DOUGLASVILLE, Ga. – Investigators from Mobile, Ala., have come to Douglas County to look into a possible connection between a man who was arrested in Alabama (search) and two unsolved killings in Georgia (search).
Investigators can place Jeremy Brian Jones (search), 31, in Douglas County at the time of both homicides, the Oct. 31, 2002, stabbing death of Tina Mayberry and the death of 16-year-old Amanda Greenwell, whose skeletal remains were found near a road earlier this year, said Chief Deputy Stan Copeland of the Douglas County Sheriff's Office.
"He is definitely a person of interest," Copeland said of Jones, though he added that authorities still were in the preliminary stages of the investigation.
Alabama authorities were in Douglas County on Wednesday to look through some of the belongings Jones left there.
Jones was an Oklahoma fugitive when he was arrested last month in Mobile and charged with capital murder in the slaying of Lisa Nichols, 44. Nichols was raped and killed Sept. 18 in her rural home in Turnerville, Ala., about 20 miles north of Mobile. The home was set afire.
While living in Douglas County, Jones was using the name John Paul Chapman. Chapman was the name he was using when he was arrested in Alabama as well. Copeland said Jones used the assumed name because he is wanted in Oklahoma and because he would have had to register as a sex offender.
The charges he faces in Oklahoma include rape by force, rape by instrument, two counts of sodomy, failure to register as a sex offender and three counts of felony bail jumping, according to the Mobile County Sheriff's Office.
Copeland said links among the Mobile and Douglas County cases, along with another homicide case in Escambia County, Ala., in which Jones has been questioned, include the fact that all the victims were white, short and had dark hair.
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