Convicted child murderer Tim Jones’ death sentence upheld by SC Supreme Court

The 2019 conviction and death sentence for Tim Jones, found guilty of killing his five young children, was upheld Wednesday by a unanimous South Carolina Supreme Court.

In a 37-page opinion, written by Associate Justice George “Buck” James, the justices rejected most arguments by Jones’ defense attorneys and said that any errors in the case were “harmless” and would in no way affect the jury verdict or the death sentence.

In their decision, justices agreed that Jones’ killing of his children in 2014 was one of the most shocking murder cases in South Carolina history and there was nothing that compares with it.

“Frankly, the horrific murders perpetrated by Jones are incapable of comparison in this state,” justices wrote.

Jones, who was a software engineer earning $80,000 a year at Intel, was found guilty in Lexington County after a 2019 trial of killing his five children: Merah, 8; Elias, 7; Nahtahn, 6; Gabriel, 2; and Abigail Elaine, 1.

Jones chose not to testify.

In a separate court proceeding immediately following the guilty verdict, the same jury recommended Jones be sentenced to death. State Judge Eugene “Bubba” Griffith then pronounced the death sentence.

The jury took less than two hours to agree on a death sentence. The two-phase trial lasted 21 days, and more than 60 witnesses testified.

‘His crimes were unspeakable’

In the trial’s guilt or innocent first phase, jurors chose from four options: guilty, not guilty, not guilty by reason of insanity and guilty but mentally ill.

Jones had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity as his defense team claimed he had schizophrenia and could not distinguish right from wrong at the time of the killings.

During the trial, both defense and prosecution witnesses portrayed Jones as a troubled divorced man with many sides, describing him as a fanatical Christian fundamentalist who believed that wives should be husbands’ servants and children should be strictly disciplined. They also described him in court as an overwhelmed single father, and an abuser of drugs and alcohol whose family was riven by mental illness, child abuse and domestic violence.

There was no doubt that Jones killed his children at their mobile home in Red Bank, strangling four of them to death — two with his hands and two with a belt. It’s unclear how the fifth child, Nahtahn, died.

After Jones killed his children, he loaded their bodies into the rear section of his Cadillac Escalade and drove aimlessly around the Southeast for nine days. He eventually dumped them in a remote wooded field rural in Alabama, wrapped in garbage bags.

He was taken into custody by Mississippi law officers conducting routine traffic stops and, shortly thereafter, confessed in detail what he had done and led officers to the place where he had deposited the bodies.

“Is there any crime more horrible than what you have heard about when you came into the courtroom?” 11th Circuit Solicitor Rick Hubbard asked the jury. During jury arguments, he recalled testimony at the trial that depicted the Jones children as “some of the most beautiful kids you will ever see.”

In the S.C. Supreme Court opinion, four justices wrote that although it had been an error to allow photos of the decomposed bodies of the Jones children to be shown to the jury, that error did not sway the jury because so much other evidence against Jones was presented at the trial.

Associate Justice John Few joined with the majority, but wrote a separate one-paragraph concurrence saying he did not think it was an error to allow the jury to see photos of the children’s bodies.

“There is hardly anything ‘unfair’ in allowing the jury to see — not just hear — what this man did to the bodies of his children,” Few wrote. “It is simply not possible to sanitize the murder of these five innocent children, nor for that matter the trial of the man who did it, nor certainly the evidence on which the state seeks to convince the jury to kill that man through the death penalty.

“Timothy Ray Jones Jr. took a long series of planned and deliberate actions, first to murder his own children, then to conceal his vicious crimes, and finally to leave the bodies of his own children for the purpose of having them deteriorate to the condition shown in the photographs.

“His crimes were unspeakable; his efforts to get away with his crimes were unconscionable; he is despicable. The photographs show all that, and thus, the photographs have probative value,” Few wrote.

Jones, 41, is being held at the S.C. Department of Corrections’ death row, located in a prison complex just outside Columbia. He is one of 34 condemned men on the state’s death row. Jones still has numerous appeals that could years to run their course.

Three months after the trial, The State Media Co. interviewed more than half a dozen jurors at the trial.

Asking for their names to be kept confidential, they said they remained haunted by the experience of having to listen to such gruesome testimony and see such graphic evidence. Some were still traumatized and some were seeking counseling.

“After everything that we witnessed and went through, to have the S.C. Supreme Court uphold our verdict and say that it was not a mistake is a relief,“ a middle-aged West Columbia resident who sat on the jury told The State Wednesday. “I feel no regret about our decision.”

This story was originally published March 29, 2023 at 1:35 PM.