Serial killing suspect regrets FBI didn't match fingerprints

Saturday, May 7th 2005, 11:39 am

By: News On 6

MOBILE, Ala. (AP) _ Suspected serial killer Jeremy Bryan Jones, while denying he killed anyone, said he regrets the FBI twice failed to match his fingerprints to an Oklahoma case when he was arrested in Georgia on minor charges.

Jones _ a former Miami, Okla., resident _ is accused of two killings that occurred after the FBI didn't match the Oklahoma prints and he was released in Georgia.

``I wish they had found them,'' Jones told the Mobile Register in a phone interview from jail Thursday. ``I would have been extradited back to Oklahoma and maybe stand trial for rape. It would have been nothing.''

If the FBI fingerprint system had worked properly, he said, he ``never would have been labeled a serial killer.''

But Jones, 32, told the Register he has killed no one, and denied confessing to any killing, as some authorities have said.

Jones claimed in the Register interview that the fingerprint mixup occurred because Oklahoma authorities had used the old-fashioned ink pad and cards to record his prints. In Georgia, his prints were taken using the newer Automatic Fingerprint Identification System, which scans fingerprints and stores them in a nationwide computer system, Jones said.

Fingerprints taken on cards must be manually entered into AFIS.

In a statement issued Tuesday by FBI headquarters in Washington, the agency blamed a database error for the fingerprint mistake, adding that it was not a case of an examiner failing to make an appropriate match.

Craig Dahle, an FBI spokesman in Mobile, said Friday it was not a factor in the computer mistake but Jones' fingerprints closely resembled the prints of John Paul Chapman, the Missouri inmate whose name Jones was using as an alias. Jones also was using Chapman's Social Security number.

Jones' real identity was discovered after his arrest in Mobile, where sheriff's investigators kept running across the name Jeremy Jones and decided to review his fingerprint file, as well as Chapman's, according to Dahle.