Jeremy Bryan Jones

Public Recantations

Jones has since denied that he killed anyone. In spite of his public confessions, he faults the FBI for failing to discover his true identity and as a result, he has been labeled a serial killer. He even denies confessing to any killing.

Prosecutors speculated this about-face was a prelude to an insanity defense.

According to John Douglas in his book "Journey into Darkness," "[Serial killers and sexual predators] do what they do not because they need to eat or to keep a family from starving, or even to support a drug habit. They do it because it feels good, because they want to, because it gives them satisfaction. You can make the argument that many of them are compensating for bad jobs, poor self-image, mistreatment by parents, any number of things. But that doesn't mean we're going to be able to rehabilitate them.

Book cover: Journey into Darkness

"My colleague Greg McCrary uses the analogy of the cake. You've baked this chocolate cake, which smells great and looks terrific, but as soon as you bite into it, you realize something is very wrong. Then you remember, 'Oh yeah, in addition to the eggs and flour and butter and cocoa, I recall mixing in some axle grease from my workshop. That's the only problem with the cake — the axle grease! If I can just figure out a way to get the axle grease out of the cake, it will be perfectly fine to eat.'

"This is the way I view rehabilitation of sexual predators, particularly serial sexual predators. The fact is that in the vast majority of cases, the urges, the desires, the character disorders that make them hurt and kill innocent men, women and children are so deeply ingrained in the recipe of their makeup that there is no way to get out the axle grease."