Tonight we’re talking about the insanity that is Dwight Jones. This case is a testimony of why people should not stay in an abusive relationship.
Did you get to listen to our last episode – the case of Cynthia Cdebaca, episode #48? In this case, one person was stuck in the middle of two others up until the very end. We also have a video of the murderer’s confession in our Facebook Fan Page Group. You can get the link in the show notes below or search for Love and Murder Fan Page in Facebook or Google. This was one of those cases for the books.
Switching gears – in our exclusive community we have the first episode of Love Obsessions where we discuss a mother who would do “anything” for her child and a man who was a bit too in love with someone. If you want to hear this, go to our exclusive community in Patreon at www.patreon.com/loveandmurder and join us there. Later on, I’ll tell you more about what you get from joining this community.
Now on to the case
Dwight Lamon Jones was born in 1962 in North Carolina and graduated from a high school in Missouri. After graduating from highschool, he joined the Army and lived in Scottsdale, Arizona at the time of this story. He married Connie Jones in 1988 while she was still in medical school and he was in the Army. She’d actually just finished her first year in medical school.
In 1991, Dr. Connie Jones received her medical degree from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. She then became a psychiatry resident at Duke University. After this she did a radiolog residency at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas. Then, in 1998, she went through a year long Clinical Breat Imaging fellowship at U of T.
Dwight then left the military after only 3 years of being in, which didn’t sit well with Connie because it looked like a lack of ambition on his part.
Now, as reports show, the marriage was doomed from the start. Dwight started showing signs of depression and started being hostile towards Connie. According to Connie, he started having frequent mood swings, showing verbal abuse, and physical abuse. She reported that she threatened him with divorce, but he begged her to stay, saying that he would do better so Connie agreed to stay. In 1997, they had a son, which would be their only child between the two of them. Dwight became a stay at home dad, caring for their son while Connie went out to work. Connie made enough for the family to live off of.
Allegedly, in 2007, Dwight hit Connie so hard that he fractured her sternum. Two years later, he’d pinned her to a couch and put his knee in her chest. There were other reports of domestic abuse, but Connie stayed to try and make their family work for the sake of her young son. They ended up staying together, in this abusive relationship, for the next 20 years.
Everything changed in 2009.
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Now back to the cliff hanger that I evily left you on.
In a report, in January 2009 Dwight assaulted administrators and was charged with a harassment order. After this, their son had to change schools. On May 6th of that year, Dwight was criticizing how his son performed during his basketball game. Allegedly, he told his son that he was “too much like a little girl.” Connie intervened and this turned into an argument and then into violence. Connie reported that Dwight held her on the wall and hit her in her face with his forearm. He then threatened her with death by saying that he would drown her in their pool – “I’ll take you out to the motherf—ing pool and drown you!” Connie went and called the police, and when they were dispatched, a standoff started. SWAT was called! OMGod can you believe that?! When Dwight finally decided he was going to come outside, it was alleged that he came out with his son in front of him like he was using him as a sheild. HOWEVER, later on in a deposition, a Scottsdale police officer denied that. According to court records, he did stay inside with his son and said stuff like, “She’s got these cops out there ready to kill me … your mom wants me to die … she wants you to die.”
Scottsdale Municipal Court charged Dwight with misdemeanor assault, disorderly conduct, and threats and intimidation. Connie had Dwight 302-ed. For those who don’t know what that means – including myself – that means she had him involuntarily committed to a mental hospital.
After this entire ordeal, 6 days later, Connie filed for divorce. She’s quoted as saying, “For as long as I can remember, he said that if I ever left him that he would kill me … That he could wait as long as he needed to … that he would wait until I had (my guard down).”
While being evaluated at the hospital, according to records, he was found to be mentally “normal” – basically they said “he was not found to be mentally “abnormal,” and he was released.
During the divorce, Connie’s divorce lawyer, Elizabeth Feldman retained a forensic psychiatrist named Steven Pitt to evaluate Dwight. Steven was also the forensic psychiatrist who consulted on the murder of JonBenet Ramsey and the Baseline Killer. During his evaluation, he performed a risk assessment and came to the conclusion that Dwight’s mental state would “continue to unravel without the right treatment.” Basically this is what Steven said, “without psychiatric intervention and treatment, Mr. Jones’ mental state is going to continue to unravel. He will become increasingly paranoid, likely psychotic, and pose an even greater risk of perpetuating violence.”
During a 4 hour interview with Steven, Dwight told him that Connie abused thier son, had numerous affairs, and she was the one trying to make him look like the bad guy. He said she was the one trying to make people believe that he was violent and paranoid. The reason she was doing this is so that she could have full custody of their child.
Now, in doing my research, I saw that the divorce proceedings were nasty and it looks like it lasted about 8 years.
During that time, Connie rearranged her bank accounts to keep Dwight from being able to access them.
Looking through the entire divorce preceedings, I saw that there was a motion filed to cease visitation between Dwight and their child. Dwight then asked for an order on maintenance, which is “a court order stating that a divorced or legally separated person must pay his or her former partner a regular sum in order to cover the costs of living.” Connie was required to pay $3,800 a month in temporary spousal support and Dwight got to keep his Benz. On 7/21/2009 is when the psychiatric evaluation was requested and it looks like Dwight finally agreed to it on 9/1/2009. Then on 3/24/2010 there was a request for supervised visitation or to cease visitation period. Then, on 5/10/2010 there was a request to attend a parenting skills program from Dwight. So it looks like he was fighting the cessation of visitation.
During all of this, their son missed his father and he was affected by what was going on. He would often stare into space for long periods of time and would also fall asleep during his counseling sessions.
Looking back at reports during the supervised visitation, it appears that Dwight almost always was calm with their son. He asked his son how he was doing in school and told him to keep up the good work in school. There was one situation, which showed that he was worried about his son, where he called 911 due to the boy’s slurred speech. EMTs came, but Dwight wasn’t allowed to go to the ER with his son. Might I also point out that Connie came to the supervised visitation with an armed bodyguard.
Although there was no more violence documented on Dwight, On 5/2/2012, there was an order of protection hearing in the case and it was modified on 7/13/2012. She continuously took out orders of protection against him throughout the divorce proceedings. She even hired a PI who went through Dwight’s rooms in their house and allegedly found a gun that Dwight denied was his. He also claimed to have found a semen detection kit and 3 pairs of Connie’s underwear. This PI would follow Dwight and claimed that he spent most of his time at a strip club in central Phoenix. Connie also claimed that Dwight spent $50,000 on gambling and strip clubs.
After some time, their son stopped visiting Dwight. It wasn’t said if it was by his choice or if Connie just stopped bringing him. Either way, the mental health practitioner who supervised the visitationsdecided to find out why their son stopped visiting Dwight. He reached out to Karen Kolbe, who was their son’s therapist, but she told him that it would be inappropriate to speak with him about the treatment she was administering. Connie also objected to speaking with the health practitioner. However, the Maricopa County Superior Court Judge, Pamela Gates said that Karen Kolbe was “unreasonable” and suggested that this tactic was “a possible act to alienate the child from his father.” She then ordered all of the therapists to sit down together and talk.
Then on September 20th and 21th, 2010, Connie and Dwight went to trial in family court. Steven Pitt testified in this trial and, when all was said and done, the judge ordered Connie to pay $6,000/month in spousal support for 5 years and she was ordered to attend anger management classes. Dwight was ordered to pay $550 a month for child support and to have a psychiatric evaluation in a couple months. She allowed the visitations to continue.
However, Connie kept filing for orders of protection.
During one of these orders of protection, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office went to Dwight’s residence which was an Extended Stay Hotel at 10660 north 69th Street in Scottsdale, and made note that he had “minimal possessions” and “appeared ready to leave at a moment’s notice.”
Connie also refused to go to anger managment and when it came time for the psychiatric evaluation, Dwight refused to go.
Connie stated that this was one of the huge issues with the legal system:
- That they allowed Dwight to have visitation with his son when the court determined he was potentially dangerous – which isn’t what I saw. What I saw was that during his evaluation, he was labeled as mentally normal, but they wanted to follow up on that
- And 2 that they mandated treatment but no one ever made sure he got that treatment. Again, I didn’t see that HOWEVER, they didn’t do anything when he refused to go for his psych eval. I think that was an oversight on the court’s part.
Connie also refused to pay the spousal support and was in arrears for 10s of thousands of dollars. So Dwight ended up filing several motions to be paid half of their joint IRA, which was more than $100,000 and Connie was ordered to pay this in July 2013 – however, it wasn’t paid out until January 2016.
Child support also wasn’t being paid so wages were garnished from Dwight’s check.
And it goes on and on until 3/29/2016 only because the 5 year spousal support order ran out and their son aged out. So Dwight and Connie came to an agreement in the divorce proceedings and that was it.
After all of this, Connie married the PI, a former Phoenix police detective, who was investigating Dwight.
Two years pased and Dwight began making videos on on YouTube. In May 2018 a YouTube account with a man narrating videos, and the person identifying himself as “Connie Jones’ ex-husband” began publishing videos. The purpose of the videos was to “show the world how he had been robbed of his son.”
On May 24, 2018, Dwight tweeted links to his videos to the Phoenix New Times and other news outlets to try and get his story seen, but no one paid attention.
In the video, the person speaking (which we are alleging is Dwight so I’ll just say that from now on) said he was recording an open letter to his son. He said he hadn’t seen his son in over 10 years and also played an interview between Steven and Connie.
“I’m going to try to give you the short version of a very long story about how this lowlife got away with it.”
In his videos he talked about “thugs” and “crooks” and “lowlifes” who, he claimed, teamed up with Connie against him. This is where he talked about Connie allegedly abusing his son.
He then said, “A biased judge let Connie’s attorney select Steven as the psychiatrist who evaluated him and she paid those psychiatrists to paint me as mentally unstable.” According to him in his videos, Connie then convinced them to ignore the evidence he had. He also alleged that numerous counselors were the cause of a wedge being driven between him and his son.
“Three words that helped her: Black, man, and gun. Hysteria.”
If you go to our Facebook Group – Love and Murder Fan Page, you’ll be able to see a video there of clips of some of his recordings.
Some of his video titles were “exposing lowlifes,” “interview with a lying female doctor…” and “an open letter to my son.” In one of his video descriptions, he wrote “open letter to my son. i have not seen since 2011 because his mom took him away from me… told her i was leaving her. she got a lawyer before me, set me up for death and the rest is history!”
He also posted rants to Facebook and Twitter. In one Twitter post he wrote, “open letter to my son …been trying to see you for years.your mom stop the visits!” and in another post he wrote, “i support the me to movement #metoo.” What did that have to do with anything or am I missing something?
On Thursday March 31, Dwight left his hotel room with a purpose. First, he was going to find Connie and his son, but they were out of town and no where that he could find. During the divorce, Connie moved alot, learned how to use weapons to defend herself, and lived life like anyone running from abuse.
Since he couldn’t find Connie, he went to visit Steven Pitt. he followed him through the parking lot to his car where they began arguing. Then Dwight shot him multiple times and left. .
Multiple witnesses gave a description of a man with a round face, bags under his eyes, and a black cap on his head. One witness said it was a white man who did the shooting.
Then on Friday, June 1, a woman named Veleria Sharp ran into a family law office bleeding from her cheek. She begged them for help before she collapsed on the ground. Someone called 911 and when they arrived the driver was recorded telling the dispatcher, “Oh my God. I don’t even know if she’s alive anymore.” EMT noticed a trail of blood, which they followed back to another building. Inside they found Laura Anderson dead on the floor from two gunshot wounds; one in the chest and one in the back. Everyone in the office was dead – which were two people. Later, Elizabeth Feldman, Connie’s divorce attorney came back to work – so this was her work place! Wow she was just probably at lunch or meeting with a client.
There was one person she could think of who would do this and, within a couple of hours, she gave investigators the name of the person she thought it was.
Phoenix police were able to prove that the shooting the day before and on this day were tied together by the collected shell casings from both scenes.
While all of this is going on, Dwight was already 7 miles away, walking into another building, where he’d had counseling about 10 years ago. He went looking for his counselor, but was told she had left for the day. Instead he decided to shoot psychologist Marshall Levine, 72 years old, twice in the face.
When he hadn’t come home, his fiance went looking for him. When she got to his office, she found his body kneeling on the ground with his head and upper body slouched over on the couch. So basically, when he was alive, Dwight had him kneel and then shot him execution style. When she called EMT, they thought it was a suicide, but when police arrived they classified it as an execution.
Just to give you some insight, WE know this is Dwight doing this, but investigators had no idea who was actually doing this and why. The pattern was executing people in the legal field, but they didn’t actually know who was doing it.
On Saturday, June 2, towards the night, Connie left a message on the police tip line.
On Sunday morning, June 3, Scottsdale Detective, John Heinzelman called Connie back on the number she’d left. She told him that she was not in town and her husband and son were with her. Then she said, “… All the people, all the places — the three places that were targeted… are places for people who represented me in my divorce case… it’s a very significant, um, a dangerous event.” She also told them that she knew Dwight was the person doing this and gave her reasonings for this – basically what we said before.
She also told detectives her story and the story of the nasty divorce that ended two years ago.
She also tied the death of Marshall Levine to the case saying that Karen Kolbe was the psychologist she took her son to. Marshall just subletted half of that office with Karen and Karen was the one who’d left early that day.
She described Dwight’s gold Mercedes to police and speculated that he might try to kill Paulette Selmi next as she was the one who did the custody evaluation and was the one who limited his contact with his son to supervised visitation.
She couldn’t figure out why he was doing this as the divorce had been finalized 2 years ago and they hadn’t seen him in years.
A few weeks before the shootings, Dwight had tried to friend his son and his son’s girlfriend on Facebook, but they both ignored him. He’d also tied to reach out to his son on numerous occasions, but was still ignored by him.
I mean, in my opinion, I think his son constantly ignoring him and not wanting to speak with him could have been the catalyst. I have so many thoughts on this, but this is such a tricky case that I’m going to keep my opinions to myself.
After this, investigators began trying to find the Mercedes before anyone else could get hurt. They decided to focus on a small area near Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard and their thought process paid off, as Dwight’s car was spotted at about 3:30 p.m. They confirmed taht Dwight was the one driving the car.
The decided to follow him and see where it led them, as they knew he was armed and dangerous and wanted to limit as much contact as they could. They ended up following him all day and into the evening. After he had gone into an apartment complex, they lost track of him for about 40 mins before they picked his trail up again, dropping a friend off at the same apartment complex (the friend later told them that they had gone to eat dinner). They then followed him to McDonald’s where they watched him eat an ice cream cone – like he didn’t just go on a murder spree – and then they watched him dispose of a .22 calibur Beretta handgun in a dumpster outside of McDonald’s. He then tossed a black cap into a Circle K trash can, then he went back to the hotel he’d been living in.
While police sat outside his hotel room, watching him, other investigators tracked his cell data. They found that he’d made another stop in an upscale neighborhood in Fountain Hills. When they sent units to this location, they discovered a discarded, folded up wheelchair right outside the front door. Police entered the residence and found two bodies, Mary Simmons and Bryon Thomas – both in their 70s. They’d been killed sometime between 11 am and 2 pm of that day.
The thing is, neither of these individuals were involved in their divorce case at all. The only connection they had with Dwight was that the gun used in the murders were Thomas’.
That’s very peculiar. Why did he target them? I mean, he shouldn’t have done any of it, but it seemed like he had a plan for all of the rest of them.
Either way, this was enough to tie Dwight to the murders. Authorities began planning an arrest. They took all of Dwight’s videos from YouTube and posts from Twitter and Facebook to use in their case. They also helicopeterd over to Connie to get DNA swabs from her and their son to compare it with DNA that was found on a shell casing at the scene.
DNA came back that whoever the killer was, was likely the person who fathered Connie’s son -which as far as I know because this isn’t Paternity Court – is Dwight.
On Monday, June 4 at around 5 a.m. the Scottsdale and Phoenix police started quietly evacuating the guests of the hotel. Unfortunately, Dwight saw the tactical officers and opened fire at them from a window on the second floor – basically from his room. Then officers heard one last gun shot and then silence.
Once they entered his room, they saw that that last shot was aimed at himself. As they searched, they didn’t find a suicide note or anything left behind explaining whyy he decided to do this.
Instead, investigators found different disguises which included fake facial hair, hats, a white mask, flare guns, handcuffs, lots of ammo, knives, shell casings, and two guns. The guns were a semi-automatic rifle and a Glock 22 which matched the shell casings that were found at the crime scene. In his car was a picture of his son on the center console and two copies of the Arizona Republic with one of them talking about the murders.
Dwight had been wearing a shirt with a picture of the Punisher from the comics. He also had a couple of Punisher comics and a DVD of the 2004 movie. I really like that movie and I won’t let him ruin it for me. For those of you who don’t know who the Punisher is, according to Google “The Punisher is a fictional antihero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character was created by writer Gerry Conway and artists John Romita Sr. and Ross Andru. The Punisher made his first appearance in The Amazing Spider-Man #129.”
The thing about the Punisher is that his wife and son were killed and he decided to get revenge on every last person who took them from him.
Also found in his room were a lot of plastic boxes with pages and pages of court documents and pages with his notes from his divorce. There was also an envelope with 4 names written on it Selmi, Kolbe, Pitt, and Feldman – everyone he attempted to kill.
By around midday on Monday, the videos from YouTube had been taken down and the only thing that showed was “terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy.”
So after all of this, where are Connie and her son now?
Dr. Connie Jones, according to her LinkedIn, says she was the medical director and radiology of Solis BenOra Imaging in Pheonix. She also wrote a book called “The Breast Test Book: A Woman’s Guide to Mammography and Beyond clinical Breast Radiology Mammography Tomosynthesis Administration Interventional Procedures Breast MRI.” She was also listed as a Board Member for the Peace of Mind Breast Cancer Conference.
Her son, on the other hand, shys away from the limelight as you can imagine. I feel so bad for the son. In the beginning he missed his dad, but as his mental health declined and who knows what else, he just checked out. I really hope he’s doing well now.
Anyway, so that is the story of Dwight Jones and Connie Jones and everyone else who wasn’t even in the marriage.
What did yall think of this episode. Do you think it was just a clear cut case of abuse or abuse and the decline of mental health?
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