Homicide Task Force Arrests Sex Offender in Prostitute Killings

Investigators probing the deaths of transients and prostitutes in San Diego County have arrested a convicted sex offender in connection with the killings of four prostitutes in 1985 and 1986, some of whom had their bodies burned and disposed in dumpsters.

Bryan Maurice Jones, 30, who is serving a 22-year prison sentence for sexual assault, was taken into custody Wednesday at Corcoran State Prison by investigators with the San Diego Metropolitan Homicide Task Force.

Jones was transported to San Diego and booked into the downtown County Jail. He is scheduled to be arraigned today on four counts of murder, two counts of attempted murder, and single counts of rape and sodomy.

Three of the bodies were left in trash dumpsters, and two of them were then set on fire. Three of the bodies were found within a two-block area in East San Diego: Tara Simpson on Aug. 29, 1985, in an alley in the 5100 block of El Cajon Boulevard; Trina Carpenter on Feb. 11, 1986, in an alley in the 4500 block of 51st Street, and Joanne Sweets on May 9, 1986, in an alley in the 4400 block of 51st Street.

Sophia Glover’s body was found in an alley in the 2200 block of Madison Avenue in Normal Heights on Aug. 15, 1986.

Jones also has been charged with the sexual assault and attempted murder of two other women on Aug. 15, 1985, and Oct. 20, 1986. The names of the two victims were not released by authorities.

No task force members could be reached for comment Wednesday.

The announcement of Jones’ arrest comes one week before the task force is scheduled to disband, and nearly four years after San Diego police, sheriff’s detectives and county prosecutors began working together to solve the murders of 45 female transients and prostitutes that began in 1985.

Sheriff Jim Roache, after questioning the progress of the task force, last month removed his detectives and returned them to work solely on his department’s homicides.

The task force investigation has resulted in two convictions and charges in four other cases.

The team has obtained murder convictions for Elmer Nance, 63, in the death of Nancy White in 1986, and Alan (Buzzard) Stevens, 48, convicted of killing 26-year-old Cynthia McVey, whose body was discovered in 1988 near an isolated part of the Pala Indian Reservation.

Ronald Porter, a former Escondido auto mechanic, is charged in the killings of Sandra Cwik, 43, a transient from Florida, and Carol Gushrowski, 26, an El Cajon mother of two.

Three people are charged in the slaying of Irene Melanie May, a 23-year-old Lakeside woman, who was tortured with electric wires and injected with battery acid before being stabbed with a screwdriver and knife. Mark Lee Thomkins, 29, of San Diego; Sheryl Ann Baker, 28, of El Cajon, and Kerry Lyn Dalton, 39, of Lakeside were arrested last month and are being held without bail.

Task force detectives last month also arrested Wayne Robert Amundson, 32, of Wisconsin, in connection with the killing of a woman they have not yet identified. Amundson is in the process of being extradited.

The task force obtained convictions against five others--James Morris Jackson, Glesty Waters, Daniel Thomas Stafford, Blake Raymond Taylor and Thomas Eastgate--for a variety of charges against prostitutes, including kidnaping, assault, attempted murder and forced oral copulation.