JoAnne Jones, though she was pretty far behind on her rent, was not ready to face eviction. So when the marshal came to padlock her apartment in Brooklyn, she knocked him over a banister. His head hit a refrigerator on his way to the landing below. The 53-year-old Jones hopped down after him, beat him with an aluminum rod, took his gun, soaked him in paint thinner, and set him on fire.
It wasn't Jones's first, shall we say, incident. In the early nineties a teenage boy beat up her son. Jones shot him . . . in the groin. On both occasions, she has expressed remorse, and in fact actually tried to extinguish Marshal Erskine Bryce with buckets of water. He died anyway.
It is not good to go around shooting and beating people or setting them alight. But there is something almost wholesome about Ms. Jones's crimes, something comprehensible, human, old-fashioned, almost sweet.
We live in a world in which people kill because their neighbor's dog told them to, or because they're channeling J.D. Salinger, or because their sexuality is so twisted that they think all prostitutes or all gay men must die, or because the CIA is beaming microwaves into their heads, or because they've been playing too much Quake.
But JoAnne Jones shoots people in the groin because they beat up her son. She beats people to death because they evict her from her apartment. No doubt the rage she feels is more than is normal, or good, or even survivable. But it is at least something the rest of us can understand. Stuff like your kid getting beat up or being tossed from your living quarters pisses you off. It'd piss anyone off, probably severely.
People get embroiled in horribly complicated financial or romantic machinations. Sometimes they just disappear and no one knows quite what happened, as in Chandra Levy, or their murderers are never caught because they engage in incredibly elaborate efforts to conceal their crimes.
But JoAnne Jones just beats the piss out of you and sets you on fire. Then she feels bad, she tries to put you out. This is a relatively straightforward operation.
Perhaps Jones's rage is itself a form of mental illness, and her sentence will include anger management workshops. Perhaps given half a chance she'd have concealed the body.
But still. She's no Hannibal. Jones's crimes are kind of all-American, apple-pie deadly assaults. We can be happy that she will likely spend the rest of her life behind bars, while still thinking that if you're going to kill people this is how you should do it: they make you really really mad and you destroy them.
If I was a murderer, I'd want to be JoAnne.
