Sick US couple recorded abuse of Adrian Jones, 7, and then fed him to pigs

WARNING: GRAPHIC, DISTURBING CONTENT

Adrian Jones was a tiny bag of bones when he died. His last months were a living hell. He was locked behind a plywood door in a shower, made to stand for hours in stagnant water up to his neck, shackled, bound, starved and beaten.

His stepmother called him "the boy", rather than use his given name. While she and Adrian's father cared for their six girls, he was singled out for abuse of the worst kind.

And even in death, there was one last indignity. Instead of a proper burial, the 7-year-old was fed to pigs his father had bought specifically for the purpose of getting rid of his emaciated body.

Michael A. Jones, left, and Heather Jones. Photo / Wyandotte County Detention Center

The last round in the criminal case against the couple, Michael and Heather Jones, played out in a courtroom in Kansas City, Kansas today. Michael, a 46-year-old bail bondsman has been sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 25 years in prison for Adrian's murder. Heather, 31, has already received the same sentence and is serving time in a lock-up in Topeka.

Both pleaded guilty to avoid longer sentences.

During the sentencing Jones refused to make eye contact with the boy's grandmother, mother and older sister as they made statements to the judge. The judge ordered that if Jones is released from jail he would spend the rest of his life on parole.

But as Jones starts his life term the questions of how the system could have failed 7-year-old Adrian remains unanswered.

His grandmother, Judy Conway, is calling for a public inquiry into how no-one helped the football-loving little boy as he went through almost a year of unimaginable agony before he finally succumbed.

Heather and Michael Jones would make Adrian stand in the stagnant pool all night. This is one of the last images taken of him.

"In Kansas there have been something like 15 cases when something similar to this has happened and only twice have they accepted any blame," she told DailyMail.com. "Even now, after all this time I still haven't seen the files."

She wrote to Governor Sam Brownback to express her dismay. "I never heard back," she added shaking her head.

The tale of Adrian Jones has shocked Kansas and surrounding states ever since Heather Jones gave her landlady passwords for her computer because she wanted her to send pictures of her children while she awaited trial in custody.

The landlady, mom-of-four Jennifer Hoevers, couldn't believe her eyes when she clicked on image after image of the cruelty that was heaped on the little boy.

One of the pictures on Heather Jones's computers showed how she and her husband had forced Adrian to stand straight by bandaging kitchen cutting boards to his front and back.

There was video of him shivering as he stood outside, shackled hand and foot wearing just a T-shirt and pajama pants shortly before 6 on a January evening. "Let me tell you, Kansas is cold in January," Hoevers told DailyMail.com.

In the distressing video, Adrian desperately tries to drink from a cup he can't pick up because his wrists are handcuffed behind his back.

There were pictures of Adrian bound tightly with rigid kitchen cutting boards beneath the bandages so he could not bend over. There was a close-up of his lips, covered with angry sores, caused, investigators believe, because he had tried to chew away at his plywood prison.

There were pictures of him blindfolded and strapped to an inversion table - and others of the injuries that caused his legs. And there was more - much more. Heather had even saved online ads for straitjackets and blanket wraps for transporting human bodies.

"She never told me that I would find pictures of Adrian - I was just shocked beyond belief at what I saw," Hoevers said.

Adrian would be strapped to an inversion table and left there by his stepmother.

"I just closed the computer down and spent a good day getting my thoughts together, trying to decide what I should do."

Graphic pictures of Adrian standing naked in the shower showed him getting thinner and thinner until his tiny frame was skeletal. "He looked like the pictures you see of concentration camp survivors," said Hoevers.

She took the images to the police shortly after Heather Jones had been sentenced. The horrific evidence of exactly what went on in Jennifer Hoevers' house was discovered too late to be used in her case - but not too late for Michael's.

She made contact with Judy Conway and gave her a DVD with everything she found on the computer, warning her of how graphic it was. The first time Conway viewed it she threw up.

Surveillance camera captured footage of Adrian handcuffed outside in the driveway.

"The first picture I saw, Heather was posing him for pictures front and back. He looked like the most malnourished kid from a third-world country," Conway told DailyMail.com.

Adrian Jones was the fifth of six children born to Judy Conway's daughter Dainna Pearce. The youngest three, Madison, Adrian and Tiesa were fathered by Michael Jones.

By all accounts she was a terrible mother. Her own daughter Keiona - known as Kiki - wrote an on-line letter to her brother after his murder. "Mom liked to go out a lot; she didn't necessarily know how to be a mom, but you did not understand at the time because you were so young," Kiki wrote.

"I was always assigned to watch you and your sisters when Mom said she was going grocery shopping, but every time she wouldn't come back from the store until the next day."

Kiki, now 20 and a junior at Emporia State University in Kansas where she stars on the track and field team and studies child psychology and development, even apologised to Adrian for sometimes wishing he and his sisters had never been born.

"I would get so angry because my friends would get to hang out and be teenagers and I was always stuck at home watching you and your sisters," she wrote.

Heather Jones took a selfie of her outside the plywood prison where Adrian spent the last days of his life.

Pearce did not respond to messages from DailyMail.com, but in a Facebook message found on Heather Jones' computer, she defended herself. "Just know my children are my heart," she wrote.

"They were raised by me, healthy, loved, fed, clothed, and in school, those three years with him and her changed them dramatically and put them thru hurt and pain and stress, they have been through hell and back."

Madison, 12, and Tiesa, 7, are now in foster care, undergoing intense therapy, Conway said.

Kansas' Department for Children and Families (DCF) investigated reports that Pearce had taken drugs while pregnant but she tested negative. They probed claims of neglect that were unsubstantiated. But in 2011 they did find a lack of supervision and of allowing her kids to skip school.

So when Michael and Dainna split after he started an affair with Heather, it was Michael who got custody of his three children.

"I wasn't happy at all," said Conway. "I wondered at the time if they had done a background check into Heather. As far as I know they never did. Kiki and I fought really hard to get access to the children."

Adrian Jones and his oldest sibling, half-sister Keiona Doctor, shared a kiss on Christmas Eve 2012. It was the last time Keiona and grandmother Judy Conway saw Adrian.

But for a while all seemed well. Conway and Kiki visited the family at Christmas 2012 and found Adrian healthy and happy. Michael Jones even gave Kiki $100 as a present and thanked her for looking after his children for so long.

That was the last time they would see Adrian.

In 2014 Michael Jones suddenly called Conway to tell her the little boy was in a psychiatric hospital because he had turned into a paedophile and had sexual predator tendencies.

Adrian was 6 at the time.

Jones told his ex-lover's mother she couldn't go see her grandson and abruptly hung up.

Conway later saw a report from the hospital. It said that Adrian was a lively, curious boy. But when Michael and Heather visited he became quiet and sullen.

"But they still released him to their custody," she told DailyMail.com. "Why would they do that? I would have happily taken him."

When Adrian left the hospital, he went to the home that Jennifer Hoevers had rented to Michael and Heather Jones for $1850 a month in June 2014. "They seemed normal tenants," Hoevers said of the first time she met them.

"Heather was pregnant and we saw five girls. Adrian didn't live with them at the time. We were told he had some issues and was in a long-term hospital getting help. It wasn't our business to pry."

The couple recorded the abuse of Adrian, including this incident where he was hit with a broom.

The single-story, four-bedroom home is set on 15 acres of land on North 99th Street in Kansas City, Kansas. It is so isolated no-one would ever hear Adrian scream.

Hoevers visited the home just once during their time as tenants. Everything seemed fine although she noticed the number of surveillance cameras in the house. She figured that being a bail bondsman could be dangerous so didn't think too much about it.

But out of sight and sound the abuse had started. One video discovered by Hoevers shows Adrian standing for hours on end with his hands in the air. Another reveals him being hit across the face with a broomstick.

A photograph showed him with a bar of soap stuffed in his mouth, others with injuries caused by a Taser. Heather seemed to be documenting the abuse and the injuries it caused as if she was proud of it.

Hoevers even found a message Heather had sent to an unknown person: "Just strapped the boy to my inversion table with handcuffs and ace bandages and put him downstairs," she wrote, adding: "the hubby wants some a** and I ain't had none in over a week!!"
She signed off cheerily: "love y'all nighty night."

And then, at some point between September 18 and October 4 of 2015, Adrian died. For two weeks, investigators believe the family lived with the body before Michael Jones went out and bought six feeder pigs. He then tossed the body in their pen trying to erase all evidence of how they had tortured the boy to death.

At Heather's sentencing in November, prosecutor Sheryl Lidtke said she had never seen abuse like it in 27 years on the job.

The pigs that Michael Jones bought.

"This is the most heinous crime I have ever prosecuted," she said.

But Michael and Heather Jones might have gotten away with murder if only he had been able to control his temper.

Jennifer Hoevers has since discovered the couple had planned to skip out on their rental home and move to Utah where they could have started a new life where no-one would know that Adrian had ever existed.

But on Thanksgiving, some two months after Adrian died, Heather Jones called cops to the Kansas City home. Michael, she said, had shot at her while she was holding her youngest daughter.

When police arrived Heather broke down and told them to look for bones in the pig pen. They found human remains that matched Adrian's DNA.

Michael and Heather Jones were arrested and ever since Heather has tried to pin all the blame on her husband.

On a Facebook message sent while awaiting trial, she wrote: "I took responsibility for the children yes I loved them and cared for them but I am only 1 person and there was no controlling or getting away from that man when he was cycling!! He had cameras everywhere in my home all rooms and even outside."

Then she talks about a time when he was stopped by police. "When he was pulled over with the 6 girls he had only loaded assult (sic) rifles, loaded handguns, his drugs, promised me he was going to kill everyone that day and end it all.

"I am beyond broken for Adrian and my girls," she added.