Five Angels Slain
Killed by the person who was supposed to protect them.
When the police stopped Timothy Jones at a checkpoint in Mississippi in August 2014, nothing could have prepared them for the utter horror that lay ahead. Jones was agitated and high on drugs. His clothes were covered in blood.
The police officers were overwhelmed by the stench of decomposing bodies. As they searched the vehicle they couldn’t work coming from. It was then that Jones confessed - said he’d murdered his five children, driving around with them in the back of his car for days.
He said he’d dumped them in black bin bags and told the police to search on a hillside in Alabama.
And there they were - little Merah, 8; Elias, 7; Nahtahn, 6; Gabriel, 2, and Abigail, 1 - wrapped in bin bags, as Jones had said. As the news broke, shock spread nationwide.
What possessed a father to murder his children? The children’s mother Amber was heartbroken. She’d handed custody to her ex-husband after their divorce in 2011, as he earned more money than her.
She was adamant that Jones was a good father during their marriage. He had a respectable job as a computer engineer. There was no sign that he was capable of such evil. The marriage had fallen apart after Amber was said to have had an affair with a 19-year-old.
She moved out of the family home, leaving her husband devastated. To those who knew the family, Jones was a loving dad, raising his kids alone in South Carolina. But, at his trial in Lexington County in May 2019, the jury heard another side to the story.
Crystal Ballentine - one of Jones’ former babysitters and single mum of a baby girl herself - said she was just 17 when she first met Jones in 2012. She worked from 7am to 6pm, looking after Jones’ kids and doing chores in the home. It wasn’t long before she and Jones, then 30, were in a relationship.
But, soon, Crystal noticed Jones had started to beat the children. Sometimes he made them stand on their tiptoes in the corner. She told the court Jones even tried to whip her own daughter when she was less than a year old - the final straw for Crystal. She ended the relationship.
But it didn’t stop Jones from handing out more brutal punishment to his five innocent children. Another babysitter, Joy Lorick, told the court she accompanied Jones and his children on a visit to Disney World in June 2014 - just eight weeks before the children were killed.
Joy told the court she’d seen Jones pull down the pants of little Gabriel and Nahtahn to beat them. And Joy testified the children had asked her, ‘Could you not tell Daddy you just fed us again?’ But why had Jones killed his five children?
The confession came from Jones himself. He told psychiatrists that, on the night of 28 August 2014, he had an angry confrontation with little Nahtahn. Just 6 years old, Nahtahn had allegedly broken an electrical outlet.
As punishment, Jones forced him to do various strenuous exercises. Later that night, Jones found the child dead in bed. But, instead of calling an ambulance, Jones panicked, spent hours thinking about what to do.
He decided his five children should be together in heaven. So he strangled Merah and Elias, using his hands, then used a belt to choke Gabriel and Abigail.
He wrapped their bodies in plastic and bundled them into the back of his truck. Driving around frantically, he stopped off at various places to buy drugs. For nine days, Jones drove around in a daze, his dead children in the back of the car.
He searched online for ways to make bodies decompose faster. Then he researched countries that didn’t extradite criminals back to the US. Jones was under no illusion about what he’d done.
Finally, he found a spot in rural Alabama and dumped his children on a hillside. Jones’ lawyers claimed he was deep in the throes of mental illness when he killed his children.
They said that his sanity was damaged by his wife leaving him for a teenager. ‘He’s crazy,’ lawyer Boyd Young told jurors. ‘You can’t rationalize crazy. But at the time, he thought it was the right thing to do.’
Then the defense called a social worker, who detailed several levels of trauma within Jones’ family. The horror included three generations of rapes, molestation by family members, gunshots, stabbings, drug deals, voodoo rituals, prostitution, frequent screaming fights, and swearing at children.
The court also heard how Jones’ own mother dipped him in ice-water baths and gave him laxatives to try to make him behave. Even Amber, the grieving mother of five dead children, begged the jury not to give her ex-husband the death sentence.
‘He did not show my children any mercy by any means,’ said Amber. ‘But my kids loved him, and if I’m speaking on behalf of my kids and not myself, that’s what I have to say.’
But, in June 2019, the jury’s verdict was unanimous. Jones should face the death penalty. Days later, Jones launched an appeal against his conviction and sentence. At the time of writing, he’s on Death Row, knowing he can never truly pay the price for the innocent lives he stole.