Murder Suspects’ Host Counts Blessings

Pennsylvania college professor Peter G. Jones was counting his blessings Tuesday after police declared that he probably would have been the next target of three murder suspects who were guests in his home.

Jones, a 57-year-old English teacher on sabbatical from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University, said he had developed a longstanding pen pal relationship with one of his guests, former Indiana prison inmate Keith Eugene Goodman, 30. When Goodman showed up last weekend, Jones thought it was only because he had invited him to stay while adjusting to life after serving time for armed robbery.

On Sunday, Jones said, he and Goodman spent the day watching football on television. At one point, after Goodman had gone downstairs to take a shower, the telephone rang.

“I had just gone down to tell him the score of the game,” Jones recalled, “when I got a phone call from the police and they said to keep talking.” Moments later, members of a SWAT team burst into the house and arrested Goodman--”He still had shaving cream on his face when they whisked him away,” Jones said.

Goodman’s companions--Christopher Mead, 22, and Mead’s girlfriend, Tracy Lynn Holland, 21--had been staying with him downstairs but were arrested at a separate location. Some or all of the three are suspects in four murders of homosexual men in New York and Mississippi, and another killing in Tennessee.

Jones declined to explain how he obtained Goodman’s name as a pen pal, but he said the two began exchanging letters four years ago. He even traveled to a state prison in Michigan City, Ind., to visit Goodman behind bars.

Jones said his new friend painted a picture of a lonely past, forsaken by family and imprisoned for robbery at age 18.

“The story I heard was certainly that he had been very deprived,” Jones recalled. “He said he had never known who his father was. He had never gotten along with his mother and hadn’t seen her since he was 16. . . .

“He (Goodman) said the other night, in fact, that the only person who had ever loved him was his grandmother and she died about a year ago. I don’t even know if that was true,” Jones said.

Goodman and his two companions arrived at Jones’ house about midnight Friday, telling him they had driven nonstop from New Mexico. Jones said he did not suspect that anything was amiss.

“They certainly looked like they had been driving that long, but now that I think about it, some things probably weren’t quite right. . . .

“It’s not like I let a stranger into my home,” he said. “You think you know someone and you don’t.”