BLUE ASH, Ohio — A man sentenced to death for the 1994 murder of Rhoda Nathan at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Blue Ash has been granted a new trial after a judge ruled the prosecution withheld evidence during his initial trial.
Judge Wende C. Cross of the Hamilton County Common Pleas Court ruled the evidence withheld was significant and should have been presented to the jury that found Elwood Jones guilty for the murder in 1996.
Jones was sentenced to death in 1997. For the last 27 years, he has maintained his innocence.
On the morning of September 3, 1994, Nathan was staying at the hotel with a friend and that friend's fiancé while in town from New Jersey to attend a bar mitzvah, according to court documents. That morning, Nathan was to meet her friends at the hotel's first floor restaurant for breakfast after she showered. Her friends left the room at around 7:30 a.m. that morning and returned roughly 30 to 40 minutes later, court documents say.
When they entered the room, they found Nathan lying naked, face-up on the floor, unresponsive. She was taken to Bethesda North Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. The Hamilton County Coroner's Office ruled her death a homicide, citing multiple traumatic injuries and blunt force impact to her head and torso, court documents say.
"The police investigation of the murder of Ms. Rhoda Nathan was mishandled by the Blue Ash Police Department in 1994," said Cross. "By the evidence there are many unanswered questions about the events that occurred at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Blue Ash during the weekend that Ms. Nathan was killed. Unfortunately this mishandling resulted in a jury considering evidence based on an incomplete police investigation and flawed circumstantial evidence."
Cross said a confession made to the Blue Ash Police Department after the murder was never disclosed to Jones' defense attorneys or the jury; Cross said the prosecution was also unaware of the confession that could have shown Jones was not the only reasonable suspect, because the Blue Ash Police Department had no record of the confession in their files.
A woman incarcerated in the Hamilton County Justice Center in 1995 testified in a hearing that she'd told police another inmate had claimed her husband "had confessed to committing the murder at the Embassy Suites in Blue Ash, Ohio and to framing a Black man for his crime," according to court documents. The woman said the other inmate hadn't confessed to police about her husband because "he was friends with BAPD officers and they drank coffee together."
When the woman reported what she'd learned to police, she testified that police told her the case was closed because "they had 'found something ... in a man's possession.'"
A pendant found in Jones' car, believed to have belonged to Nathan, was presented as a major piece of evidence. During Jones' initial trial, prosecutors told the jury the custom-made pendant "was as if Nathan left her print with the defendant." However, Cross said officials with the Blue Ash Police Department traveled to New York City to visit Nathan's home and learned the pendant was not unique or custom-crafted — the engagement ring Nathan's family had believed the pendant was made from was actually in the possession of another family member.
Family told Blue Ash police they believed Nathan's pendant was simply purchased at a jewelry store in the Bronx, but this information was never documented or disclosed for trial, where the pendant became a key piece of evidence in the state's case.
The prosecution also withheld evidence that undermined their case against Jones, Cross said, including a Hepatitis B test that "is so significant that the state's theory is scientifically implausible," said Cross.
At the time of her murder, Nathan had Hepatitis B; during the initial trial, Dr. Steven Burdette, who was then a professor of medicine and chief of infectious diseases at the Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine testified on behalf of the defense.
Burdette told the jury in 1996 that, if Jones had beaten Nathan with his bare hands as the state had claimed, he would have contracted the highly contagious virus through her blood, because of open wounds he'd have received to his hands in the beating, court documents say. The state had tested Jones for the virus in September 1994 and he'd tested negative despite never having been immunized against Hepatitis B — though neither that test nor its results was ever disclosed as discovery or presented at trial.
Also undisclosed by prosecutors were witness statements made by hotel guests who claimed to have seen "several security breaches at the hotel" near the time of the murder, court documents say.
One hotel guest claimed to witness a roughly 6-foot-tall white man in his late 20's with a thin build, medium-length brown hair dressed in dark clothing walking rapidly out the hotel door, which had been propped open with a cup, before "running through the parking lot and sprinting into the woods."
In total, Cross said that roughly 4,000 pages of evidence was withheld from Jones' defense attorneys and, ultimately, the jury. According to court documents, those pages included police investigative notes, witness statements and 400 pages of hotel guests' questionnaire responses.
"Whether the state acted in bad faith or out of negligence when failing to disclose material evidence to the defense, which could have arguably changed the outcome of the trial, it is clear that the failure to disclose the existence of relevant, exculpatory and impeaching evidence prior to trial deprived Elwood Jones of a fair trial," said Cross.
After Cross announced Jones' motion to request a new trial had been granted, people seated in the gallery behind Jones broke into applause and Jones' and his attorney embraced.
"They still have work to do," said Julius Jones, Elwood Jones' nephew. "There's a dead woman, they don't have a killer. They convicted the wrong man so I feel for their family also. We may have had a victory today but they need to get their victory when they arrest the right man who did the crime."
In a press conference Tuesday afternoon, Joe Deters, Hamilton County prosecutor, said he believes Cross made the wrong decision.
"Jones has made 10 prior attempts to overturn his conviction — and each and every judge who reviewed his case upheld his conviction," read a press release from his office. "It is only after shopping for his 11th judge that he found a judge to buy into this nonsense. It is shocking to me that a trial court judge can so easily ignore the binding decisions of superior courts."
Deters disputed that the items Cross cited as grounds for a new trial were relevant or crucial to the outcome of the trial. The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed all the evidence Cross cited previously and determined that those items "were not material and did not justify appellate relief," the press release said.
Nathan's status as Hepatitis B positive was disclosed to Burdette before the trial, the press release said, but it did not mention whether the test given to Jones and its subsequent results were disclosed or found to be material evidence.
"All he does is they lie, and they lie to cover it up, and then they lie about the cover up, and they blame over people," said Jay Clark, one of the lawyers on the Jones defense team, directed at Deters. "They could not get off their fixation on Elwood Jones. If the prosecutor's office has such a good case, that it thinks it has, they should have no problem re-convicting him in the retrial, but I guarantee you now they cannot."
Deters also argued that the alleged confession suggesting another man had told his wife he'd killed Nathan could not be trusted and would not have been admissible in court, because it's "double hearsay." Additionally, the woman who allegedly pointed the finger at her husband was found mentally incompetent at the time and was in the process of divorcing her husband, Deters said.
The press release doubled down on the uniqueness of the pendant typically worn by Nathan and didn't address Cross' statements that Blue Ash police had discovered the jewelry was purchased from a normal store and not customized.
"Ms. Nathan's pendant was created by her late husband using the diamonds from his mother's wedding ring," the press release reads. "This piece of jewelry was unique and something Ms. Nathan never took off."
Deters said his office plans to appeal Cross' decision to grant Jones a new trial.
A hearing will be held on January 12 at 10:30 a.m.
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