mr. jones? yes, sir. this is art smith with the sheriff s office just calling to let you know that we have both your cars ready. both of them, obviously, are down here at the sheriff s office right now. so are you with elaine right now? no. i m sorry? i don t think so. mr. jones, i m not following you. you asked me where i would bury a body. i m sorry. you asked me where i should bury a body. which came out of nowhere, which surprised us. because nobody had asked him where he buried the body? nobody had asked him about where he buried the body. we were calling him about his vehicle. and the day before, we never talked about burying the body. reporter: very, very strange. and most certainly interesting when they found out why jones seemed so out of it, he d just taken an overdose of sleeping pills, after leaving, for his wife, what appeared to be a suicide note. my dearest love, he wrote.
i ve prayed all night and this morning. i ve asked for his forgiveness! i want you to know how much i love you. you re the best thing that has happened to me. please forgive me! and then he added this, tell the cops to get. i never did it, but i can t be railroaded. jones recovered quickly but his actions that day remained a mystery because he wasn t talking anymore to investigators. the evidence was definitely pointing toward lester jones. but we still had to keep an eye open on mr. livingston, mr. heald, mr. coralluzzo. and remember that these are the ones we know about. is there somebody else out there we don t even know about yet? reporter: didn t help when lab results from paige s car came back negative. the fire burned it clean of evidence. so the sheriff s office turned to a volunteer search dog team for help. and sure enough, the dogs appeared to hit on jones scent in paige s charred car. and along highway 50 where all those items were found.
and they took me to a safe house. and did they catch him? no, they didn t know where to look. reporter: a few days later, somebody broke into lisa s mother s house in oklahoma. she called me later that day and said when she was leaving work that she noticed this car was following her and she said it was ralph. she called the sheriff s department and she s like, he s here, he s following me, and they arrested him. my mom said she asked him what was he doing. and he said, looking for your daughter. reporter: lester ralph jones was convicted of assault and kidnapping and served three years. but now he was out and remarried and the by the fall of 2007, a pile of circumstantial evidence connected him to paige birgfeld s disappearance. why didn t you just go arrest him? our job is to gather the facts and then present it to the district attorney s office and they make that determination.
then the next day linderholm heard about paige s car and the fire. i wanted to go over and look at it and i arrived just in time for it was put on a platform on a trailer and it was being hauled away. when it passed me i just it just left me with this horrible feeling. reporter: as she drove away something across the road caught her eye. it was a sign for bob scott rvs. lester jones had told me that he worked for bob scott rv. and when i drove around, i saw a car in the parking lot that was the same one that was in the driveway when i walked up to lester jones house. and i thought, oh, my god. reporter: right away carol went to the sheriff s office, told them all she knew about lester ralph jones. how much credence did you give that story, or did you? we gave it a lot of credence.
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