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Tuesday, Jun. 23, 2009

Friends say suspect told them about old murder

Former neighbors recall Jones bragging that he got away with it

After downing a few beers, Russell Jones would say the strangest things, according to former neighbors.

Things like getting away with murder. And hiding a body on his father's remote property. And using the old man's equipment "to make it quick and easy."

"I thought this was merely drunken banter," said Josh Case, who lived across an apartment walkway from Jones six years after Jones' petite former renter at another Modesto home disappeared in October 1999.

Case and his wife, Dawn Metzger, said they were stunned when news broke Nov. 2 that Modesto police had unearthed a skeleton on Halloween from a makeshift grave on property owned by Jones' parents near Groveland. Using dental records, authorities closed a mystery that had stumped them for eight years.

The human remains, police determined, were those of Dena Raley-McCluskey, Jones' for-mer renter.

Russell Todd Jones, 47, hasn't granted interview requests since his Nov. 1 arrest, a sheriff's spokesman said. He's been charged with the murder and remains behind bars with bail set at $2 million. But much of Jones' past was known to The Bee because of an unrelated case.

Three years after Raley- McCluskey vanished, Jones fell victim to swindlers who prayed with him and then duped him into signing over the deed to the house he once shared with Raley-McCluskey. Much of Jones' life came out as he and his girlfriend, Brenda Hines, who was terminally ill, took the witness stand in that fraud case. And Jones exchanged numerous phone calls with The Bee before and after Hines' death in May.

Jones had bought the modest, nondescript house at 1217 Karen Way in Modesto for $85,000 in 1998. He said his father fronted the $5,000 down payment because Jones never had much money.

The high school dropout later bragged about skills in construction, air conditioning and mechanics. But he often struggled to pay the mortgage, records show.

Before she vanished, Raley- McCluskey rented the home's master bedroom and master bathroom, while Jones lived in a smaller bedroom and another man rented a third room, said the woman's stepmother, Donna Raley.

Waymon Floyd, 77, still lives two doors down.

"She was a shy, quiet little girl," Floyd remembered.

Her mother, Barbara West, says her 36-year-old daughter weighed 90 pounds. They shopped for her in the girls' section of a store before attending the wedding of West's niece shortly before her daughter vanished, West said.

Raley-McCluskey had been dating Mark Keough, family members said, but the relationship was volatile. West said her daughter called to say she had been fighting with Keough but didn't want to attend the event solo.

"She said, 'I'm asking Russell to be my escort,' " West recalled. " 'Russell?' 'Yes -- my roommate.'

"At the wedding, my aunt came over to take a family picture. "Nobody asked him, but (Russell) got into the picture. When my aunt had it developed, she gave me an 8-by-10 and I looked at my husband and said, 'What the hell? He's not family.' So I've got a picture with him in it.

"The man was very nice- looking. When the police showed me his booking picture (re- cently), I would have never known it was him. I got to thinking, eight years of hiding something bad you've done would take a toll on your body."

Floyd, the neighbor on Karen Way, said Raley-McCluskey gave him a small copper church clock she had repaired to offer at his garage sale Oct. 9, 1999.

The next day was the last time anyone saw her alive. Except whoever killed her.