Olivia Hayes
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
Nearly 15 years after his death, Columbia Police are still trying to piece together the last 12 hours of Timothy Jones’ life.
A jogger found the 43-year-old Columbia man just after 9:30 a.m. Dec. 20, 2011, at the end of White Oak Lane in Columbia near the MKT trail connector entrance.
“He was found deceased, face down,” said Lt. Matt Gremore with the Columbia Police Department Criminal Investigations Division. “I can’t get into the amount, but I can tell you that he had stab wounds.”
Gremore was in his third year with the department, working as a midnight patrol officer at the time of Jones’ death. He says he had only interacted with Jones once, three days before his death. He took over the Jones homicide investigation in 2020.
Police did not immediately identify Jones publicly after he was found dead. However, by Christmas of 2011, CPD had publicly identified Jones and released surveillance footage and a still photo from two locations where they believed he was last seen alive.
“The detectives back then collected evidence all over downtown, all the way down to Forum, anywhere that they think that he could have been seen on video,” Gremore said.
The still photo taken from surveillance footage at Jimmy John’s downtown, in the 1000 block of East Broadway, shows Jones leaving the restaurant just after 10 p.m. Then, footage from a nearby building shows him walking west along East Broadway on the sidewalk across the street. It was raining in the surveillance footage.
Gremore said even with the images police were able to retrieve from around the time of his death, the lack of technology at the time has hindered the investigation.
“If you go through a neighborhood now, the odds of showing up on a Ring doorbell, surveillance cameras like that stuff’s everywhere,” Gremore said. “There’s not video everywhere like there is now or even cellphone data.”
White Oak Lane, where Jones was found dead, is nearly two and a half miles away from the downtown stretch where he was last seen alive. Gremore said police are still unsure how Jones made it from downtown Columbia to White Oak Lane, but he does have an idea.
“He traveled a lot by bicycle. My guess is he probably traveled by bicycle to end up down here at some point,” Gremore said.
From Jimmy John’s in downtown Columbia to the end of White Oak Lane it’s about a 52-minute walk, a nine-minute car ride, and a 14-minute bike ride.
Jones was believed to be homeless at the time of his death, according to Gremore. His family members say he was having marriage problems and had just been kicked out by his wife, his brother, Terry Jones, said. However, Terry said Timothy had many friends or family members he could have called for a ride or a place to stay that night.
Gremore said through the investigation, CPD has not been able to identify any motive behind the Jones killing or a link to any other crimes that happened around that time in 2011, but given the manner of his death, Gremore doesn’t believe the attack was random.
“I would say typically in your stabbing cases, most people knew the victim when that happened,” Gremore said.
Police have still not recovered the weapon used to kill Jones, nor do they know what time he was killed in the stretch of time from when he was last seen on Dec. 19 to when he was found dead the next morning on Dec. 20.
A lot of questions with few answers still linger around the final 12 hours of Timothy Jones’ life more than a decade later.
“In a homicide investigation, that’s huge to try to figure out what led up to it. So who was he with in those 12 hours? Who would have that information to know who he was with?” Gremore said.
CPD is investigating 17 unsolved homicide cases with 19 victims dating back to 1985.
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