John Roy Jones, age 31, male, White/Caucasian, was shot to death on March 30, 1985, in Seattle, Washington. He was killed inside his trailer after an argument with Gerald Ross Pizzuto Jr., who later claimed the shooting was accidental. Contemporary reporting and later summaries describe the confrontation as escalating over cocaine before Pizzuto fired the fatal shot, a version of events the prosecution disputed in court.
In the months that followed, investigators tied the killing to Pizzuto, who was already being sought for the March 16–17, 1985 killing of Rita Drury in Seattle and, by late July, for a double murder in Idaho. Pizzuto failed to appear for his arraignments in the Washington cases and was captured in August 1985 in Great Falls, Montana on warrants from both Washington and Idaho. He was interviewed there by a Seattle detective before being returned to face charges.
Washington prosecutors charged Pizzuto with first-degree murder in Jones’s death on May 8, 1985. Following trials held after his Idaho death sentence for the separate Herndon murders, Washington courts found him guilty of second-degree murder for killing Jones and first-degree murder for killing Drury. On December 7, 1987, he received a sentence of 28 years and six months for Jones, plus an additional 41 years and one month for Drury, to run consecutively. These convictions and sentences stand alongside his Idaho death sentence, which has since been the subject of extended litigation.
