1820
Pigeon Forge takes its name from an iron forge built by Isaac Love around 1820, which was named for its location along the Little Pigeon River.
about 0:06:09The story
In July 1987 Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, was on the brink of the tourist boom that Dollywood would bring. Dorothy Ann Robertson Jones, 42, known as Ann, ran the Wild Hair T-shirt shop in Settlers Village, a cluster of souvenir shops where her friend Letty Marie Cruz worked in the Turquoise Jewelry Shop. They met on the covered porch at Settlers Village, where he was working on a nearby site, and met there almost every day. The week before the murder he told her to bring a towel and a knife so they could gut Ann Jones.
They drank and took cocaine, parked in the lot of a nearby nursing home and walked to Ann's house. He went in first, then waved her inside. Ann called out from her bedroom.
She came round while he was trying to gag her, and he bound her wrists and ankles with the towel strips and the sheer material, gagged her and pulled a strip of terry cloth so tightly round her neck that she gasped. She went to the bathroom to try to be sick, could not, and came back to find him striking Ann's back with the cue. He emptied her purse, they took what looked like the day's takings, and he used the knife to cut the telephone lines outside.
At about one in the afternoon on July 11th Ann's daughter, Christy Scott Jones, came to the house, found the purse contents strewn along the hall and followed them to the bedroom. Her mother was face down on the bed, partly clothed, her arms and legs bound with blue terry cloth and sheer off-white material, a gag cutting into the corners of her mouth and terry cloth wrapped tightly round her neck. There was far more blood than the injuries seemed to explain, spread in places that made no sense. The state forensic pathologist, Dr Cleeland Blake, found several blunt traumatic contusions to the head, a fractured skull and displaced nasal cartilage. She had bled heavily from the mouth and nose, had linear scraping injuries like whipping marks on her back and a hard slap injury on her right buttock made while she was alive. She had suffocated while unconscious. All the blood was hers. The only things missing were the contents of her purse and a pink Oral-B toothbrush.
He told Cruz that a wild woman had got hold of him, told her boyfriend Robert Yochum that a bitch had hit him with a beer bottle, and told a mechanic, Tom Bentley, that he needed to paint the car because someone might recognise it. He spray painted it silver. Cruz later noticed that he had an odd pink toothbrush with a rubber tip, the same model as the one missing from Ann's house, and she remembered that she had sold him a silver turquoise and coral ring with a Thunderbird design a few months earlier. Christy found that ring beside her mother's truck within weeks of the murder and handed it to the police.
For a year there were no leads. At first she said she knew nothing but thought an old boyfriend might. Over the following months she described the killing in increasing detail. He said he had spent the night at his grandmother's house, then that he had been riding around with a friend and the friend's wife.
The prosecution handed the defence more than a hundred pages of her statements at 7.15 the night before she was called, and the judge refused an overnight recess, saying the material was not complex and the statements were not that different. Defence counsel cross-examined after a ten-minute break. She conceded on cross-examination that he was not insane and could have obeyed the law.
The Tennessee Supreme Court split 3-2 and upheld the death penalty on May 11th, 1993. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case in November 1993. In 2020 he was 59 and held at the Northeast Correctional Complex, with a release eligibility date in 2025.