Story Archive

You Can’t Have It

Earl Ray Jones and his wife April were fighting over money. He beat her and held her prisoner; now he faces sentencing and divorce. El Paso County, Colo., Magistrate D. Denise Peacock ordered Earl Ray to pay April $3,000 a month in support, but he’s quit his $82,000 job and he told Peacock he’d gotten rid of half a million dollars in savings too. He provided bank records showing he’d converted it to gold, and told April’s lawyer he’d taken the gold to the motel where he’d been staying after leaving the marital home, and placed it in a trash receptacle, just to make sure April Jones couldn’t get any of it. “If that would have been an option,” Earl Ray Jones said in a deposition, “I would have been walking around giving people $100 bills.” But bank tellers wouldn’t give him the cash. (AC/Colorado Springs Gazette) ...He won the battle over the money, but it cost him a lot more.