Behind Fatal Shot, A Marriage With Ever-Widening Cracks

From the outside, their lives seemed ideal: After 35 years of marriage, Bernice and Armstead Jones had three successful adult daughters, a spacious custom-built house in Woodinville and a comfortable retirement before them.

But with one shot from a .22-caliber pistol Friday afternoon, prosecutors say, the facade crumbled, revealing a relationship fraught with betrayal, anger and, finally, despair.

King County prosecutors allege 56-year-old Bernice Jones shot her husband in the back of the head while he was sitting on a couch in their first-floor TV room.

Armstead Jones, 55, who had retired from The Boeing Co. in June, died Monday at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

Yesterday, his wife was charged with first-degree murder.

Using excerpts from Bernice Jones' diary, documents prepared by prosecutors tell the story of a distraught woman's struggle to cope with her husband's plans to leave her for another woman.

In late 1994, prosecutors say, Armstead Jones first made it clear that he wanted a divorce.

Before that, there were few clues of problems.

Jones graduated from the University of Washington in 1976 with a degree in engineering. He went to work for Boeing in 1977 and took an early retirement this summer after working as an upper-level manager overseeing building construction and maintenance.

This year, he served on the Seattle School Board's oversight committee to critique the district's construction program, but he resigned when he thought a new venture might be a conflict.

"He was really a very gracious, intelligent man," said Janet Donelson, a project director in the UW capital-projects office who also serves on the oversight committee. "We were very, very disappointed when he felt he needed to resign."

Jones had an affinity for fishing, prosecutors say, but his wife recently had grown suspicious about his frequent fishing trips.

Still, Bernice Jones wanted desperately to keep her marriage together, prosecutors say, and the two began counseling.

"After all these years, I don't want to go out in disgrace and shame," Jones wrote in her diary Aug. 14, according to court papers. "There must be another way. What is it?"

As the summer passed, the pages of her diary filled with sadness. "Our 35th anniversary, and I sit here alone," she wrote Aug. 21.

It wasn't until Sept. 13 that Jones realized there was another woman, court papers say. She apparently found a phone bill with a long-distance call to a number she didn't recognize.

"Me being treated like the fool seems to be the action of the day," she wrote several days later.

According to prosecutors, she decided to confront the woman her husband was seeing. Once she called and asked for her husband. Another time she showed up at the woman's house. For more than an hour, Bernice Jones tried to convince the woman that she loved her husband and had everything to lose if he left her.

While she was there, Jones called her husband, who asked her to relay a message to the woman he was seeing. Prosecutors say Bernice Jones told the woman, "He wants me to tell you that he loves you."

The couple's three daughters live out of state and could not be reached. But neighbors and acquaintances could not hide their shock over the news.

"I'm just beside myself," said Marj Clawson, a real-estate agent who was helping the Joneses sell their house. "They were really special, neat people. There was just no indication at all."

Clawson met with the couple in June when they decided to put their house on the market. She said they were proud of the house they had designed and built nine years ago.

They told her they were sad to sell it but were ready to scale down, travel and perhaps live closer to one of their daughters.

"The day they listed the house they took hold of each other's hands and said how they had pondered so long and hard," Clawson said.

Curtis and Sheryl Zirbel live nearby in the heavily wooded, semi-rural neighborhood in the 17100 block of 232nd Avenue Northeast. Sheryl Zirbel said Bernice Jones, who had once volunteered in a literacy program, recently talked about her husband's retirement.

"I asked her if it was an adjustment having him around," Zirbel said. "She said, `Oh, no, I just love it.' "

Zirbel said the two seemed content whenever she saw them - working in the yard or stopping to chat on their way to an errand.

Prosecutors say there was no sign of struggle at the immaculate house and no evidence of alcohol, drug use or prior domestic violence. Police who responded to Bernice Jones' 911 call found her husband motionless on the couch, the pistol at his side.

She was being held on $500,000 bail. Prosecutors say she has talked about suicide and might attempt to take her life if she were released.

"Tomorrow is THE day," prosecutors say she wrote the night before her husband was shot. "The finger of fate is slowly moving across my life, leaving tears and sorrow in its wake."