Civil trial does not withdraw shadow

Acquitted of murder, Jonathan Dye Jones hoped suing the Sheriff's Office would get rid of lingering doubts about his innocence and win him millions. It did neither.

By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 19, 2000

TAMPA -- The jurors were not asked this week to decide whether Jonathan Dye Jones is a killer. That was the job of another jury, six years ago, and it said no.

Instead, the jury panel of four men and four women seated at U.S. District Court for Jones' wrongful arrest lawsuit against two Pasco detectives was faced with a different set of questions.

Did detectives Timothy Powers and Rodney Bishop lie when they said Jones confessed to the torture murder of ex-girlfriend Kathryn Murphy in 1993? Did they plant a bloody bootprint to frame him? Did they trample his constitutional rights?

No, no, and no, the jury said Monday.

By taking the Sheriff's Office to court, Jones, a 33-year-old Dade City laborer, hoped to persuade jurors he was the innocent victim of an agency that railroaded him -- and to take home millions for his troubles.

He hoped, too, to clear his name in a community where he claims to be a pariah. But he might have done just the opposite.

"I think a lot of it backfired on him," said Grace Murphy, 78, Kathryn Murphy's mother, who still is convinced of Jones' guilt.

Though his guilt wasn't technically the issue at his civil trial, the case implicitly revisited the question of whether he killed Murphy, who was found stabbed and strangled in her Lacoochee home in 1993.

"We just thought he did it," said Elmer Ellie, 67, of St. Petersburg, one of the jurors in the civil trial. "We went over everything, and we were all in agreement, and we felt the police department was more credible than he was."

Ellie said jurors examined a photograph of one of Jones' work boots and compared it to a bloody bootprint found at the crime scene. "We felt that was his," Ellie said.

Another juror, Peggy W. Taylor of Tampa, said she believed the detectives, who said Jones confessed but did not get it on tape. "I think that he probably confessed, and then he got a good lawyer, and that takes care of everything," said Taylor, 75.

In the arguments that helped free Jones at his criminal trial, lawyer A.R. "Chip" Mander III cast suspicion onto another man and said the Sheriff's Office botched the case.

The agency, in a misstep, failed to send 37 pieces of evidence to the crime lab until just before the trial was originally scheduled to begin, prompting a continuance and Jones' release on bail. That left him unshackled during trial, with a potential psychological effect on jurors to his advantage.

Ellie said he and fellow jurors wondered how the first jury acquitted Jones. "It must have been a technicality, because we didn't know how he got off," Ellie said.

At the civil trial, the judge limited evidence of other women who said Jones sexually assaulted them. Lawyers debated repeatedly at sidebar about what evidence jurors should hear.

While she believes Jones confessed, Taylor said she doesn't know whether he committed the murder. "I don't know if he did it or not, because we didn't get to hear the whole thing," she said.

Sheriff Lee Cannon, meanwhile, who was named in the suit, called Monday's verdict a vindication for his agency, and for Powers and Bishop in particular.

"I know how bad they were hurting in their hearts," he said. Legal costs were steep, he said, but "There's no price too great to pay for the vindication of those two guys."

Partly because of the Jones case, Cannon said, the agency in 1996 drafted a written policy that detectives should record interrogations when possible.

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