both shot in the head.

Okay.

It's believed that,

because of the way the bodies were found, that Danny was shot first, and then that my sister had kind of raised up and was shot.

Do you know what kind of...

gun was used.

We were told that it was a high caliber gun, but never what kind.

I don't think that there was a true effort made to solve this.

There was such

little investigation, so many leads not followed through.

I think

because

they pinned it as drugs involved.

Police have told Paula different versions of events over the years.

They've posited that Danny owed money for methamphetamine and conversely that he he was owed money.

Paula leans towards the latter, that Danny was dealing.

It's also worth noting that Jeremy Jones is a firearms enthusiast, to say the least.

He had a vast collection, one he still boasts about to this day.

And in at least one incident, he was stopped by cops with a whole pickup bed full of guns, including high-powered rifles, only to be let go after a few phone calls.

Danny Oakley did not have a job.

Okay, I mean, you know, an eight to five kind of job.

So if he were strictly a user, how would he fund his gas, his electric, his groceries?

How would he fund that?

So he had to have had some source of money coming in.

Danny also had a small fleet of vehicles.

He had repossessed someone's boat shortly before he was murdered, likely because the person was behind on payments to him or someone in his immediate ring.

Doris never discussed any of this with Paula, but Paula saw her sister change in her six months with Danny.

The last two months, things just weren't right with her.

Her personality was, it just wasn't my sister.

I mean, it was awful.

Her responsibility level, her

presence level, you know,

just she was always, I mean, we were always about the family.

She was always present if there was anything going on.

Christmas had happened.

She wasn't the normal Christmas type situation.

It just,

that was just different.

Paula found another clue, she believes, when she went through the remains of Danny Oakley's trailer a few days after the murders.

This was February in Missouri.

It's cold.

When a few days after I went to the residence to see it, to look and as I walked in the door, there were two

bags packed.

One of them was obviously my sister's stuff because one of them was a bathing suit that she came to my house months before and helped herself to.

I mean, we did that to each other, but I mean, I know for a fact that it was hers.

I mean, from like the deodorant that was in it, we can only use one brand that was in there, this swimsuit.

So, obviously, in my mind, they were packed ready to go somewhere warm.

Two or three days' worth of clothes, and they were sitting right by the back door.

Doris never mentioned an upcoming trip to Paula or anyone, as far as Paula knows.

She did not mention that to my niece, however, she did tell her that

things would be getting better soon

in my mind

that would mean financially

this all tracks with my analysis of the case the impression i had been under was that danny oakley was just sort of a low-level user and that there was money owed and that this was sort of the impetus for the attack When you're talking about owning a business, owning multiple vehicles and stuff, this is not a a run-of-the-mill meth head,

which then makes me suspect that he was in fact moving product,

in which case this is a territorial dispute.

And again, that's, I mean,

maybe it's a distinction without a difference, but I don't think so.

I think it's a much more important target.

This idea reminds me of a detail in the Freeman case.

In the parallels between Danny Oakley's case and Danny Freeman's case, kind of word on the street was that Danny Freeman had just escalated from selling weed to potentially selling or moving in some way as like a middleman or something, meth.

There are several families in the area who would absolutely take out rival dealers, especially if they're upstarts.

None of these families have been tied to the Oakley Harris case, to the Bible Freeman case, or to the Jennifer Judd case, for that matter.

In the initial investigation, police focused on an associate of Danny's, a man named Denny Ray Honeycutt.

Honeycutt later told police he was sleeping on the couch at Danny's trailer the night of the murders.

He heard the shootings, but didn't know who did it because he had run into the bathroom and was hiding in the tub.

It's tough to buy this story though, because Doris' license was found floating in the toilet.

So if he was hiding in the bathroom, surely he and the killer would have seen each other.

When Honeycutt said that he was in the trailer and heard the shootings and was in the bathroom, does that, yeah, the look on your face says that you don't believe that that was true?

No, I don't believe that for a second.

She doesn't think he told the truth, but she also doesn't think he killed Doris and Danny.

You couldn't just walk into the door.

You couldn't just have a key, the door to the the trailer.

You kind of had to have been let in from outside.

Okay.

And in the past, Danny had allowed Danny Honeycutt to couch surf there.

So, you know, you go over a lot of scenarios in 28 years.

I think that there's a possibility Danny Honeycutt showed up, needed a place to stay.

He was let in.

Knowing what was going to happen in later, he let somebody in to do the deed.

This makes sense to me.

I can easily see a scenario in which Denny Ray didn't pull the trigger, but that it's possible he let the killer in that night.

If a certain confession is to be believed, it's possible that Doris and Danny were about to leave town to avoid Jeremy Jones, or someone who hired Jeremy Jones to carry out a hit.

It's possible that Denny Rae Honeycutt opened the door that night to let Jones in.

It would have been a swift attack, perhaps because it's not his first.

A first-time killer often hesitates, but if he killed Jennifer Judd four years earlier, this was not something new to him.

New weapon, better preparation, but psychologically not something new.

Determining if Jeremy Jones killed Doris and Danny does not tell us if he killed Jennifer Judd.

But if he killed Jennifer, it's slightly easier to understand the comfort and ease with which he was able to kill Doris Harris and Danny Oakley.

If Jones is telling the truth in his many confessions, it seems that Jennifer Judd is the first person he killed.

Doris and Danny were next.

Then Sarah Palmer and Harmon Fenton, Justin Hutchings next, and then finally the Bible Freeman murders.

Again, all of this is if his confessions are true.

If so, it means he started with someone he knew, if tangentially.

This is frequently the case with killers who will go on to become serials and is part of the reason I think it's important to really explore him as a suspect in Jennifer's murder.

Murdering Doris and Danny is the first time he murders for hire, if his claims are accurate.

Paul Birch contacted me because Jeremy Jones had confessed to the murder of them and it kind of took me off my feet or whatever.

And of course, I had a million questions and was also speechless at the same time.

Had you been aware, so

in 1996, you would have never probably had any cause to know about Jeremy Jones, even though he was a criminal menace in the area already with sexual assaults.

You wouldn't have heard of him.

By the time he confessed.

Had you heard of him?

Like, because by then he was on the run from the area.

Like, when Paul said to you, this guy's confessed, were you like, oh, I've heard of that guy?

That's exactly it.

I had heard of him because his name was coming up in other cases.

And I guess I have no proof of this, but since, I mean, in all the talks, I've heard that his mom, Jeremy Jones's mother, did favors to some of the officers to help keep her baby boy out of jail.

That could not surprise me less.

It's difficult to address this issue responsibly, but it is part of something that has been humming along in the background for many, many years in this community.

Of course, it could be extremely ugly gossip that has been around long enough that it's just become accepted as fact at this point.

But there are also certain rumors, including but not limited to the one Paula described, for which there are some pretty significant red flags of credibility and documentation.

Sadly, it's never a huge surprise to find dysfunctional sexual behavior in the family history when one is discussing a violent predator like Jeremy Jones.

At first, Paula wasn't sure what to make of Jones's claim.

She was skeptical of Jones for good reason.

When the whole Jeremy thing come about,

obviously

it wasn't like the normal things that he has a history of doing.

But he has a history of hits as well and they look different.

They tend to be with a gun where his sexual assaults are rape.

And it was earlier on.

You know, it was 96, not that he hadn't been doing things before that.

But,

I mean, was this a new high for him?

Was this, you know, money?

Was this drugs?

Was, you know, was this trying to make a name for himself in the whole drug world?

Yeah, you know.

Paula is spot on here.

I think that's exactly what it could have been.

He was acting as an enforcer, essentially.

Again, all of these are done with the like, if Jeremy in fact did it, this is what we're looking at.

Right.

In that case, it would have been like just a hit, like, this is just business.

And one of the reasons, like, academically, Jones is considered quite fascinating to criminologists because he is one of the rare examples of somebody who killed for work and for fun.

And, you know, he has these hits that look a certain way, the stuff that he has confessed to Kathy and Danny and Doris and Danny and, you know, a couple of others as well.

And then he has the ones that appear to be sexual homicides and those look very different.

And in this case, at least what he said was that it was something to do with drug money that Danny either owed or wasn't cooperating in a way he was supposed to or something.

And that was, so he was told to go there basically.

As Paula reviewed Jones's statement, she noticed that he seemed to know the exact layout of Danny Oakley's property, which was not a cookie-cutter design.

What is your speculation on what would have ever even once put Jeremy Jones in that house?

Drugs.

In what capacity?

Buying or selling drugs.

I personally think because of the no no job and the cars and the cell phones and all that, I think

that Danny was, I mean, he obviously used some because of his toxicology and his autopsy report.

But I think that Jeremy Jones was probably there

buying or,

you know, giving information, whatever.

I,

in the beginning, I really

thought, oh, this is the guy from the information we were being fed.

And he still could be.

If he was not there, I think that he definitely, I mean, the druggies kind of, you know, know the threats and this kind of thing.

I think that it's a good possibility that he at least has information about what happened.

At the time, Paul Birch said Paula was welcome to visit Jones to ask as many questions as she wanted.

He just very sensitively conveyed to me some information and told me that if I wanted to come and visit with him, that that was okay, that I would be able to do that.

My husband said absolutely not.

He is law enforcement and we had a young daughter and he said that that would be putting our daughter at risk.

She stayed home, but desperately wanted to go.

This man had confessed to killing my sister.

I wanted to sit across the table from him and make him look at me.

Not that he obviously has any kind of empathy for anyone.

So probably more for my own feelings, but to look him in the eye.

To ask him why, number one, he's done what he's done.

Chances of him being honest are slim.

but I would still have that opportunity.

And there was a couple of things that I wanted to ask him because my husband said, you don't need to go.

He'll just lie to you.

That's what those criminals do.

But there were two questions that I wanted to ask him that had not been publicized or anything that had he told me the right answer, I would have known that he was at least there.

One of those questions has since been publicized.

One never has.

That will be a question that will help me believe that they did or did not do this.

right now she won't share with us the nature of that question after all these years and all the dashed hopes and botched attempts to solve this case i can't blame her for keeping some things close to the vest

i also can't blame her for continuing to consider other suspects even after jones confessed paula is a phenomenal investigator Her binder overflows with phone records, autopsy reports, newspaper articles, and anything else she has tracked down in the 28 years since losing her sister.

Flipping through, she brings up a name I've heard associated with this case, but never with any clear understanding as to why.

A man named Ken Bowles.

Ken Bowles was a banker.

My niece met him.

I mean, very minimal exchange of words.

She explains that her niece was at Danny Oakley's trailer the night before the murders.

As she was leaving, Bowles was standing outside talking to Danny.

Doris introduced her daughter, Paula's niece, to Ken Bowles, and then her daughter got into one of Danny Oakley's cars and drove home.

Her mom stayed with Danny.

The next day, the day of the murders, Bowles does something weird.

My niece got out of school the next day at like 3.30.

There was the bag phone in Danny Oakley's vehicle that that my niece was driving was ringing and it was Kenneth Bowles

telling my niece that her mom and Danny were dead that they had been shot the bodies hadn't even been removed from the trailer at that point so my niece immediately was trying to call me and I wasn't home and so she was calling my mom where's Aunt Paula where's Aunt Paula and she was going to go straight there.

This banker wanted her to meet him and he would tell her more details and she said just meet me there and he said no I can't because there's cops all over there and so she finally agreed to meet him at this convenience store and I mean he really didn't tell her much more than they had been shot and the house had set on fire and he wanted her to get in his vehicle and go with him to his house.

Needless to say and thankfully she did not.

She refused because she was going to the location and didn't get in with him.

So who is he then to them?

He was a loan officer.

Bowles said someone had come into the bank where he worked and he'd overheard them talking about it.

Paula doesn't buy this story because the police hadn't announced the shootings.

People only knew about the fire at that point.

Why was this man calling a 16-year-old, notifying her of her mother's murder, and attempting to get her to meet him somewhere?

It still doesn't sit right with Paula.

It doesn't sit right with me either.

From what Paula's gathered so far, it sounds like Bowles was somehow involved with Danny's meth trade.

Paula wonders if Bowles, then in his early 30s and working as a loan officer at a local bank, helped Danny launder money, or if he's somehow connected with Jeremy Jones, I do believe that physically or financially, the banker had something to do with this.

I don't think the banker probably had the nerve to pull the trigger, you know, but that doesn't mean that he didn't pay someone like Jeremy to do it.

And I mean, I think at that time frame that Jeremy was, again, probably trying to look manly and look able to do these kind of things.

And that would have been the perfect opportunity to sleeping people.

So I think that it's a very good possibility.

As Paula tells me this, I'm thinking of the things Michelle McCorkle said about Chuck Chance, Justin Judd, and some of their friends being loosely involved in what she called the quapa mafia.

Justin says he didn't touch drugs or have anything to do with anyone selling or taking them, but I need to consider all angles.

Maybe Ken Bowles can tell me more about Jeremy Jones' involvement in the local drug trade.

Maybe he can tell me whether he ever met Justin Judd or Chuck Chance.

I'm not quite sure what he'll know about Jennifer's case, but if he can shed light on any of these questions, it's worth a conversation.

I ask if she has any idea where he is these days.

Paula believes he works about two hours away.

We find an address for his workplace and the next morning we go for a drive.

I'm well, how are you?

Absolutely.

I'm looking for a Ken Boltz.

Do you know if he's

like, who are you?

Are you law enforcement?

What's that?

Are you law enforcement?

Where is that?

I'll talk to him about that.

How's that?

Hi, Mr.

Bowles.

My name is Sarah Kalen.

I own that.

Ken Bowles wasn't hard to find.

I walked into the store where he works, and there he was.

I am working on a couple different cases that may or may not be connected in the region, and I'm hoping to speak with some potential witnesses.

And that's why I was hoping I might be able to speak with you.

Ken is a late middle-aged guy now, thinning gray hair, glasses, average height and build.

He's dressed in business casual, but with a Harley-Davidson jacket on.

Remnants of the wilder days, I suppose.

I'm recording this on my phone because Oklahoma is a one-party recording state.

TVs are playing cable news overhead.

About the Danny Oakley and Doris Harris case from 1996.

That's an old one.

Yes, it is a very old one.

That's what I specialize in.

You know, it kind of depends on who you talk to, and

there's still a lot of questions up in the air, and there's still some possible connections with an inmate in Alabama.

Jeremy Jones.

Yeah.

Ken Bowles knows exactly who I'm talking about.

I say we don't need to talk right here, right now, but that I would like to talk to him at some point.

It's not the ideal place, but it's hard to catch me

after work.

I guess we're going to talk right here.

I don't know if I'm going to be able to remember much.

He agrees to try.

He doesn't seem to struggle with his memories, though.

Right away, he tells me he remembers his last conversation with Danny Oakley.

He said he'd either be

in really good shape or death.

He says he was dead the next morning.

It's tough to hear, but he adds that a month or so before Danny was murdered, Danny told him he was a, quote, walking dead man.

Bowles seems comfortable talking to me in a way I recognize.

Some people are generally comfortable with this kind of questioning if they've dealt with law enforcement more than once, and Bowles has.

So there was some sort of plan in place for them.

I'm conscious of bombarding him at his job, and I don't want to make things messy for anyone in their workplace.

I try to get through my questions quickly.

Mainly, could Jeremy Jones be connected to the reason Oakley would either be in good shape or dead?

Did you know Jeremy Jones before on this?

I know he got very famous in the region after he was apprehended in Alabama.

If I'd have been there, he'd have happily killed me.

I don't know that.

Do you know if he and

Stanny Oakley had any business connections?

They knew each other.

They did know each other.

They didn't know each other because he asked me about it.

Jones asked you about Oakley or Oakley asked you about Jones.

What did he ask you?

Bowles is nodding his head.

Do you know if Jones ever did any work for him, like in terms of like the mess distribution or anything like that?

Do you know

what degree of involvement in that world Danny had?

Like, was he manufacturing?

Was he selling?

Was he simply used?

He was selling.

Standing in a busy workplace is not the best place for an interview.

Ken says Danny was, was, quote, moving large amounts.

He says Danny never mentioned that he and Doris were planning to go away.

I asked what he was doing at Danny's place that night.

He tells me he was a user.

A user.

Oh, okay.

Okay, and so you were buying from him?

Sometimes.

But I was also collecting from him, too.

He has some loans up collecting.

Tadgo reminded him makes payment every now and then.

Oh, I got you.

I'm still trying to piece together this relationship between Bowles and Oakley, where banks and loans and repos were concerned.

I don't think Bowles is going to explain the real nuts and bolts of it.

I can't say I blame him.

But it seems that there was some sort of light embezzlement or money laundering going on.

Whatever it was, Bowles would send Oakley to repossess vehicles on behalf of the bank.

And Jeremy Jones, for his part, was responsible for repossessing in his own way, getting money from people who owed the dealers he worked for.

By force, if necessary.

Or, knowing what I know about Jones, by force even when it might not have been necessary.

I ask about Denny Rae Honeycutt.

Bowles claims he doesn't remember him very well.

I ask about Doris' daughter.

Bowles said he had met her a few times at Danny's and he called her as soon as he found out about the murders.

How did you hear about it?

Oh, I had people come by the bank.

Like Paula Barnett, I struggle to believe this is true.

If the firefighters hadn't even discovered the bodies yet, how was anyone talking about it in the bank?

Unless those people knew before the firefighters.

And there's only one way that could be the case i'll get out of your hair last thing i'll ask you right now

is there anybody who you've always thought i bet you that person had something to do with it

no matter of fact when i was told it was jeremy i was kind of surprised on that because i didn't really know the connection on that part

but you did they definitely did know each other for years because i'm i'm definitely trying to hammer that out so um from what daddy told me yes they did know each other they did

so like currently let me know he didn't uh that Jeremy did not like it.

I watched his

confession videos, all of them.

And I'm like, yeah.

I have a feeling he took credit for some things he didn't do.

I do, too.

I do, too.

But I also think that he's been dismissed in cases that he probably did do.

And I, you know, and that's kind of what I'm trying to kind of like sort through the difference between the two, if that makes sense.

No, Danny gets kind of tight-lipped on

stuff like that.

He says Danny was tight-lipped on his dealings with Jones.

In Jones's confession videos about that case, what he claims is that he was there to collect on a debt that Danny owed money to somebody who had basically hired Jones to go and either collect the money or kill him.

He says, wow, okay,

and smiles.

I would really love to know the thought process behind the wow, okay, and the smile.

What are you thinking?

Well, no, it's just

my little one-time around him.

I mean, you can see it in his eyes.

He didn't give a shit if I pulled the trigger on.

Bowles tells me he dated an ex-girlfriend of Jeremy Jones.

Bowles and the woman were in bed one night, and Jeremy Jones broke in.

He stood in their bedroom, ranting, threatening them.

Bowles pulled a gun on him.

Jones got right up close, putting his face right in front of the barrel.

In that moment, he didn't seem to give a shit if he lived or died.

Does that mean you think he could have done that?

I think he could have done anything.

Everyone I talk to seems to think Jeremy Jones is capable of anything.

Ken Bowles seems to think Jeremy Jones could have killed Doris and Danny.

Lisa Bible Broderick, whose cousin Laura was killed in the Bible Freeman case, tells me that even though someone else was convicted in that case, she still has questions about Jones' confessions and whether he might have been involved.

So far, none of Jennifer Judd's family or friends tell me they suspect Jeremy Jones was involved.

But when they say this, they say it's because her crime scene didn't show any signs of a sexually motivated killing.

There are details in the case files that indicate otherwise.

that Jennifer might have fought off a sexual assault or that the killer was at least sexually motivated.

I cannot share these details, but they leave me wondering if Jennifer's family and friends would be more suspicious of Jones if they knew two things.

One, that Chuck Chance's prints do not match those found on the murder weapon.

And two,

that this crime could fit Jones' profile based on the violent rapes he committed prior, and the murders we know he committed after.

Even among people who become serial killers, a first murder is rarely as smooth as later killings.

What if the Doris Danny case and the Bible Freeman case went fairly smoothly because Jones already knew how to get away with murder?

What if getting away with Jennifer's murder helped him understand how to kill again?

My conversations with Lisa Bible Broderick, Paula Barnett, and Ken Bowles bring all of these questions to the forefront of my mind.

Everyone thinks Jones is capable of anything.

Everyone, that is, except the police officers who so quickly dismissed his confessions.

When Jones confessed to killing Jennifer Judd, the KBI gave a bunch of interviews saying, we think Jones is lying, we think he's lying.

Well, The easiest way to confirm he's lying is to run his fingerprints and DNA and see if they match the evidence.

Why didn't KBI do that?

Further, KBI agent Larry Thomas went down to Alabama and interviewed Jones multiple times.

We have the recordings of the initial interview in 2005.

Thomas went back in 2006 and again in 2007.

In both of those follow-up interviews, the reason he was in Alabama interviewing Jones was because he felt that Jones could be a witness against Chuck Chance.

Even Jones picked up on this and called him out on it.

You don't believe me because you want to pin this on Chuck, he told Thomas.

In his interviews, Jeremy Jones tells Thomas, I knew Chuck didn't do this.

I'm not saying he didn't kill people, but he didn't do this.

Could it be that Jeremy Jones knew this because, as Jones told Thomas, Jones is the one who killed Jennifer?

OSBI agents did the same as KBI agents.

They went to Alabama to talk to Jones and quickly dismissed his claims to the murders of Doris and Danny, the Freemans, and Laura Bible, and several others in Oklahoma.

Why?

It brings me back to the question I've been asking since day one.

Why did the KBI and OSBI dismiss Jones so quickly?

And why do they continue to dismiss him?

Next time on Who Killed Jennifer Judd.

Everything he did that day makes no sense.

But I actually used Jeremy as an informant.

I've dealt with this for so dang long.

And to be honest,

the worst of it was finding her.

You know, not knowing all these years, you know, it's been hard and stuff like that, but none of it's as hard as that moment.

I will never, ever forget that feeling.

Ever.

Who Killed Jennifer Judd is produced by ARC Media for ID.

You can follow our show wherever you get your podcasts.

We'd love it if you could take a second to leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts.

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