19-year-old’s remains identified 4 decades after ‘suspicious’ disappearance, OK cops say
When 19-year-old Melody Ann Jones didn’t show up for work at Seminole’s Dairy Queen in 1983, her family went to check on her.
They walked into her home in Earlsboro and found her 20-year-old husband, Paul Richard Jones, stabbed to death, according to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations and a 1983 article by the Oklahoman. Police said the man’s injuries pointed to a homicide.
“(The) door was slightly opened so I pushed it on open, took two steps, saw a gun on the bed and Paul’s legs on the floor,” Melody’s mother, Carol Garton, told the Oklahoman in 1983.
Melody Jones wasn’t at the home. Authorities called her disappearance “suspicious.”
She was reported missing, investigators said. Police believed she was abducted after her husband was killed, according to the Oklahoman at the time.
On Aug. 7, 41 years after Jones was reported missing, investigators announced her remains had been identified.
Pieces of her skeleton, however, had been discovered long ago. It took decades to identify them, investigators said in a Facebook post.
Skeletal remains were discovered in a rural area of Seminole County in 1998, investigators said. The remains were taken to the Office of the Oklahoma Chief Medical Examiner’s Office, but they couldn’t be identified.
In 2017, the Pottawatomie County Sheriff’s Office believed they had a tip that would lead them to her body, KOCO reported.
“We dug by hand; we used dogs. We had a backhoe company in a dig out in two or three spots,” Pottawatomie County Undersheriff J.T. Palmer said in 2017, according to KOCO.
However, Jones’ remains weren’t found during the 2017 search. They were found in 1998, but investigators didn’t know at the time.
By 2024, the medical examiner’s office had “acquired the necessary resources needed for additional testing,” according to the Facebook post. With those resources, investigators were able to say that the remains found decades ago belonged to Jones.
An investigation into the cold case is ongoing.
Seminole is about a 60-mile drive southeast of Oklahoma City.
This story was originally published August 8, 2024 at 6:04 PM with the headline "19-year-old’s remains identified 4 decades after ‘suspicious’ disappearance, OK cops say."
