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After his case hit the front page of the Tulsa World,Jay more or less went directly to ground. He stopped attending services, for instance, at the Harvard Avenue Christian Church, a modern brick edifice where his younger daughter, Terri, taught preschool and where he usually sat front and center with his wife on Sundays, singing loud enough for everyone to distinguish his voice. "It's kind of like someone dies," he said. "What do you say? 'Sorry for your loss'? I just didn't want the people I would come into contact with to have to come up with some kind of statement like that."
His minister, the Rev. Stephen Wallace, was one of the few people the U.S. attorney allowed Jones to talk to about details of his plea bargain, and Jones went to see him right after he knew it was all going to be made public. "Mainly what I did was listen and ask, How can we be helpful to Je
As the reporting date closed in, Jay and Je
The most Jones could hope for was a 15 percent reduction for good behavior, which meant the earliest he would be out was the end of September 2007. In a letter sent to his lawyer, Jones's doctor tried to get him special consideration, saying he was deeply concerned about what prison might do to his health. He had suffered two heart attacks, after all, in 1986 and 1998, the last around the time he learned of the anonymous letter to the rating agencies, and was taking three different medications for high blood pressure. Jones's lawyer, Robert Nigh, a former public defender who represented Timothy McVeigh in the unsuccessful appeal of his death sentence, recommended against sending the letter on to the Bureau of Prisons. Their likely response would be to assign Jones to a special medical facility out of state, which would make family visits difficult.
Neither was Jones getting any comfort from his prison handbook, which suggested that his agreement to testify for the government at the Bartma
On Friday, June 27, with just three more days to go before prison, Jones a
Jones would play country music anywhere they allowed him to, but he particularly liked going up to Chelsea because hardly anyone knew him there. The gig was at the civic center near the Burlington Northern railroad tracks, where every Friday night thirty or forty farm couples, many in their seventies and eighties, gather for potluck supper and to push and pull one another around the dance floor. Jones usually plays backup rhythm, but this time he stepped up to the mike to employ his thin, reedy voice in service of a blue-grass song that started off "There's a cabin in the pines in the hills of Caroline/and a blue-eyed girl is waiting there for me." During a smoking break outside, he took some ribbing about how Porter Wagoner must be missing his suit by now, when the lead guitarist in the group, who hits more than seven feet in his boots and cowboy hat, slipped Jones a piece of paper with his name and address on it and said quietly, out of anyone's hearing, "You write me a letter, and I'll write ya' back."
June 30 started with a blinding rainstorm that for half an hour forced cars on the freeways encircling Tulsa to pull off to the side. Je
Terri started reading out of the prison manual. "Daddy, it says to take your eyeglasses and a lot of change for the vending machine."
"Sweetheart, they don't let you have money."
"Yes, they do, and you can take your wedding ring and-" Je
"Mom, I don't know if you can take your medicine," Terri said. This made Je
"He has to take his medicine."
"No, he can take his eyeglasses, he can take his Bible or a religious medal and he can take his wedding ring, as long as it doesn't have any stones, and that's it."
As it neared 9 a.m., Jones wanted to get going, get it over with. He hates good-byes. "Je
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