Shivangi Sinha
In September 2014, Timothy Jones Jr. was pulled over during a routine traffic stop near the Mississippi border. Officers noticed his unusual behavior and discovered suspicious items along with blood inside his vehicle. When they checked his records, they found that his ex-wife, Amber Jones, had reported him and their five children missing just days earlier from Lexington County, South Carolina. As investigators pursued the evidence, they uncovered the horrific truth that Jones had killed his five children and disposed of their remains. The details of the case and how it was solved are explored in the episode ‘The Sins of Our Son’ from ID’s ‘Evil Lives Here: My Child the Killer.’
Timothy Jones Jr. Moved Into a Trailer With Five Children After His Divorce
Timothy Jones Sr. and Cindy Jones welcomed their son, Timothy Ray Jones Jr., into their lives on December 28, 1981. Cindy was only 16 at the time, and his early life was far from stable. His father later claimed that his mother was allegedly erratic and may have had an undiagnosed mental health condition. When Jones was about 18 months old, she left the family, and he was raised primarily by his father. In 2001, Jones was arrested in Illinois on charges including cocaine possession, check forgery, and car theft. He was sentenced to seven years in prison but was released in 2003. After his release, it appeared he was trying to turn his life around, and he met Amber Kyzer in Chicago, with whom he began a serious relationship.
In 2004, Amber and Jones got married in DuPage County, Illinois, when she was just 18 years old, and the young couple appeared to be happy. They went on to have five children: Merah, Elias, Nathan, Gabriel, and Abigail. In the meantime, Jones seemed to be turning a new page professionally. In 2011, he graduated from Mississippi State University with a degree in computer engineering. He then secured a job as an engineer with Intel in Columbia, South Carolina, where the family settled down. It was also there that their two youngest children were born. Reports later suggested that Jones was allegedly a fundamentalist and raised his family in a strictly religious environment.
In 2011, the Department of Social Services (DSS) opened an investigation into the family after Jones accused Amber of neglecting their children. The case was closed after a short time, but tensions between the couple continued. Jones also accused Amber of infidelity, and in May 2012, the two separated for about two weeks. During that period, he took the children to Mississippi. A few months after their youngest child, Abigail, was born, the couple finalized their divorce in October 2013, with Amber being granted visitation rights only under Jones’ supervision. Following the separation, Jones moved into a trailer off a dirt road in Red Bank, near Lexington, South Carolina, where he lived with the five children. While they were staying there, DSS investigated the home twice but did not find sufficient grounds to remove the children.
Timothy Jones Jr. Had a Lot of Evidence in His Car That Implicated Him in Five Homicide Cases
The second investigation was still ongoing when another troubling development occurred. The children were usually taken to a Chick-fil-A in Lexington for Amber Jones’ supervised visits, and she also spoke to them every night. However, on August 28, 2014, she was only able to speak to Nathan around 7 pm. After that, she could not reach any of the children or Jones, and he failed to show up for a scheduled visit. On September 3, 2014, Amber contacted the police, who then reported the family missing and issued an alert. The children had last been seen at their respective school and daycare on August 28 and had not returned since. It was Jones who had picked them up that afternoon and taken them to Walmart. He had allegedly forced them out of the car at one point, leading to an unlawful neglect charge related to the incident.
On Saturday, September 6, 2014, Jones was stopped during a routine traffic check in Mississippi. Officers noticed that he was behaving oddly, and when they ran his license plate, they discovered the missing persons report filed by Amber. The police then searched his vehicle and found bloodstains, maggots, trash bags, and items such as saws and acid. They also recovered detailed notes describing how to mutilate a body, after which he was immediately taken into custody. On September 9, 2014, he confessed to killing his five children and led authorities to a rural dirt road off New Era Road near Oak Hill in Camden, Alabama, where their remains were found in black trash bags. The bodies had been dismembered, and the cause of death for all five children was determined to be manual strangulation.
Timothy Jones Jr. is on Death Row in South Carolina Today
Timothy Jones Jr. maintained that his son Nahtahn had been playing with an electrical socket that broke, and that this made him angry. He claimed he made his son do physical exercises afterward, after which the child died. Jones further stated that his daughter witnessed what happened and that his panic led him to kill all five children. He also alleged that he had been hearing a “demonic voice” that influenced his actions and prevented him from turning himself in after Nathan’s death. However, experts who reviewed the case testified that Nathan’s injuries were consistent with strangulation. Authorities concluded that Jones killed his children on August 28, 2014, and kept their bodies in the trunk of his car.
They also believed that on September 1, 2014, he purchased supplies from Walmart to dismember the remains and later disposed of them along a dirt road. At Jones’ trial in May 2019, he claimed that the killings were not premeditated and insisted he had acted in a moment of impulse. His lawyers also raised an insanity defense, but the psychiatrist called by the prosecution did not support those claims. A family babysitter and a school nurse who had both previously reported concerns to DSS testified during the proceedings. Their statements helped the prosecution argue that the children had been living in a home marked by alleged neglect and abuse over a long period of time.
In June 2019, Jones was found guilty on all five counts of murder. Shortly after, the jury also found aggravating circumstances and recommended the death penalty. In 2021, he appealed, arguing that the trial had been unfair, but both his conviction and sentence were upheld. He is currently incarcerated at the Broad River Correctional Institute in Columbia, South Carolina. He has two disciplinary sanctions against him and continues to be on death row.
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