News OK
May 12, 2015
On a hot summer day in 1982, vacationing widow Lois Arlene Jones decided to go sunbathing in her bikini in the backyard of her mother’s southeast Oklahoma City home.
Her mother went to work, telling police later Lois had been in a good mood.
The mother, Mary Stewart, returned that afternoon to find Jones’ sunburned body in the bathtub — the water still running, police reported. Jones, 57, from East Dubuque, Ill., had been raped and strangled.
Three decades later, cold-case investigators have a suspect — a former death row inmate now confined to the state mental hospital in Vinita.
John Paul Washington, 60, of Oklahoma City, was linked to her July 6, 1982, death through DNA evidence, authorities confirmed. Prosecutors, though, have not decided yet whether to charge him in her death because of his mental issues.
A key issue is whether it would be a waste of time and resources — given that state psychologists repeatedly have found in the past he is too mentally incompetent to assist in his defense at a criminal trial. If charged now, he would be examined again and the outcome could be the same.