Emotional second sentencing as Jerry Jones gets 15 more years in prison
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EVERETT - The unenviable task Beth Blood faces now is telling her two small daughters that their grandpa can't go to their dance recitals and birthday parties, read to them or play tickle monster with them anymore.
But her most difficult burden will be to explain to them that he's in prison because a jury convicted him a second time of killing their grandmother, a crime Blood will likely always believe her father didn't commit.
A judge yesterday sentenced former pharmaceuticals representative Jerry Jones to 15 years behind bars for the murder of his wife, Lee Jones, in the bathroom of the couple's Bothell-area home in 1988. She had been stabbed 63 times.
Jones was convicted of the slaying in 1989 and given a 25-year sentence.
He spent 10 years in prison until a federal judge overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial because the first jury didn't hear about a teenage neighbor who had allegedly threatened Lee Jones.
The family still believes that teenager, now a grown man who has a history of assaulting women, is the real killer.
Nonetheless, a second jury convicted Jones at the end of his second trial last month.
Snohomish County Superior Court Judge Gerald Knight's decision to reinstate Jones' original sentence, minus the decade he's already served, disappointed Blood and her sister, Kim Jones, who were at the hearing to ask that their father be locked up for as little time as possible.
Jones' attorney had asked for 20 years, the minimum sentence allowable for the crime.
"The longer Dad's in prison, I'm in prison," said Blood, while her sister, father, and other relatives wept loudly.
Prosecutors, in contrast, asked that Jones get a sentence of 33 years.
Deputy prosecutor Ron Doersch said that Jones deserved an exceptional sentence because the murder was so brutal.
Doersch said that the 33 years "is certainly not excessive."
The sisters tried yesterday to convince the judge that their father is innocent, hoping that would persuade Knight to lighten Jones' sentence.
Their voices breaking, they told the judge that their father wasn't capable of such a heinous crime.
They described the future they wanted to have with their father, one in which he could play with his grandchildren and eat meals with them, as he's been able to do for the past two years while he awaited his second trial.
Kim Jones painted a picture of a close-knit family devastated by the mother's brutal murder and then further traumatized by a judicial system that she says wrongly pinned the crime on the father.
"My father has suffered enough," she said.
"Whatever happens today cannot bring our mother back, but it can at least bring us together."
Jones' attorney also gave the judge about 30 letters from family friends vouching for his character and asking that he be spared a longer sentence.
Jerry Jones, 54, also made a statement.
"On the night of Dec. 3, 1988, I loved my wife and I kissed her," he said. "The next thing I knew she was the victim of an attack."
Knight told the sisters that his "heart goes out" to them and to their teenage brother, who lives with his paternal grandparents in Alabama.
He also ordered that Jones be allowed to hug his daughters and say goodbye in a private room when the hearing ended.
"What child would want to believe one parent has killed the other?" he asked.
Nonetheless, he said, he had to impose a sentence that would hold Jones accountable for the crime. To do otherwise, he said, would be to "second guess" the jury's verdict.
"I'm operating on the premise that he's guilty," Knight said.
Jones' lawyer said he will appeal the second verdict.
Prosecutors had also given the judge three letters from friends of Lee Jones asking the judge to give Jerry Jones the longer sentence prosecutors were seeking, but Knight said he didn't think a longer sentence was warranted.