Serial murder suspect from Oklahoma faces charge in New Orleans slaying

Friday, January 14th 2005, 10:23 am

By: News On 6

MOBILE, Ala. (AP) _ A suspected serial killer being held in Mobile will be charged in the slaying of a New Orleans woman whose body was found in a vacant lot in February 2004, a police detective said.

New Orleans detective Armando Asaro told WKRG -TV on Thursday that Jeremy Jones will be charged in the death of Katherine Collins when Asaro returns to New Orleans. He declined to comment on the evidence against Jones, ``because we don't want to jeopardize anybody else's case.''

Collins, 47, originally from California, had been raped and stabbed. Police said Collins had worked as a prostitute in New Orleans.

Asaro collected a DNA sample from Jones in October and returned to Mobile on Thursday to notify Jones of the pending homicide charge.

Jones, 31, of Miami, Okla., is already charged with capital murder in the Sept. 18 slaying of a Mobile County woman and a Georgia teenager.

He's also being questioned in the Dec. 30, 1999 disappearance of Oklahoma teenage girls and is considered a person of interest in other unsolved murders around the country.

Investigators from Craig County, Okla., have questioned Jones in the Mobile jail about the missing teens, Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman, both 16, but no charges have been filed.

``He's very smart and he knows the right things to say,'' Craig County Sheriff Jimmy Sooter told the Mobile Register on Thursday.

Oklahoma authorities say Jones was in the Welch, Okla., area when the teens were abducted from a mobile home. Jones had been arrested on drug and alcohol charges about 18 miles from the crime scene.

The teens disappeared the night the bodies of Ashley's parents, Danny Freeman, 40, and his wife Kathy, 38, were discovered in their torched mobile home in Welch.