Clifford Jones Jr. was a 14-year-old male who died on April 26, 1986, in Wayne County, Georgia, in a crime that shattered his family home just across the road from the Reedy Creek Restaurant his parents operated. In the darkness before sunrise, the house became the scene of a brutal home invasion. His sister had left only a short time earlier for a school trip, and not long after that, armed intruders came to the residence knowing the family was believed to keep restaurant cash at home over the
weekend. When the violence was over, Clifford, his mother Nina, and his father Clifford Jones Sr. were all dead. Court records say his father was stabbed, beaten, and shot multiple times, while Clifford himself was beaten with a pistol, stabbed in the back, and then shot. The killings were tied from the beginning to robbery, with money and other property taken from the home.
Investigators and prosecutors soon centered on Larry Lee, his brother Bruce Lee, and Sherry Lee, who was connected to Bruce. The state’s theory was that the group drove to the Jones home together, that Bruce and Larry entered armed with handguns, and that when Clifford Jones Sr. resisted, Bruce killed him while Larry forced Nina and Clifford Jr. into a bedroom and attacked them there. Sherry Lee later became one of the prosecution’s key witnesses and said she was present, though not inside for the full attack, and that she saw part of what happened before the group fled. A neighbor reportedly saw a car leaving the area at high speed, which became part of the case built around the Lees.
The hunt for suspects widened after another violent crime roughly two months later in neighboring Glynn County. During a burglary at the home of Charles Moore, Bruce Lee was shot and killed after Moore returned home and confronted the intruders with a neighbor. Larry Lee fled into the woods and later escaped with Sherry Lee. Police tracked them across the country, and they were arrested days later in Flagstaff, Arizona. Larry Lee was then charged in the Jones family slayings with three counts of murder, along with armed robbery, burglary, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. He also faced a separate felony murder charge in the death of Charles Moore.
At trial in Wayne County in November 1987, the case against Larry Lee rested heavily on Sherry Lee’s testimony and on a jailhouse informant who claimed Larry confessed behind bars. The prosecution won convictions on the Jones family murders, and Larry Lee was sentenced to death. In 1988, the Georgia Supreme Court upheld those convictions and sentences. For years, that seemed to close the story in the eyes of the law, leaving the official version that Clifford Jones Jr. had died during a robbery carried out by Larry and Bruce Lee, with Sherry Lee as an accomplice and witness.
But the case did not stay settled. Over time, post-conviction litigation uncovered serious problems with the original prosecution. A judge later ruled that key exculpatory evidence had been withheld from the defense, that the jailhouse informant had lied in important ways, and that Sherry Lee had previously given statements denying any knowledge of the crime before she later testified against Larry Lee. Evidence also emerged that investigators and prosecutors had failed to disclose information pointing toward other possible suspects. Among the names raised later were Robert and Joe Yarbrough, two men a detective believed should have been investigated because of similarities between the Jones murders and another robbery killing in Wayne County. Bruce Lee remained a major suspect in the attack itself, but he was dead before any trial on the Jones murders could ever happen, having been killed during the later Glynn County burglary.
Those revelations changed the legal picture completely. In 2008, a judge granted Larry Lee a new trial, finding the original proceedings had been deeply compromised. The ruling described the state’s case as thin and criticized the concealment of evidence that could have helped the defense challenge the prosecution’s entire narrative. Sherry Lee, who had received immunity and was never charged in the Jones murders, later recanted her trial testimony, saying she had lied to avoid being prosecuted. By then she had also died, meaning one of the central voices in the original case was gone.
In the end, the charges against Larry Lee in the Jones family murders were dismissed in 2015 rather than retried. That means there was an arrest, there were formal charges, there was a capital murder trial, and there was a conviction and death sentence, but those convictions did not stand. Bruce Lee was long treated as one of the principal perpetrators and was specifically identified in the original court record as the man who killed Clifford Jones Sr., yet he died before he could be prosecuted for the family murders. Sherry Lee was implicated in the state’s original theory, but she was granted immunity and never charged. Other men were later named in court findings as possible alternative suspects, but no final conviction for the murder of Clifford Jones Jr. remained in place. What survives is the horror of a boy’s death in a robbery turned massacre, and a case whose official answer collapsed decades after the bloodshed.
