Knock Knock

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Jason B. Jones** (0:12)
This is Knock Knock, the Unsolved Murders of Betty Jones and Katherine Krigler. My name is Jason B. Jones.
I was 10 years old, the phone rang. Something was wrong, very wrong. That call was about my grandmother. She was dead, and not just dead, but murdered. I will never forget that night, because it was September 3, 1990, was the night that I was introduced to evil.

**David Lindley** (0:46)
It was a very unusual crime for our community, and of course, a very brutal crime.

**Jason B. Jones** (0:51)
It would take me 27 years to finally get up the courage to ask all the questions about that night. I'm kind of freaking out a little bit. I'm not gonna lie. It was important for me to see where it happened, as I was documenting this and trying to understand it.
It was two girls hanging out watching TV, getting ready to sleep. Being in here, I feel like I understand how scary that would have been with the knock on a door.

**Bill Lott** (1:27)
Betty goes and answers the door, and the guy comes in, and immediately Katherine starts hearing screaming and knows something is wrong with Betty. And then he attacks Betty.
And then he kills her. He immediately went toward Katherine, raped her, strangled her, thought he killed her.

**Julia Krigler-Holt** (1:49)
I could hardly wrap my head around it. The fact that there was somebody that had actually committed a murder, and then to just rape my grandmother so nonchalantly, you know, and just leave her to die.

**Bill Lott** (2:13)
What was done in that house was as bad as anything Jack the Ripper ever did.

**Richard Schlesinger** (2:17)
Standing in front of this house today 28 years later, what's it like for you, knowing that you still don't have your man?

**Bill Lott** (2:24)
It's frustrating. There's no doubt about it.

**Jason B. Jones** (2:27)
I always assumed that Betty and Katherine's case was cold and dormant. What I learned is that Sergeant Lott is no ordinary police officer.

**Bill Lott** (2:37)
Even though I'm a dinosaur, I'm constantly getting on the Internet and looking at signs. Parabon, what they do is they take the DNA and they developed a DNA facial recognition of the killer.

**Ellen Greitak** (2:52)
We're able to give them a prediction of what that person looked like. So it's essentially a genetic witness.

**Richard Schlesinger** (2:57)
You remember the moment when the picture veiled itself on your computer screen?

**Bill Lott** (3:02)
It's like, now I know what you look like. I'm gonna get you.

**Jason B. Jones** (3:06)
Even as a child, I learned what the monsters fear. Whether imaginary or real, monsters today still fear the light.
When we started this podcast, I thought that real answers would be years or decades off. Never in a million years did I think that we would get answers so quickly.

**Richard Schlesinger** (3:42)
Jason Jones has a job he loves. He designs album covers and produces music videos I think something like this. in Nashville. But for more than a year, he had a second passion.
He had a podcast, a dark podcast.

**Jason B. Jones** (4:01)
I will never forget that night.

**Richard Schlesinger** (4:04)
And it was personal.

**Jason B. Jones** (4:06)
I remember waking up in the middle of the night sweating.

**Richard Schlesinger** (4:09)
Jason launched his podcast in September 2017
It had an odd title, Knock Knock. It is about a particularly vicious crime that had been unsolved for nearly 30 years.

**Jason B. Jones** (4:25)
I can't imagine the terror that Betty and Catherine felt. When they realized behind that Knock Knock stood a monster.

**Richard Schlesinger** (4:35)
For Jason, this was more than just a murder tale. It's the story of his family.
Betty Jones was his step-grandmother.

**Jason B. Jones** (4:45)
I think that there was this hum of fear throughout our family after Betty died.

**Richard Schlesinger** (4:52)
It was Labor Day 1990 Jason was 10 years old and living outside of Houston. That's when his family got that phone call, telling them Betty had been murdered in Starkville, Mississippi.
Were you scared?

**Jason B. Jones** (5:11)
Oh yeah. I knew enough to know that there was someone out there that killed my grandmother, and they may want to kill me too.

**Richard Schlesinger** (5:20)
Jason's parents, Bill and Colleen Jones, struggled to explain it all to him and his younger brother, Simon. Do you remember the words you used?

**Colleen Jones** (5:32)
We don't know why, but God called Betty home, and we'll see her again someday.