Killer’s ex-wife says she lived in constant fear
For nine years before his Arizona rampage, she says, she prepared for the day he would finally attack.
On May 31, Dwight Lamon Jones launched a killing rampage that left six people dead across the Phoenix area before he committed suicide as police closed in.
The killings unsettled Arizona. But for his former wife, Connie Jones, it was the end she had been fearing — and preparing for.
“I really have been on high alert for the last nine years.… I knew that one day we would be in a situation where he was trying to kill me,” she said at a televised news conference Tuesday. “I felt that I had a personal terrorist.”
Jones was speaking publicly for the first time about the slayings, which included two mental health professionals and two paralegals who were connected to her divorce case.
After she filed for divorce in 2009, ending her 22-year marriage, Connie Jones hired an investigator, Rick Anglin, a retired Phoenix police detective, to protect her and her son.
They made themselves hard to find.
“Any personal habits they had, their favorite place to have a birthday dinner or Christmas Eve dinner, all this had to be changed,” Anglin told reporters at Tuesday’s news conference. “We basically had to de-program them from what they would normally do.”
The family cycled through three safe houses to avoid Dwight Jones, who had moved into an extended-stay hotel.
Connie, who worked at a hospital, rotated through rental cars and switched up her driving routes so she would be harder to pin down.
Even going to the grocery store required planning, in case of any unexpected encounters. When Jones went to the movies, she sat in the back of the theater to watch out for her former husband.
It was as if she had to become a different person.
“It has become my personality,” she said. “I don’t know that I can go out and not look and see who’s around me.”
Anglin also gave Jones “extensive” training with guns and defensive driving in case her ex-husband came for her. The pair spent a lot of time together, talking.
They became friends and, eventually, more: They married, and Anglin became her protector for life, and a new father for her son.
Connie Jones never actually saw her ex-husband again; she only communicated with him through lawyers.
She got custody of their son in the divorce, but Dwight got monitored visitation sessions. During the divorce proceedings, Dwight would sometimes try to track Connie, or show up at the child-visitation facility parking lot when she was there, Anglin said.
At one facility, he tried to kidnap their son, Connie said, and at another, he arrived with a sun visor in his car that said, “Love kills slowly.”
Connie was afraid that he would snap when the money she’d given him from the divorce — more than half a million dollars — ran out. He apparently never got the mental health treatment ordered by the court, and Connie was unable to obtain protective orders after four years.
She said she never stopped being afraid, recalling that he had told her “he could wait for a long time before he got his revenge, that he could wait years until my defenses were down.”
Investigators have not offered a reason for why Dwight Jones struck when he did.
As the number of victims grew, Anglin, holed up in an isolated cabin with Connie, recognized the links and phoned police.
The tip from the couple seems to have set authorities on Jones, and investigators surrounded him at the extended-stay hotel, where he shot himself.
The couple said they grieved for the dead and felt survivors’ remorse. The showdown Connie had prepared for never arrived.
“We were certain that she was the one who would have this final confrontation,” Anglin said.
But grief wasn’t the only emotion for Connie Jones. She felt “very happy” when she heard her ex-husband had killed himself, along with a “relief in my chest that this, for me at least, would be the last that I had to deal with him.”